During my childhood, I made many visits to Mammoth Cave National Park, My Old Kentucky Home (a 19th century historic house where abolitionist, Stephen Foster stayed), and Abraham Lincoln’s Birthplace. These places sparked my imagination about what it was like to be another person and live in different time and place. I don’t know how many times I visited these places but to this day when I smell boxwood shrubs, sensory memories transport me to the grounds surrounding My Old Kentucky Home, and Mammoth Cave is forever etched in my identity. My grandmother collected and sold early American country antiques known as primitives (simple, practical items like cupboards, stools, and dry sinks), and my family home contained many of them. I have fuzzy memories of wandering around antique malls with curiosity and wonder, thinking about the stories and people behind all those objects. To this day, my primitive antiques are among my prized possessions.

Flash forward to my early adulthood.

I had a master's degree in applied anthropology (following my interest in learning about the vast diversity of cultures, people, and ways of being in the world), but museums were not on my radar as a place to work. I was working for a small non-profit focused on supporting public schools in racial, language, and gender equity through program evaluation and professional development. As part of an evaluation study for the non-profit, I conducted observations of public school teachers who had been trained by museum educators to lead “object-based” lessons. I still remember watching a museum-trained teacher practice leading a lesson focused on a historic object with her classroom of third grade District of Columbia public school students. I had never heard of object-based teaching and learning, and something radical happened to me at that moment that I didn’t really piece together until years later. My personal attraction to history and old objects merged with my professional passions for education and equity and my skills in research and evaluation. Within a year (22 years ago), I completely shifted my career trajectory from formal educational research and evaluation to informal education/museum evaluation.