The Bullock Texas State History Museum’s mission is to engage the broadest possible audience to interpret the continually unfolding Story of Texas through meaningful educational experiences.
The Texas Story Project is a crowd-sourced digital initiative to document Texas, one story at a time. It accepts any and all submissions of stories by, about, and for Texas.
In 2018, the museum partnered with the St. Mary’s University History department in San Antonio, Texas, to integrate The Texas Story Project into its curriculum for students taking a required course in history, as well as declared history majors.
This effort has led to the submission, online publication, and promotion of more than 200 stories, including groundbreaking work by students on wide-ranging topics including the forced expatriation of American citizens during WWII, highly personal stories of family dynamics, immigration, love and loss, and much more. St. Mary’s faculty and students have used their work on the Texas Story Project as a springboard for further research that has led to the proposal of legislation to recognize WWII-era German American internees, promoting national recognition for vital yet forgotten personal and societal histories.
This project was declared a resounding success by St. Mary’s University faculty, who are now expanding the program’s use beyond its history department. They have committed to the Texas Story Project as a vehicle for serious training in writing-intensive practicums and oral history. These “real-world course assignments” have even led to a conversion of self-proclaimed “history haters” taking a required course into “history lovers.” The university has declared this partnership as “the linchpin of the restructuring of our history department curriculum” and have acknowledged the museum for providing a program platform upon which they can flexibly build effective pedagogies.
The Bullock Museum is also reaping dividends from this partnership. It gains powerful content that when published to the Texas Story Project website and promoted through social media fulfills the museum’s mission to reach audiences beyond its local neighborhood in Austin. Website metrics have demonstrated a 73% rise in Texas communities visiting the Texas Story Project online. Dwell times on Texas Story Project website pages average 4.5 minutes per unique visit, nearly four times the time spent on other website pages.
Research from the Texas Story Project is influencing museum curatorial perspectives by providing access to unique material culture that can be included in both the current project display cases (see attached images) and, eventually, into the fabric of 46,000 square feet of permanent exhibition space. This access to material culture and associated stories is critical for the museum, which, as a non-collecting institution that borrows every single artifact on display, must continually find new ways to tell the story of Texas.
The museum continues to seek additional partnerships with primary and secondary education institutions throughout the state, such as Texas A&M in Prairie View, Texas, and a Houston Montessori school created for underserved kids. Non-education partners will include local libraries, the Texas Freedom Colony project, and more.
Major conference papers have been presented in the history, education, and museum technology communities including SXSW EDU, the Museum Computer Network, AASLH, NCPH, and more. Great interest has been shown by the larger secondary education and museum communities in what is being recognized as a replicable, scalable, sustainable model for engaging students and teaching critical professional skills — all while advancing the museum’s mission in creative and sometimes unexpected ways.
Videos produced to promote the program and individual stories:
Project introduction: https://youtu.be/_SAyUVX8GG4
Educator collaboration: https://youtu.be/hYi6cMXpHeQ
Wes Wesselhoeft, WWII internee: https://youtu.be/71QSw-m_NYs
