Explaining an Explainer

Recently, my history class participated in a live video chat with a museum in England called the Museum of Science and Industry. The purpose of this video chat was to talk to some workers at the museum called “Explainers” and to learn about the textile making process. In order to prepare for the video chat, my class investigated the MOSI website and took notes about the cloth making process. We then watched a video sent to us before the live video chat. This video was created by an Explainer at MOSI and he introduced us to many of the machines that were used in the process of creating cloth. We wrote down key words as we watched the video and after the video was over, we used our google search skills to find out what our key words meant. We looked up what a Draw Frame was, and found out that it is a machine used to stretch and straighten cotton into a single sliver. We also found out that a sliver is a long bundle of fiber used to spin yarn. After finding our definitions, we drafted questions that we could ask to the Explainer who we would be video chatting, named Jamie. That was the end of our preparations for the video chat.

This is a picture of a young mill worker that was taken around
  1900 by Lewis Hine, a man who was working against Child Labor.

While participating in the video chat, I learned about the textile process, the process of creating cloth. I also learned about the evolution of textile technology. Before factories were set up with advanced machines, it would take an entire family to make cloth. The loom that the family used was put in the attic of the house so the family would have the most light possible to work with. The women and children prepared the cotton for weaving, and the father weaved at the loom. But new machines such as the Draw Frame and Power Loom made the textile process much faster and families no longer made cloth themselves. Since machines in factories were powered by the steam engine or by water power, more than one machine could run at once. The factories were extremely loud because of this. Many workers went deaf. Most workers were children and teenagers. I also learned about factory accidents and health of the factory workers. Many workers breathed in so much cotton dust that cotton fibers built up in their lungs and eventually suffocated them. Also, people worked so closely together that disease spread quickly. Children worked so much that they didn’t go to school until the Half Time Act was created in England, which said that children had to go to school for a few hours a day and then they could spend the rest of the day in the mills. Education was an improvement for mill workers, but their families still suffered. In order for their children to work at the mills, entire families had to move into cities so their children could work and would have a place to live. In apartment buildings about 100 people would have to share one toilet. Conditions for families weren’t good. We were told all of this by Jamie, an Explainer at MOSI. He also told us a little about working at a museum. The back of his work uniform says something along the lines of “Ask me any question.” He gets asked odd, and sometimes rude questions, but he really likes being an Explainer.

I thought that the whole experience of video chatting a museum was very cool, but I’m not sure that I would do it again. I learned a lot from Jamie when he talked in detail about one particular subject such as factory accidents and child labor, but when he was trying to show us the machines, I became confused. It would have definitely been easier to see the machines in real life. The video was kind of shaky and I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, or what I was supposed to be learning from seeing the machines, because I wasn’t 100% sure of what each step of the textile process was. But I did learn and was interested in the conditions and environment of the mills in England. Jamie’s descriptions taught me a lot. I just didn’t absorb much of what was happening during the actual textile process.