Canterbury Shaker Village has a new education manager
Canterbury Shaker Village’s new education manager, Kyle Sandler, talked about his vision for educational programs at the Village and what visitors can look forward to when the Village reopens for the season on Saturday, May 13.
What led you to Canterbury Shaker Village?
I studied American history at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. Then I attended graduate school at Dartmouth College. I did my Master of Arts and Liberal Studies and basically specialized in colonial American history and religion. While I was doing my degree there, I started volunteering at Enfield Shaker Museum as a historic preservation volunteer. Things kind of evolved, and I started doing tours while I was finishing up my master’s degree. Then they had an opening for their education coordinator position, and the board recommended me for that position. I was at Enfield Shaker Museum for eight years, getting well-versed in all things Shaker and Shaker history. I did a variety of workshops and classes, and I was in charge of an annual Shaker forum. I also taught an online class for a couple of years that kind of came out of Covid called Shakers 101. I came from Enfield Shaker Museum to Canterbury Shaker Village last October.
What does your job as education manager entail?
First and foremost, it’s to manage interpretation of the Village. I oversee our team of tour guides, and I’m responsible for maintaining and building new interpretive plans and tours that will be offered to the public. I work with our curator of collections and collections manager on a pretty regular basis … on developing new exhibits for the Village for this season and seasons to come. Other aspects of my job are setting up various educational programming, like workshops and classes … and I oversee some of the volunteer activities.
What new experiences are you working to create at the Village?
We’re going to be launching our new smartphone tour app. Basically it’s an outdoor grounds tour of the different buildings. Visitors will access the app on their smartphone, which will bring up information on the buildings and historic images. Eventually it’ll have video and audio content as well. It’s a self-guided way for people to immerse themselves in the Village and provides another option for people who don’t want to do the traditional guided tours that we offer.
What else is planned for the Village’s upcoming season?
Our first exhibit of the year is going to be Canterbury-made Shaker furniture from the collection, most of which is going to date from the late 18th to the mid-19th century, with a couple of later pieces. That’s a starting point for what we’re going to be doing over the next couple of years, which is really a deep dive into the collections here. We have — and this is a really rough estimate — about 100,000 items in the collection. Between 40,000 and 50,000 of those are three-dimensional objects that range from the late 18th century into the early 1990s, when the last Shaker sister, Ethel Hudson, passed away. The collections here are in need of a fresh look, and we’re going to do an updated inventory project. Hopefully, in the coming years, we’re going to start the project of digitizing the collection and making it more widely available. We have storerooms full of these wonderful items — some that haven’t been displayed in decades and some that have never been displayed to the public, because of space limitations.
What do you enjoy about studying and sharing Shaker history?
I’ve spent the last almost 10 years now studying Shaker furniture. That’s been [the focus of] my personal research and my passion — studying and understanding what’s happening, how Shaker furniture varies from throughout the Shaker world. The other thing I’m very interested in is Shaker leadership and internal community politics. The Shaker villages had hundreds of people, so there was a lot of interpersonal dynamics. That’s something I’m really fascinated about, understanding what it was like to be a Shaker here and the challenges of this kind of communal experience.
Featured photo: Kyle Sandler. Courtesy photo.