Teaching General Stores

One of the projects that I worked on during my internship with the MSU Museum is a gallery kit about the General Store in the Heritage Hall. This was an interesting project because I got the chance to create a specific set of programming for a gallery that doesn’t currently have anything. I wanted to create a gallery kit that discussed how shopping and packaging have changed over time. However, the development process was difficult since there are two components to the box (discussion questions and information and a hands-on activity) and I never got to test them together.

The second part of the box was a hands-on activity, which was honestly my favorite part of the whole box. I worked with a doctoral candidate at MSU School of Packaging to create a foldable cereal box that visitors could design and fill with whatever they want. We also worked to create a 2D soup can label version that visitors can also design and wrap around a can later if they don’t want to make a 3D box. This part of the gallery box was first tested at the Sensory Friendly Saturday event in November. It was a big hit and visitors really enjoyed the process of designing and creating their own box.

However, the initial part of the gallery kit, a series of discussion questions and general information not as easy to find time to test. However, a couple of weeks later, when a school group was visiting I was able to bring out the replicas of food packaging from the General Store and discuss with them the history of general stores and marketing along with the questions about general stores. It was nice to engage in a discussion with visitors.

Unfortunately, I never got to test and work on the two parts of the gallery kits at the same time, and hopefully we will be able to in the near future. However, it was nice to actually engage with visitors instead of just talking at them for a while about the General Store and not knowing if they are actually absorbing and learning any of the information.

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