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Distance Learning from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum

May 2005
The Henry Viscardi School will participate in a distance learning program with a grant from Teaching Tolerance of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

With funding support from Teaching Tolerance of the Southern Poverty Law Center, 5th grade students from the Henry Viscardi School and the Drexel Avenue School on Long Island will participate in a 2 way, live interactive broadcast from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on May 24th at the Smeal Learning Center at Abilities!.

Using distance technology, this project will broadcast an interactive tour from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in lower Manhattan to a group of students with severe physical disabilities at the Henry Viscardi School on Long Island. The museum consists of several actual tenement apartments representing ones that housed thousands of European immigrants to this country at the turn of the century. Preserved artifacts from the time period as well as historical documents on several of the families that resided there can be viewed in the museum and on the tours. Due to the historic nature of the building and the need to preserve it, there is no elevator access. The museum does provide alternate activities for those who cannot climb the old, narrow staircase.

A trained museum educator who poses as 14-year old Victoria Confino, an immigrant to the United States in 1916, conducts the tour. Through our capability, students who could not otherwise attend or get in to the museum because of its inaccessibility, will be able to interact through live, two way video broadcast and gain an understanding of the challenges facing immigrants to this country in the early 1900s. In order to foster inclusive learning, children from a neighborhood school (The Drexel Avenue School in Westbury) will be invited to join the group. This project extends a pilot program completed last year to test such broadcasting as an alternate mode of information dissemination between the museum and groups who cannot travel to the actual site.

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