Children reflect on the meaning and importance of monuments | UCSB

What is a monument? What is its purpose? Whose story does it tell? And who decides on its existence and location?

These are some of the questions that students from Santa Barbara area schools explored when they participated in Monument Creation, a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) and the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation (SBTHP).

The object of the investigation was a statue of Carlos III, King of Spain in 1782, the year the Presidio of Santa Barbara was founded. The statue, which is located in the courtyard of the Presidio, was donated to the city of Santa Barbara in 1982 by King Juan Carlos I to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the historic site.

But the creation of monuments is just one of many collaborations between the IHC and the SBTHP, all aimed at strengthening public teaching of the humanities.

The Trust co-sponsors an internship for students in the IHC Public Humanities Graduate Fellowship program, which is designed to prepare doctoral students in the humanities for careers as socially engaged humanists, both within and beyond academia.

The internship allows an IHC graduate student to spend 200 hours over the summer working alongside SBTHP staff members and gaining a first-hand view of public humanities in action.

Additionally, SBTHP Executive Director Anne Peterson, who received her doctorate in public history from UC Santa Barbara, regularly lectures at a skills seminar for IHC Public Humanities Fellows that educates them about careers in public organizations and the nonprofit sector.

A public historian by training who became the chief administrator of a major nonprofit community organization, Peterson’s career path offers graduate students an important example of the diverse paths available to them as highly skilled scholars and educators in the humanities.

In recognition of its public collaborations in the humanities with SBTHP, IHC received the Trust’s 2024 Partnership Award. The award “recognizes individuals or organizations that have participated in collaborative efforts that support the mission of SBTHP and have had a significant impact toward that end.”

“We are thrilled to present the Partnership Award to the Interdisciplinary Center for the Humanities,” Peterson said. “The Center exemplifies partnership for our nonprofit organization. The Center staff knows our organization inside out and listens to us as we discuss our priorities and resources to ensure we find a project that aligns with each organization’s goals.”

“We’ve been hosting a co-funded workshop every year for over five years,” Peterson said. “And last year, the IHC hosted a teacher workshop called Making of Monuments at El Presidio de Santa Bárbara National Historical Park, which included the Presidio Research Center collections, several staff members and monuments from El Presidio National Historical Park.

“The project fit perfectly with our own priority of evaluating the park’s monuments with a view to reinterpreting them.”

The Making of Monuments, created by IHC director Susan Derwin, a professor of comparative literature, is ultimately “a humanities program designed to support civic participation,” Derwin said.

As part of the program, primary school students reflect on a monument that represents colonial interests and perspectives and consider how the public narrative about the monument might be rewritten to reflect the history of past and present communities that have been excluded from it.

In its broader sense, the program introduces students to the experience of active participation in democratic practices and processes, in this case by considering the importance of historical memory and public narrative and their role as creators and keepers of these narratives.

“There is a need for civic learning in California,” Derwin said. “The humanities can help meet that need through collaborations, like ours, between UC Santa Barbara, the Trust and four elementary schools in the Santa Barbara Unified School District.”

The three-part Making of Monuments program began in summer 2023 and ended in May 2024.

In early August 2023, eight teachers from the Santa Barbara Unified School District participated in a week-long workshop at the Presidio that included research in the Presidio’s central archives, discussions, meetings, and small group collaborations.

“Working with three doctoral students from the History Department, teachers explored the meaning and significance of monuments and then used this knowledge to design activities to encourage students to recognize and reconsider monuments in their communities,” explained Christoffer Bovbjerg, IHC deputy director.

Jen Griffith, a fifth-grade teacher at Adams School and one of the workshop participants, said, “I felt that both organizations provided me with the ideal supportive environment to have the autonomy as an educator to create my own curriculum on the topic we were learning about: the definition of a monument and the historical significance of local monuments.”

“It allowed me to take my students through engaging learning experiences that gave them exactly the type of first-hand learning experiences I love to provide in my classroom to provoke investigations into real-world problems, spark intellectual curiosity and deepen critical thinking skills,” she said.

A field trip to the Presidio during the school year gave schoolchildren the opportunity to observe the statue up close.

“They saw the statue in its full context. Well, in its context or lack thereof,” Bovbjerg said. “It sits in the Presidio courtyard without a lot of landmarks. Trust staff led a discussion with the students recalling what they had been working on in class.

“They asked questions like: ‘Why do you think this monument is there? Who does it represent? How could you explain its history?’

During a visit to UCSB, the students applied their new analytical skills to a study of the Gaucho Argentino statue at the Mosher Alumni House. They conducted their own research with the help of graduate students who participated in their instructors’ workshop last summer.

“Students will end the academic year with a new understanding of the importance of monuments and the stories they tell, as well as their relationship to the communities in which they reside,” Bovbjerg said.

“They will also have developed a greater appreciation of their own power and responsibility as community members to preserve, change or reimagine the monuments and the stories that represent them,” Bovbjerg said.

With the support of a UCSB Faculty Outreach Grant for 2024-25, Derwin noted, the Making of Monuments program is set to begin its second year this summer, with a new set of faculty.