Observational Course Journal Entry #4

Part 1: Site Information

I visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame's website. This organization is dedicated to preserving and telling the story of baseball by exhibiting the actual hall of fame, hosting a museum and archives, and sponsoring research into the history and development of the game over more than 150 years. The institution is located in Cooperstown, New York, a fairly isolated village at the southern end of Otsego Lake in central New York. Although the community has been bestowed the honor of having seen the birth of baseball, nobody actually knows where it got started. Nevertheless, the institute has become a mecca of sorts for baseball fans around the world.

Part 2: Observation

My visit to the National Baseball Hall of Fame occurred on April 9, 2021.

Description

This website contains information meant to educate would-be pilgrims to Cooperstown, but an extensive digital collection is accessible online that contains thousands of digital images of art, 3D memorabilia, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. The collection boasts pieces from the near sacred promissory note documenting Boston RedSox Owner Harry Frazee's disastrous blunder selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, to the kitschy Nolan Ryan bobblehead. In all, over 250,000 photographs and three million documents are preserved at the institution, including over 16,000 hours of media. 209 stories fill the baseball history page, with still more stories featuring deep dives into some of the great players. An education section features field trip sign-ups and downloads for kids activities, educators, and researchers. Finally, an endowed internship offers a ten week internship for undergraduate and graduate students to learn about the varied career fields employed at the museum.

Interaction

From museum patrons to internships to field trips to social media and email lists, this organization engages in multiple layers of educational interaction.

Analysis

I was surprised at the amount of programs and activities at a place I previously considered to be a backwoods memorabilia sand. The extensive museum collections and digital holdings, including digitized version fo physical artifacts is impressive. It uses state of the art browsing software to present artifact attributes alongside a robust viewer that allows the visitor to magnify the digital image to see texture. Books, films, and articles could be generated just from the contents of this collection. What might appear to some as a front for merchandising, and a laughable crusade to chronicle what amounts to a child's game, there seems to be something far more profound at play here. The organization is serious, their methods sound, and their message is perhaps even more prescient for our COVID world: that America's National Pastime can bring bring us together.

Part 3: Readings

Cuban, L. (2007). Hugging the middle: Teaching in an era of testing and accountability, 1980-2005. Education policy analysis archives, 15(1), 1-29. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v15n1.2007

Key to article: What do America's four million teachers actually do? What actually happens in the classroom? Knowing this is key to unlocking the single most important tool to inspiring 50 million students in the U.S.
There is a back and forth between student-centered and teacher-centered, between progressive and traditional ways of teaching. It's a pendulum swing.
Over time there has been a build-up of energy around testing
Observation of 3 districts results

Despite high-stakes testing, traditional arrangement of desks only half of classrooms in 2/3 districts.
Half of elementary teachers using mixed groupings
Secondary more traditional grouping

Author senses seemingly conflicting evidence of expanding hybridization and increased attention to rote prep for tests
Teachers are using constructivist and other progressive techniques learned at college in spite of test-prep pressures, but it could just be a patina.

I didn't see any overt connections to the National Baseball Hall of Fame except an overarching historical arc that matches Cuban's century-long sweep over educational practices and policies. Just as baseball has been made and remade over the decades, responding to the pressures of economics and politics, education, too has been impacted by some of the same forces. For example, both elements were highly impacted by the industrial revolution, which propelled both into their own kind of industrialized spread.

Part 4: Integrations

In terms of big picture, I can see some loose coupling in baseball. When communities come together at the ballpark, an incredible array of sociocultural backgrounds mix and mingle over hot dogs and home runs. A cheer for the team erupts from 60,000 people who in other contexts may be less unified. What is about sports that draws people together with such fervor that education can learn from?