Take an audio tour of a 2022-23 exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum! Listen to artist Lee Boot chat about his show "Lee Boot: Abstracts & Artifacts," on view at The Peale from November 2022-January 2023. You can see videos and interact with more media files using Smartify, the ultimate cultural travel app! Includes 21 narrated stops.

Lee Boot (00:00): So now you're seeing a small, what looks like a drawing that's framed in black and a much larger, print above it. The drawing is all the factors that I imagined back in 2002 or three whenever I did this drawing. We're actually involved in young people's ability to achieve an education. Little, there's a little drawing for, you know, if you look at the drawing on the bottom, each part of it is a little symbol, symbolic drawing itself of one of those factors, you know, whether it's industry or the school buildings themselves or whatever. And I had taught high school for 16 years. I had taught school for 16 years, high school for most of that. And I had a lot of feelings about it, you know, I believe that we were trying to solve the problem of educating young people more successfully just within schools and teaching when there's many factors that influence a young person's ability to get the education they want and deserve.

(01:11): So the field trip project was putting cell phone video cameras in the hands of high school students to ask them what they thought either impeded or helped them get an education. And these phones were donated by Nokia. They, it was a brand new thing to have a video camera in your cell phone back in 2007. And, the study was was funded by the National Institutes of Health. We asked these students to kind of create this video, blog footage about this information. And then we had editors working around the clock to assemble those, that footage into short films and post them online on a special website where 70 other high school students could see them and discuss them if they wanted to, in, you know, a social media-style conversation, you know, that they could type online. And we made 76 films in 28 days, and there were about 500 comments.

(02:15): And what we found was that these comments, these discussions that happened as a result of these students filming their lives related to education, you know, their thoughts about their teachers, their thoughts about their parents in some cases, if they were driving them crazy and, and keeping them from getting educated in their minds the films that were posted really created discussions that related to what the literature what the scientific literature says about student motivation to learn to get a good education. So it was a very successful project. Students, as it turns out, know a lot about why they are able to take advantage of the educational opportunities offered them or not.

(03:02): It's, it was a very interesting project. You can see several of the films, the last films made in these in this series of films. On the monitor, the second monitor in that circle of monitors that's in the center of the room, if you follow the yarn up. And then down to the center of the room, you'll see which monitor it is, and it says Field trip on it. So I hope you enjoy those.