Making Connections With Stone Texts And Symbols

By Author: Jordon
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Despite no formal preparation for the museum event and limited uses of printed texts, while in the Bedford and on their own, adolescents in school groups constructed personal meanings from diverse texts. Take, for example, the following conversation between Flo aka Mic and Bishop. The pair self-identified as African American eighth-grade boys with interests in rap music, composition, and performance. They were part of a school that serves inner-city students labeled by its administrators as disadvantaged. Rarely had they and their school peers visited museums. In the following conversation, Flo aka Mic and Bishop have slipped away from a directed Cartier Jewelry decent tour in the Bedford to be on their own to view and discuss a replica of an ancient stone object mounted on a wall:

Flo aka Mic: [looking at a stone-carved relief replica; see Figure 2] this thing came from far, far away. I read in the sixth grade how they used these kinds of pictures, and how they put different symbols together and made it into a story like English. In Egypt they used pictures, you know, like how ...
... we use English and they change the words into pictures and different symbols way back in the day.

Bishop: [pointing to elements of the carving] See, this is the king and all his followers, and this man right here is bowing down.

Flo aka Mic: You can tell by the way the dude there is bowing down he's probably a slave.
Bishop: Look how they carve the pictures. This stuff is like the stuff we been studying in social studies. I can write my name in cuneiform. It's the type of writing the scribes of Mesopotamia used.
Flo aka Mic: Isn't it very fascinating how they, back then, were very courageous in their art?

Then we got electricity and then we got lazy. Now it's easier to do things. Back then they could use different stone and different things all around them to make things.

As illustrated in this exchange, even when on their own in the museum, the adolescents discussed school topics, such as writing and other symbol systems; what they had learned earlier in classrooms, for instance, how to write cuneiform, as mentioned by Bishop; and how objects related to Cheap Cartier Jewelry concepts encountered earlier in subject area classes. On the other hand, their notice and reading of the museum relief replica points to personal interests in a topic that threaded through many of the two boys' everyday conversations: African slavery evidenced not only in this Egyptian section of the Bedford but also in the symbols, monuments, and other institutions of the southern United States city where the investigation took place.