Area educators enjoy a special partnership with Colonial Williamsburg

Teachers in the area — and across the country — have long held a special relationship with Colonial Williamsburg, the world’s largest living history museum. For educators in the Williamsburg area especially, there’s hardly a better asset to be found than the site of so much history right in their own backyard.

Julie Lipscomb, a fourth grade teacher at Stonehouse Elementary School in James City County, has been teaching in the area for nearly 30 years. She said Colonial Williamsburg has been a great resource for her over the years, especially with fourth grade’s focus on Virginia history.

“We study Revolutionary War and colonial life and the early settlements, (and) we’re doing it all from a Virginia focus,” she said. “To be right here in the area and be able to take a day trip, I always feel so fortunate.”

Her students’ favorite part of visiting Colonial Williamsburg tends to be seeing the costumed interpreters, who make history come to life as they speak to the kids without breaking character. After seeing photos of the different sites, the kids also enjoy getting a chance to see the same places they saw in their history books.

“To be immersed in it, you can look at pictures and it’s just not the same thing,” Lipscomb said. “To have talked about it and then to go down there and see it live like that just makes so much more of an impression on them.”

Lipscomb has had plenty of experience with Colonial Williamsburg over the years, including with The Bob and Marion Wilson Teacher Institute of Colonial Williamsburg, which offers both onsite and online programs as well as tuition and scholarships.

As part of their ongoing relationship with teachers, Colonial Williamsburg recently held “Educators Appreciation Night,” inviting teachers, administrators and support staff from around the area.

Lipscomb, along with the rest of the fourth grade team at Stonehouse, attended the event where they enjoyed a reception, explored the site’s museums and learned about classroom resources from Colonial Williamsburg staff.

It was both a celebration and a chance for those educators to catch up on the latest from Colonial Williamsburg.

“It’s always exposure to new ideas and new things because Colonial Williamsburg is always changing,” Lipscomb said. “They’re constantly trying to change out to make it meet the kids today, and the curriculum changes.”

At Colonial Williamsburg, the field trips department handles the types of guided tours that Lipscomb and her students have traditionally been able to go on during their visits to the site. Recently, the team has been working on expanding offerings, said Alan Ramsey, the group interpretation supervisor.

“Traditionally, what we’ve had is three-hour guided tours with one of our guides,” he explained. “... One guide, 26 students, moving about the city. Then, the pandemic hit, and it gave us a chance to really reexamine a lot of what we were doing.”

The team is working on adding an option in which groups can be more self-guided, with interpreters set up at various interactive stations around town.

This allows for both “a lot more hands on activities and a lot more in-depth interpretation,” Ramsey said. “Instead of us just taking them on, say, a tour of the Capitol and telling them about history, there’s an activity where they can talk about how Virginia wrote its original Declaration of Rights and discuss what kinds of rights they would want to have in a Declaration of Rights today.”

Fourth grade groups like Lipscomb’s are one of Colonial Williamsburg’s “bread and butter” areas, Ramsey said, but the field trip department sees everyone from little kids to college students. The tours can be tweaked for specific areas of focus and to ensure that every age group will be just as engaged.

“It can vary greatly,” Ramsey said. “... Depending on how much information (teachers) can provide us with in advance, we can really alter the experience a lot of ways to do what they need us to do. If they want to focus particularly on 18th century government, we can (do that). If they’re more focused on the economy in the 18th century, we can make a tour like that work.”

A grant funded by Peninsula-based wholesale plumbing distributor Ferguson helps make many of these field trips possible for local schools. The grant, which began in 2014 and will continue until 2024, offers more than $1 million for fourth graders to visit Colonial Williamsburg each year, covering admission and transportation for students from 13 regional school districts, including Williamsburg-James City County.

Finally getting a chance to take field trips once more has been a relief after two years of COVID in which schools weren’t doing much traveling.

“We’ve missed that part of our curriculum,” Lipscomb said.

Sian Wilkerson, sian.wilkerson@pilotonline.com, 757-342-6616