The seventh grade Colonial Museum is one of several capstone experiences through which students demonstrate a sustained commitment to academic excellence. It is an inquiry-based project connected to a week-long trip to Jamestown and Williamsburg, VA, that is rich in scholarship and provides students with the opportunity to explore their wonderings about  life and work during the 1700s. Students dig deeply into areas of personal interest and, in addition to learning much about their topics, they learn important research skills that will serve them well in future academic endeavors. Just as important, they also come to understand more fully the work of historians and what it means to be a member of a learning community.

Throughout this journey, students explore the theme of “Cultures in Contact.” Through this lens, they examine the experience of Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans and how each contributed to the history of the period. Students also confront the issue of how the historic record is often not reflective of these varied perspectives. As a result, they come to understand why it is crucial that our attempts to understand the past take in the fullest possible view of these diverse experiences. The idea of history as an echo of varied voices and contested stories, mirrors the seventh graders attempts to craft the story of their research experience and to find their voices as historians. One needs only to spend a few minutes in the Museum to hear the power of their voices.

When the museum is open, students share their learnings about life during the colonial period with students in Kindergarten through eighth grade and with their families. In each of these exchanges, seventh graders are asked to think not only about what information they want to communicate, but how best to do so. Supported by demonstrations, simulations, models, dioramas, artifacts, and role playing, students share with their visitors the substantial fruits of their labors. That students are able to talk about the facts and ideas that they have learned is certainly impressive, but more moving is their ability to reflect on what it might have been like to live during this time. It is also exciting to listen to them as they use their newfound learning to look more critically at the legacy of these issues as they face us today. In this way, they experience the Museum not as seventh grade students, but as historians.

This digital museum exists to serve a number of important goals:

• It provides a way to capture something of the learning process that is so crucial to this project.
• It allows us to better use the research produced by a given class to inform the work of future classes.
• As a growing body of knowledge, this historical record of the Colonial Museum experience challenges students each year to consider the question, “What new ideas will I add to the fabric of the story of our understanding of the colonial experience?”