Ottawa residents will get a backstage pass to the city’s arts and culture scene this weekend, as museums and galleries offer behind-the-scenes tours in celebration of Culture Days.
Culture Days is a national festival that asks organizations across the country to engage Canadians in their local arts community.
Centretown’s own Bytown Museum is participating by giving tours to show what it takes to work in a museum, and encouraging children to submit ideas for their own mini-exhibition.
But will families really put aside the TV remote to spend their weekend at a museum? Do young people want to spend time planning an exhibition, when an iPhone beckons from their pocket?
More and more museums are discovering that looking back into the past and engaging with history does not mean having to pretend smartphones, tablets or tweets don’t exist.
The best way to connect youth to history is to take advantage of technology and social media that teens are using anyway, and make the past accessible through it.
The Bytown Museum’s Youth Council is doing just that. The group is made up of volunteers aged 16 to 23, who research local history and share it with the public through blogs, podcasts, and social media.
Robin Etherington, executive director of the museum, says history becomes exciting every time there is a new platform to share it.
This philosophy is not only innovative, but effective. Bytown Museum’s 2013 annual report noted a growth in online presence, having 1200 likes on their Facebook page. Today that number is over 1500. The report also found that 90 per cent of visitors used social media or the website to learn about the museum’s activities.
Enabling teens to connect with history, regardless of platform, allows them to learn while building an emotional connection to the past. Next time they walk the halls of Parliament or watch the Ottawa River rush past, they can feel linked to people who have done the same for centuries.
A shared history encourages young people to find ways to connect their peers to the past.
For example, the Youth Council at Bytown collaborated to design the children’s activity area at the museum, researching the characters, choosing the storyline and placing the artifacts.
Youth engaging in history doesn’t end at the information level, as it builds engaged citizens who are connected to their past, their peers, and interested in educating the next generation.
Etherington says understanding history will give youth confidence in the decisions they make for the future. As the city comes alive to youth, they will gain pride in where they have come from, and excitement about where they are going.
As Culture Days sweeps through the city this weekend, choose to bond with history, and invest in the future of Ottawa.