When the COVID-19 pandemic forced cultural institutions across Montreal and surrounding areas to close, McGill’s Redpath Museum was no exception.
The famed University institution shut its doors to visitors for safety reasons, leaving elementary and high school students in particular feeling the loss. After all, field trips to the Redpath Museum were a regular favourite among schools across the island of Montreal. Now, a new project by the Redpath Museum Public Education Program is looking to recreate the experience of a museum visit for school-aged students by launching the Redpath Museum Discovery Boxes (RMDB) program.
The project addresses the immediate need to completely transfer the Redpath Museum's science and culture public education program – both for the University and the larger community – to a virtual platform, as well as a format that works off-campus. To achieve this goal, the Redpath is creating up to six box models to distribute on loan to schools across the city.
“The boxes contain exploration items focused around different themes such as dinosaurs, fossils, evolution, and more,” says Ingrid Birker, public program manager, Redpath Museum. Each box contains authentic specimens and 3D printed copies of some more rare specimens to be used with curriculum worksheets.
“Outreach learning isn’t a new concept for Redpath Museum. Actually we’ve been going out since 2007 to perform hands-on science in classrooms and community libraries on weekends to showcase things like volcanoes, dinos, Egyptian artifacts and more. But the box concept, a museum-to-go idea, truly came to be due to COVID. We wanted to deliver an inquiry-based learning experience through which all of the kids’ senses are stimulated.”
Rather than having a museum representative physically going to showcase the material, teachers can bring the box items to life through demonstrations and some video assistance from the Redpath Museum team, of course.
The boxes are being developed in collaboration with the Faculty of Education to ensure the content levels are age-appropriate and respect the corresponding government curriculums. Each box is also co-developed with a McGill researcher to ensure the content is accurate and draws upon fundamental sciences like geology, anthropology, and biology.
The project is currently in its pilot phase, with two boxes being tested at Montreal schools. Organizers hope to have the boxes market ready by September 1 to correspond with the start of the new academic year.
“Overall, the teachers who have experienced the kits have had very positive feedback to share with us, which we’re collecting through a detailed survey,” Birker says. “In fact, they’re asking for even more time with the boxes which is very encouraging; we’re pretty sure the demand will be there for these services post-COVID, so this is something we’re looking to establish for the long term, which is also fantastic considering the museum is slated to close in 2022 for major renovations.”
The CARE Centre in Côte Saint-Luc and École Guy Drummond are just two of the schools participating in the pilot program.
"CARE had a box in March and we thought this was a very good and innovative idea,” said Amanda Dery, Director of CARE. “The museum in a box allowed us to partake in a museum activity from the safety and comfort in our own classroom. The box was simple to use and had detailed descriptions of the materials we were exploring. It's as if we were in the Museum itself."
The Redpath Museum Discovery Boxes received generous kick-start funding from the McGill Sustainability Projects Fund (SPF) through the McGill Office of Sustainability (MOOS).
“MOOS has been great throughout this entire pilot process,” Birker says. “They saw right away that this was something not just with educational value, but also something good for kids’ emotional and mental welfare, and they’ve been so supportive of the undertaking.”
About the SPF: The Sustainability Projects Fund mandate is to build a culture of sustainability on McGill campuses through the development and seed-funding of interdisciplinary projects. It creates opportunities for the McGill community to actively engage in sustainability initiatives on campus, empowering individuals to be change agents in their own studying and work environment. Since 2010, the SPF has allocated $10 million to 250 projects – 86 per cent of which were student-staff collaborations.