The Student Run Museum
By SUSAN BONTHRON
Mary Lee Powell’s students began the Cannery Museum in St. Cloud, Florida, which is to our knowledge the only student-run museum in the U.S.
I spent some time with my Community Works Journal colleague Joe Brooks visiting teachers and the principal of Michigan Avenue Elementary (MAE) school in St. Cloud. MAE teacher Mary Lee Powell and her students started the Cannery Museum as a way to help preserve Florida’s heritage.
MAE is a huge school. It’s built like a giant wheel, with classrooms in each spoke and the library at the hub. Saint Cloud’s residents have watched the swift disappearance of a way of life that has defined the community for the past century or more including cattle ranching. Being a Vermonter made the Heritage Fair I attended at Saint Cloud particularly poignant since I could share in the longing to preserve knowledge that was too quickly disappearing.
All day on Thursday afternoon we visited the school during their outdoor fair and barbecue to celebrate Florida’s heritage. There was an old chuck wagon with a story teller and a display of Seminole artifacts and skills by a Seminole of the Muskogee tribe named Jim Sawgrass. I didn’t have an opportunity to hear the story teller, but Mr. Sawgrass’ performance was quite entertaining and informative. He explained (and often demonstrated quite skillfully) the use of each of the tools and artifacts he had brought (blowing a conk horn, using a blow gun, musket and bow and arrow, explaining how to prepare a deer hide). He dispelled some common myths about “Indians” that the children had; for example, the “TV beat” of the tom-tom drum, how “Indians” are not all one people but many tribes, how braves and squaws call their approval of a returning hunter, and how to say various words in Muskogee (chiKEE is house, for example).
After Mr. Sawgrass’ demonstration, we watched a parade of children with the exhibits they had created about Florida’s heritage, many with environmental themes such as saving the bald eagle. The displays were colorful and represented a lot of hard work and research. When the fair day was over, many of the children who had displayed exhibits were involved in taking them over to the Cannery Museum for a special event on the following day.
Let me tell you what I learned (from a fourth grader in Mary Lee Powell’s class) about the children-started-and-run museum known as the “Cannery.” It is based in an historic building that was built in the 1930s during the depression to can vegetables grown by the townspeople. The cannery gave the townspeople work to do and a place to prepare food they had grown and put it by for hard times. In subsequent years, the building fell into disrepair. The school district leased the site for a nominal sum in order to allow Lee’s fourth graders to work there and restore the building. The Cannery project became the focus of their whole curriculum, as Lee applied the principles of the Foxfire and Place Based Service-Learning teaching methodologies in her classroom.
The project expanded to include a garden, a blacksmith shop (built by the father of one of Lee’s students), and an exhibit of scenes of cowboy life of the old west donated by a local citizen who made each scene himself. Cowboy life is important in St. Cloud, which is primarily ranching country where longhorn, brahmas and “scrub cattle” roam the flat grassland pasture that characterizes the landscape. But cowboys are now a fast-disappearing entity around St. Cloud thanks to the influx of tourists and plastic of Disney Enterprises. These make the Cannery Museum and the gathering and preservation of St. Cloud’s history all the more crucial. Lee’s “Cannery Kids” led tours of their museum for a busload of people who came down from the National Service-Learning Conference in Orlando.
What was especially powerful about the Cannery experience was the chance to experience firsthand the extraordinary atmosphere in Lee Powell’s and her partner Tillie Berghorn’s fourth-grade classrooms an atmosphere full of genuine curiosity, pride about their accomplishments, true student ownership of a collaborative project that affects the whole community.
For me the contrast between that genuine warmth and the unreality of Disneyworld so nearby was everywhere apparent. Though we had only the briefest contact with Disneyworld (dinner at a “log cabin” restaurant complete with phony cowboys wielding cap guns), some of us felt compelled afterward to counteract the effect with a visit to a nearby nature trail. The “Reedy Creek Swamp” is itself a magnificent example of what the best kind of service-learning initiative can result in: It is the Osceola District Schools Environmental Study Center. As we wound through the cedar swamp suspended on a wooden boardwalk above the soggy surface, we were able to view in complete comfort some heart-stopping sights: a coiled water moccasin asleep three feet below; a full-grown alligator sunning himself on a log; a group of mud turtles on a sandy beach; and most memorable of all, a full grown bald eagle sitting above her nest full of young. We were close enough to see every feather of her beautiful white head!!
I was struck by how great it feels to work side by side in the sunshine with friends of all ages, inspired by the words of local seniors and to achieve that unique satisfaction that only comes when you’re learning by doing, and “doing for” someone else.
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