Multicultural Museum Education in and beyond Exhibit: Local and Transnational Synergies from Canada's Oldest Chinatown.

In 2013, as part of 'A Chinatown Celebration,' a month-long festival celebrating Canada's oldest Chinatown, the Royal BC Museum (RBCM) mounted a temporary exhibition Tradition in Felicities: Celebrating 155 Years of Victoria's Chinatown (TiF) (Figure 1). The exhibit also celebrated the Chinese Freemasons' 150^th anniversary in Canada. TiF featured a unique centerpiece: a handcrafted lantern created in the 1930s by Victoria's Chinese Freemasons, one of the oldest Chinese organizations in Canada (Figure 2). It is the oldest-known such lantern in North America and Southeast Asia. 'Objects,' as scholars of material culture point out, 'help [people] to know, understand, and situate [them]selves within the world, both externally and internally'(Clouse 2008: 6). The connections of objects to lived experiences render them historically and culturally meaningful. In tracing the history of the lantern, we consulted both members of the Chinese Freemasons, including elder Jon Joe who helped to identify the names listed on the lantern, and Chinatown's former residents and descendants, in accordance with the RBCM's practice of multicultural community outreach and participation. This lantern engages diverse audiences and inspires a cross-cultural aesthetic appreciation through its Chinese, trans-Pacific, international and Canadian connections. Handcrafted in Victoria by a master from Hong Kong, the lantern is based on the classic Chinese tradition of the running horse lantern, which is more than 2000 years old. The top panels present the Chinese Freemasons' international icon; in the middle are intricate moving details in Chinese calligraphy couplets and paintings in the traditional running horse lantern design; and, on the base, a list of local sponsors and contributors. A diagram within the exhibition explained the different elements of the lantern in detail. The top and bottom panels convey the artifact's connection to local and regional history. The Chinese Freemasons' westernized icon reveals its transformation from a secret society in Qing China to an international society of Chinese Freemasons after entering the Americas, indicative of the transnational context of the migrant culture in Chinatowns. The bottom panels epitomize the composition of Victoria's Chinatown: long-term businesses, settled resident families who developed roots in Canada, and a few sojourners who eventually returned to their birthplaces in China. For a provincial museum such as the Royal BC Museum (RBCM), where I am a curator, one of our mandates is education -- to share knowledge about British Columbia with the world. At the same time, increasingly complex cross-cultural and transnational perspectives reflect concerns for broadening the framework of knowledge sharing and museum education in a multicultural context. The new framework allows us to examine cultures informed by both the concept of globalization, as the homogenizing effect of integrated market capitalism often associated with multinational corporations, and the 'hybridities and fluidities' of the transnational aspect of this world system from multidirectional contacts between nations, cultures and individuals. The TiF project can be used as a case study of museum education from transnational perspectives, to address Klaus Müller's question: 'can museums propose or even help shape a different model of a global society than the one being advanced by multinational corporations?' (2003) Through sharing, and raising the awareness of, local, diverse, 'hybrid' and previously hidden stories of a formerly underrepresented group, the Chinese population of Victoria can, through a small exhibit, counter the homogenizing effect of globalization and educate people about social justice through intercultural understandings of other groups' experiences. This group was not presented as a homogenous one. Their stories captured diversities in class and gender and were contextualized to resonate locally, nationally and transnationally. The first section of this essay provides an overview of the integrated process of both multicultural community outreach and engagement, and museum knowledge production and education that advanced the understanding of historical injustice from the perspective of the insiders. The second section examines how this process reunited this previously marginalized group and engaged new transnational audiences. The process inspired educational moments that are unique to museum settings through forging local synergies and revealed in the diverse visitors' feedback. As the Adult Learning Team Lead at RBCM acknowledges, while it is not easy to measure educational outcome in informal settings such as museums, first tier outcomes, in this case the comment book, can be analyzed to get a better sense of whether our long-term goals might be reached. Following the guidelines set out by Inspired Learning for All, the RBCM looks for evidence of exhibits affecting visitor attitudes and values, such as opinions or attitudes towards other people and the RBCM in relation to an experience, and increased capacity for tolerance. These key indicators are measured in this section to understand TiF's educational impact. The third section proposes a continuing cross-cultural educational program as a legacy of the exhibition in the form of a trilingual (English, French, and Chinese) video which, through information and communications technology (ICT), will be available online and in educational institutions, inspiring interest and sharing knowledge not only within the RBCM's walls but also with a wide range of audiences. This ICT project moves museum education beyond institutional walls and tests educational possibilities of museum knowledge. It is a new museum multicultural education initiative, the outcome of which is yet to be measured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]