 Welcome to our panel on public scholarship and applied research in graduate seminars. We have with us Richard Menkis from UBC and Lenny Hart, MA student now incoming PhD student from UBC. We're going to talk about the course example history 595B public history for our course today. My name is Annika Rosanovsky. I work with the UBC Arts Amplifier. My pronouns are she and her. The UBC Arts Amplifier is a very small initiative in the faculty of arts that tries to connect graduate students to sort of meaningful forms of engagement, engaging their research outside of campus basically to sort of do applying their research with community organizations or industry partners off campus to sort of diversify their own career paths but also to sort of understand and more strongly how their own research actually applies to real world problems that are being solved sort of outside of the ivory tower. And so I'm here sort of a little bit just to facilitate and I'm also going to share a little bit of resources in what firms we can help if any of you in the audience would be interested in pursuing some form of applied research in your own classes then we can help you with that. So I'd like to I thank you all for gathering with me on the unceded ancestral and traditional territories. I am today talking to you from what is also called Fairview or otherwise the territory of the Muscovines, Guamish and Saywa Tooth nations. And I was thinking about doing this land acknowledgement again as for example somebody who's also not not from Canada and an unwanted visitor in that sense here. And I thought I could pose the question sort of to all of you as sort of a take away to think about for today in in what way this knowledge this this acknowledgement informs anything that you do in your in your everyday life. Does that inform the relationships that you form? Does that inform any of the decisions that you make when you're at work? What is sort of the importance for you of knowing that you are on these territories? So for today we're going to talk about applied research projects. I thought maybe we're also not too many people maybe we can start with a brief question of if anybody in the audience has actually used an applied research project before. If you like you can use the raise hand function to let us know if any of you are familiar with the concept. Nobody okay that is perfect so we can introduce you a little bit to what applied research projects are. We're keeping this very broad overall. So for an applied research project you indeed design your course with a project component that would mean students will work with an off-campus partner that could be oh perfect Dury thank you okay yeah public-facing website can be indeed absolutely form of like public research project. So the applied component is indeed coming in from if you have an off-campus partner that might be an arts organization that for example needs a new framework for the next grand application that they want to do or maybe it's a not-for-profit that wants to do an environment scan about the kinds of service gaps that they encounter. It could be a service provider who likewise needs some insight from somebody with the necessary knowledge and skills to help them assess a certain situation and so what your students would do in these kinds of projects is they would help the community partner actually solve these problems. And so in short students actually get to experience how their knowledge how their whole degree experience applies to things outside of university and so helped by your own course and the framework that you provide through sort of the classroom learning and that community partner project you sort of get to help students and transitioning that knowledge into a new context. And so we have two people here with us today who are going to talk a little bit about their particular experiences because there's various good reasons why these applied research projects are really beneficial to incorporate. A lot of it is some of it is very obvious like you allow students to grow their professional connections with people that are not just within a university context but you also provide skills where students learn how they can communicate their research in ways that is actually meaningful to people who don't work in academia. Likewise because students have a new context it often taps into a lot of creative potential and figuring out ways to address these new problems. This exposure can also help with diversifying students' career paths and it also helps with the intellectual confidence of knowing that niche knowledge that was gathered in the core form of like a master's degree for example or even the PhD can actually be applied in a broader scale and that you know there's something beyond that very specific niche research area that can actually be really useful and that students actually possess. Likewise a lot of research projects that are applied rely more on collaboration either because of the community organization that actually has an input or because there's several students working on tackling this project together. Likewise we have public communication and interpersonal skills just again because this is a lot of different people working together in a new context and so that supports a lot of that and so I'd like you to welcome Professor Richard Menkis and the MA student Lily Hart who are going to talk a little bit more about their experience. Yeah would you to introduce yourselves briefly? Hi I'm Richard Menkis I teach in the Department of History. My area is modern Jewish history. I also look at issues like Canadian responses to the Third Reich. I have always been very interested in doing work with museums and have created some exhibits, worked with others on exhibits and I'm very excited to be here to talk to you about the most recent experience of doing that with students. Lily? Hi I'm Lily Hart. I'm a current MA student incoming PhD at the Department of History. My current thesis has to do with the history of anthropology in Canada. My PhD work is more on like Pacific Northwest history and how small town historical societies constructed like stories of nationhood and settler colonialism and things like that and then I've done some public history I did some public history in undergrad years and then now in grad school and I'm also the digital content manager at a non-profit called Confluence so I've done some stuff there as well and I'm excited to be here and thank you for asking me. Perfect so I have a few questions that hopefully like provides all of you with a better idea of what Richard did in his course and so maybe Richard you can just tell us sort of a bit more general about what the applied research component was in your history class and what community partner you collaborated on. Sure so this was a graduate course in public history which means it's taking history beyond sort of the world of academic articles you know giving conference papers in other words beyond sort of the usual suspects when it comes to the academic modes of dissemination. I didn't want this to be a theoretical investigation of public history but really needed to be very much both theoretical and hands-on with practical applications so the students were responsible for doing one public history project with another student and another on their own and I decided to work with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center because I've had experience working with them before especially on a couple of exhibitions and education guides and very briefly I can just if I share my screen with you so one of the assignments was a research guide which students did in collaboration with one or two other students. These research guides integrated into a structure which the Holocaust Center already had where they introduced the materials for the center so they had already done one on what's called enemy aliens and war orphans and then the students in the course did the research guides to diaries and correspondence Holocaust photography and issues relating to anti-semitic propaganda. Students were also then responsible for an individual project and this was something that kind of broke out of the mold of what the center had done because they had done before these sort of rather tightly constructed and narrowly construed I would say galleries but what I wanted the students to do would be more a project individually where they created a narrative whether it be in the form of a podcast or in the form of a larger slideshow exhibition and so that's what students did individually they did one podcast each student well three of the students did podcasts and four of the students did public history and these were something like I say which is different than what the Holocaust Center has done before and here we see Lily with her podcast and the others did as I said exhibits and there were four of them on the topics topics that were they were introduced to by working on the research guide as well uh so that's it I worked with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center and we created instruments which they could be using and mounting on their website and that's my introductory glittering thank you so much I think everybody get like a good idea of the kind of things that you can do um Lily I was wondering was that component part of your reason why you took the class or did you not know in which case like what was your reaction when you found out um yeah that was the reason I yeah definitely the reason I took it so like um like I said um like I've done public history and undergrad um and at Portland State University I just wanted to continue to do it at a graduate level um and so I signed up for it and I didn't you know quite know all the details but one thing I was really pleased about is we got to do our own uh individual projects because in undergrad all the classes I take in um it was like very much group work so you might have like four people working together to write like one panel for like like one label for a museum object or something which is like a useful thing but it was nice that we did like the group projects to kind of get um help each other like understand our topic you know the holocaust my name is holocaust photography and uh me and Adina we know work together on this um research guide and then we went off one of us did a gallery one of us did a podcast but like having that individual product at the end I think was really like it's a useful learning process which I'm going to talk more about in the resume thing but like I was um I signed up with it for like I particularly wanted to a public history course especially because the other course I was taking that term was at the MA writing seminar so I was like I want something that's using the different part of the brain or yeah here we go ah perfect yeah yeah thank you so in that case I'm also curious um Richard why did you plan on um apply like why did why did you want to incorporate the applied research project in your well like I say this is a course in public history and I really wanted it to be um both a I didn't want it just to be theoretical but I wanted to be hands-on um let me explain a little bit more about why it's so important for this kind of work to be done in general and why the hands-on component is important um I thought that we could collectively students and maybe we could collectively sort of explore what it is that historians can do why they should do it what historians have done in the past and when we look at that you can see that you know there's a long history of historians not just doing articles and books but also being out there being out there giving being part of public policy um in the past it would have been let's say on radio or television or working on movies in addition to working on museum exhibitions so um I I wanted students to understand that there are historians who we who work in other areas and this is not just I wanted them to have the opportunity to do it for themselves and to experience it and it's um and it's not just sort of students or or academics um um changing academic research and making it available for public but rather it is a kind of dialogue and uh share and learning about sharing authority which I really wanted again the students to experience and not just to read about um theoretically so we want to see how it is that there are people out there who want to learn about history beyond the academy and we also need to learn that there are stories that we should be listening to which may be traditionally we haven't listened to and that we have to improve our our listening skills so um I wanted students to have that experience um which I think will deepen them as historians as civically minded perhaps um and then it's also I think really um an important experience for learning to think critically even and clearly as historians I mean it's one thing for us to write 3000 word essays and think okay well we've you know we've elaborated on a subject it's when we do this kind of work we can see how much more difficult it can be to write 300 words rather than 3000 words and you only can do that um if you sit down and you know and try to create an exhibit or in the case of an exhibit how you blend together let's say visual with the written so that they complement each other and and definitely I mean we know photographs and illustration photographs are not just an illustration but often they're treated that way but when you actually build an exhibit you can see how the visual and the text are part of that need to be complementing each other narrative or in the case of of the podcasts how it is that you bring together your own narrative with the other voices so that they find a good balance in other words um it's a way of learning as historians to communicate and to think more clearly so I think um it makes them makes all of us into better historians as well as thinking about our responsibilities now there's also I know this is the last point I'll make there's also of course I feel like I'm going to be giving specific details to a lot of the general remarks that you made at the beginning and I'll try to color in well maybe I won't try to color always in the lines that you made but I'll elaborate a little bit on them um I want the students to see that professionally there are alternatives to being academic historians to give them a chance to feel what it is to be in a museum or um or to um to try to do something for public broadcasting in in the podcasts so to see that there are other things that historians can do alternate career paths or even if you do become an academic historian that these are ways in which your profession has gone which you can choose to do if you've you know if you've experienced it first you can decide on the basis of your knowledge what it is that you want to do generally in terms of your career and then more specifically what practices you want to be involved with is a historian so um I'm going to shut up now oh you shared some really fantastic parts I really I think there's a really important about the the sharing of the authority and being included in the kinds of stories that can be told but I think you made a really good point too that um there's a lot that can only be learned if you're actually engaged in the process rather than just looking at it sort of from the classroom and so um Lily was was that an experience that that you would recommend like did it have some of that sort of desired impact for you I think so yeah I mean like like thinking like having to think through and think more clearly and things like that yeah I think so and I think that's like so true because I mean like when we're writing our essays and stuff we have to communicate to other academics or to our professors or things like that and that's one thing that can be difficult to self but like to really write clearly for the public is a whole different skill like you can take you know a long time to get those like 300 words done and I find too like um like when I'm trying to like write my thesis or something like thinking about how I would like tell this to a public audience public member of the public like really helps me think through like when my writing is just getting like convoluted and unclear so like just that skill even bringing that public writing skill into your own um academic one can be really helpful but yeah and I think personally I always feel like uh there's like the research is great it's great to do research it's great to do it internally but like it has to be shared with the public or it's not I mean it just has to be like otherwise I don't know there's not a huge point so I think it's really important to be able to all of us to acquire that skill even if we don't all go on to become like public historians or in the public sphere or whatever just to be able to like go and do a lecture that the public can actually understand you know it's just because that suits for is kind of like a public I don't know I feel like we do have duties to like share whatever you search right um yeah so I think it definitely like I recommended it uh you know and it came through for me in the class class I think and then um you know especially because this is not like like the Holocaust is not my area of study so like having to kind of learn about myself and then think about how to communicate it was like a really learning process that was helpful for that yeah nice and so you've talked a bit about like how like much you took away for like communication how like how it's very different um is there other things in which that project made you think sort of um changed like your view of like of history or like did it or or confirm any things that you sort of felt um about history see me I think like one thing I found interesting was like sort of like you know I know I've done public history and not public this year before I don't think I realized like how like when Dr. Maki's was talking about like radio like I had never really thought about of course I think about podcasts now I never thought about how much history has been shared in the public sphere via radio and things like that for such a long time there's even before there's like public history training you know in the 70s or 80s more like there's still been um it's being it's always being shared out um and I think like that changed a bit of it like just thinking about the role of the public historian itself has been around for a long time which actually we hope a bit you know PhD but um see what else will change history I think and then um and also just like I hadn't done a lot with I got assigned to you know Holocaust photography is like the area and I hadn't really done much with photography and thinking about that in any kind of historical context so um thinking about how to like how the top photographs are interpreted and used and we did some really um we read some really useful articles on that that also changed how I thought about their role so thank you yeah and do you so I think there's a lot of good cases in which history is a particularly compelling example because you both talked about a lot of the artifacts that sort of circulate in the public and and a lot of engagement but can you think of other classes um that you've taken um where you think like or that you would like to take where you could see a similar applied research project being just sort of interesting or who are helping you in some way further understand the subject like a non non-history one um maybe if you have one okay so I was like wow since this was a lot um yes so like um yes all that once here you'd be seeing our histories because that grad program and I think a lot of classes could benefit from some sort of applying project even though like this class you know it's the whole focus of public history but like just thinking about like say we do like in the history department we do a MA thesis writing seminar just taking the same time as this but I think it could be useful having like even just like a week to think about it or like a mini project or think about how would you present your thesis research to the public and how could you do it I think that could be useful for students um because um I just I mean it'd be a useful thing to be able to do um then like the other classes like how could you make an applied project for a historiography that'd be kind of funny but I think it would be interesting um and then you know thinking I'm trying to think back to like my pre-ma days like other subjects um I think you know there's like um probably do a lot I think a lot of humanities classes you could have that be an option at least for students especially students like maybe your final project is the essay or something else more applied but um with all the classes I've taken here I think the other one the best be at the MA research seminar like just maybe you don't have time to actually do a project we have a week where you think of a concept or something yeah um I like that I actually I have a friend in physics who tried to really disseminate his thesis for an audience at the public library and then he also said it was an amazing experience to sort of go from his PhD level to common knowledge physics and still trying to explain what it is that he was doing and he also found it was a very good um um uh practice yeah I kind of stepped back away from like your little like blinded bubble of like PhD and then yeah exactly and so maybe um maybe Richard you could tell us a little bit about if you think there are specific elements that we really that would make a course particularly suitable for including um such an applied research project like was there something about your course that made it particularly easy or or practical to include such a component well I mean it was as I said before it was it was clearly something that was meant to to explore the relationship between sort of you know what academics do sort of in the university and the ways in which they can present it outside the university and what they can learn by presenting it from outside the university so it obviously had a direct sort of um and I just couldn't imagine doing a sort of a theoretical course on public history it just didn't make sense to me and that's also what my own experience was about I think that every course to a certain extent can as Lily was saying can include an element or get people to think that okay well you know you know there and you know so much history now talks about representation so instead again of just talking about representation sort of as you know this is what you know this is what's happened in museums then you know in a course say well can you imagine an artifact that you would want to put into a museum or that you would want to describe for a museum or an image so there could be always a very smallish practical component to it so that people can at least think that way or or realize that if you're talking about representation one of the ways you'll learn about is that you try to do it yourself or you try to imagine doing it yourself in a in a kind of public setting so I think that there's always a possibility of including it with but in some courses it makes sense for there to be a much you know a much more elaborate and much more developed as developed public research side and and this is one of them. Maybe you could share too for the audience how how much time of your class was spent for students on that applied research project? It was my view was it was always going to have to be at least half of it was going to have to be on the on the on the on the public research project and it was necessary to construct you know the you know to think in advance about the course to make sure that you've given it that amount of of time to make sure that it fits properly but yeah I always I always knew that there was always going to have to be a lion's share of the course it's going to have to be about it and if it's not about it then it's going to be reflecting on having done it sort of in a more theoretical way so it's always going to be looking at it but in terms of the hands on I knew there are always have to be the the strongest element would have to be the actual hands-on project and the question was how do we build it in so that it fits into an academic course but did it also shows the students what's involved in doing it? Yeah maybe following up on that because you said like there's a little bit of ways in which you have to make it fit and sort of serve the purpose that you're thinking about are there any tips that you would give an instructor who's never done an applied research project about what things they need to think about before they go about implementing one of them? Yeah I mean I think first of all you have to give yourself a lot of time I think to to think it through right I mean you've got to give yourself a lot of time to find that balance between the practical and the theoretical and why do you need to have a lot of time because and the way that you can deal with it is by consulting widely I spoke I spoke to all of my colleagues who had done public history and who had had a public component listen to them I was fortunate that I had some funding to help me get a student who like did a lot of research in other syllabi to see what other places had done and then I could look and so that took time then it also takes time to find the right partner because you know I may have certain skills or certain experiences but I don't have you know that creating narratives for museums but I don't have the the skills that are the experience that those in museums would have to say to students okay well you know this is how you layer your text this is how you include images you know and and so you have to find the right partner so that they can get the experience in a way that is going to be most useful in a holocaust center I mean I had experience working with them and so I knew that that there were the people there who could who could who could help but I also had to give myself time to think about well what institution do I want to work with like I looked at a variety and I spoke to and I spoke Laetitia I spoke to her about a variety of possibilities and then narrowed it down again to what I was familiar with because I needed to find a way of of feeling comfortable with the project that I was assigning and knowing the people that I was working with right and so but that didn't just mean that I but it also meant that I I sort of like I knew the kinds of things that the holocaust center did and so I was the one by having looked at their website again and again and again I was the one who said well this is what I think the practical projects can be when they just be useful for you so it takes a lot of time to to sort of a kind of you know trial and error asking a lot of people but also digging deeply into the place that you're going to work to come up with the work project so you've got to give yourself a lot of time before the course starts you've got to think broadly and then narrow it down figure out a way that you know that it'll be don't make it don't make it overly complicated for yourself because there's going to be inevitably be complications you don't realize so try to you know try to simplify it so I worked with it an agency that I knew and I had all the students work with one agency rather than putting them into other you know different ones because then it would be another level of complications so it requires a lot of time to organize and and to to consult widely but then to narrow and and then also to think about sort of just being good to yourself in terms of keeping it somewhat simple so that the students can benefit and it won't be too hard for you so that's give yourself lots of time and think widely but then narrow it down do you anticipate doing the same project or like an extension of this project again for another history class um I mean I I enjoy I enjoyed this so much that I would like to do it again you know the graduate there are only a limited number of graduate courses that are offered every year and so you know it changes and you have to offer a variety of of possibilities but I mean in my in my undergraduate courses in my in the capstone courses I have also included public history projects and so yeah I will I'll continue to do it sounds great um Lily maybe sort of going into um sort of like your main your main takeaway or maybe you want to talk a little bit about how how much interaction there was between you and the museum for example and and how I don't know how it felt like having your podcast actually on the website for the center or yeah what was sort of some of the really amazing aspects of um having done this project yeah see it's the podcast it was interesting it was really useful as um definitely like a learning curve because I know we edited our podcasts here then George I was a upper year MA student and had experienced the podcast she like kind of cleaned it up for us but we um we edited them and so you know we produced them designed and then edited and um yeah it's now online which is kind of cool to see how many people have listened to it but I think that was like really practically helpful because like just recently at my job like we have a podcast series and it's it's slightly different not fully history but usually we hire people who like do everything but now we're going to do or I do like the basic production and basic editing and they clean it up so like that's nice for me nice saves us a bit of money too but I wouldn't have acquired that skill set I don't think I would have had the time to like invest in that skill set if I hadn't been able to do it in the class because it's just you know it takes a while to have that support um to do that um so like practically it's been like really useful um so that's been a nice skill to like take away and then interactions with the museum yeah they were we interacted you know we we visited them a couple times in person and then Caitlin at the museum you know they were super responsive and and helpful in terms of I used a lot of oral histories in my podcast we like emailed back and forth and they like pull the recordings for me um I interviewed one of the directors the the director of the museum and that was a bit in the podcast so like it was nice just to interact with them and I always enjoy um like sort of getting it's nice to be part of like kind of start to get start to be part of like the public history community um and whatever place you're living like I feel like that's grounding um and just obviously it's great for networking but um yeah they were it was cool nice to interact with them and um they were super helpful but yeah one of the big takeaways too is just like gaining this like practical skill of how to like design a vision and podcast which I and edit which I never done before and then I guess the other takeaway too is like you know for my phd like my main field of history but I'm hoping my secondary account field will actually be public history which has never I don't think we've ever done that in the department before but like my advisor is somewhat receptive and then um he's receptive and then uh you know taking the class here makes me feel like there's probably like a way to do it simply you know we teach public history and everything so hopefully that sounds like it was a really good experience yeah cool um briefly maybe um share um some of the resources um sort of there were um for anybody who's potentially interested and then maybe we can see am I already got one question in the chat so maybe we'll have a few more questions um I'll get back to that in one second there we go unmuting too fantastic so um so Richard said like he spent a lot of time um talking to to um like looking at different partners and figuring it all out and so we compiled a little bit of um a faculty sort of help page um from the arts amplifier to sort of um help with some of the sort of common questions um a little bit about the timeline um and in case that like you also need some help to um make this fit for your own course um we're happy if you want to reach out to us um Richard mentioned he talked a lot to Latisha she's our project lead um we in general like have a lot of good relationships with a lot of community organizations and so it doesn't have to be history um as long as it's sort of in the humanities um we're very happy to sort of get involved we can either really help you find a partner um we can also like give you some feedback um on your on your syllabus um or we can also provide you with some help on specific like assignments that you are thinking of or descriptions um I'm also going to put these in the chat in a little bit um I also wanted to point out that um if you want to have a look specifically at um the syllabus from Richard's class you can have a look I'll post that in the chat too um we've collected a few more indeed um our pioneers in a five research project and do seem to be um the history and departments and so we've collected another syllabus from somebody from UCLA and we're waiting for somebody else um from another Canadian institution to share their syllabus with us so it might give you a little bit of um ideas of where you could take this um we've sort of kept this very practical sort of in in what could you get started and why would you maybe want to and what are some of the takeaways but um maybe if you have any questions um more more specifically or more broadly um feel free to share them either through the chat um or you can just unmute yourself and um ask your question yeah Judy go ahead yeah it's hi Richard um so this sorry sorry I joined late so you may have already addressed this um I wonder how do you evaluate the work of your students I I come with my undergraduate teaching background so having a grade is very important um and and I'm also thinking about the challenge you have when you if you ever need to negotiate a grade with the community partners like um just because the community partners may have very different expectations I tried to find a way of um creating projects that were substantial but also to break it down so that it wasn't like one grade for the project at the very end but rather that there'd be stages in which you can write drafts you can get feedback get feedback from um like the students were two or three students worked on um on a research guide which meant that two or three students had let's say a certain expertise which they developed about photography so that meant that when the student one student did a podcast and the other student did a an exhibit well at least they knew about the subject of photography where they could talk to each other and give feedback and then there were three students who worked on a three or four students who worked on exhibits three and four who worked on podcasts and so therefore they could have give feedback to each other about the process of doing podcasting so it was very important for the projects to be broken down into smaller components for there to be time for feedback for drafts for feedback feedback from me feedback from um the community partner and the community partner would share strengths and weaknesses and that in fact there would not be really um the grade wouldn't have been given actually until there was time for the student to incorporate whatever feedback had been given so ultimately the grading is going to be on me but it's only going to be after a longer process of back and forth between students between me and the students and between a community partner and the students and um and well I mean I I spent a fair bit of time I think trying to to crunch the numbers so that there was that kind of balance between sort of first drafts and final versions um and uh well um I I hope it worked out I hope it was fair maybe I can ask a follow-up question sort of Lily your your your focus on feedback just made me uh made me wonder um Lily what was that process um like for you like was it sort of it sounds a little bit like iterative development like you get some input and then you work from there how was it getting feedback from like all these different sources like you got feedback from from Richard and you got feedback from your peers and from the museum itself what was that like it was good I was helpful so I remember yeah um like we had sort of a feedback we had a feedback day the museums like our peers had to like read or listen to our first drafts by then as well as the museum staff so we got to sort of not know all managed by them but so we had this like everybody we had got to talk a little about what we did and then we could hear feedback what people had like um heard or listened so it was more fairly efficient that way to have it all and then follow up uh written feedback Dr. Menke so um that was helpful and then that was like and then I know then after the class and did see there was a couple um things that they spotted in the podcast like very minor things so we had like that round um but you know I found it helpful like the peers remember them spotting some like interesting sort of communicative things um with the podcast thinking things more clear than of course the staff they they're kind of like uh you know they really spot the um like if you accidentally and like they make they can really do like quality control making sure everything is accurate um in the podcast so just having those different stages I think it's very similar it's like what it would be like working with like a client um if you were like working is like a consulting historian or somebody like that so anybody who has a question can have if you use the chat or to raise your hand um I have one more in the meantime if anybody needs to gather their thoughts um Judy made me think of um sort of um evaluation like again happens sort of on on both parts um Richard did you have any conversations with the museum afterwards sort of about their experience like sort of Lily's comment about um working with a client made me sort of wonder um did you get any feedback from the museum side on how the project wrapped up sort of from their perspective yeah I've I've had a number of conversations with uh with the director and with the people who were the immediate sort of uh contact people and and um and they're very happy with the way that it went I mean that was I mean I think that one of the things that we have to do as instructors and in reaching out to them is to realize how of course we're trying to you know we're we're trying to provide a setting for the formation and for thinking about you know how students can get other kinds of experiences but in all fairness to the community partners we need to think about well how might they benefit from this as well I mean they're going to benefit by having I think people who are who are who are more in tune with the process of public history generally but more specifically I mean these are things now that they are putting up on their website right these are things you know they have now three more research guides than they had before they are having another place where people visiting their website can go and learn about the topics and about the collection so it was really important for me in advance to think about how this could benefit from they could benefit from it and in my conversation with them since they they appreciate the work that the students have done and what they're able to put up on the website right yeah I think you nicely touched upon the point that like this is always about mutual mutual benefit like that it's not that the organization is just sort of having to take care of like extra supervision but that it's actually very talented and people who basically create work for them that they can actually use yeah it's a great point I don't want to be taking up all of our question and the period does anybody else have a question maybe a form of engagement that you were thinking of that you'd like sort of some feedback on as we just heard can be very helpful yeah I think that there's a lot of people that I mean I have a list of people that I could be thanking people who who were at the Holocaust Center the executive director Naina Krieger the collection to registrar Caitlin Donaldson the archivist Shaila Seller I brought in an anthropologist who could give feedback on the issue of sort of curatorial dreaming where they can think about what they did in new ways I had the help of Laetitia Hanville I had the help of of of of Danielle Barkley to talk about professional development issues and I was able to get funding from my department so that I could hire somebody who's an experience as experienced with podcasting that was George Twist and then I also was able to get funding from the department so that we could visit rather than just being us doing practical work that we could visit other museums now and I think you know that wasn't necessarily they weren't the students weren't at this point creating their own but they were saying other places which had faced these issues so we went to the sports the bc sports museum and the first nations gallery and spoke to the to the executive director there Jason Beck and we also were able to speak to chief Laura Mussel savage of the squad first nation chiloac to talk about the the gallery that they'd created we did a virtual visit to the museum for human rights and we also listened to a number of podcasts so there are people I wanted to thank but I also wanted to highlight that the practical work isn't always just doing the work but also seeing other places which have done this work and you need to that's one of the things that you need to build in which maybe I hadn't stressed before visiting visiting other museums and speaking to other museums before you doing your own project can be part of that process and and once you think about ways of building that into I would recommend that people try to avoid doing this in the middle of a pandemic and and trying to figure out whether we're going to make it into a museum or not and in fact for two museums we were the first group in there after the pandemic but but if you're free from that kind of concern or restraint yeah you should try to think about how you can bring in others beyond your partner not necessarily to be doing the hands-on work but to share their experience of doing hand of doing practical work that actually sounds like it was an amazing class lady I swear I really hope that your phd experience can live up to the finish of your master's degree yeah I really I would say the indigenous sports gallery that was such a highlight I don't like all my classmates who are just so pleased with that visit and that gallery like I also just recommend like it's like kind of tucked away museum so it's like this amazing gallery so if you ever are like downtown near it like I really recommend that one perfect I have to admit I haven't explored many museums I'm sort of I'm also like I'm fairly new but now I think I'm a year in Vancouver but half of their things were still pretty much closed down and and so I'll have a growing list basically of places to go and visit so we're sort of um finishing time-wise but if anybody else wants to have a question answered we can squeeze another one in what I don't have I don't have a question but um Richard's comment really reminds me of an experience I was in a I was I was joining a end of the course sharing where there are students working in the community and it's an animal welfare program so we also had community partner coming to one Zoom coming to join and it was really interesting it was quite exciting at the end that the North Vancouver Coyote group is now hearing how the Richmond group um how how they develop like how how the partners are actually learning from each other and then sharing information and finding out oh the students help you do this we would like something like this too so it was I this reminds me that it was a Zoom meeting so but then I remember that conversation that the partners started they are taking over the conversation because they really want to know what each other is doing in the different area so so that that was a highlight for me when I was in that um sharing at the end of the course I mean I I do want to say that one of the questions that you asked me in advance was you know what is the what is it that I hope the students would gain but I want to flip that question I want to emphasize for everybody who's out there that there's so much the instructors gain from doing this kind of work um in my case um you know I felt that together we were exploring questions of authority and sharing authority and what it means and I learned an enormous amount from the students I was moved by how respectful the students were of the stories in the images that they were consulting at the at the holocaust center and um yeah it was it was you know it it really made deepened my own understanding and feeling about that kind of issue that issue of sharing authority so it was a wonderful wonderful experience working with the students and more specifically doing the applied research uh was not just a great benefit to them but to me now again there's going to be I hope very practical things like that they've gotten hands on experience that they can add it to their resume that they can get a letter from me saying that they've done it they can get a letter from somebody is from a shared partner that so there's really you know very hands-on practical things but there's also a very strong uh a strong benefit intellectually and professionally and even emotionally from working on a project like this that might actually be the the perfect way to finish a section for like instruction and teaching and learning um at the university I think is very nicely indeed highlighting um that um the work put in is definitely worth it for um all basically participants um so yeah thank you all so much um for your time and like um Richard and Lily um had to get like questions from me and everything and take the time to to think about it and both are taking that time out of their um the research days um to be here so thank you both very very much for your time and your your insight and perspective and um I put all of our resources in the chat if anybody wants to most of the things um will be found on our faculty help page and uh yeah if any of you have any questions feel free to reach out to the arts amplifier again