Category: Q&A

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.

Manchester Chamber awards SNHU president

The Greater Manchester Chamber has named Dr. Paul LeBlanc, president and CEO of Southern New Hampshire University, its Citizen of the Year.

Tell us about you and your background.

I was born in Canada in New Brunswick in a small farming village. I actually spoke French before I spoke English. There was really no work there for anyone, so my parents and my four older siblings and I immigrated to the Boston area when I was 3, and I grew up in Waltham, Mass. I went on to be the first member of my extended family to go to college. I think being a first-generation college graduate and an immigrant informs my sense of work and my sense of Manchester so much, because Manchester itself is a city of immigrants and of people who had to work hard and didn’t have anything handed to them. I came to Manchester almost 20 years ago as president of SNHU. Before that, I had spent seven years as the president of Marlboro College in Vermont, and before that, I was heading up a technology startup for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company in Boston.

What do you consider some of your biggest accomplishments?

I always think of universities as playing an important role as an economic engine. When I came in, we had 2,500 students and were just a small, somewhat dated campus in the north end of Manchester. Today, we’re a national and international university with 185,000 active students, making us the largest university in the country. But we’ve still always been very focused on Manchester as our hometown. … I had this idea for a Center for New Americans, which we’ve created in conjunction with the YWCA, recognizing that Manchester’s history is built on New Americans. It has programs for youth, language programs — a wide array of programming. … During the pandemic, we, with partners, stepped up and took the lead with a number of things, like providing more than 210,000 meals during the first two years to kids who were on school lunch programs who might not have enough food at home; and working with the National Guard, converting the whole of our athletic complex into a spillover health facility for local hospitals. I think these are the things that I’m probably being recognized for as Citizen of the Year, but in reality, I’m accepting this [award] in the spirit of everything that SNHU and all of our people do.

What is your vision for the future of education?

We are often cited as being one of the most innovative universities in the country. That includes not only using online education to extend the reach of SNHU and to reach people who really need a degree to unlock an economic opportunity, but also being pioneers in competency-based education, which untethers people from time and allows them to move much faster. Innovating around delivery models that work better in people’s lives is a really important part of what we do. … We have a national network of community partners that are deeply embedded in underserved communities, and we have something called the GEM program, which stands for “global education movement,” and that brings degree programs to refugees. We’ve worked in refugee camps in Kenya, Malawi and Rwanda, and with refugee communities in South Africa and Lebanon, so we really do have a global reach. Our vision is to continue to try to make higher education more affordable and to put it in the financial reach of learners who are often left out and feel unable to access a system that’s increasingly too expensive for them.

What do you like about Manchester?

Manchester is a working city; it’s got some grit, and, like every city, it’s got real issues, like homelessness. But I love that it has such a strong sense of community and rootedness. … It has an amazing diversity of people in a state that can often feel pretty homogenous, and there’s energy and vibrancy that comes from that heterogeneous population. … Its food scene is burgeoning. … The Millyard is a hotbed of technology and innovation. … People are doing things in the arts community. … Yet it stays very modest. There’s a great self-deprecating humor about New Hampshire and Manchester. No one gets too full of themselves.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I’m lucky enough to be able to do some really interesting travel. I just came back from Antarctica, which was the most amazing travel experience ever. I’ve been to all seven continents and 60-something countries. That’s my passion. Closer to home, it’s things like cooking, reading, writing. I’ve been going back to my writing more lately, which I very much enjoy. I’ve written two books in the last two years.

Featured photo: Paul LeBlanc. Courtesy photo.