History Explorations

LDMS Students Find Local Ties In State Museums

To close out their first month of the school year, eighth grade students from Lylburn Downing Middle School traveled to Richmond on Aug. 31 to tour the state’s flagship history and art museums. And while there, their journeys allowed them to more carefully explore the histories of Rockbridge County and the Shenandoah Valley; to virtually traverse the commonwealth and the histories and cultural assets of its immigrants; and even to take their own timely “Odyssey” back through the artistic legacies of the Trojan War.

This curriculum-tied “doubleheader” was organized by rotations through five exhibits, sharpened by scavenger hunts that were designed by Lexington City Schools faculty (including Eric Wilson, who also directs the Rockbridge Historical Society and co-chairs the regional Rockbridge250 committee) and education and exhibit staff at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

At the VMHC, pairs of students teamed up to explore and interpret a pair of complementary exhibits. The regionally curated “Our Commonwealth” included a range of materials and digital interactives highlighting Lexington and Rockbridge County, with materials that were co-curated during the pandemic by Wilson and RHS trustee Tom Camden in 2020-2021.

The more globally integrated “We The People: The World in our Commonwealth” chronicled over five centuries of immigration to Virginia. The winding route through its four gallery spaces coupled historic artifacts with contemporary contributions drawn from family keepsakes, oral histories, and reflections from 21st-century Virginians reflecting on their own range of ethnic and cultural heritage.

Thanks to RHS’ new partnership with the VMHC as one of the state’s inaugural Virginia History Affiliates, a traveling version of “We The People” will be hosted at the RHS Museum from April 12 to May 24, 2027, when they’ll also tour it for weekday stands at local public libraries and for projects in middle and high school classrooms.

At the VMFA, those imaginative portals moved students through an even wider chronological range. Their explorations of sculptures and ritual objects from Ancient Greece and Rome will help set the stage for coming units this year in their World History and Latin classes. Another gallery, “Waterways,” combined different media that inventively lensed a range of environmental and cultural perspectives crafted by indigenous, Virginian, and American artists, while also prompting students to compare and contrast a pair of the museum’s most celebrated paintings of Natural Bridge.

A final exhibit highlighted three centuries of creative work by Afro-Virginian artists. Wilson noted that, “In framing this opportunity, we frontloaded this year’s outing to complement the annual opening unit for our English classes: ‘I, Too, Sing America,’ titled to echo Langston Hughes’ resonant refrain.”

“This year,” he continued, “investing more time with both realistic and more abstract forms in the visual arts helped them anchor classroom assignments that nationally constellate poetry, songs, musicals, novels, and yearlong revisitings of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. We’re grateful to our faculty, parent chaperones, and museum colleagues for helping lean into this material, in order to provide more authentic and relevant touchstones that both build on and broaden more traditional curricula and SOL-standards set by the Department of Education.”

The day before the trip, the stage was helpfully set by LDMS parent and Washington and Lee University professor of art and art history Elliott King. He helped to develop basic habits of observation, interpretation, and their own creative illustrations with a presentation that he titled “What to Look for in Art (When You Don’t Know What You’re Looking At).”

As King relayed afterwards: “I was really impressed with the eighth-graders at LDMS. They offered terrific responses to well-known works like ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware,’ as well as lesser-known pieces by artists such as Robert Colescott. Some students also had the opportunity to hold a 700-year-old West African figurine I brought with me, which helped demonstrate how visual ideas can transcend both time and geography. It really is remarkable how many special opportunities LDMS provides students in our community, and I’m grateful for the chance to contribute.”

In reviewing the longer arc of collaborative preparation, and by building on students’ seventh grade English and Civics classes, Wilson reflected that “Time over the summer allowed us to work more deliberately with experts at the VMHC and VMFA in ways that specifically tailored their resources to standing and new classroom assignments. We also and mindfully designed these encounters to support the school’s social and emotional learning curriculum – particularly a powerful installation centered on five profiles of ‘Immigration, Integration, and Resilience’ – and to further cultivate our young citizens’ habits of community engagement and lifelong learning.”