Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation will discuss how anthropological pedagogical methods are adopted in education programming at the Ulster American Folk Park, Northern Ireland, by promoting critical thinking, empathy, and awareness of environmental sustainability within the programming for primary school children.

Paper Abstract:

The Ulster American Folk Park in County Tyrone Northern Ireland is a living history museum focussing on the migration of people from Ireland to North America with narratives and artefacts originating in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The main museum is an outdoor park exhibiting original homes and buildings from Ulster and North America, with an accompanying indoor gallery that offers historical context to the buildings and stories featured.

Through a comparison between two education workshops developed by education officer and historian Dr Pauline Gardiner, and delivered by the education team at the Ulster American Folk Park, this paper outlines the importance of anthropological pedagogical methodologies in museum education relating to migration and materiality. The team adopts these methods to promote empathetic attitudes towards refugees by focussing on narratives of emigration from Ulster to America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, using ancestral homes to promote awareness of environmental sustainability, anthropological pedagogical practices such object-based learning, analysis of primary resources, and interpretation of the narratives and objects by museum staff and the children themselves within their workshop activities. I will outline how critical thinking, empathy, and issues around sustainability in modern life are brought to the fore in the education offering at this living history museum.