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Through the senses: Discovery Day bring history to life for blind
Photos courtesy of Dallas Heritage Village - Ceshaun Smith of Plano learns how to scrape corn at the Dallas Heritage Village.
By Kelley Chambers, kchambers@starlocalnews.com
The smell of a meal roasting over an open fire. The sound of a blacksmith's hammer ringing against an anvil. The feel of clay being molded into a bowl.
For a sighted person, a visit to a local museum rarely extends further than what they see. But for more than 90 visually impaired children who visited the Dallas Heritage Village last week, they got a literal feel for life as a Texas pioneer.
The museum opened its exhibits for Discovery Day, allowing children to utilize their sense of touch and smell to understand the world of blacksmithing, laundering, wool spinning, working in the general store, sitting in antique desks and exploring equipment in the bank.
Other activities the children were able to learn about outside of a book and through their senses were how corn was planted and shelled, how butter was churned, how animals were fed, what toys were like and what attending school may have been like in Victorian America.
Located in Old City Park, the Dallas Heritage Village is one of only five museums in Dallas to depict life during this era and showcases 38 historic structures, including log cabins, a railroad complex, a farmstead with livestock, a 19th century church and more. The museum became the first cultural organization in Dallas to provide regularly scheduled programming for children with visual impairments in 1991, and today serves as a national model for access to history for these children.
While the event, which is held once every two years, is an exclusive opportunity for these children to tour the museum, their experience isn't much different than what other visitors can expect, said Melissa Prycer, director of education at the Dallas Heritage Village. Areas such as the general store and farmstead have always encouraged the hands-on approach, as it is a way for even sighted learners to better understand the workings of not-so-modern technologies and concepts, she said.
"Everybody learns in many different ways, there are always tactile learners in every group," Prycer said. "It's like any other light bulb moment with a child. I did hear a 'whoa now I get it!' a couple of times, so I could tell they were starting to make a connection. But we hear that any day of week. Yes, they have visual impairments, but they are still learning about history in a way that's very similar to others kids who come to the museum."
There are more than 90 visually impaired students within the Plano school district. These children, along with their parents and the visual impairment faculty for PISD, attended the tour which was, in one word, "phenomenal," said teacher Susan Breeding. In addition to going beyond the basics when it comes to educating these children, visits like these are also excellent social opportunities, Breeding said.
"A lot of the time, they might be the only visually impaired student on that campus," she said. "It's nice to have that support network of other students that see things like they do. It [also] flushes out the concepts they are reading about in their social studies and history classes."
The idea of providing a historic field trip specially designed for the visually impaired came from Mary Ann Siller with the Richardson ISD. Now a national consultant in blindness and low vision, Siller was the national education director for the American Foundation for the Blind when she approached the Dallas Heritage Village about partnering with the foundation.
Discovery Day has made an impact on a national level, as the American Foundation for the Blind created its own guide for showing museums and libraries how to make their own programs for the visually impaired.
"We agreed that a museum visit is usually a complex, visually stimulating experience that requires visitors to learn by looking," Siller said in a release. "The docents do an amazing job translating the standard visual experience through the use of descriptive language, a technique we teach in advance training sessions for this day."
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