Reflections: Working with a local museum and landscape

This post is part of the UMD Anthropology reflections series. Ennis Barbery gained her M.A.A. in 2013. Her research interests include cultural landscapes, museums, and heritage tourism.

Docent Matt Johnson stands in front of the Greenbelt Museum's historic house and explains features of Greenbelt's planned landscape before leading a walking tour (August 2013)

When I started the first course in the Museum Scholarship and Material Culture Certificate program, I was not sure that I would be able to complete the certificate. My schedule of required courses had prevented me from starting the museum course sequence earlier in my time at UMD, and—now--graduation from the M.A.A. program was just one semester away. After talking with faculty members about my career interests and goals, I decided to extend my time as a graduate student in order to gain the experience that this certificate program offers.

I am glad that I made that decision. The certificate provides a chance to learn from museum practitioners at the Smithsonian Institution and other museums, and—in large part— the certificate is what each individual student makes it. As a student interested in small, locally focused museums and in cultural landscapes, I had the opportunity to focus my course work on these topics. The most significant part of the course work, for me, was the practicum course. In this course, students design their own projects tailored to their interests and negotiate them with mentors at a museum and faculty members.

I researched museums in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area (there are many options) and found several that seemed to be the kind of institutions for which I could see myself working in the future. The one that ultimately worked out as a site for my museum practicum project was the Greenbelt Museum in Greenbelt, Maryland. Its director, Megan Searing Young, was interested in the project I proposed, and I was interested in the work she did at the Greenbelt Museum.

We developed a working relationship in which I focused on an independent project that benefitted the museum, but I was also able to shadow her in some of her activities. I saw what it meant to direct a small museum in this particular case: the relationships she maintains with residents and city government and the tasks she has to balance from collections management and programming to basic accounting and marketing.

My independent project was also rewarding. I interviewed 14 Greenbelt residents, asked these residents to draw maps of Greenbelt, transcribed these interviews with the help of two undergraduate students (thank you Becca Lane and Katie Hutchinson!), analyzed this data, and created interpretive content in the form of podcasts for the Greenbelt Museum’s website. I hope the products I was able to produce will continue to prompt discussion among residents and museum supporters about what constitutes Greenbelt’s history and which parts of Greenbelt’s landscape are included in this history.