History curriculum contributes to upcoming Oakland Museum of California exhibition

• January 25, 2011 9:00am

Work by Linda L. Ivey’s Public History students will have contributed to the Oakland Museum of California’s newly transformed “Gallery of California History” when it opens later this year.

Assistant Professor Ivey and Adam Nilsen, OMCA’s project liaison, collaborated beginning in fall 2008. Her Introduction to Public History students simultaneously completed education goals and benefited the future museum project conducting research, recording interviews, recommending artifacts, developing exhibit proposals, and writing related term papers.

“I had students that needed practical experience. The Museum needed researchers from California’s diverse communities. It’s a perfect fit,” says Ivey in the current issue of “Inside/Out,” the museum’s magazine for members.

The “Inside/Out,” story goes on to say that from OMCA’s perspective, the collaboration has enlivened the Gallery of California History with a new level of community engagement.

From the point of view of Cal State East Bay and its public history students, the experience has advanced academic acumen and interest.

One student, Dorothea Crosbie-Taylor, even landed a job at OMCA, first as an exhibit assistant and now as the community liaison.

The project was so successful that the initiative is now expanding to other CSU campuses.

The newly transformed Gallery of California History is based on the theme Coming to California – an idea that evokes not only the arrivals and departures of people throughout human history and their interactions with the inhabitants already here, but also the notion of coming to terms with the influence of California on our individual and collective identities

Information on the newly transformed Gallery of Califonria History is on page 8 at:

DD