TEACHERS LEARN TO MAKE COUNTY'S PAST COME ALIVE.

Byline: Jesse Hiestand Daily News Staff Writer

Simply reading about life in Ventura County some 200 years ago isn't the same as grinding acorns with mortar and pestle or navigating with a crude map.

So the county Museum of History and Art has launched a pilot program that shows local teachers how to use its vast collection of documents and artifacts to bring local history alive for their students.

``We have the whole county's memory here,'' said Alexis O'Neill, the museum's educational director. ``But it's bigger than just facts. It's about making links between the past and the present so you understand how history came to be what it is today.''

The first of five classes was held Thursday evening for 10 teachers of grades 3, 4, 5 and 8, who got a quick lesson in Ventura County history. But the key to the course is learning how to find and interpret ``primary sources'' of local history, be they maps, photos, diaries, tools or buildings.

O'Neill, a former elementary school teacher, said the course will emphasize the ties between land and people, since one tends to shape the other.

``A lot of times we talk about the stars of history. But the real stars are the everyday people. So kids need to know that they have their place in history too,'' she said.

Museum Curator Tim Schiffer said the course materials include reproductions of museum maps that teachers can use in classroom exercises.

``The way a map was made says a lot about the period in which it was made,'' he said.

A Chumash rock painting from the 1500s shows that culture's view of the cosmos, while hand-drawn maps from the 1830s Rancho era were used to stake land claims, he said. Maps from the 1870s American period have straight lines, reflecting the use of surveys, while 1948 California road maps note the twists and turns of the highway system.

After studying some of the museum's 5,000 maps, students could then be asked to draw a map of their town, he said.

``Kids have no sense of time at all - it's like yesterday, 10 years ago and the prehistoric period,'' he said. ``This could help them relate history to their own experience, because once you get yourself onto that time line, it makes a lot more sense.''

Schiffer spoke at the first class about the process of setting up Ventura County in the New West exhibit, which has been open to the public and school tours since December.

The museum serves about 14,000 school kids each year, he said, either through tours or a program that sends volunteers into classrooms with artifacts and documents to share with the students.

Museum librarian Charles Johnson, a guest speaker at an upcoming class, said the local history course can make teachers more aware of the museum's resources, which in turn may provide a chance for students to participate in - and feel connected to - the historical process.

``Most of what you read in a textbook has been pre-interpreted,'' he said. ``They're secondary materials that have already been digested. By accessing primary source materials you allow people to make fresh observations.''

He hopes youngsters learn a new appreciation of their world by seeing how much value historians place on items often disregarded as useless, such as an early city directory or the county's first telephone book, which dates to 1895.

``There's a certain magic when a person is actually able to access (these items), to see and hold examples of their own past,'' he said.

For O'Neill, the first step in sparking this interest in kids is to get their teachers fired up about Ventura County's historical legacy.

The course includes field trips such as a walking tour of streets adjacent to the San Buenaventura Mission so teachers can learn to spot how various cultures and their architecture have shaped the area over the past few hundred years.

``They need to be curious enough to find out why it is that certain things sprung up in that area so that the kids become information seekers too, because that is the historical process,'' she said.