Works Cited

Works Cited

Findlay, James A., and Lillian Perricone. WPA Museum Extension Project, 1935 - 1943: Government Created Visual Aids for Children from the Collections of the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book. Fort Lauderdale, FL: Bienes Museum of the Modern Book, 2009. Print.

Findlay, Jim. "Education by Design." The Bienes Museum. Broward Library. Web. <http://digilab.browardlibrary.org/wpa/aboutwpa.html#themep>.

Miner, Curtis. "Pennsylvania's Museum Extension Project." Pennsylvania's Historical and Museum Commision. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 2011. Web. <http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/arts_and_architecture/2805/museum_extension_project/408689>.

Montalto, Nicholas V. A History of the Intercultural Education Movement, 1924-1941. New York: Garland Pub., 1982. Print.

PMEP. "[Pennsylvania: Pamphlets and Handbooks] State-Wide Museum Extension Project Catalog (The)." Digital Collections. [Harrisburg, PA?]: Pennsylvania Work Projects Administration, Federal Works Agency. Web. <http://digilab.browardlibrary.org/u?/wpa,76>.

Wintz, Cary D. Harlem Speaks: a Living History of the Harlem Renaissance. Naperville, IL: Source, 2007. Print.

Pennnsylvania. Works Progress Administration. One Year of W.P.A. in Pennsylvania, July 1, 1935-June 30, 1936 / Edward N. Jones, State Administrator, Works Progress Administration for Pennsylvania. – [Harrisburg, PA? WPA for Pennsylvania, 1937?], 93-95.

U.S. Work Projects Administration. Archives of the Work Projects Administration and Predecessors, 1933-1943. – Brighton, Sussex, England: Harvester Microfilm, 1987, reel 12, Final State reports for… the Museum and Visual Aids Program…., p. 1.

Pennsylvania. Work Project Administration. Museum Extension Project. The State-Wide Museum Extension Project Catalog / Pennsylvania Work Projects Administration, Federal Works Agency. – [Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Work Projects Administration, Museum Extension Project, 1939-40?], p. 6-7. 

Operations

Employed 880 people, namely: sculptors, painters, architects, draftsmen, teachers, librarians, biologists, researchers, writers, designers, musicians, skilled tradesmen and hundreds of other workers.

"Its supervisory staff is 100% college trained. Forty-five degrees held and twenty-three colleges and universities represented. Five foreign university graduates working.
The purpose of this Project is to extend and increase free museum advantages and release free visual education materials to public schools, institutions and buildings open to the public. Owing to the scattered population of some regions of Pennsylvania, the public school children of these districts are without advantages offered in larger cities by free museums and exhibitions. Miniature museum models and materials sent to these rural school and institutions will offer to some extent, the visual education now lacking. This which [sic] could be added to from time to time. The museum sets, miniature groups, and visual aids will be carefully made, with attention to proportion and detail. Bibliography and other printed information will accompany each set." (Finlay, 35)

The Project is divided into five departments:

1. Architecture and Research
2. Art and Photograph
3. Marionette and Music
4. Sculpturing and Casting
5. Model Making 

Items

The production of these items was administered at the state level in at least twenty-three states by WPA sub-agencies working in conjunction with local boards of education, colleges, museums, or other bodies. The WPA and its various sub-agencies put millions of the unemployed back to work during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930's. At the state level, many of the WPA sub-agencies producing educational visual aids were named "Museum Extension Project" or "Visual Aids Project." However, depending on the state, these programs may have had different names. The WPA's Pennsylvania Museum Extension Project (sometimes called the State-Wide Museum Extension Project, or simply as the Museum Extension Project) was the most successful and prolific of these programs and served as a model for other states. For purposes of shorthand, we shall refer to all the WPA-administered educational visual aid programs using the name "Museum Extension Project" (MEP).

Education by Design is an online exhibit and image database of educational visual aids produced by the Museum Extension Project (MEP), a division of the New Deal jobs creation program, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and owned by the Bienes Museum of Modern Book at Broward County Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The digitization of these historic artifacts was made possible through a National Leadership grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a federal agency that fosters innovation, leadership and a lifetime of learning.

The Catalog

*NOTE BRAILLE

Photos

pg.139/pg.19

MEP Goals

• In response to World War one, educators and social performers sought to find ways that people and nations could live together harmoniously.  To achieve this end, they hoped education would help people rise above ethnocentrism and nationalism
• To help to provide assistance to the already establishes tax-supported institutions - schools, libraries, museums
• Obtain visual education aids and use them to enlighten teaching and learning with a sensory experience.
• To provide children who resided in rural areas without cultural amenities with local museum-like exhibits

John Dewey, was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform.  He was one of the biggest influences behind the MEP.  The MEP used three of his arguments for progressive education:
1.) A natural learning process engages the student's interests and stimulates curiosity.
2.) The learning experience does not happen in a vacuum.  Curriculum must be relevant to the connections to the real world.
3.) Knowing through doing:  True learning occurs when the student actively uses knowledge in social and intellectual interactions.

Pennsylvania Museum Extenstion Project Beginings

Visual education represented a new and exciting frontier then, in much the same way that digital education does today. The problem was securing the “proper materials” and getting them into classrooms. “The commercial concerns are not disposed to devote themselves to the preparation of high grade pictures,” one educator complained. Access to existing sources of visual material—the rich collections amassed by public museums and libraries—was also restricted by geography. School children in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia could turn to grand public institutions such as the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Free Library of Philadelphia. For most school districts in the vast swath of Pennsylvania, field trips to faraway museums were not an option. To its credit, the Pennsylvania Department of Public Instruction, forerunner of the Pennsylvania Department of Education, tried to make visual resources available to all. The department had made the State Museum’s vast collection of lantern slides available for loan to public schools across the Commonwealth as early as 1907. 


That experience may have been instrumental in bringing the program to Pennsylvania. In 1935, WPA officials tapped fifty-eight-year-old Martha Cox Colt of Harrisburg, an artist and educator, who had been affiliated with the Harrisburg School of Art and the Central Pennsylvania Art School, to launch Pennsylvania’s program. It would be the first statewide program in the country, and as such, others would be watching closely. Colt was given a small staff and office space on North Cameron Street, several blocks from the State Capitol, and put to work under the administrative oversight of the state’s Division of Women’s and Professional Projects. The Pennsylvania Department of Public Instruction became the program’s official statewide sponsor. Over the following five years, until the sponsorship was transferred to the Pennsylvania State College (now University) in 1940, state education department officials played critical roles in determining the project’s direction and scope of work. 

WPA > STATE (Harrisburg, PA) > small districts

The Museum Extension Program (M.E.P.) 1935-1943

Native Navaho

The Museum Extension Project  is one of the least known of the Work Progress Administration (WPA) programs, yet was one of the most abundant in terms of progressiveness, considering it did not only create jobs which helped insure our future, but the work was for furthering a new way of educating America’s young peoples.  The MEP turned out millions of pieces of "visual culture," including dioramas, puppets, costumes, 3D models, maps and more into the hands of children.The Museum Extension Project emerged out of the Division of Women’s and Professional Projects which is a unit of the WPA that focused on the relief and employment programs for women and white-collar workers.


The various WPA Museum Extension Projects, however are little known and understood.  Through in depth research it has been revealed that at least twenty-four different states created their own branches of MEP, all ranging in specific names and goals, but still centered around “visual cultural.”

American Family Pt. 2

The first created and most important branch of MEP’s history is the, Pennsylvania's Museum Extension Project (PMEP).  Also the largest and most diverse or the MEPs, PMEP was the first to instigate the concept, and was used as an example of the MEPs that followed.  The PMEP integrated and utilized  the abilities of people who were unemployed with all sorts of Unusual specialties, from historian to artisan.