As an LSU facility, the LSU Rural Life Museum's curated grounds were always intended for learning. In recent years, the museum has developed new and innovative ways to engage university students and LSU’s academic community. The most visible of these efforts have come through Katherine Fresina, Curatorial Director, and Jane Ashburn, Assistant Professor of Practice at LSU College of Art & Design. Through collaboration and the museum's unique resources, the museum's educational component has expanded to host several hands-on LSU courses, from undergraduate architecture courses to doctoral-level design courses.
The museum’s spirit of living history pervades these classes: rather than sitting through lectures day after day, students learn by solving real problems on the museum grounds.
Recording Historic Structures
Roughly half of a student’s time in Ashburn’s Recording Historic Structures class—an introductory-level LSU architecture course—will be spent on the museum's grounds, photographing, sketching, or measuring the dimensions of any number of historic buildings on the property. These studies produce full documentation of a given building, from floor plans to elevations, in accordance with the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS).
The course has been on LSU’s roster for decades, but before Ashburn—a conservator herself—it had not been taught in ten years.
“They actually get to do the work in a historic building," Ashburn said. "We talk a lot about the materials and the construction methods, and how they are different.”
Photo courtesy of LSU Rural Life Museum
LSU students get hands-on experience at LSU Rural Life Museum
This work is not meant only for students specializing in the preservation of historic structures—knowing how to work with them prepares any architecture student for the future. In 2024, an American Institute of Architecture (AIA) survey found that forty-five percent of American architecture firm billings came from work done on existing structures, rather than new construction.
“The statistics are actually saying that the students who are getting their architecture degrees today are more likely to be working on a pre-existing building,” Ashburn said.
Introduction to Conservation
Conservation, a course typically taught at the graduate level, involves learning how to protect historic objects. It’s Ashburn’s specialty, and she created the course specifically for LSU undergraduate students so they could get a taste of the field before grad school.
Class participants form a student conservator firm, tasked with the LSU Rural Life Museum as a client. Students are assigned a series of objects throughout the semester — antique locks, hammers, and other low-risk, high-use objects from the museum’s Ephemeral Collection. Students then examine the object’s material, finish, dimensions, and function before proposing the best methods of preserving it based on their observations.
“They become very possessive over their objects,” Ashburn added.
After their research, each student conservator must present their work to the client — the museum staff — and explain both their object and their preservation methods. The museum then displays some of these studied objects and the research produced from the course. Katherine Fresina, the museum’s Curatorial Director, says the student work is valuable in more ways than one.
“We're creating this database of knowledge about these types of objects in general, and then the objects themselves go on to help us with interpretation,” Fresina explained. “The research helps us in identifying similar objects in the future.”
Material Culture
Those LSU students earning their Doctorate of Design in Cultural Preservation who choose the Material Culture Studies path will end up at the LSU Rural Life Museum for Ashburn and Fresina’s collaborative Material Culture course. Students gain real-world experience in a museum setting and, based on a “keystone object,” they design, direct, delegate, and complete an exhibit with museum objects.
“They get the experience of being responsible for these collections and for the interpretation,” Ashburn explained. “They have to figure out the direction and complete the full design.”
Most recently, students in this course were given a license for a 1927 grocery store as a keystone object. The result was the Makin’ Groceries exhibit, which examines the daily consumption and shopping practices of rural South Louisiana in the 1920s and 1930s using objects typically found in a rural general store. It also highlights the wetland harvesting traditions of alligator hunting and frog gigging, the role of store-bought staples in kitchen life and cuisine, the importance of coffee culture in everyday routines, and the economic systems that shaped rural South Louisiana.
Makin’ Groceries is currently on display at the Rural Life Museum.
“The Rural Life Museum has been incredibly generous,” Ashburn said. “I show up with twenty people who are measuring buildings, wandering around. It is so rare to have such willing and positive partners.”
The museum benefits from the partnership as well. According to Ashburn, every semester yields a student or three who falls in love with the museum, and some come back to volunteer or do independent studies. Fresina herself started her own career at LSU Rural Life Museum as a volunteer.
“There's so much potential out here for students to get real world experience in many fields of study,” Fresina said.
Learn more about how the LSU Rural Life Museum provides a unique lens to understand material culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
