(Cross-posted at BlogHer)
In museums, who gets to represent whose culture? It’s an old question that in the U.S. tends to play out most publicly when Native American patrimony and culture are displayed in museums. When such cultural controversies become global, often ownership comes into question–who really owns the Elgin Marbles, for example? The perniciousness and persistence of colonialism has dragged many of these conflicts into the 21st century. But what happens when the tables are turned, when a Middle Eastern country–specifically Abu Dhabi–wants to represent Western culture, and even make use of Western museums’ brand names in the process? And how should museums in the West advise colleagues in the East who are new to the museum field?
These and other questions are facing major museums–including the Smithsonian, which is advising the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage on a Bedouin museum; the Guggenheim, which in 2012 will open a 300,000-square-foot museum there that has alternately been described as a medieval cathedral and pharaonic”; and the Louvre, which has licensed its name–to the tune of $520 million–and its expertise and art (for an additional $747 million) to an art museum slated to open in the city in 2012.
(To see the designs of the new museums, as well as read artistic statements from their “starchitects,” check out this round-up from ArchNewsNow.)
About Abu Dhabi
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates and its second largest city, with nearly 900,000 people residing in it. The Guardian provides some history and context for the United Arab Emirates cultural interests:
They were once little more than oil outposts in the desert, wealthy but remote, seven emirates bound together in a federation on the south-eastern tip of the Arabian peninsula. But the United Arab Emirates are fast reinventing themselves as a cultural and recreational hub, with tens of billions of dollars of investment transforming Abu Dhabi and Dubai in particular. Abu Dhabi, whose petrodollars give it one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, is styling itself as the cultural alternative to Dubai’s more ritzy holiday and retail destination.
The emirates capital plans an “upscale cultural district” on Saadiyat, with the $400m Guggenheim museum part of a $27bn government-funded development that will include museums, a concert hall and art galleries alongside two golf courses, hotels and an “iconic 7-star property”. The Dubai plans include indoor ski slopes, an underwater hotel, a $4bn theme park, and the elite island development known as The World.
The billion-plus dollars that Abu Dhabi is paying France is part of a long-standing economic relationship with the Western European nation. As The New York Times reports, there may be a bit of quid pro quo underlying the French government’s willingness to cut a deal with Abu Dhabi.
For France the agreement signals a new willingness to exploit its culture for political and economic ends. In this case, it also represents something of a payback: the United Arab Emirates has ordered 40 Airbus 380 aircraft and has bought about $10.4 billion worth of armaments from France during the last decade.
Louvre Abu Dhabi
Much of the controversy has swirled around the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which will feature art from throughout history and all the world’s regions, including Islamic art. At the time the French government was negotiating with Abu Dhabi, 4,650 museum experts signed a petition protesting the deal, claiming that the Louvre was behaving more like a profit-maximizing corporation than as a protector of and educator about the world’s, and particularly France’s, art.
Others have criticized the petitioners. Maymanah Farhat, a specialist in modern and contemporary Arab art and the editor of ArteNews, says colonial turnabout is fair play. In a long and thoughtful article, she writes,
Much of the opposition to the proposed Abu Dhabi Lourve lament that the French public will be deprived of its heritage. Three out of eight of the departments that structure the Louvre collection contain art from the Middle East and North Africa and are categorized as such: “Near Eastern Antiquities,” “Egyptian Antiquities” and “Islamic Art.” If this latest transaction with Abu Dhabi does in fact indicate a move to exploit France’s patrimony, then it must be acknowledged that the “French culture” being disputed over is not purely French nor is it devoid of a ruthless colonial history. In theory then, according to French opinion, it is perfectly acceptable to exploit non-French peoples and cultures for economic gain, whereas everything French is somehow sacrosanct and must be guarded from the tentacles of globalization.
In an editorial in The American, Jonathan Bronitsky writes that critics of the Louvre deal are being impractical:
While the French intelligentsia may not admit it, the fact remains: museums are costly enterprises. The Louvre, the most frequently visited museum in the world, requires hundreds of millions of dollars a year to operate. Unlike American cultural institutions, which depend largely on private philanthropy, European museums have traditionally relied on public funding—in part because Europeans are unable to donate pretax dollars, as we can in the U.S., and so have weaker incentives for voluntary giving. With the spiraling costs of security, insurance, restoration, and other expenses, museums like the Louvre will need to find additional funding sources if they are to maintain their preeminence and fulfill their mission of preserving and perpetuating culture.
In response to Bronitsky, art historian Didier Ryker wrote that he goes to museums to see their best works, and is disappointed if those works have been rented out willy nilly, without regard to art historical contexts–which he felt was the case with the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He concludes,
Lastly, it is untrue to say the Louvre museum needs money. The Louvre is now, given French laws that allow tax deductions to companies which buy works of art for the museum, a very rich museum, which can sometimes even compete against the Getty (for example when it bought a sculpture by the Austrian artist Messerschmidt, outbidding the California museum). Museums and historical museums are the main reasons for tourists coming to France and they bring a lot of money to the country. In exchange, it seems fair the State should ensure these museums’ financial health without forcing them to rent themselves.
Censorship and human rights concerns
Resistance isn’t coming just from the West, however; critics in the Muslim world are joining the fray. Reports USA Today,
The Louvre must breach significant cultural barriers in its foray into the Muslim world, in which the representation of the human figure — even when clothed — can be a religious taboo.
One Arab reporter asked during a press conference Tuesday whether the museum would protect its visitors against “pornography.” A French journalist asked whether the museum had sufficient protection against “Islamic extremists” who might threaten the Louvre Abu Dhabi or its collection.
Museum officials did not address the issue of nudity in works. But art selection will be done by a committee including Abu Dhabi’s rulers, who understand the sensitivities in this city, one of the more liberal bastions in the conservative Gulf.
Many critics have expressed serious concerns about the museums’ lack of openness to ideas expressed through artwork from around the world. Artworld Salon, for example, reports that the Emirates will not allow entry to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to people holding Israeli passports–which is especially ironic considering the Guggenheims are Jewish-American–and will censor gay content as well as nudity in the works. Culturegrrl asks, “Is it kosher to establish a museum named for a Jewish founder in a country that doesn’t recognize Israel?”
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi architect Frank Gehry notes the cultural challenges:
Abu Dhabi does throw up some very particular issues for the Guggenheim and the display of art. I don’t think we’ll be allowed to display nudes, and there are all sorts of concerns about the way women are allowed to be shown. But, I think this an interesting moment in doing something to bridge the cultures of the US and the Middle East with real dialogue; I’m learning here, which is great, and I think we can shape an original building that is as much Abu Dhabi as me.
In addition, human rights groups have raised concerns about the potential abuse of the migrant construction workers building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Scholars and museum professionals have also noted that the globalization of these museums raises issues that blend art, culture, politics, and economics. For a thoughtful accounting of the issues, check out Susan Ostling’s paper on the Guggenheim franchises in Abu Dhabi, Las Vegas, Bilbao, and elsewhere. Of the museum in Abu Dhabi, Ostling writes of former Guggenheim Foundation director Thomas Krens,
In an interview in 1998, Krens gives us some insight to his reading of the concept of ‘world culture’. Such a reading appears to undermine any concern for the importance of the local and regional national cultural identities. It thoroughly diminishes any possibility for an independent identity developing through the collections or exhibitions of the satellite museums. It reveals his voracious drive for uniformity through globalization. Krens says:
You have to take a look at all this talk of world culture. World culture has dissolved local culture because local cultures by a dialectical process of influence cancel out…Lets project well into the next century. Will such a thing as local cultures exist? You have to come to the conclusion that they will not. And this is not about me liking or not liking local culture and tradition. It is that the forces of culture are out there. I don’t believe our objective is to stand in the way of an eroding tradition…Will there be a culture on a local level? Probably not. Will it be recognizable in terms of traditional characteristics? Probably not either. There will be a world culture out there; there is already a world culture out there (cited in Suau 1999).
Training new museum professionals
Another concern of some critics is whether the museum staff in Abu Dhabi will have sufficient training to take care of priceless works of art. An additional issue is whether the new museums will adopt the various formal and informal ethical guidelines that govern museums around the world. Which tenets that Westerners see as central to museum ethics–for example, freedom of artistic expression–will guide the new museums, and which ones will be tossed aside in favor of local cultural mores and religious traditions?
Many institutions will provide mentoring and management advice to the new museum professionals, including the Guggenheim, the Louvre, New York University, and the Smithsonian, as well as leaders from other museum studies programs in the United States.
My take
First, I have to admit that I am very ambivalent about these projects because they are situated in the Muslim Middle East. Before you call me Islamophobic or racist, let me explain. As progressive as Abu Dhabi is relative to other countries in the region, the antisemitism of the region, as well as the continued repression of those women who desire greater autonomy, gives me pause. Should institutions that promote cultural openness be doing business with countries where all people are not created equal? (Yes, I know that such a stricture means countries in Western Europe could refuse to do business with U.S. cultural institutions as well!)
At the same time, the exhibition of any art–and especially art from regions outside the Middle East–is promising in that it may contribute to a broader cultural openness in Abu Dhabi and other parts of the Middle East. Additionally, I would like to see greater cultural exchange with the Middle East, along the lines of the travelling exhibition of Afghan art and artifacts, that might better educate Americans and other Westerners about the history and culture of the now-Muslim nations.
I want to see museums in the UAE and the broader Middle East showcase local art and artifacts rather than buy the esteem of Western tourists by borrowing or purchasing art from Western museums. Museums in Afghanistan, for example, should be able to showcase pre-Islamic Afghan art, despite Taliban prohibitions against artwork. Women’s artwork, Bedouin arts, and the cultural productions of other groups that have been marginalized in the Muslim, Arabic, and Persian worlds should be showcased, but the truth is that these people’s contributions are not valued.
As a scholar in cultural studies, criticizing local cultural or religious values makes me uneasy–I don’t want to impose my Western viewpoint on non-Western peoples, unless there are people being denied human or civil rights–but my opinion changes within the context of museums because they are learning institutions.
What are your thoughts on these issues?
Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toybox.
Although I teach in a museum studies graduate program (and wish I could do it full-time), my primary job is to help faculty become more thoughtful about teaching undergraduates at the University of California, Davis. Since I began working in the university’s Teaching Resources Center, faculty have come to me for assistance with myriad issues, but there are three that arise more frequently than others:
- They are teaching very large (200-900 student) classes.
- They feel compelled to cover large amounts of material.
- Their students can’t think analytically–or write.
The first and third of these quandaries are generational ones in that in the U.S. we are educating students in an era of reduced resources, higher enrollments, and high-stakes testing in K-12. The second quandary relates intimately to the first and third.
The problem of coverage, what I have heard termed “the tyranny of content,” has of course long plagued curators and exhibition developers as well as professors. In museums it takes many forms: a desire to exhibit all the varieties of one object (e.g. butter churns, to borrow an example from Dan Spock) or to cover an immense amount of material and history in too small a hall (e.g. the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s African Voices exhibition), for example.
Museums have also long had to deal with large numbers–sometimes crushing numbers–of visitors to new, blockbuster, or otherwise favored exhibitions. How to serve so many people while still giving each visitor a sense that she has had a personalized interaction with the museum content is one of the great quandaries of museum education, and we’re barely scratching the surface of this problem with some tentative experimentation with digital and/or mobile devices.
The new generation of young adults, however, presents a particular challenge to museum educators, exhibition developers, and docents. If they attended a public university in the U.S., and especially in California, these “Gen Y” “Millennials” are likely to have been a victim of what I call the factory farming of students: large lecture halls crammed with students, multiple-choice tests, and a long series of general education courses that represent to them not opportunities to explore new disciplines, but rather a series of boxes to be checked off: the writing requirement, the diversity requirement, the quantitative thinking requirement, etc. In addition, these college students and graduates came of age under No Child Left Behind, a regime of high-stakes testing that led school districts to “teach to the test” rather than engage in the student-centered learning that imbues young people with curiosity, gives them the intellectual tools and cultural literacy they need for interpreting and analyzing the world, and ensures a desire for lifelong learning. Many of these young people are thus victims of large-scale, depersonalized educational systems. Trained to memorize and regurgitate instead of interpret and create, they are not equipped to engage with museum content–and worse, they may not even be aware of their predicament.
Clearly, this generation provides an opportunity for–or, rather, is in desperate need of–visitor studies that examine how trends in our K-12 and university systems affect museumgoers’ understanding of material culture, art, hands-on science exhibits, and natural history objects. What new kinds of interpretation will we need to develop? How can we teach interpretive skills to those in galleries as well as convey content?
Based on my own experiences in the Gen Y classroom, my observation of others’ classes, and my consultations with faculty, I offer here some tentative suggestions for meeting the needs of Gen Y learners in the museum.
Provide strong orientation. By this I mean museums need to strike a balance between free-choice learning and making learning objectives painfully explicit. How this might look will vary by institution, but one place to start is with a strong framing device. One exhibition that accomplishes this well is the new mammal hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. There is no clear pathway through the exhibit hall, and it’s easy for the dramatically lit trophy-quality mounts and evocative soundtrack to overwhelm the visitor with their pure spectacle. However, the museum has framed the exhibition in an orientation gallery, using this conceit:
photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution
Visitors are welcomed to the Mammal Family Reunion and learn that mammals can be identified because they all share three basic traits: they have hair or fur, they possess specialized middle ear bones, and they produce milk for their young. Elsewhere in the exhibition, visitors learn more about mammals’ diverse environmental niches and adaptations, but the framing device is that all of these animals, despite their tremendous diversity, are from the same “family” (more precisely, the same class within the phylum chordata). Certainly there are some of you saying, “Really? That’s all people are going to take away from this exhibit? That mammals are hairy, produce milk, and have something in their ears?” To which I say:
- Millennials have learned to memorize and retain, at least temporarily, facts about a subject. Learning (or, in the case of college-educated millennials, re-learning) three things about mammals is an excellent starting point for them.
- Millennials’ science education has suffered in K-12 as a result of NCLB’s emphasis on math and reading comprehension. Drop them in a place as large as the NMNH and they’re going to feel overwhelmed. Give them a flash card’s worth of information to begin with, and they’ll feel comfortable.
- This is only orientation information, a short list of objectives they can carry with them as they wander around the exhibition and apply these facts or principles to what they’re seeing.
Ideally, as the visitor walks through the mammal hall, she would be learning concepts that build upon these basics. For example, mammals all have fur or hair, but they have differing amounts of it. A jackrabbit and a sea otter have dramatically different densities of fur because they have adapted to living in very different environments. Although they descend from a common ancestor, these animals evolved in ways that allowed them to occupy, and even thrive in, a niche.
Help visitors develop analytical frameworks and interpretive skills. We see a bit of this in the example above. Visitors learn three basic facts, and then begin to make observations on their own about each fact–e.g. that mammals’ fur density differs by species. Next the visitor should be prompted to puzzle through why the fur differs. And then comes the big lesson: What are humans doing to change the environments in which these animals live? What happens when an animal evolves over tens or hundreds of thousands of years to occupy a niche that is decimated by humans in a matter of years? What are humans’ responsibilities to endangered mammals? Why might humans be more amenable to protecting mammals (AKA “charismatic megafauna”) than they are other species, and what are the advantages and liabilities of this approach to conservation? Labels, podcasts, hands-on activities, docents/explainers, and visual organizers all can contribute to this learning.
Customize streams of content. Provide interpretive tours organized around visitor interests instead of gallery space. Offer audio tours created by a variety of experts or amateur enthusiasts, including “guerrilla” audio tours. Examples from our mammal hall might be an evolution-focused podcast, a conservation-focused activity book or handout for children, or ways for visitors to send themselves the URLs of content related to the exhibition areas in which they’re most interested–e.g. polar mammals or desert creatures.
Provide content in multiple formats. The streams of content you provide must be accessible in several formats. This might mean visitors can generate e-mail messages to themselves–perhaps a series of autoresponders–to learn more post-visit, send to their mobile phone or PDA the snippets of code they need to embed customized media in their blogs or Facebook news streams, or pick up topic-specific paper handouts upon exiting the exhibition.
Offer opportunities for collaboration. Hands-on exhibitions sometimes call for cooperation among visitors, but opportunities for collaboration are rare–and it is a skill that Millennials may not have had the occasion to practice in high school or college. They do, however, excel at text-messaging and similar brief format activities. How might you use cell phones’ texting capacities, for example, in your exhibition space? Once you have Millennials contributing as individuals, you can adapt your content to move them up Nina Simon’s hierarchy of social participation.
UPDATE: Since I wrote this post, NPR has posted another segment in their Museums in the 21st Century series–and this one addresses how the culture of testing has impacted field trips for school kids.
This post is the second in a series. Be sure to check out Part I for more explanation.
After September 11, there was much ado in the media about people not wanting to be out and about in public places and the resulting trend of “nesting” in one’s home by outfitting it with greater personal comforts. For many of us, one of these comforts was high-speed internet access, and with our faster browsing speeds, we discovered ever-greater numbers of virtual communities to which we might belong. One danger of this retreat to the Internet is the further withdrawal of individuals from their geographic, place-based communities. Through the establishment of her Centers for Community Digital Exploration (CCDE), Barbara Ganley seeks to use online social media to reinvigorate connections among people in their local communities.
One liability of this project is that it might be tempting to take the simpler route of establishing centers in communities according to a general blueprint, almost on a franchise model, where any outsider trained in the protocols of the CCDE’s operations and mission could go into a community, set up camp, and get the ball rolling. In reality, however, every community is different–in terms of cultural diversity, socioeconomic class, and even Internet access–so there is a danger similar to that faced by Glenn Wharton in his restoration of the statue of Kamehameha in the king’s hometown and by countless ethnographers: outsiders come in, stir up resentment because they don’t understand the community, and then the social experiment fails.
Barbara’s approach is different. Already she is negotiating a contract with a foundation interested in community planning. Barbara wants to persuade community members in four geographically diverse, small rural towns to tell stories both face to face and using various digital media. Through talking with them about the stories and through the sharing of these stories throughout the community–and perhaps through the establishment of CCDEs in each community–Barbara will help communities identify their core values and their specific desires for features of their communities. She will, in short, be turning story into action, which is, after all, the goal of so many contemporary museum exhibitions (and particularly science exhibitions that promote better living through, say, the embrace of local foodways, a reduced carbon footprint, or conscientious attention to and eradication of invasive plant species).
There’s a lot museums can learn, I think, from Barbara’s own conscientiousness about community, from her contemplative slow blogging, and from her fierce independence from models of educational practice that are less than democratic, that constrain individuals and communities, and that always privilege critical over creative thinking.
This past week I experienced one of those wonderful confluences of thought and experience that make me thankful for my tendency to snatch up whatever interesting opportunity that comes along, no matter how overcommitted I already may be. I spent Thursday evening through Saturday afternoon visiting my friend and colleague Barbara Ganley in Vermont, where I was joined by Barbara Sawhill and Laura Blankenship. BG just finished up 19 years teaching writing and literature at Middlebury College, but she’s starting a new endeavor: the Centers for Community Digital Expression, and she wanted to bounce some ideas off of us. I spent the weekend gorging myself on Vermont artisanal cheeses, excellent bread (one especially delicious loaf handmade and delivered by Bryan Alexander), and salad greens plucked from Barbara’s garden. In short: Good food, excellent company, and terrific conversation. These women inspire me.
On Sunday and Monday, I participated in a colloquium at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, where I teach a museum studies course. What I heard at the colloquium resonated all the more because of my trip to Vermont. This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on the confluence of these two events.
Over the course of the two days of the JFKU colloquium, we were treated to three excellent talks, but my favorite was given by Glenn Wharton of NYU and MoMA, who recounted his efforts to restore the painted statue of King Kamehameha (PDF) in North Kohala, Hawaii. You can read many of the details of the project in the report at that link, and I encourage you to do so, as it’s a model of community engagement. Wharton is white and an outsider to Hawaiian culture, but he earned the respect of the community by honoring their own processes instead of trying to impose his own.
Within his intriguing and sometimes humorous talk, Wharton’s comments about the special privilege of the conservator really struck a chord with me–and by privilege, I mean disciplinary privilege, judiciously applied. Wharton pointed out that few contemporary anthropologists would have the opportunity (or, I think, the unmitigated chutzpah) to walk into a community and engage them in discussions about ethnicity and skin color–a necessary conversation, as the community needed to decide what color to paint the statue’s skin. Nor could an anthropologist wander into a community, remove the eyes of a statue–which Wharton did as part of the conservation effort–and ask community members, “Hey, what do you think about that?”
As a Ph.D. in cultural studies, a disciple of material culture studies, and a fan of all things American studies, I’m fascinated by the various ways scholars of culture provoke–and more importantly, permissibly provoke–communities into talking about themselves. In the poorest of these cases, the community is left feeling impoverished for the experience and betrayed by the scholar. In the best of these situations, both outsider and community benefit–the scholar gets his or her data and paper or book, and the community has an opportunity to consider issues they might not have contemplated together prior to the outsider’s arrival.
This blog has gone too long without any new posts. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about museums–far from it. But I have been thinking about museums from outside museums, from affiliated–or potentially affiliated–institutions rather than as a practitioner within the museum field.
In my ideal job, I would muse about museums all day long, tinkering in the intersections of exhibits and education, of theory and visits. And I’m very fortunate in that for part of each week for part of the year, I get to teach a history and theory class in a graduate museum studies program. Even better–this year, I’m overseeing the master’s theses, so I get to witness a dozen and a half students–some of them with lots of museum experience, some of them with a bit less–emerge into the profession, their first big academic project under their belts.
The rest of my time, I occupy myself as a teaching consultant at my local university–meaning I help faculty be more thoughtful about their teaching of undergraduates. My days could easily degenerate into a series of canned workshops on grading tests, using the university’s course management system, or lecturing. Such workshops typically draw few people. And at a university with thousands of instructors, it gets pretty disheartening when only three people show up to a workshop.
Instead, at our teaching resources center, we’re taking a different approach. While it is important that faculty know how to write a test (how else can you assess students in a course of 750?), it’s also important that they see one another as resources. Instead of weekly workshops, then, we’re trying something different. Here’s a sampling:
Every Friday during the academic year, between 15 and 30 faculty come to hear their peers talk about innovative strategies they’re trying out in their classrooms. An ecologist recently spoke about how he’s using technological tools to make his 500-student course feel smaller. A geologist talked of how she records four-minute-long videos revisiting a key concept from her lecture, then posts the videos on YouTube. A physician talked of how he uses online simulations in the continuing education of doctors throughout the state.
We publish a monthly newsletter, The Electronic Envelope, that brings faculty up-to-date with not only what we’re doing at the teaching resources center, but also alerts them to the hot issues in pedagogical discussions today. Many of our faculty are very much caught up in research agendas, and they don’t have time to keep up with the latest and greatest in undergraduate instructional practice. So we write short articles–almost like blog posts–on such issues as reading among Gen Y students, digital literacies of students and faculty, and strategies for improving visual literacy.
We offer quarterly More Thoughtful Teaching (MTT) symposia, each comprising three hours of presentations, workshops, and conversations. Each MTT takes a different form and supports a different strand of undergraduate instructional practice. Our most recent MTT focused, for example, on fear and anxiety among faculty and students. We had the director of the university’s student mental health center give a talk on student mental health, and then over lunch we sat at themed tables to discuss anxieties we and our students feel over such subjects as technology, copyright and intellectual property, and evaluating students and courses. The theme of the event was inspired by this passage anatomy and cell biology Professor Tom Marino of Temple University wrote in 2000:
“I knew why I liked the safe humanistic classroom now. It was the classroom I have always wanted but was afraid to try. Yes, I too was afraid, and fear was not only part of my students’ classroom it was part of my classroom too. So what could I do and how was I going to do it?
I was going to make my classroom a safe place. A place where students did not just learn about the facts but also learned about each other and the implications of the facts they were learning. It was important no for me to begin to create a place where my students felt free to explore and grow along with experiencing the subject they were studying. In my safe, humanistic classroom, my students will be learning as much about themselves and their relationship to the subject and their colleagues as they are about science facts. We will all be working together to learn.”
Why am I telling you all this? What does this have to do with museums?
Plenty. All of our activities are aimed at helping faculty interact with and help one another. We put forward questions–and the opportunity to ask questions–and listen and moderate as faculty answer those questions in ways that make sense to them depending on their disciplines and where they are in their careers. We’re providing a “third space”–not the home, not the classroom or lab or office–where faculty can exchange ideas about teaching–where they can learn to take risks that will likely improve their instruction. If we can reach even 100 faculty members each year–and we are in contact with far more instructors than that–we can impact the lives of thousands of undergraduates, as well as graduate students who have these faculty as mentors.
Similarly, the best museums–through exhibits, outreach, and other educational programs–seek to meet people where they are, and help them take the next steps on their journey toward making their communities a better place. This gets back to the post on museums and civic discourse I wrote back in March. Funding issues aside, many museums are ideally positioned to serve as these “third places” where people can be changed and be inspired to effect change in their communities.
I spent a couple years working for a small science center, first as an educational outreach specialist and then as an exhibition developer. In both roles I was called upon to tailor our exhibits and lessons to meet the needs of classroom teachers–that is, I needed to make explicit in the appendices of our teacher guides exactly which of the state’s science standards our programs met for each grade level. The science center’s assumption, then, was not only that classroom teachers needed help meeting the standards because they didn’t have the temporal and financial resources to teach these subjects in their own classrooms (which was true), but also that the state’s standards of scientific literacy by grade level made sense.
Such an assumption troubles me. Yes, Americans in particular could benefit from supplemental learning opportunities that boost their scientific and historical literacies. That said, should we let the state dictate the content of our exhibitions and education programs? I’m considerably less interested in making sure that a fourth grader understands the basics of electricity and magnetism and can build a simple compass than I am in getting that fourth grader to think through the hard choices we have to make about the sources–coal, wind, petroleum, solar, geothermal–of the electricity that powers her home. I’m more interested in helping a seventh grader and her parents understand why it’s not safe for a huge school bus depot to be sited in their neighborhood–and helping them combat rising rates of asthma among urban children–than I am in having that same girl understand the finer details of how the cardiovascular system functions.
Let the schools teach students to make compasses and diagram bronchioles. Our job as museum professionals is to provide the learning that students frequently can’t get in schools because of conservative school boards, high-stakes standardized testing, or for myriad other reasons.
But to get to the community–to those youth and adults most in need of this kind of advocacy and information–museums need to partner with institutions they don’t normally court. In my previous post on civic discourse, I mentioned supermarkets as one space for advocacy about foodways. But there are plenty of other spaces as well.
For example, say you’re doing an exhibition on AIDS or HIV, and you’ve seen these stats:
Black people have come to bear the greatest burden of AIDS in America. They represent 54 percent of the new HIV/AIDS cases in America, 70 percent of the new cases among American youth are Black, and nearly 67 percent of the new HIV/AIDS cases among American women are Black, and 43 percent of the new cases among men are Black. Most importantly, the majority of those still dying from AIDS in America, totaling more than 18,000 last year, were Black.
(BlackAIDS.org)
Why wouldn’t you partner with local African American churches as well as correctional facilities where African American men are incarcerated in numbers out of proportion to their representation in the United States? If you work for a science center, you can reach out to churches, even though in the U.S. we tend to see science and faith as oppositional.
Another example: Increasingly, Americans are growing food in community gardens, in abandoned lots, in their backyards, and even in their front yards. After more than five decades of waging war on weeds in their suburban front lawns, citizens are realizing that lawns can be an environmental nightmare. Add to that a dawning realization that our food sources are insecure, and you have an increased interest in urban agriculture. (Did you know there are people farming in the increasingly abandoned Detroit suburbs?) Whether your institution is dedicated to history, art, or science, there are myriad opportunities to connect with local communities around growing food: tours of local suburban homesteads, workshops on how to grow tomatoes–even on an apartment balcony in a hanging basket (and don’t forget to give away tomato plants), classes on how to compost, quasi-guerrilla gardening projects in underutilized public or private spaces, or contests to see who can grow the biggest pumpkin or the tallest sunflower in each neighborhood in your city or town. Set up a sustainable garden on your museum grounds, demonstrating how to safely recycle “gray water.” Write labels and install educational signage in your town’s communal gardens. Showcase how people historically conserved, transported, and used water and food in your region. Hire some local artists and horticulture experts to collaborate on an art garden, where the beauty is in the garden itself but perhaps also in sculptures made from “freecycled” objects.
The earth is dying, our educational systems are in many ways dysfunctional, and Americans’ health is declining. Museums can’t afford to be apolitical in the face of such challenges. We don’t need our exhibit labels to express radical political beliefs, but our actions and partnerships need a radical overhaul.
What museum-community partnerships do you find exciting and inspiring change in their regions?
(Cross-posted at BlogHer)
I know this content of this post isn’t news for the museum professionals who read this blog, but I get some search traffic from people looking for more general information about museum-going. This post is meant for them. 
Did you know that during conversations they have about science museum exhibits, parents are three times more likely to explain scientific concepts to boys than they are to girls?* Here are some tips on helping your daughters and other girls get the most out of museum visits. (Note: All of these tips apply to boys as well!)
1. Before going to the museum, check out the museum’s web site. Many museums offer tips to teachers (and, by extension, parents) on how best to prepare children for a visit to that specific museum. Some museums even have materials designed for teachers, including background materials as well as worksheets for kids or (better yet) pre- and post-visit activities. (See, for example, these resources from the National Museum of American History.) If you can’t find any such materials on the web site, try calling the museum’s education department to see if they have any age-appropriate materials available related to the current or permanent exhibitions. Let these materials inform your visit to the museum.
2. Familiarize yourself with the subject of the exhibitions before you go to the museum–but don’t overdo it. This might be as simple as reading a few pages on Wikipedia. If you can find children’s books or newspaper or magazine articles on the topic, share these with your children. But don’t pressure your kids to absorb too much before the visit–you don’t want to burn them out. Just pique their curiosity–and give yourself some background knowledge so that you can help your kids understand the context of the objects and activities at the museum.
3. If you’re going to a very large museum, make a preliminary visit without your kids. Large museums can be tiring, so it’s a good idea to get an idea of what’s in the exhibition halls before you show up with your daughter. Bonus: If you’re at an art museum that has an audio tour, take it! That way you can gain a better context for the art and you can use this knowledge when you visit the museum with your children.
4. Call ahead to find out when the museum is most crowded–and then avoid those hours. For many museums, the best time to visit is early or late in the day on a weekend, or after 3 p.m. on school days.
5. Talk to your kids while you’re in the exhibition. Ask them questions about the art, science phenomena, or objects on display. Ask open-ended questions that require an answer of more than a word or two. Connect what you’re seeing with your daughter’s interests or other experiences in her life. And remember: don’t shy away from scientific topics, especially if you’re a woman yourself. You want to model for your daughter the satisfaction we get from asking intelligent, interesting questions and seeking answers.
6. Talk to museum staff and volunteers on the exhibit floor. In science centers, aquaria, and zoos, there will often be education staff available to engage with your family and to answer your questions. These people–many of them volunteer docents or “explainers”–tend not only to be trained to work with children, but also have a passion for the subject.
My experience in art museums, unfortunately, is that there are fewer people available to answer questions, unless you tag along on a docent- or curator-led tour. In this case, don’t be afraid to approach the security guards and ask them questions. Chances are they’ve overheard information from the tours and can share something about the art with you. Despite their sometimes stern demeanor, many of these guards enjoy being asked about their expertise or opinions. If they can’t answer your questions, they might be able to point you to someone who can.
7. Don’t be afraid to interact with other families. Too often, museum visitors wander around in their own little family silos. Most kids like to interact with other children, so if you see an opportunity–for example, at a hands-on science center or children’s museum–to let your daughter try an activity with another child, encourage her to play.
8. Even if you’re especially well-prepared for your visit, don’t be didactic–that is, overly instructive. Pay attention to cues from your daughter to see what interests her, and follow her lead.
9. If appropriate, purchase souvenirs at the museum store–and I’m not talking about the cheap little plastic crap near the register. You don’t need to spend a fortune, but if there’s something relevant to the exhibitions that is affordable, interesting, and age appropriate, then purchase it for follow-up activities (see #10). I especially like The Savvy Source’s tip to purchase postcards of the art you have seen in a museum, and even to start a collection of such postcards for your children.
10. Plan some follow-up activities. If you’ve been to an art museum, make plenty of art materials available to your children for the days following your exhibit. We have a table set up in a corner of our kitchen where our almost three-year-old sits down a couple times a day to draw, paint, glue, cut, and hole punch his way to happiness. It’s a mess, but he gets a lot of joy from it, and learns a lot, too. (His preschool teacher is amazed at his attention span for arts and crafts. Little does she know we’ve inculcated him at home. Heh heh.) You could even place the postcards from tip #9 on the wall for inspiration.
If you’ve been to a science exhibition, go to your local library and find books of related science experiments. I recommend just about anything by Janice VanCleave–her experiments are simple to do and make concepts clear.
Parenting and education bloggers have been very generous with tips on museum-going. Here are a few:
What are your thoughts? Share your tips for (and frustrations about) visiting museums with children in the comments.
Leslie Madsen-Brooks helps university faculty improve their teaching. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.
*Kevin Crowley, Maureen A. Callanan, Harriet R. Tenenbaum, Elizabeth Allen (2001). Parents Explain More Often to Boys than to Girls During Shared Scientific Thinking. Psychological Science 12 (3), 258–261. (Abstract)