Don’t forget this week’s exhibit exploration- “Learning to Teach Chesapeake Themes with Animals” with Andrew McCown!

10/20/11

Don’t forget! This Thursday, at 1:00 PM in the Museum’s auditorium, my good friend and colleague Andrew McCown, director of Echo Hill Outdoor School, will be joining us to talk about his approach towards teaching the Chesapeake’s history and biology, using real live critters to demonstrate!

If you work on Waterman’s Wharf, crew Mister Jim, lead school tours, or just in general want to add to your interpretive ‘toolkit’, please feel free to attend and learn some new ways to bring the Bay to life for our visitors!

Aquaculture in Talbot County

The Talbot Spy just posted a new story in aquaculture in Talbot County. Not too much new information (especially for all of you recent graduates of the oyster program training), but it’s interesting to see what is going on locally since so much of the current aquaculture success story is monopolized by Marinetics.

The John White images I’m always discussing as the best way of understanding what the Indian world of the Chesapeake looked like at first contact can be found at the link below. The images are accompanied by their De Bry engravings, which differ greatly (and often with new titillating or artistic embellishments, always inaccurate) and provide an interesting contrast.

http://bit.ly/oyMDzG

These photos are from the inaugural adult “Oystering Legacy” tour, which went out this very atmospheric morning to a bunch of exhibits including the Rosie Parks restoration site. The tour covers the history of the relationship between people and oysters in the Chesapeake from the time period of first contact to today, and helps our visitors understand why restoring a dilapidated (but beautiful!) skipjack is so important to the Maritime Museum and the Chesapeake at large.

The docent in the photos is Joe Irr, whose background in our Ecology Cruise and Bay Bounty tours (as well as his prior volunteer work for the Martha Lewis) make him an ideal guide for this program.

Welcome to Beautiful Swimmers!

This is the inaugural post of beautifulswimmers, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s education blog. Ideally, this will be a resource for our docents and volunteers at the Maritime Museum, and will be used as a way to share information, stories, and links, but it will also be open to the public as a general educational forum.

This blog takes its name from a book that revolutionized the public perception of the Chesapeake and the people who worked the water, the classic “Beautiful Swimmers” by William W. Warner. “Beautiful Swimmers” drew attention to Chesapeake conservation- not only the natural resources of the Bay, but also the cultural resources. Truly our watershed’s “watershed” moment. From then onward, the field of Bay conservation and education became established, and an understanding of the need to preserve and document our Chesapeake way of life gained momentum.

Since I’ll be writing the posts, I’ll introduce myself- name is Kate Livie and I’m the director of education here at the Maritime Museum. (Those unfamiliar with our organization can check out our main website here: www.cbmm.org) It’s a wonderful place to visit and learn, and it is just as wonderful to work and teach here. 

I hope you enjoy the content and photos I’ll be sharing, and I hope to hear from you in the comments as this blog continues.