During my summer at Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC), I was able to participate in a collaboration between the conservators at BACC and teachers at Hoover High. At Hoover High, students are grouped into different academies or cohorts that focus on year-long project which intersects with classroom curriculum. BACC worked with the Sustainable Academy of Building & Engineering (SABE) program to develop curriculum around the conservation and preservation needs of the school’s WPA era Donal Hord sculpture, which was housed in the library. Overarching themes such as sustainability, different value systems, display options, and various chemistry concepts were explored as bridges between the academic classes and conservation. I produced two digital handouts which were organized by overarching themes, with a paragraph explaining the link between each theme and conservation, and links to relevant readings and publications. All the reading resources were then compiled into a digital library which was made accessible to the participating teachers.

The work of compiling a digital library continued during my second year and was expanded into a google drive that housed a large set of resources and annotated bibliographies for teachers and BACC as they continued their work with local San Diego schools. For more information view the project report on the google drive education toolkit.