While the Gorgas House regularly promotes programs with on-campus visitors including students, staff, and faculty, it provides a service to our off-campus communities as well. In collaboration with UA Early College’s LEAP (Leaders Exploring Academic Possibilities), the Gorgas House hosted 30 rising high school students this week.

The LEAP program introduces students to different jobs and specializations based on possible major fields of study. It allows these students to interact with experts in careers that they may one day be interested in.

At the Gorgas House, the LEAP students learned about the fields of anthropology, history, and museum studies. They were introduced to subfields of archaeology, biological anthropology linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology. The students were able to interact with prehistoric artifacts and reproductions of fossils from the paleoanthropological record. Tours of the museum provided an application of public history, historic space interpretation, and how museums blend ideas and methods from multiple disciplines.

The LEAP program is an exciting opportunity for the Gorgas House to teach and learn alongside our non-campus community members. Being able to teach and share the space in fun and engaging ways is incredibly fulfilling and shows that museums are places for everyone. Thankfully, two more LEAP groups are visiting the museum this summer and we are looking forward to seeing them!

– Written by Brandon Thompson, Director of the Gorgas House Museum