Threading Play into Learning: Clothing as an Immersive Tool in Museum Settings

By Danielle Harris-Burnett

In college, my campus shared land with a living history museum, and as an anthropology major, that meant a quick and easy commute to work. But it also introduced an interesting question: where was the barrier between the historical landscape of the museum and the modern world of the college? The museum covered a span of several miles, interpreting what the state of Maryland would have looked like a few decades after European colonization. Even the college’s newer buildings featured a historic façade to match the original architecture, meaning it was easy for museum visitors to accidentally wander into the campus’s newer buildings. One way the museum separated the spaces was through immersive historical costuming. Visitors could look out over the field to see a 17th century interpreter tending to the museum’s pigs and sheep, a scene easy to imagine taking place in the same space centuries earlier.

Museums are uniquely positioned as learning spaces. Since the early 2000s, many have integrated elements of play into their exhibits. This allows children and visitors to create their own experiences, where they can focus on their own learning interests in a hands-on setting. Allowing children to handle recreations of historical garments and fabrics allows them to visualize life in the past on a concrete level. They can feel the weight of a woolen garment or handle the raw materials that make clothes. Taking part in these tactile activities sticks with the children and builds their capacity to ask questions about lived experiences in the past.

Clothing and fabric play a vital role in the interactive stations at the Vermont History Museum. One of the COVID-19 adaptations we retained in the exhibit is the dress-up mirrors in the Catamount Tavern, where kids can line up their faces and feet with hats and shoes in the reflection. When I started at the museum in January 2023, I noticed the hats and shoes did not match up with one another. One of my colleagues explained this was an intentional choice. By mixing and matching images of 18th century clothing from different economic levels and gender expressions, children can create their own image. This sentiment carries into the dress-up station in the Tavern.

We recently added a new interactive activity in the museum’s Farming section, where visitors can learn to card wool. This process involves repeatedly running wool through a set of combs to create a worked set of wool fiber called a rolag, which is then used to create yarn. In the month since this interactive opened, we have seen both adult and child visitors stop to learn how to card the wool. While visitors experience varying degrees of success with their wool, they all walk away with a new understanding of the work required for a common household fabric.

By experiencing historical clothing at various stages of development, visitors can gain a new appreciation for the work and time that went into making clothing and other hand-made items. They also learn how clothing signals identity. By playing with recreations of historical garments, we give them a better understanding of how people in the past used clothing to express themselves.

This article originally appeared in the Summer/Fall 2023 issue of our member magazine, History Connections. To get it and support the Vermont Historical Society, sign up as a member.