A cool exhibit: South Portland students inspire museum project

SOUTH PORTLAND — If you've ever seen a nature program about penguins and watched the flightless waterfowl as they appear to jump for the sky, only to crash into the frigid ocean below, you know from the moment they touch water and dart off after a silvery meal how there can be beauty and grace even when falling short of a lofty goal.

On Monday, third-grade students from South Portland's Skillin Elementary School got a little taste of what that feeling is like firsthand, with a visit to the Children's Museum and Theater of Maine, on Free Street in Portland.

Although the students did not get the live penguin habitat they requested, letters and drawings sent to convince the museum of the good, common sense behind the idea have become part of an exhibit, "Penguins in Portland," on display through Nov. 12. More importantly, the first child-initiated project in the 35-year history of the Children’s Museum may change how it operates in the future, according to Chris Sullivan, the museum's director of exhibits.

“I’m sure we’ll look to do a lot more of this in the future, working more directly with area students,” said Sullivan.

“It’s not just that these students are enjoying the results of their really hard work by having their pictures on display,” said the museum’s public relations manager, Lucy Bangor. “They are getting to pass along what they’ve done, while other students will get to learn from them. We’re really into that peer-to-peer learning, so this fits in perfectly with our mission.”

That mission – “to inspire discovery and imagination through exploration and play” – got a boost in April, when Sullivan received a large manila envelope from Skillin Elementary. Inside he found a stack of handwritten letters from every student in Violette’s class asking him to build a live penguin exhibit. Each letter offered “a persuasive argument for the exhibit,” said Bangor, including information on specific species, tips for overcoming potential challenges and even a treatise on how the proposed exhibit might help the environment, by saving local schools long trips to Boston to penguin habitats on display there. All were accompanied by colorful illustrations and diagrams created by the students.

  

“I was inspired by these drawings,” said Sullivan. “The ingenuity was amazing. They were troubleshooting everything, even offering ideas like how we could pipe in seawater from the bay to save money. They wanted to help us figure out things like feeding and water filtration.

“It was clear they had an assignment that got them thinking creatively, anticipating challenges and figuring out how to overcome them,” said Sullivan. “That’s the kind of problem solving that creates big-picture thinkers.”

According to Superintendent Suzanne Godin, one challenge for South Portland schools, as the department begins work on a new mission statement and strategic plan, is transitioning from an education model that prepared workers for lives in a manufacturing economy to one designed to help students develop what she calls the “higher-order thinking” needed as part of the “21^st century skills” movement.

Instead of entering a workforce of narrow, routine, repetitive jobs, today’s students must be prepared to understand how things work. “They have to learn how to learn,” says Godin.

According to the 2006 book"The New American Workplace," by James O’Toole and Edward Lawler, nearly two-thirds of U.S. wealth is now generated by the information-service sector.

“In plain English,” O’Toole and Lawler write, “today American companies can make more money selling knowledge than they can by making and selling things.”

That focus on critical thinking skills is part of why project-based learning is rising to the forefront in South Portland, with its focus on “learning through doing.” The idea, Godin said, is to attack a topic from multiple disciplines and hands-on projects that require creative problem solving without any clearly wrong answer, rather than rote memorization of right answers, to build and strengthen the interconnected pathways of the brain.

That’s partly what student teacher Amber Lane was doing last year with a perennial “penguin unit.


“I took what the district had been doing for years and built on it from there,” Lane said on Monday. “We did a whole spectrum of lessons and tried to tie everything into penguins.”

In addition to the usual study of the animal, Lane led her second-graders through art and math projects using penguin themes. The idea to solicit the Children’s Museum was an effort to apply the theme to lessons in literacy.

“I wanted to tie it in to their community, to make everything more meaningful and relevant for them,” said Lane, now a graduate of the University of New England looking for a full-time teaching job.

The letters students wrote under Lane’s direction were so convincing, Sullivan said, he felt “compelled to respond.” While the museum did not have the financial wherewithal to build a live penguin habitat, Sullivan did enlist the aid of his uncle, Connecticut-based photographer Brian Sullivan. The elder Sullivan travels the world documenting endangered animals and was in the midst of a project to document all 20 known species of penguins. His nature pictures hang in the new exhibit, with each species matched to ones described and illustrated by students, including the King Penguin, Rock Hopper, Chinstrap, Gentoo, and the endangered Galapagos Penguins.

“This is really amazing. We certainly never had the opportunity for anything like this when I was in school,” said Deb Ivy, whose daughter, Olivia, was one of the student artists with work in the retrospective. “This is a great collaborative effort by the school and the museum and a wonderful chance for kids to be a part of a curated exhibit, and to understand what that means.”

“Look at that,” said teacher Diana Violette, as her students darted to and fro, seeking out their own works on the wall, during a Monday afternoon field trip to the museum. “Some people work their entire lives to get their work in a museum like this.”

“This is really cool,” said Olivia Ivy. “It’s good for everyone to see Skillin School’s work. I feel really happy.”

“Now, everyone can experience what penguins are like, and they can see what they look like, if they don’t already know,” agreed Lily Crain.

“I’ve never had my picture in a museum before,” said Caitlin Rodrigue, with a beaming smile. “I learned a lot making it.”

“I think this is fantastic,” said Alison Curran, whose son Liam had his drawing of Rockhopper penguins posted. “I’m really proud of them for pursuing this with their teachers and of the museum for following through, especially because it sounds like they don’t get this kind of thing here very often. I’m sure they’ll be doing a lot more now.”

“I get that they couldn’t do live penguins,” said Liam, “but this is pretty cool. I’m glad they did it so people can see what we learned.”

“I knew they would be really proud of themselves,” said Lane, as she watched Curran and her other former students crowd around their drawings, comparing them to Sullivan’s photographs. “I’m just really happy the museum was kind enough to let them be a part of something this big.”