Creating Teaching Opportunities and Building Capacity Through the Museum on Main Street Program

This essay explores how public history educators can use the Smithsonian Museum on Main Street program as an opportunity for teaching. The MOMS program emphasizes "capacity building" in small towns and rural museums, but it can also fill a similar role in building skills and knowledge for both educators and their students. The essay focuses on a particularly fruitful, multi-year collaboration between MOMS partners in Georgia to offer models for creating these educational opportunities. As MOMS celebrates its twentieth anniversary, there has been very little scholarship about the interworkings of the program at the state and local levels.