Diverse BC on the Royal BC Museum’s Learning Portal
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Liz Crocker (she/her), Learning Program Developer, Royal BC Museum
As the provincial museum with a mandate to reach British Columbians across the province, the Royal BC Museum’s location on the southern tip of Vancouver Island is an impediment, especially for students and teachers. That’s why we launched the Learning Portal in 2015.
Despite housing over 10 million objects and specimens representing natural and human history, our museum still has many gaps in its collections and on the Learning Portal. We have worked with community partners to ensure we acknowledge and share a wide range of stories and histories of this province, and to address the gaps in the collections and on the Learning Portal. So many people and communities have contributed to the Learning Portal in our first 10 years. With educators and writers from diverse communities, we have published pathways about the displacement and dispossession of thousands of Japanese Canadians in Canada in the 1940s, early Chinese Canadian experiences in BC, early Punjabi immigrant experiences in BC, and diversity in early Black communities.
In the pathway about Vietnamese Canadian experiences in BC, BC-based artist Chrystal Phan developed content for the Learning Portal related to her art and her identity as a second- generation Canadian. Chrystal Phan also worked with former curator of history, Dr. Tzu-I Chung, who recognized the gap in Vietnamese Canadian objects in the provincial collection. On behalf of her parents, Chrystal donated the belongings they brought with them when they fled Vietnam in 1980. The Royal BC Museum now holds several of Phan’s large paintings, which are included on the Learning Portal.
The popular Our Living Languages exhibit, co-created with the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, also has an online component on the Learning Portal so visitors can experience much of that exhibit remotely. Within the Our Living Languages pathway you can watch the powerful film of the same name and listen to recordings of cradle songs in some of the Indigenous languages of British Columbia. There is also a “teach” section of this pathway with a lesson on languages that uses the cradle songs from the exhibit.
That lesson plan, as well as other Indigenous-themed lesson plans (including Simple Machines, Listening for Birds, Native Plants of the South Coast, Something Fishy, and Species at Risk), were created by educator Hannah Morales from Cowichan Tribes. Hannah Morales also developed the residential schools pathway, which includes a lesson plan as well as images and film of residential schools from the BC Archives. For additional Indigenous online content from the museum outside of the portal, you can look through Living Cultures & Archives, where you’ll also find a video about artist Richard Hunt accompanied by a teacher resource guide.
Finally, the playlist section of the Learning Portal is where visitors can present their own content. Science teachers have used this section as a safe online space for students to practise science communication with an authentic audience. Teacher-librarians have created playlists to pull together content linked to a particular theme. Each year French teachers and students from across Canada participate in the popular J’aime les mots, a French language meme contest in Quebec. The contest uses images from Canadian cultural institutions, including from our very own BC Archives. Making up memes to go with archival photographs is a fun language arts activity that can be done just as easily in English or any other language.
You can start exploring the Learning Portal by sifting through themes or visiting the for educators section (top right of the homepage), where you can watch the instructional video and explore curriculum-linked content.
The Learning Portal is a living resource that helps the Royal BC Museum extend our reach across this vast, unique, and diverse province.
