Item
Lynn Brown Oral History, 2020/07/02
Media
Title (Dublin Core)
Lynn Brown Oral History, 2020/07/02
Description (Dublin Core)
Interview with Lynn Brown , Educational Coordinator of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center by interviewer Alex Bice. Lynn speaks about the importance of group and physical interaction learning. She also shares her thoughts on how the pandemic has altered educational practices for students and teachers during a time of distance learning.
Recording Date (Dublin Core)
07/02/2020
Creator (Dublin Core)
Alex Bice
Lynn Brown
Partner (Dublin Core)
Northeastern University
Type (Dublin Core)
audio
Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)
English
Museums & Libraries
English
Education--K12
English
Social Distance
English
Cities & Suburbs
Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)
Boston
Massachusetts
library
map
Leventhal
distance learning
Zoom
teacher
student
online learning
Date Submitted (Dublin Core)
07/20/2020
Date Modified (Dublin Core)
10/21/2020
11/17/2020
03/02/2021
08/04/2021
05/01/2022
09/08/2022
01/10/2023
Date Created (Dublin Core)
07/02/2020
Interviewer (Bibliographic Ontology)
Alex Bice
Interviewee (Bibliographic Ontology)
Lynn Brown
Location (Omeka Classic)
Boston
Massachusetts
United States of America
Format (Dublin Core)
Audio
Language (Dublin Core)
English
Duration (Omeka Classic)
00:46:47
Transcription (Omeka Classic)
Alex Bice 0:00
So we are recording. My name is Alex Bice. I am here with Lynn Brown. The date is July 2 2020. The time is 8:57 AM. Lynn, I want to briefly review the informed consent and deed of gift documents that you signed. This interview is for the COVID-19 Oral History Project, which is associated with the Journal of the Plague Year: A COVID-19 Archive. The COVID-19 Oral History Project is a rapid response oral history focused on archiving the lived experience of the COVID-19 epidemic. We have designed this project so that professional researchers and the broader public can create an upload their oral histories to our open access and open source database. This study will help us collect narratives and understandings about COVID-19 as well as help us better understand the impacts of the pandemic over time. The recordings demographic information and the verbatim transcripts will be deposited in the Journal of the Plague Year: A COVID-19 Archive and the Indiana University Library System for the use of researchers and the general public. Do you have any questions about the project that I can answer?
Lynn Brown 1:08
Just one, is this a grant-funded project? And if so, who's providing the funding?
Alex Bice 1:15
I do not believe it is grant-funded at this point. I believe that it's currently operating through ASU [Arizona State University]. I don't believe they have a grant for it yet but I believe they're working on getting some
Lynn Brown 1:32
Okay. Okay.
Alex Bice 1:35
Taking part in this study is voluntary, you may choose not to take part or you may leave to study at any time, leaving the study will not result in any penalty or loss of benefits to which you are entitled. Your decision whether or not to participate in the study will not affect your current or future relations with Indiana University, IUPY or the IUPY Arts and Humanities Institute. Participant-participating in this project means that you're interview will be recorded in digital video and or audio format and maybe transcribed. The recordings and possible transcriptions of my interview, copies of any supplementary documents, or additional photos that you wish to share. And the informed consent and deed of gift may be deposited in the Journal of a Plague Year: A COVID-19 Archive and the Indiana University Library System and will be available to both researchers and the general public. Your name and other means of identification will not be confidential. Do you have any questions?
Lynn Brown 2:30
No
Alex Bice 2:31
Great. In addition to your signed document, would you please offer a verbal confirmation that you understand and agree to these terms?
Lynn Brown 2:39
I understand and agree to the terms.
Alex Bice 2:41
Excellent. I am also asking that you verbally confirm that you have agreed that your interview will be made available under the following license Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 4.0.
Lynn Brown 2:54
Yes, fine.
Alex Bice 2:56
And finally I want to ask for a verbal confirmation that you have agreed that your interview will be made available to the public immediately.
Lynn Brown 3:04
Yes, fine.
Alex Bice 3:06
Excellent. Thank you. So in terms of getting started, I was wondering if you could just tell me a little bit about your background, including your previous experience working in museums and cultural heritage?
Lynn Brown 3:24
So yeah, I taught in the public schools for close to 20 years, starting in Boston Public Schools, and then from the bulk of that time in Cambridge. And I was a middle school teacher of humanities for, again, most of that time, seventh and eighth graders. And then I left teaching, and I was looking for work, where I could still interact with students. I was super interested in visual culture and art. So I worked at Mass College of Art in the Bakalar & Paine Galleries, which are their sort of international galleries, publicly open galleries. And worked, leading they're Looking to Learn program, which works primarily with Boston Public Schools, students, but also students in the greater Boston area. And then that was-did not have benefits. And so I looked for another position and found the job as the Education Coordinator at the Leventhal Map Center, that's an Education Center at the Boston Public Library. And I've been there for three years.
Alex Bice 4:48
Excellent. Could you talk a little bit about what the Leventhal Map Center does?
Lynn Brown 4:55
Sure. So the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center was established with money from Norman B. Leventhal, who was a wealthy developer in Boston and a map collector. And he was concerned about the management along with other people about the management of the library's map collection. And he wanted to provide funding so that the collection would be sort of stewarded as well as be made available through educational programming to Bostonians, especially K-12 students. So that was the origin of the map center. It has a unique relationship in that it is a private nonprofit that lives within the Public Library. We have a very close relationship with the library and we take care of the library's map collection and offer programming related to it. So we, again not over this past year, but in previous years we offer programming to-up to 4000-or around 4000 students, most of them Boston Public Schools, university classes. We have-we used to have two public exhibitions in our gallery space a year. Again, things have really changed now. Our current exhibition is digital and available online. Yeah, that-we provide reference to researchers. G-we now have a GIS librarian. And so GIS services, and classes, as well as research on finding GIS geospatial data sets for people. It's also something we provide.
Alex Bice 6:56
Great. And what has some of the education programs that you've worked on for the Leventhal Map Center, what have those, sort of, consisted of?
Lynn Brown 7:08
Do you mean in terms of content or, or like process?
Alex Bice 7:14
I guess both.
Lynn Brown 7:17
So we for K 12 education, we have a really wide ranging sort of list of content that we provide. We are somewhat responsive as well as we link new content that we developed to our exhibitions. And then we also have sort of programs that have existed since the beginning of the Map Center that align somewhat with mass frameworks, and just our ideas about what students should have and when they should have start thinking about geographic education. So we have programs for elementary schools-young elementary school students that introduce them to maps called "What is a Map?" is one of our programs. And they start to think about, you know, what, what do maps do other than help us find our way around. What different kind of maps are there? Maps are all different and have distinct purposes. So that would be one example of something that's sort of a core program. And then we have, we have a number of lessons over the last couple of years that we've developed actually, more, more in the last year on indigenous presence in New England. Actually, we did have materials that started before last year as well, but we had a large exhibition called "America Transformed," the two part exhibition looking at westward expansion. So as part of that we partnered with indigenous consultants and indigenous cartographers, and as part of that work, we created reproductions are maps that highlights settler colonialism and indigenous presence in the overwhelmingly Euro-American maps that we have, but also some native maps. So we have more-we have a lot of new programs and new lessons and curriculum available in the area of indigenous presence in North America and in what would become the United States. We, for instance, have a lesson that we did over last year because we were concerned about young people getting registered to vote called "Why Vote?" that looks at maps, map-interactive map created by a cartographer through Esri [ Environmental Systems Research Institute]. The talks about the effect of non-voters on the outcome of elections. And then we have-we do a lot of curriculum design on lessons related to our exhibitions. Like now we have an exhibition that is digital that we were hoping to have it open by now, but the library is closed. So it's all online. But we produced on-edigital materials for that exhibition, so lessons on helping students understand what projections are, and how every map is distorted, and what to look for in thinking about-when thinking about the world on a map, questions to ask. And another lesson on different ways of representing data. So one on counting populations of children in Boston and different ways, different kinds of maps, that introduces students to things like choropleth maps and civilization and different ways to represent data as well as the ways to inquire about what the purpose of a mapmaker is and why they want the data and why they might use it in different lines.
Alex Bice 11:10
Great. That sounds very interesting. Thank you. Before sort of all of this started and the Map Center had to close with, obviously, all the other sort of museums and cultural heritage institutions in Boston, what did it-
Lynn Brown 11:30
And schools.
Alex Bice 11:32
And schools as well. What did an average day in your position look like?
Lynn Brown 11:39
Well, a day might look like showing up early and setting up materials for a group of maybe two classes of elementary school students from a Boston elementary school, who would come into the MAP sensor and I would greet them and meet in the learning center at the Map Center, which is a small room, in the back of our gallery, where students would sit on the floor with each other, and they would draw maps, and we would talk, and then they would break into small groups and work with map reproductions or the actual maps. In doing inquiry exercises, they will present their findings and then we would tour them around the exhibition or they might do a scavenger hunt looking for information in the exhibition, then they would leave, clean everything up, maybe get a short break, and then the other group from that school or another group class would arrive, we would do the same thing all over again. And then some days, maybe we would have a third class from that school or not. And then I would spend a lot of time scheduling other school groups to come in and out. For lessons we also I might be preparing materials for outreach. So I would maybe be preparing for the following day in which I would be packing up large maps and large map reproductions materials to go to another school maybe a middle school in Boston to do programs on demographic maps that show Boston, the change over time some of them demographic map some of them, you know, historical maps of different kinds.
Alex Bice 13:30
Gotcha.
Lynn Brown 13:31
[unintelligible]
Alex Bice 13:34
Great. In terms of how has the pandemic and institution and school closures sort of affected your job? What does an average day look like, I guess now?
Lynn Brown 13:52
Right? Well, the average days I you know, leave the bedroom to go to the office in the next room and I spend all day on a computer and work with my-with the Director of Education at the Map Center in figuring out how do we offer both lessons and curriculum, learning opportunities to teachers. A lot of what we do too is also not directed directly at students but also towards teachers, professional development in different ways. So how do we continue to do what we do remotely and online as opposed to in person. So a lot of it is near the beginning, because we were getting ready to open our exhibition when everything shut down our new exhibition. We spent a lot of our time, our days on computers, writing, writing online curriculum and figuring out-putting it in markdown language so that it could be loaded up into the catalog, sort of online catalog structure. We were platform we were using so it's learning how to how to-I had to learn new, new technology and new ways of thinking about curriculum that we had designed for kids to do in person, like crawling around on the floor around large sheets of butcher paper, everybody drawing and writing on the same piece of paper. How do we now make that accessible to teachers in a way that students will not be together? So a lot of time was doing that, figuring out how to make curriculum clear and accessible online. And then a lot of it was that we also had to, I guess this sort of also happens a sort of perfect storm where the public library was switching to a new communications platform. So everybody was going to Microsoft Office teams. So there was a lot of time, team coordination, sort of organization coordination, trying to figure out how do we get all of our files all over the place in one place on a on a new digital platform? How do we communicate with each other? A lot of time was spent doing that. Spent a lot of time figuring out-we had a large grant program we were in the middle of that was-we were going to high schools to teach kids how to to interpret and make GIS maps and think about data related to Boston and with the goal of thinking about how maps can and can't be used for advocacy around neighborhood issues. And when school shut down that was sort of stopped all of our engagement with students in their classrooms. So how do we continue our relationships with teachers and with students related to that work? So we spend a lot of times sort of trying to figure out approaches to that. So some of it looks like trying to pull kids together from different schools we worked with and asking them-asking teachers to connect us with some students who might be willing to continue to work with us or talk with us, reaching out to them bringing them into Zoom conversations so that the students could talk-could help design interview groups and interview questions that they would then facilitate with students from other schools and then scheduling those meetings. So those kids could run discussions with students from other schools who also worked with mapping with us in different ways. Hmm, that's, that's a, that's there's other t ings, but that's sort of a picture of what I do now.
Alex Bice 18:32
Gotcha. And I guess, do you envision any of this sort of, as institutions start to reopen, obviously, schools are out at this point? Do you envision any of your schedule or sort of how you go about your work? Do you see that? Do you think that'll shift again at all?
Lynn Brown 18:57
Well, our our mandate is to be responsive, you know, to whatever happens to schools. So our job is to provide materials, support to educators, and to students in whatever way they need it. So teachers are being asked right now in many districts, like Boston teachers are being asked now as they plan for next year to plan, to plan their-administrators are being asked to plan their schedules in their schools and their, you know, the flow of their, their year and days according to three scenarios. So educate-you know, administrators and teachers now have to plan for three scenarios. One if it's all virtual or remote. One if it's a hybrid. So maybe one week on one week off, small, you know, 50% of the kids one week and then 50% the next week. And what if it is, you know, things, whatever open up. So they're being asked to completely. So they're being asked to plan along three different possible eventualities. So we also have to sort of be following that. Our guess is in the fall, we're not going to be ready to-for students all to be in classrooms together, as they were before. So we won't be going back to just how things used to be. And that a lot of our work will still be-has to be accessed digitally, which in a way is okay for us along the line that we needed to, we needed to make a lot of our materials more accessible, more clear, online anyway. So a lot of the work we're doing now is it's, it's good for us to have as a institution. But we are really missing, you know, just sort of, personally as teachers, we're really missing engagements with students. And we are also aware of the limitations of engaging with materials when you can only look at them on a screen, as opposed to, you know, seeing how big a map is and spinning it around. And you know, we aren't point now where students can put on a VR headset and like, zoom into a map and walk around the landscape, as you know, as it is. So they're sort of embodied experience with a map is really limited when they're not able to sort of be in the Map Center and have a real map and hold magnifying glasses and that kind of thing. So we don't know if we're going to be able to do that in the fall.
Alex Bice 22:04
Right. How do you, how do you personally feel about doing more, sort of, doing more digital work this coming fall? Is that something that excites you in relation? Or is it more just a placeholder for the more in person engagements until we hit a time where things can-it's truly safe to like be in groups again?
Lynn Brown 22:38
Right. So who knows, like when or if it's like if we're waiting for a vaccine to that be able to happen. So personally as, as when not, not as sort of education coordinator with with a mandate to just be responsive. You know, this is terrible. I took this job as because I wanted to continue to engage with students, because their relational aspects of teaching is really interesting and engaging and provocative for me. And I'm good at it. And I-my skills as an educator, and what I can bring to an educational experience with students, is truncated because of where we are now, like I can't-for instance, in a group of kids, it's very-in that because of the number of years I've been doing it, it's easy for me to figure out who are the kids who tend to be disengaged, who might not find themselves, who might not see themselves in the work that is in front of them or maybe in school period. And I enjoy as part of my job being able to bring that student into the experience, have them feel seen, and heard, and validate what they have to offer. In an engaged-in a group engagement and engage one on one engagement and engagement with with a object in an archive. And so I don't-can't do that anymore. That's not something I do. We don't work with full classes now. We might in the fall, do it remotely. But I won't, I won't be able to see those kids. I won't be able to identify what kids need a little extra acknowledgement or focus from me in order to bring them more deeply into what we're doing. So the whole relational aspect of teaching is, you know, not here. It's not completely gone, or I mean for teachers who see their kids every day online. For them, I don't think it's completely gone. And I think they actually feel like they're having some, some of them are having actually even more deep relational connections with families than they had before, especially for young kids. But, you know, for high school teachers right now they're saying, you know, 40% of their kids just didn't show up. So it's a-yeah, it's sad and miss it a lot.
Alex Bice 25:33
Yeah, I'm sure. Thank you. That's very, very helpful information to hear. In terms of talking more specifically about the medium that you work with a the Leventhal Center, which is Maps, what do you think-what do you think they offer as an educational medium?
Lynn Brown 26:02
So much. I mean, I can-I'll just list a few things, but it by no means the things I'm going to talk about. It's not at all comprehensive, because there's so many things, but I'll talk about a few. So one is I think they provide the the opportunity for students to engage with visual culture in a way that requires questioning and observation and close looking. And it's something that students, I think, are, especially when their world is increasingly on screens and what they're seeing is curated and designed to, to direct their attention in certain ways. That their ability to to notice how their attention is being directed and to be thinking about why it might be being directed in particular directions is I think that's not being taught. And I think some students, and you know, as they get older or have a certain level of sophistication around that, and they're able to able to be really sort of skeptical and critical viewers of whatever, they're not just viewers, but sort of consumers of online media. But for a lot of kids, I think they're not getting that. And when you are engaging with us, a map a static source, especially if you're like, with the object itself. There's a certain kind of attention you have to bring and a sort of a recursive process of well, look again, look again, look again, and think about why. You know, what's there? What isn't there? Why might not be there? Oh, Who made it? Okay, there's a name well, who's that person? What do you know about that person? Or what might you guess about that person? If you don't know anything, then what might your next step be to figure out like if what you're what the truthfulness is at what you're looking at? So, I think there's a kind of close looking and inquiry that can happen with those kinds of objects that is useful. Training, I guess, for not just kids, but for all of us in thinking about material and visual culture produced by human beings, for other human beings to look at. So that's one thing that I think maps are useful. I think it's also useful because students are oftentimes not thinking about the world spatially, at least not not in a way that they are. For not in a meta way, like they're not aware that they're thinking about the world spatially when they are. And I think, for example, we're developing an elective that will be taught in hopefully taught in one to one school pilot in one school in the fall that is focused around the question of how to racial ideas become spatial practice. So, looking-thinking about the world spatially, and in terms of the geography of what's around us, is a lens through which to think about policy, like how has the world around us been constructed, it's not just, it's not just It doesn't just exist. It's not just that it is. It was made this way. And it was made this way by people who are following certain kinds of ideas and certain kinds of policies. So maps helps students start thinking geographically and spatially about their environment. And not just that things are just a given like they just exist. Maps are, maps are cool, like they're puzzles. So like that can be really engaging for students to like, try to figure out what's going on in them. You know, they're almost like a third type of Where's Waldo game in a way like, like, What is there? What's in this thing? What is it trying to show me? Like it's a, it's like a puzzle to unlock. And as students also like to see themselves. Like, where, where, where am I on this map? Like, it's important for us to know like, where are we situated in any place? And what is our relationship to an artwork? What is our relationship to a short story? We're always trying to write find ourselves, not always, but oftentimes trying to find ourselves in whatever it is we're engaging with. So maps, you know, offer in an interesting way to do that. Like, where am I in this map? Or, my God, I'm not in this map, like, what does that mean? Like my-I'm erased from this map. What does that mean? So, those are some, those are a few ways, actually going probably, if I sat down and thought about it, you know, planned it out a little bit more. I mean, I know I could, but I'm going to stop there.
Alex Bice 31:36
Gotcha. In, in relation to those that you mentioned, how sort of thinking about the world, spatially getting students to see or not see themselves in a place. Which of those sort of educational pieces that you mentioned, do you think are the most feasible to sort of bring into this more online setting but seems like is what people are going to be experiencing over the next year?
Lynn Brown 32:08
Can you repeat that one more time? I think I know what you're asking, but can you say it one more time.
Alex Bice 32:12
I just wanted to ask added the sort of educational facets of maps that you mentioned earlier, which do you think are easiest or the most feasible to bring into an online museum education environment?
Lynn Brown 32:30
Right. I think they're all possible. I mean, when I think-they're all possible, I think, I mean, I know I know, they are, I mean, we've already done some of that. So and educators are doing some of that with their students. So and I do it when I learn about maps or I take a class you know, on cartography or on, on using maps to students or something we that are oftentimes those are virtual, I think it's possible to do that. I think the hardest thing is to make sense of anything, it's best to do it in community and to discuss with other people what it is that you see or don't see or learning or not learning or-For example, in these I described earlier these-working with high school students who would who designed interview questions for other high school students and then ran small discussion groups with them. And the-Michelle and I, who were just a two person education team, were-recorded the breakout sessions-the breakup conversations in the-we didn't say anything. The students ran the conversations and had the conversations. They lasted for about 45 minutes probably. One student, in response to a question said-I guess one of the questions was what kind of map would you like to see that you don't see? I'm not sure exactly what the question was, but it might have been that one. But one student, a Cape Verdean student, was saying, you know, "a lot of my classmates had no idea that my country even exists." And my country is so small that it doesn't even really show up on a lot of maps. I can't even see it. So she was talking about how important it was for her to feel like there was a map or something to look at that showed her country that she could use to show other people about where she's from, to sort of validate her where she comes from. And another student in the group was like, "Oh, that's how I feel about where I'm from. So I'm from a country in Central America." She Salvadorian. So she's like "I'm from one of the smallest countries in Central America, from El Salvador. And I feel like people don't know anything about my country either. And it's not. It's kind of small and not emphasized on most maps. So I would really like to see more maps of Central America and how my country relates to those." So I really so in that way, they were like making a connection between the two of them which, which in my mind, in a class, if we were in an in person class, that connection might lead to whatever. It might, you know, it might lead to a friendship. It might mean lead to them wanting to work together on a project if given an option at any point. It might lead to a future conversation about one of their countries, you know, teaching about some of their immigration, their immigration stories maybe to each other. And that is not happening. Like, that's just not happening. I mean, it happened in that that situation that I was describing, but that's because we had to construct that pretty carefully, where students controlled what questions would be asked and and that the students were asking the questions, not suddenly, maybe we would have gotten the same answers if we had been asking the questions. I don't know that. But but that community aspect of learning together is it's, I don't know what kind of effect that's gonna have on us, on students, on our communities, on, I mean, on education, I guess. I think our communities are going to be okay. I think I think people are finding ways to have community with each other. But I don't, in terms of education, I don't know. I think that aspect of what's happening in education is, is gonna, is really diminished right now. Some teachers I've seen are doing really a really amazing job at trying to not let that happen. Like, I got to go to like a children's book launch party. We're like, all the kids were on the Zoom and they were all reading parts of the book that they had written and you know, chatting with each other in the chat window. But it's very much that the teachers had set this tone and expectation for that to happen and I really just don't feel like that's gonna happen everywhere.
Alex Bice 37:53
It's a very, very good point about the rural community, especially in education. In terms of sort of going, going forward, what do you see in terms of the future of museum education, both in terms of like, I guess, how do you think museum education can help people relate and learn about this moment and the conversations that are happening now especially around like the pandemic, but also race and these other major conversations that are occurring in Boston and in the state and throughout the country at the moment?
Lynn Brown 38:55
Well, I mean, I think I mean, I think that by doing what we should have been doing or should have been doing all along, right, and what a lot of people have been doing all along, except, you know, figuring out how to make it accessible to people, and find structures within remote interactions that allow for people to come together. You know, a lot of people are experimenting with ways to make that happen. The thing that museums can do is, and I'm a believer in like that the objects really matter. Right? That and hope-hopefully, that stays part of what, what museums do is that the stuff, the stuff matters, because the stuff is our portals. Right? They're portals into the history. They're portals into-just the Mass Historical Society just sent out, whatever, one of their like weekly posts over the last week leading up to July 4. And they talked about a document that they have in their collection, which is a flyer to a meeting with William Loyd Garrison, and Sojourner Truth, and I think Thoreau was there, all speaking on the occasion of leading up to July 4, where I think Garrison, I need to go back and read it because I sort of looked at it quickly. I want to go back but I think at that meeting, like Garrison, like burned a copy of the Constitution, maybe? I don't know, it was like, he did something really provocative and people, whatever but I mean, that meeting and that, that, you know, interracial meeting on confronting the injustice-injustices and of the time leading towards abolition. You know, there's a lot to think about, and that objects and questions that it raises for us today. So I think what museums can do is to contextualize their work and raise questions for us to be thinking about the human condition, right? Like, wow, why why was X? Why did that lead to such a huge change in our you know, society in one way or another? Or why did that not lead to a change even though there was so much energy put into something by so many people? And objects can sort of like bring us in as a little doorway, right? Into some into something that is really huge. It can help to focus our attention. So I think that's one way. That's one way museums can do it. And then maybe we can expand our thinking about like, not just like what is an object, right? What is what is the stuff, but like a community garden, right? But like that is a, that can be an object. Like there can be a museum of community gardens and community garden histories like maybe think that that was an archive more or something else. But you know, I would love to see something like that. Like my community garden where I had my garden is on the land, on land that was used to be housing for people that was torn down in order to build a highway through the city that never ended up being built, because community members and activists from many, many different communities came together and said, "No, we're not going to put this highway through our neighborhoods." And now it's a community garden, but it used to be housing like people used to live there. So maybe those could be museums can think about those spaces, as you know, museums have spaces instead of just objects.
Alex Bice 43:28
Absolutely. So those are all of the questions I had, relating to this interview. Is there anything else you wish I would have asked?
Lynn Brown 43:50
I don't know. I don't know.
Alex Bice 43:54
Okay. Do you have anything else you would like to Say before we finish this oral history.
Lynn Brown 44:05
No, I don't think so. I, I guess I would want to reemphasize again, that I think that our, the biggest challenge we're facing in terms of education in the world that I am is this relational aspect.
Alex Bice 44:22
Absolutely.
Lynn Brown 44:23
Is, is how do we, how do we, you know, we see it, right? Like, I've been going to, I've been going to protests. I've been, you know, people are coming together. Anyway, despite the situation that we're in there does not seem to Massachusetts to be an uptick in cases as a result of demonstrations. We, you know, we've had our first day of no one dying, right? We haven't had a huge increase in infections as results of demonstrations in the city. So like, we're going to figure it out. Or we are figuring it out. Or, like figuring how to try to, try to be careful and, and manage our risks for ourselves. Everybody's making their own decisions around risk. But in education, I'm, I'm worried about students experiencing the relation between each other, and between themselves, and their teachers. And yeah, I guess that's it.
Alex Bice 45:31
Excellent. Thank you so much for your time and your thoughts on all of this. It has been-
Lynn Brown 45:37
Okay.
Alex Bice 45:38
-very informative.
Lynn Brown 45:40
Okay, great. Thank you for for doing this project. And I'll be in when when do people who just are interested in looking to see what people are saying in this project, when will we be able to do that?
Alex Bice 45:55
Um, I will-I am not sure off of the top of my head because there are specific people that go through and do some of the back end curation for these oral histories, but I will definitely reach out to them and let you know.
Lynn Brown 46:13
That'd be great. Yeah. I mean, it might be an interesting teaching tool for us too. So I like that there will be publicly available and you know, there might be things for for students, especially high school students to be reflecting on this time, sort of more, more concurrently than, you know, kids are in kindergarten looking back. It might be interesting for kids who are using this stuff now or soon.
Alex Bice 46:39
Yeah, absolutely.
Lynn Brown 46:41
Okay, cool. Thank you.
Alex Bice 46:43
Yeah. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
Lynn Brown 46:45
Okay, you too. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai, 2nd pass by Clinton Roberts
So we are recording. My name is Alex Bice. I am here with Lynn Brown. The date is July 2 2020. The time is 8:57 AM. Lynn, I want to briefly review the informed consent and deed of gift documents that you signed. This interview is for the COVID-19 Oral History Project, which is associated with the Journal of the Plague Year: A COVID-19 Archive. The COVID-19 Oral History Project is a rapid response oral history focused on archiving the lived experience of the COVID-19 epidemic. We have designed this project so that professional researchers and the broader public can create an upload their oral histories to our open access and open source database. This study will help us collect narratives and understandings about COVID-19 as well as help us better understand the impacts of the pandemic over time. The recordings demographic information and the verbatim transcripts will be deposited in the Journal of the Plague Year: A COVID-19 Archive and the Indiana University Library System for the use of researchers and the general public. Do you have any questions about the project that I can answer?
Lynn Brown 1:08
Just one, is this a grant-funded project? And if so, who's providing the funding?
Alex Bice 1:15
I do not believe it is grant-funded at this point. I believe that it's currently operating through ASU [Arizona State University]. I don't believe they have a grant for it yet but I believe they're working on getting some
Lynn Brown 1:32
Okay. Okay.
Alex Bice 1:35
Taking part in this study is voluntary, you may choose not to take part or you may leave to study at any time, leaving the study will not result in any penalty or loss of benefits to which you are entitled. Your decision whether or not to participate in the study will not affect your current or future relations with Indiana University, IUPY or the IUPY Arts and Humanities Institute. Participant-participating in this project means that you're interview will be recorded in digital video and or audio format and maybe transcribed. The recordings and possible transcriptions of my interview, copies of any supplementary documents, or additional photos that you wish to share. And the informed consent and deed of gift may be deposited in the Journal of a Plague Year: A COVID-19 Archive and the Indiana University Library System and will be available to both researchers and the general public. Your name and other means of identification will not be confidential. Do you have any questions?
Lynn Brown 2:30
No
Alex Bice 2:31
Great. In addition to your signed document, would you please offer a verbal confirmation that you understand and agree to these terms?
Lynn Brown 2:39
I understand and agree to the terms.
Alex Bice 2:41
Excellent. I am also asking that you verbally confirm that you have agreed that your interview will be made available under the following license Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 4.0.
Lynn Brown 2:54
Yes, fine.
Alex Bice 2:56
And finally I want to ask for a verbal confirmation that you have agreed that your interview will be made available to the public immediately.
Lynn Brown 3:04
Yes, fine.
Alex Bice 3:06
Excellent. Thank you. So in terms of getting started, I was wondering if you could just tell me a little bit about your background, including your previous experience working in museums and cultural heritage?
Lynn Brown 3:24
So yeah, I taught in the public schools for close to 20 years, starting in Boston Public Schools, and then from the bulk of that time in Cambridge. And I was a middle school teacher of humanities for, again, most of that time, seventh and eighth graders. And then I left teaching, and I was looking for work, where I could still interact with students. I was super interested in visual culture and art. So I worked at Mass College of Art in the Bakalar & Paine Galleries, which are their sort of international galleries, publicly open galleries. And worked, leading they're Looking to Learn program, which works primarily with Boston Public Schools, students, but also students in the greater Boston area. And then that was-did not have benefits. And so I looked for another position and found the job as the Education Coordinator at the Leventhal Map Center, that's an Education Center at the Boston Public Library. And I've been there for three years.
Alex Bice 4:48
Excellent. Could you talk a little bit about what the Leventhal Map Center does?
Lynn Brown 4:55
Sure. So the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center was established with money from Norman B. Leventhal, who was a wealthy developer in Boston and a map collector. And he was concerned about the management along with other people about the management of the library's map collection. And he wanted to provide funding so that the collection would be sort of stewarded as well as be made available through educational programming to Bostonians, especially K-12 students. So that was the origin of the map center. It has a unique relationship in that it is a private nonprofit that lives within the Public Library. We have a very close relationship with the library and we take care of the library's map collection and offer programming related to it. So we, again not over this past year, but in previous years we offer programming to-up to 4000-or around 4000 students, most of them Boston Public Schools, university classes. We have-we used to have two public exhibitions in our gallery space a year. Again, things have really changed now. Our current exhibition is digital and available online. Yeah, that-we provide reference to researchers. G-we now have a GIS librarian. And so GIS services, and classes, as well as research on finding GIS geospatial data sets for people. It's also something we provide.
Alex Bice 6:56
Great. And what has some of the education programs that you've worked on for the Leventhal Map Center, what have those, sort of, consisted of?
Lynn Brown 7:08
Do you mean in terms of content or, or like process?
Alex Bice 7:14
I guess both.
Lynn Brown 7:17
So we for K 12 education, we have a really wide ranging sort of list of content that we provide. We are somewhat responsive as well as we link new content that we developed to our exhibitions. And then we also have sort of programs that have existed since the beginning of the Map Center that align somewhat with mass frameworks, and just our ideas about what students should have and when they should have start thinking about geographic education. So we have programs for elementary schools-young elementary school students that introduce them to maps called "What is a Map?" is one of our programs. And they start to think about, you know, what, what do maps do other than help us find our way around. What different kind of maps are there? Maps are all different and have distinct purposes. So that would be one example of something that's sort of a core program. And then we have, we have a number of lessons over the last couple of years that we've developed actually, more, more in the last year on indigenous presence in New England. Actually, we did have materials that started before last year as well, but we had a large exhibition called "America Transformed," the two part exhibition looking at westward expansion. So as part of that we partnered with indigenous consultants and indigenous cartographers, and as part of that work, we created reproductions are maps that highlights settler colonialism and indigenous presence in the overwhelmingly Euro-American maps that we have, but also some native maps. So we have more-we have a lot of new programs and new lessons and curriculum available in the area of indigenous presence in North America and in what would become the United States. We, for instance, have a lesson that we did over last year because we were concerned about young people getting registered to vote called "Why Vote?" that looks at maps, map-interactive map created by a cartographer through Esri [ Environmental Systems Research Institute]. The talks about the effect of non-voters on the outcome of elections. And then we have-we do a lot of curriculum design on lessons related to our exhibitions. Like now we have an exhibition that is digital that we were hoping to have it open by now, but the library is closed. So it's all online. But we produced on-edigital materials for that exhibition, so lessons on helping students understand what projections are, and how every map is distorted, and what to look for in thinking about-when thinking about the world on a map, questions to ask. And another lesson on different ways of representing data. So one on counting populations of children in Boston and different ways, different kinds of maps, that introduces students to things like choropleth maps and civilization and different ways to represent data as well as the ways to inquire about what the purpose of a mapmaker is and why they want the data and why they might use it in different lines.
Alex Bice 11:10
Great. That sounds very interesting. Thank you. Before sort of all of this started and the Map Center had to close with, obviously, all the other sort of museums and cultural heritage institutions in Boston, what did it-
Lynn Brown 11:30
And schools.
Alex Bice 11:32
And schools as well. What did an average day in your position look like?
Lynn Brown 11:39
Well, a day might look like showing up early and setting up materials for a group of maybe two classes of elementary school students from a Boston elementary school, who would come into the MAP sensor and I would greet them and meet in the learning center at the Map Center, which is a small room, in the back of our gallery, where students would sit on the floor with each other, and they would draw maps, and we would talk, and then they would break into small groups and work with map reproductions or the actual maps. In doing inquiry exercises, they will present their findings and then we would tour them around the exhibition or they might do a scavenger hunt looking for information in the exhibition, then they would leave, clean everything up, maybe get a short break, and then the other group from that school or another group class would arrive, we would do the same thing all over again. And then some days, maybe we would have a third class from that school or not. And then I would spend a lot of time scheduling other school groups to come in and out. For lessons we also I might be preparing materials for outreach. So I would maybe be preparing for the following day in which I would be packing up large maps and large map reproductions materials to go to another school maybe a middle school in Boston to do programs on demographic maps that show Boston, the change over time some of them demographic map some of them, you know, historical maps of different kinds.
Alex Bice 13:30
Gotcha.
Lynn Brown 13:31
[unintelligible]
Alex Bice 13:34
Great. In terms of how has the pandemic and institution and school closures sort of affected your job? What does an average day look like, I guess now?
Lynn Brown 13:52
Right? Well, the average days I you know, leave the bedroom to go to the office in the next room and I spend all day on a computer and work with my-with the Director of Education at the Map Center in figuring out how do we offer both lessons and curriculum, learning opportunities to teachers. A lot of what we do too is also not directed directly at students but also towards teachers, professional development in different ways. So how do we continue to do what we do remotely and online as opposed to in person. So a lot of it is near the beginning, because we were getting ready to open our exhibition when everything shut down our new exhibition. We spent a lot of our time, our days on computers, writing, writing online curriculum and figuring out-putting it in markdown language so that it could be loaded up into the catalog, sort of online catalog structure. We were platform we were using so it's learning how to how to-I had to learn new, new technology and new ways of thinking about curriculum that we had designed for kids to do in person, like crawling around on the floor around large sheets of butcher paper, everybody drawing and writing on the same piece of paper. How do we now make that accessible to teachers in a way that students will not be together? So a lot of time was doing that, figuring out how to make curriculum clear and accessible online. And then a lot of it was that we also had to, I guess this sort of also happens a sort of perfect storm where the public library was switching to a new communications platform. So everybody was going to Microsoft Office teams. So there was a lot of time, team coordination, sort of organization coordination, trying to figure out how do we get all of our files all over the place in one place on a on a new digital platform? How do we communicate with each other? A lot of time was spent doing that. Spent a lot of time figuring out-we had a large grant program we were in the middle of that was-we were going to high schools to teach kids how to to interpret and make GIS maps and think about data related to Boston and with the goal of thinking about how maps can and can't be used for advocacy around neighborhood issues. And when school shut down that was sort of stopped all of our engagement with students in their classrooms. So how do we continue our relationships with teachers and with students related to that work? So we spend a lot of times sort of trying to figure out approaches to that. So some of it looks like trying to pull kids together from different schools we worked with and asking them-asking teachers to connect us with some students who might be willing to continue to work with us or talk with us, reaching out to them bringing them into Zoom conversations so that the students could talk-could help design interview groups and interview questions that they would then facilitate with students from other schools and then scheduling those meetings. So those kids could run discussions with students from other schools who also worked with mapping with us in different ways. Hmm, that's, that's a, that's there's other t ings, but that's sort of a picture of what I do now.
Alex Bice 18:32
Gotcha. And I guess, do you envision any of this sort of, as institutions start to reopen, obviously, schools are out at this point? Do you envision any of your schedule or sort of how you go about your work? Do you see that? Do you think that'll shift again at all?
Lynn Brown 18:57
Well, our our mandate is to be responsive, you know, to whatever happens to schools. So our job is to provide materials, support to educators, and to students in whatever way they need it. So teachers are being asked right now in many districts, like Boston teachers are being asked now as they plan for next year to plan, to plan their-administrators are being asked to plan their schedules in their schools and their, you know, the flow of their, their year and days according to three scenarios. So educate-you know, administrators and teachers now have to plan for three scenarios. One if it's all virtual or remote. One if it's a hybrid. So maybe one week on one week off, small, you know, 50% of the kids one week and then 50% the next week. And what if it is, you know, things, whatever open up. So they're being asked to completely. So they're being asked to plan along three different possible eventualities. So we also have to sort of be following that. Our guess is in the fall, we're not going to be ready to-for students all to be in classrooms together, as they were before. So we won't be going back to just how things used to be. And that a lot of our work will still be-has to be accessed digitally, which in a way is okay for us along the line that we needed to, we needed to make a lot of our materials more accessible, more clear, online anyway. So a lot of the work we're doing now is it's, it's good for us to have as a institution. But we are really missing, you know, just sort of, personally as teachers, we're really missing engagements with students. And we are also aware of the limitations of engaging with materials when you can only look at them on a screen, as opposed to, you know, seeing how big a map is and spinning it around. And you know, we aren't point now where students can put on a VR headset and like, zoom into a map and walk around the landscape, as you know, as it is. So they're sort of embodied experience with a map is really limited when they're not able to sort of be in the Map Center and have a real map and hold magnifying glasses and that kind of thing. So we don't know if we're going to be able to do that in the fall.
Alex Bice 22:04
Right. How do you, how do you personally feel about doing more, sort of, doing more digital work this coming fall? Is that something that excites you in relation? Or is it more just a placeholder for the more in person engagements until we hit a time where things can-it's truly safe to like be in groups again?
Lynn Brown 22:38
Right. So who knows, like when or if it's like if we're waiting for a vaccine to that be able to happen. So personally as, as when not, not as sort of education coordinator with with a mandate to just be responsive. You know, this is terrible. I took this job as because I wanted to continue to engage with students, because their relational aspects of teaching is really interesting and engaging and provocative for me. And I'm good at it. And I-my skills as an educator, and what I can bring to an educational experience with students, is truncated because of where we are now, like I can't-for instance, in a group of kids, it's very-in that because of the number of years I've been doing it, it's easy for me to figure out who are the kids who tend to be disengaged, who might not find themselves, who might not see themselves in the work that is in front of them or maybe in school period. And I enjoy as part of my job being able to bring that student into the experience, have them feel seen, and heard, and validate what they have to offer. In an engaged-in a group engagement and engage one on one engagement and engagement with with a object in an archive. And so I don't-can't do that anymore. That's not something I do. We don't work with full classes now. We might in the fall, do it remotely. But I won't, I won't be able to see those kids. I won't be able to identify what kids need a little extra acknowledgement or focus from me in order to bring them more deeply into what we're doing. So the whole relational aspect of teaching is, you know, not here. It's not completely gone, or I mean for teachers who see their kids every day online. For them, I don't think it's completely gone. And I think they actually feel like they're having some, some of them are having actually even more deep relational connections with families than they had before, especially for young kids. But, you know, for high school teachers right now they're saying, you know, 40% of their kids just didn't show up. So it's a-yeah, it's sad and miss it a lot.
Alex Bice 25:33
Yeah, I'm sure. Thank you. That's very, very helpful information to hear. In terms of talking more specifically about the medium that you work with a the Leventhal Center, which is Maps, what do you think-what do you think they offer as an educational medium?
Lynn Brown 26:02
So much. I mean, I can-I'll just list a few things, but it by no means the things I'm going to talk about. It's not at all comprehensive, because there's so many things, but I'll talk about a few. So one is I think they provide the the opportunity for students to engage with visual culture in a way that requires questioning and observation and close looking. And it's something that students, I think, are, especially when their world is increasingly on screens and what they're seeing is curated and designed to, to direct their attention in certain ways. That their ability to to notice how their attention is being directed and to be thinking about why it might be being directed in particular directions is I think that's not being taught. And I think some students, and you know, as they get older or have a certain level of sophistication around that, and they're able to able to be really sort of skeptical and critical viewers of whatever, they're not just viewers, but sort of consumers of online media. But for a lot of kids, I think they're not getting that. And when you are engaging with us, a map a static source, especially if you're like, with the object itself. There's a certain kind of attention you have to bring and a sort of a recursive process of well, look again, look again, look again, and think about why. You know, what's there? What isn't there? Why might not be there? Oh, Who made it? Okay, there's a name well, who's that person? What do you know about that person? Or what might you guess about that person? If you don't know anything, then what might your next step be to figure out like if what you're what the truthfulness is at what you're looking at? So, I think there's a kind of close looking and inquiry that can happen with those kinds of objects that is useful. Training, I guess, for not just kids, but for all of us in thinking about material and visual culture produced by human beings, for other human beings to look at. So that's one thing that I think maps are useful. I think it's also useful because students are oftentimes not thinking about the world spatially, at least not not in a way that they are. For not in a meta way, like they're not aware that they're thinking about the world spatially when they are. And I think, for example, we're developing an elective that will be taught in hopefully taught in one to one school pilot in one school in the fall that is focused around the question of how to racial ideas become spatial practice. So, looking-thinking about the world spatially, and in terms of the geography of what's around us, is a lens through which to think about policy, like how has the world around us been constructed, it's not just, it's not just It doesn't just exist. It's not just that it is. It was made this way. And it was made this way by people who are following certain kinds of ideas and certain kinds of policies. So maps helps students start thinking geographically and spatially about their environment. And not just that things are just a given like they just exist. Maps are, maps are cool, like they're puzzles. So like that can be really engaging for students to like, try to figure out what's going on in them. You know, they're almost like a third type of Where's Waldo game in a way like, like, What is there? What's in this thing? What is it trying to show me? Like it's a, it's like a puzzle to unlock. And as students also like to see themselves. Like, where, where, where am I on this map? Like, it's important for us to know like, where are we situated in any place? And what is our relationship to an artwork? What is our relationship to a short story? We're always trying to write find ourselves, not always, but oftentimes trying to find ourselves in whatever it is we're engaging with. So maps, you know, offer in an interesting way to do that. Like, where am I in this map? Or, my God, I'm not in this map, like, what does that mean? Like my-I'm erased from this map. What does that mean? So, those are some, those are a few ways, actually going probably, if I sat down and thought about it, you know, planned it out a little bit more. I mean, I know I could, but I'm going to stop there.
Alex Bice 31:36
Gotcha. In, in relation to those that you mentioned, how sort of thinking about the world, spatially getting students to see or not see themselves in a place. Which of those sort of educational pieces that you mentioned, do you think are the most feasible to sort of bring into this more online setting but seems like is what people are going to be experiencing over the next year?
Lynn Brown 32:08
Can you repeat that one more time? I think I know what you're asking, but can you say it one more time.
Alex Bice 32:12
I just wanted to ask added the sort of educational facets of maps that you mentioned earlier, which do you think are easiest or the most feasible to bring into an online museum education environment?
Lynn Brown 32:30
Right. I think they're all possible. I mean, when I think-they're all possible, I think, I mean, I know I know, they are, I mean, we've already done some of that. So and educators are doing some of that with their students. So and I do it when I learn about maps or I take a class you know, on cartography or on, on using maps to students or something we that are oftentimes those are virtual, I think it's possible to do that. I think the hardest thing is to make sense of anything, it's best to do it in community and to discuss with other people what it is that you see or don't see or learning or not learning or-For example, in these I described earlier these-working with high school students who would who designed interview questions for other high school students and then ran small discussion groups with them. And the-Michelle and I, who were just a two person education team, were-recorded the breakout sessions-the breakup conversations in the-we didn't say anything. The students ran the conversations and had the conversations. They lasted for about 45 minutes probably. One student, in response to a question said-I guess one of the questions was what kind of map would you like to see that you don't see? I'm not sure exactly what the question was, but it might have been that one. But one student, a Cape Verdean student, was saying, you know, "a lot of my classmates had no idea that my country even exists." And my country is so small that it doesn't even really show up on a lot of maps. I can't even see it. So she was talking about how important it was for her to feel like there was a map or something to look at that showed her country that she could use to show other people about where she's from, to sort of validate her where she comes from. And another student in the group was like, "Oh, that's how I feel about where I'm from. So I'm from a country in Central America." She Salvadorian. So she's like "I'm from one of the smallest countries in Central America, from El Salvador. And I feel like people don't know anything about my country either. And it's not. It's kind of small and not emphasized on most maps. So I would really like to see more maps of Central America and how my country relates to those." So I really so in that way, they were like making a connection between the two of them which, which in my mind, in a class, if we were in an in person class, that connection might lead to whatever. It might, you know, it might lead to a friendship. It might mean lead to them wanting to work together on a project if given an option at any point. It might lead to a future conversation about one of their countries, you know, teaching about some of their immigration, their immigration stories maybe to each other. And that is not happening. Like, that's just not happening. I mean, it happened in that that situation that I was describing, but that's because we had to construct that pretty carefully, where students controlled what questions would be asked and and that the students were asking the questions, not suddenly, maybe we would have gotten the same answers if we had been asking the questions. I don't know that. But but that community aspect of learning together is it's, I don't know what kind of effect that's gonna have on us, on students, on our communities, on, I mean, on education, I guess. I think our communities are going to be okay. I think I think people are finding ways to have community with each other. But I don't, in terms of education, I don't know. I think that aspect of what's happening in education is, is gonna, is really diminished right now. Some teachers I've seen are doing really a really amazing job at trying to not let that happen. Like, I got to go to like a children's book launch party. We're like, all the kids were on the Zoom and they were all reading parts of the book that they had written and you know, chatting with each other in the chat window. But it's very much that the teachers had set this tone and expectation for that to happen and I really just don't feel like that's gonna happen everywhere.
Alex Bice 37:53
It's a very, very good point about the rural community, especially in education. In terms of sort of going, going forward, what do you see in terms of the future of museum education, both in terms of like, I guess, how do you think museum education can help people relate and learn about this moment and the conversations that are happening now especially around like the pandemic, but also race and these other major conversations that are occurring in Boston and in the state and throughout the country at the moment?
Lynn Brown 38:55
Well, I mean, I think I mean, I think that by doing what we should have been doing or should have been doing all along, right, and what a lot of people have been doing all along, except, you know, figuring out how to make it accessible to people, and find structures within remote interactions that allow for people to come together. You know, a lot of people are experimenting with ways to make that happen. The thing that museums can do is, and I'm a believer in like that the objects really matter. Right? That and hope-hopefully, that stays part of what, what museums do is that the stuff, the stuff matters, because the stuff is our portals. Right? They're portals into the history. They're portals into-just the Mass Historical Society just sent out, whatever, one of their like weekly posts over the last week leading up to July 4. And they talked about a document that they have in their collection, which is a flyer to a meeting with William Loyd Garrison, and Sojourner Truth, and I think Thoreau was there, all speaking on the occasion of leading up to July 4, where I think Garrison, I need to go back and read it because I sort of looked at it quickly. I want to go back but I think at that meeting, like Garrison, like burned a copy of the Constitution, maybe? I don't know, it was like, he did something really provocative and people, whatever but I mean, that meeting and that, that, you know, interracial meeting on confronting the injustice-injustices and of the time leading towards abolition. You know, there's a lot to think about, and that objects and questions that it raises for us today. So I think what museums can do is to contextualize their work and raise questions for us to be thinking about the human condition, right? Like, wow, why why was X? Why did that lead to such a huge change in our you know, society in one way or another? Or why did that not lead to a change even though there was so much energy put into something by so many people? And objects can sort of like bring us in as a little doorway, right? Into some into something that is really huge. It can help to focus our attention. So I think that's one way. That's one way museums can do it. And then maybe we can expand our thinking about like, not just like what is an object, right? What is what is the stuff, but like a community garden, right? But like that is a, that can be an object. Like there can be a museum of community gardens and community garden histories like maybe think that that was an archive more or something else. But you know, I would love to see something like that. Like my community garden where I had my garden is on the land, on land that was used to be housing for people that was torn down in order to build a highway through the city that never ended up being built, because community members and activists from many, many different communities came together and said, "No, we're not going to put this highway through our neighborhoods." And now it's a community garden, but it used to be housing like people used to live there. So maybe those could be museums can think about those spaces, as you know, museums have spaces instead of just objects.
Alex Bice 43:28
Absolutely. So those are all of the questions I had, relating to this interview. Is there anything else you wish I would have asked?
Lynn Brown 43:50
I don't know. I don't know.
Alex Bice 43:54
Okay. Do you have anything else you would like to Say before we finish this oral history.
Lynn Brown 44:05
No, I don't think so. I, I guess I would want to reemphasize again, that I think that our, the biggest challenge we're facing in terms of education in the world that I am is this relational aspect.
Alex Bice 44:22
Absolutely.
Lynn Brown 44:23
Is, is how do we, how do we, you know, we see it, right? Like, I've been going to, I've been going to protests. I've been, you know, people are coming together. Anyway, despite the situation that we're in there does not seem to Massachusetts to be an uptick in cases as a result of demonstrations. We, you know, we've had our first day of no one dying, right? We haven't had a huge increase in infections as results of demonstrations in the city. So like, we're going to figure it out. Or we are figuring it out. Or, like figuring how to try to, try to be careful and, and manage our risks for ourselves. Everybody's making their own decisions around risk. But in education, I'm, I'm worried about students experiencing the relation between each other, and between themselves, and their teachers. And yeah, I guess that's it.
Alex Bice 45:31
Excellent. Thank you so much for your time and your thoughts on all of this. It has been-
Lynn Brown 45:37
Okay.
Alex Bice 45:38
-very informative.
Lynn Brown 45:40
Okay, great. Thank you for for doing this project. And I'll be in when when do people who just are interested in looking to see what people are saying in this project, when will we be able to do that?
Alex Bice 45:55
Um, I will-I am not sure off of the top of my head because there are specific people that go through and do some of the back end curation for these oral histories, but I will definitely reach out to them and let you know.
Lynn Brown 46:13
That'd be great. Yeah. I mean, it might be an interesting teaching tool for us too. So I like that there will be publicly available and you know, there might be things for for students, especially high school students to be reflecting on this time, sort of more, more concurrently than, you know, kids are in kindergarten looking back. It might be interesting for kids who are using this stuff now or soon.
Alex Bice 46:39
Yeah, absolutely.
Lynn Brown 46:41
Okay, cool. Thank you.
Alex Bice 46:43
Yeah. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
Lynn Brown 46:45
Okay, you too. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai, 2nd pass by Clinton Roberts