Day Two

Today's Schedule & Speakers

Priority Focus: Access to History, Arts, Culture

Priority Focus: Access to Educational Resources & Experiences

Lecture Hall, National Museum of African Art

9:00am > Framing Remarks

Tricia Edwards is the interim director for Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) and Smithsonian Affiliations.

Previously, Edwards was the deputy director for SITES and the Affiliates program, where she provided executive leadership and direction for overall planning, development and management of all programs and activities. She has led the organization in the implementation of a new strategic plan to catalyze public engagement and spark learning, enjoyment and wonder by connecting the resources of the Smithsonian to a vital network of museums and other educational and cultural organizations. Prior to this role, she served as the deputy director for Smithsonian Affiliations and interim deputy director for exhibits, finance and administration for SITES.

Before joining SITES and Smithsonian Affiliations, Edwards spent 12 years as the head of education for the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where she developed Spark!Lab, a hands-on invention workspace for children. She also oversaw installations of Spark!Labs in cities across the U.S. and abroad.

Prior to coming to the Smithsonian, Edwards directed education activities at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and Delaware Museum of Natural History. She began her career as a pre-school teacher.

Links
https://www.sites.si.edu/s/

Affiliate Directory: https://affiliations.si.edu/affiliate-directory/

EdwardsT@si.edu 

9:45am > Community Engagement through Museum on Main Street

Museum on Main Street offers small and rural towns opportunities to use Smithsonian exhibitions and programs to boost interest and engagement in local history and culture. Explore how to bring out the best in your community in association with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street program.

Selwyn Ramp is a Project Director for the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program, where, together with the rest of the MoMS team he develops small exhibitions and programs tailored specifically for rural communities across the United States. Selwyn is passionate about empowering individuals to share their own stories through collaborative, community-driven projects that use creative storytelling to foster meaningful and lasting impacts. With a digital-first mindset, he is particularly interested in leveraging technology and forward-thinking practices to drive sustainability and innovation within the cultural field.

Selwyn holds a Bachelor's degree in Art History and Studio Art from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and a Master's degree in Museology from the Reinwardt Academie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His work frequently explores the intersection of cultures (small and large), languages, and community identities, enriching public engagement and access.

Links
https://museumonmainstreet.org/

RampS@si.edu 

10:30am > Our Families, Our Communities, Our Histories: Preserving Histories Through Community Curation

The Robert F. Smith Center for the Digitization and Curation of the African American History (the Smith Center) serves as the burgeoning digital humanities and public history forum for the Museum. The Smith Center consists of three components including the Community Curation projects, the Fellowship program, and the on-site Family History Center (FHC).  All three components are rooted in community collaboration, accessibility of collections and histories, continuing education, and genealogical support for institutional and communal partners.  Since 2017, the Smith team has effectively interacted with other institutions, families, emerging professionals in the field throughout the country to establish a grander collective of communities to preserve local histories. Over the last eight years, the team has collaborated with communities and institutions across the country and internationally. There are five cities listed in the original charter as destinations for Community Curation including Baltimore, Denver, Chicago, New York City and St. Louis. In addition to the original cities, the Smith team collaborates with regions, institutions and communities in the local D.C., Maryland and Virginia area, the New Orleans cultural scene, Northern Pacific region, Southern communities, the Central Plains states, and the Midwest.

Dr. Doretha K. Williams is the Director of the Robert F. Smith Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).  The Smith Center serves to make accessible historical collections through digitization, public programming and engagement, and by supporting educational development in the museum and archives fields.  Prior to her appointment at NMAAHC, she was the Project Director for the D.C. Africana Archives Project (DCAAP), a grant-funded digitization program with the Africana Studies Program and the University Libraries at the George Washington University (GWU).  From 2011 to 2013, Doretha served as the Executive Director of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City, an educational resource and cultural center that provides access to its collections for research. Doretha received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas. She is a proud graduate of Fisk University, class of 1998.

Links
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/museum-centers/digitization-curation-african-american-history/family-history

WilliamsDK@si.edu 

11:15am > Creating Portraits of Community

Learn about the Creating Portraits of Community curriculum, an inter-unit collaborative project dedicated to helping students across the nation document their communities through photography and oral history, with a special focus on telling the stories of rural communities.

Allie Knight is the Distance Learning Coordinator at SAAM. She manages SAAM's Artful Connections program, which provides free, on-demand arts-integrated virtual lessons to any classroom. Prior to joining SAAM in 2020, she worked in education at several other museums including the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art and the National Gallery of Art. She has an M.A. in Art History from The George Washington University.

Abbie Hitzemann is the Project Manager for the Creating Portraits of Community project, A Together We Thrive initiative, collaborating with museum educators and classroom teachers in rural and urban communities to build interdisciplinary curriculum, learning resources, and communities of learning that foster belonging in the classroom.

KnightA2@si.edu
HitzemannAL@si.edu 

1:15pm > Launching to the STARS: SAO's New Program Creates STEM Pathways for Rural Students

Approximately 32,200 rural schools serve between 9.5-9.8 million children in the US each year. 64% of these schools are located in high poverty areas, and when compared to their city counterparts, are significantly underfunded, with limited or no access to out-of-school informal learning opportunities that are known to offer the meaningful hands-on experiences that spark lifelong interest in STEM, including astronomy.

Smithsonian STARS aims to bridge the gap for rural students by providing equipping every rural school with a telescope kit, hands-on learning experiences leveraging the incredible dark skies over rural communities and astronomy lessons that meet both Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and state learning requirements.

Join us for a peek behind-the-scenes of this powerful, 100% philanthropically-funded new program to learn how Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is helping the nation's rural children know that the sky is for everyone, and that means, them, too.

Amy C. Oliver, FRAS aka Nerdy Astronomer, is public affairs officer and science center manager at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory— a facility of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. She is also the Director in Arizona of Smithsonian Scientists Taking Astronomy to Rural Schools (STARS), which launched in April 2025 and will soon roll out nationwide. Amy is principal scientific investigator of Dark SkyNet — a cross-border light pollution monitoring network — and Project GLOWworm, studying unexpected bioluminescence above 8,000 ft. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of Louisiana-Lafayette, Master of Science from University of Oklahoma and DEI certification from University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Amy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2021 for her work in mitigating the effects of light pollution on astronomy and global ecosystems,, currently serves as Chair of the Tucson/Pima County Outdoor Lighting Code Committee, has published multiple articles and book chapters, and was a 2024 TEDx speaker.

Links
https://smithsonianstars.si.edu/

amy.oliver@cfa.harvard.edu 

1:15pm > Transforming Education Through Science in Collaboration with Communities Across the Globe

This session will share some success stories of implementation of STEM projects we have done with rural communities. There will be a focus on the resources that are freely available for communities along with ways to access them and the professional learning opportunities that support the resources.

Amy D’Amico oversees all Professional Development and Leadership Development initiatives at the Smithsonian Science Education Center. Dr. D’Amico has over two decades of experience as an educator that began by teaching middle school for the Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts where she became a science teacher leader and helped lead science professional development for the district. Dr. D’Amico earned her BA in Biology from New York University and received an MS and a PhD in Biology from Northeastern University in Boston.

Links
https://ssec.si.edu/

DAmicoA@si.edu 

2:30pm > Community Connections: Democracy in Dialogue and Stories 4-History

This session will offer a brief overview of two national civic engagement initiatives provided by the Office of the Undersecretary for Education. Both programs partner with localities across the country in an effort to support youth in an exploration of their communities' past and present while considering the possibilities for the future within the larger American narrative.

- Democracy in Dialogue Virtual Exchange: With Smithsonian support, program facilitators lead place-based investigations with students to better understand the unique stories of their hometown and share and reflect on their discoveries with partner communities in another corner of the country.

https://www.si.edu/educators/democracy-dialogue-virtual-exchange-program

- Stories 4-History: This partnership between the Smithsonian and 4-H aims to provide an opportunity to elevate youth voices from rural communities across the country. 4-H members between the ages of 13-19 engage in a civic engagement project that amplifies local stories of democracy, centering on topics that matter to today’s youth.

https://museumonmainstreet.org/stories4history

Jared Morris served 17 years in public education as a classroom teacher, instructional coach, and division curriculum lead. As an education specialist for the Smithsonian’s Office of the Under Secretary for Education, he currently co-leads the Democracy in Dialogue Virtual Exchange program.

MorrisJ3@si.edu 

3:15pm > National Partnerships at the Smithsonian that Spotlight Local Context

With a vision for reaching every learner across America, the Smithsonian has built long-lasting partnerships with national positive youth development and out-of-school time organizations, including Boys & Girls Clubs of America and National 4-H Council, as well as emerging partnerships with Girl Scouts of the USA and Girls, Inc. Using a tiered approach for engagement and co-creation practices, we’ve learned a lot about designing and developing universally available resources leveraging our collections and pedagogy that offer space for local content and context. 

Learn more about the development of these partnerships, the Office of the Under Secretary for Education’s approach to engagement strategies, and how local youth across the country have leveraged the Smithsonian’s resources for inspiration. These partnerships illustrate that the Smithsonian is not solely a destination, but rather an opportunity to connect the past to the present and national stories in the spotlight to what matters most to local communities.

Ashley Naranjo is a museum educator, specializing in the use of digital resources for teaching and learning. She currently manages education partnerships in the Smithsonian’s Office of the Under Secretary for Education. She has developed and implemented professional development opportunities for teachers, librarians and fellow museum educators since 2011. She holds a B.A. in Human Development from the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and a M.Ed. in Learning Design and Technology from the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. She is a 2019 graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute’s NextGen of Museum Leaders program. 

NaranjoA@si.edu 

4:00pm > Native Knowledge 360: Transforming Teaching and Learning about American Indians

Learn about Native Knowledge 360° the National Museum of the American Indian’s National Education Initiative to transform teaching and learning about Native Peoples in K-12 classrooms. Participants will receive an introduction to the digital learning resources and free teacher trainings available to the public, and will also receive a free teaching poster for their classrooms or setting and the Essential Understandings framework that provides language and key concepts about Native Americans historically and today.

Renée Gokey (Citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma) is the Teacher Services Coordinator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. She began her career at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in 2000, where she worked with Indigenous peoples and stewarded American Indian collections from the Western Hemisphere. In the museum education field in 2004, she’s designed educational programs, virtual and onsite teacher training, and learning materials and K-12 curriculum for families, students and teachers through work on NMAI’s Native Knowledge 360° National Education Initiative. She consistently seeks out new ways to better serve teachers and collaborations with organizations to amplify access of quality resources and teaching strategies through the Native Knowledge 360° National Education Initiative. Through her position at NMAI and in work with her own tribal nation, Renée Gokey advocates for culturally responsive teaching, social justice through education fand advocating promotion of Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural practices. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology and Native American Studies from the University of New Mexico and Master’s degree in Education from George Mason University.

Links

Home | Native Knowledge 360° - Interactive Teaching Resources

NMAI-Essential-Understandings.pdf

Search NK360° Educational Resources | Native Knowledge 360° - Interactive Teaching Resources

Educator’s Blog: Land Acknowledgments as a Tool Towards Social Justice in Your Classroom | Smithsonian Voices | National Museum of the American Indian Smithsonian Magazine

Making Land Acknowledgment Meaningful | Smithsonian Institution

NK360 - Education Initiative - Teacher Materials - Honoring Original Indigenous Inhabitants - Land Acknowledgment

GokeyR@si.edu 

4:30pm > Environmentalism Through a Humanities Lens, the Power of Community History and Culture in the Environment

The history and culture of a community plays an integral role in how their environment is defined and can be explored. Come learn about how the Center for Community and Environment (CCE) is partnering with communities to investigate and honor the rich and complex interactions of differing communities and their connections to their environment. We are eager to hear about the many ways that rural communities engage with their environment and to share the ways in which the CCE has partnered with our local communities to share the resources of a museum and research institution. This session will be an opportunity to explore how the partnerships between museums and communities can create opportunities for thriving environments.

Lisa Icenroad is the Associate Director at the Center for Community and Environment (CCE) at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum. She is responsible for the strategic planning and development of the CCE as it continues to serve the Anacostia and DC communities, as well as expands its reach and network across the country and internationally. Lisa is a nonprofit programs leader with over 10 years of experience in creating, managing, and growing outdoor, science, and education programs with grantees and community partners. She enjoys working with communities to learn about their history and to work collaboratively in supporting growth and leadership opportunities for individuals to thrive. Over the past few years, she has focused more acutely on equitable outdoor engagement and has created a national program to support communities and community members that are working to address systemic barriers of engagement in outdoor recreation. Lisa loves being outdoors and is passionate about supporting opportunities that allow all people to authentically engage in their environment and advocate for positive change in their communities.

Katrina D. Lashley is Research Coordinator at The Center for Community and Environment (CCE) at Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum (ACM). In her pervious duties as Program Coordinator, she led the Urban Waterways Project, a twelve-year research and educational initiative which documented the relationship between urban communities and their watersheds thorough the lenses of civic oversight, community engagement, and environmental advocacy. In 2018 Lashley developed the Women’s Environmental Leadership (WEL) initiative which builds capacity for future environmental leadership by convening an international network of established environmental leaders with emerging and aspiring leaders for in-person discussions focused on the exchange of best practices, wisdom, and experience. In 2022, as part of preparations for ACM’s Year of the Environment, she developed the framework which anchors CCE’s work in a Humanities-based perspective.

Lashley received her BA in English Literature and Italian at Rutgers University and earned an MA in History (Public History track) at American University, with a focus on the British Caribbean. She has worked on projects for the National Museum of American History, Museum on Main Street, and Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial. In addition to her Public History work, Lashley taught English Literature and English Language for 12 years.

Links
https://www.si.edu/museums/anacostia-community-museum

IcenroadLM@si.edu
LashleyK@si.edu 

5:30 > Reception at Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

This session introduces the various facets and initiatives of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Programmatically and through practice, this research center illuminates the diversity of living traditions and creates space for and connections between communities and people through ethical and inclusive collaborations. We produce an annual festival on the National Mall, a non-profit record label, and cultural vitality programs to support the sustainability of homegrown forms of cultural and artistic production. We engage in reciprocal research, documentation, and training. And our archives is committed to shared stewardship. In this session, staff will provide an archives tour and highlight current projects and potential opportunities for engagement, including upcoming Smithsonian Folklife Festival programs.

Sabrina Lynn Motley has been the director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage since 2013. Here, she has expanded research and programming networks, fostered community collaboration, and explored new practices. Previously, she was senior director of programs and exhibitions at Asia Society Texas Center, where she highlighted Houston’s evolving demographics and its role as a gateway to Asia. Sabrina also served as Vice President at Vesper Society and senior education and program director at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, contributing to the development of performing arts venues at both institutions. As an independent consultant, she produced public programs for the J. Paul Getty Museum, curated exhibitions, and produced a weekly world music radio program. She holds a B.A. in world arts and cultures, an M.A. in African studies from UCLA, and is currently a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UCLA.

Sojin Kim is a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, where she works on multifaceted, collaborative projects addressing migration, music, and public history. Her work spans Festival programs, exhibitions, workshops, as well as research and documentation projects, primarily engaging communities in Washington, DC; Southern California; and Asian Americans in multiple regions.

Links

Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

https://folklife.si.edu/

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

https://folkways.si.edu/

Smithsonian Folklife Festival

https://festival.si.edu/

Cultural Vitality initiatives

https://folklife.si.edu/cultural-vitality

Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections

https://folklife.si.edu/archives

Selected project highlights

• Masters of Tradition: A Cultural Journey Across America

A story map featuring extraordinary artists from across the country who have received the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor for excellence in folk and traditional arts

https://folklife.si.edu/masters-of-tradition

• Stories Objects from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, 1967-2017

An online exhibition featuring the stories of the people and communities behind 50 objects from past Folklife Festivals

https://festival.si.edu/50objects

• Folklife Magazine 

An online magazine with content contributed from both within and beyond the Smithsonian)

https://folklife.si.edu/magazine

• Youth and the Future of Culture 

2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program info

https://festival.si.edu/2025/youth-future-culture

• The Ozarks: Faces and Facets of a Region 

2023 Folklife Festival, produced in partnership with Missouri State University—landing page, documentation of event

https://festival.si.edu/2023/ozarks

• Accordions on the Move

Example of a Folklife Festival “narrative stage” or “story circle”—a discussion/demo session with accordion players representing two different U.S. regional styles at the of 2017 Festival

https://festival.si.edu/blog/accordions-on-the-move

• Sin Fronteras-No Borders: Community Skate Jam

Highlights from skate jams involving both local DC skaters and featured participants of the 2024 Indigenous Voices of the Americas Festival program

https://festival.si.edu/blog/community-skate-jam