There’s been a ton of talk over the past year about how participating in social media—whether through blogging, social bookmarking, Twitter, Flickr, or whatever—can be a form of curatorial practice.

And I totally get the appeal of that particular metaphor. In fact, I understand that some people mean to use it in a very literal way, in the sense that they see themselves as imposing a welcome order or useful narrative on a very unwieldy collection of internet artifacts. I’ve seen some people I think are absolutely brilliant using the term this way.

Those who know me well know I don’t roll out my Ph.D. lightly. But as an (OK, adjunct) professor of museum studies and soon-to-be assistant professor of public history, I have to call bullshit on this one. As a lover of metaphor and as a poet who embraces all the possibilities of metaphor, I completely expect commenters to tell me to loosen up in this case. In fact, I suspect I’ll come across as a snob. But really, this distinction—what is curating, what very much isn’t—matters tremendously.

Educators with some facility in social media have become particularly fond of the term. But education isn’t curating. Curating isn’t education. In fact, in many museums, curators and educators are, alas, at odds with one another. Traditionally, curators have developed a depth of expertise in a content area over years of study, while educators tend—and yes, I know I’m generalizing here—to be younger folks with less education and experience. Education positions have a ton of turnover, a ton of burnout; curatorial positions come with more prestige and a sense of ownership of a position, sort of like tenure. Curators have at least a master’s degree and frequently a Ph.D. Educators have undergraduate degrees and increasingly, in this era of incredible competition for jobs, master’s degrees.

I don’t mean to imply that curators are above the fray, that they hold themselves at arm’s length from education. But their function is different. Curation is not a process of choosing the best resources to help other people learn. It’s much, much more, and to suggest that social bookmarking, sharing links via Twitter, or using an internet platform’s algorithm to help you determine which songs belong on your internet radio station is curation is ridiculous. Differentiating among things you like and dislike, or resources that you think are good or bad, and then sharing those opinions with people as a collection of internet or educational resources, is not curation.

When people talk about “curating” via social media, they’re really talking about filtering, and curators do so much more than filter. You can’t, I’m afraid to inform Robert Scoble, just “click to curate.” In fact, the absence of talented curators makes a given educational context degenerate, in newcurator’s most excellent formulation, to reality television.

Educators also do more than filter. They translate the curator’s research and expertise into small bites digestible by the general public or schoolchildren. This is a talent unto itself, and—as a former museum educator and exhibition developer—it’s not easy to develop because informal education diverges so spectacularly from what we’re all taught is supposed to happen in formal educational settings.

The conflation of a combination of sharing, digital resource connoisseurship, and online teaching and learning with a form of curation not only devalues the actual practice of curation—and by extension the time, effort, and passion it takes to develop sufficient expertise to become a curator—but also obscures the skills we hone as we navigate sharing on the social web.

We need a new term for folks who are developing (or who have already developed) the depth of expertise that marks curatorial work, but who also practice the distinctive forms of teaching and learning engendered by the social web. It’s not exactly edupunk, and it’s not museopunk.

In my mind, the people—and particularly academics—who occupy this space practice Keats’s “negative capability”: they are “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” By this I mean they get the tension—apparent to anyone who has planned a college course or an exhibition—between helping students or visitors develop content expertise and giving them opportunities to think critically and creatively. Doing both of these things simultaneously—cultivating expertise and promoting real intellectual development and discernment—is incredibly difficult to do from a lectern. The social web, like a provocatively interactive museum exhibition, offers new possibilities for this kind of participation in, and service to, the world.

California Academy of Sciences botanical curator Alice Eastwood standing on the scarp of the San Andreas Fault, 1906. Eastwood was both a curator and an educator.

What we call that exciting—and dare I say disruptive?— role is open to discussion and debate. Kindly leave your witty neologisms in the comments.

Update: Just saw this article on the new curators in the New York Times, which in some ways undermines my argument and in other ways reinforces that curating is its own special skill set. An excerpt:

It is also a group plugged in to all areas of museum life. They don’t simply organize exhibitions, they also have a hand in fund-raising and public relations, catalog production and installation. “The old-fashioned notion of a curator was that of a connoisseur who made discoveries and attributions,” said Scott Rothkopf, 33, who is the latest full-time curator to join the Whitney Museum of American Art’s team. “A lot of that work has already been done. The younger generation is trained to think differently, to think more about ideas.”

In consultation with some arts marketing gurus—and I’m afraid the name of the firm is escaping me right now, so please comment if you know the name of the consultants who helped redraw the floor map—the Symphony completely changed its subscription price points.  Some people’s annual subscription prices increased dramatically, while others’ plummeted by hundreds of dollars.  The map looks kind of crazy at first glance:

Some of those Level 4 seats are pretty prime.  Imagine being in row 6 or 7, at the inner edge of the green area.  Yet those are the cheapest seats in the house–currently only $79 for a season subscription to six classical music concerts.  (And yeah, you can bet my parents now have a couple of those seats.)

Take a look at the season subscription prices for 2009-2010:

P (center front loge): $344
1 (most of the floor): $339
2 (balcony, and portion of the edge of the floor at stage right): $264
3 (edge and rear of loge, most of rear of floor): $175
4 (first few rows, plus a portion of the edge of the floor at stage left): $79

Let’s reexamine that floor map.  I don’t think I’m about to give away any proprietary secrets here, as this is a published floor map, and anyone who has attended acoustic music performances in a concert hall will know where the preferred seats are, which ones tend to sit empty, and where the priciest seats usually are.  But the map definitely provides some food for thought, and it calls for a close reading.

Pricing the balcony higher than many seats on the floor and the loge is an interesting strategy from a marketing and public relations perspective.  From this viewpoint, people sitting in the balcony aren’t doing anyone any good.  They’re removed from interaction with the people the box office manager would want them to talk to–those who can talk up the benefits of floor or loge seats.  And they serve no purpose when it comes to concert reviews; you want the front of the house, and if possible the entire floor and front of the loge, packed with people so that the reviewer gets the sense that the Symphony has die-hard fans who won’t miss a single concert.  If you’re reserving a few seats in pricing section 1 for music critics, you want them to see people enjoying the concert–hence the incentive (lower prices) for people to purchase subscriptions in the first couple of rows.

The cello-side and front-row demographic—the level 4 subscribers—is a potentially interesting one.  I don’t have access to the latest demographics from the Symphony, but you can imagine who might be clamoring for those seats: retirees with a limited income, students, frugal types, former or amateur cellists, and newcomers to the symphony experience who might not understand that the cello side is considered, well, more uncouth and less desirable than violin-side seats.*  They’re not the symphony’s core demographic–those folks buy seats in areas 1 and P–but they have the potential, particularly if they’re young, to rejuvenate a symphony audience whose average age is increasing.

I can definitely imagine a scenario where those who sat in the front couple of rows for a season or two decided to upgrade so that they could have a less obstructed view.  Or cello-side folks who want to move to the violin side or the center floor.

How does this apply to museums?  Think about the things for which you charge:

• General admission
• Admission to special exhibits
• Individual or family membership
• Enrichment activities for children or families
• Behind-the-scenes tours
• Lectures
• Museum-sponsored field trips
• Other special events
• mp3 player rentals for audio tours
• Food in the café
• Items in the museum store

Which of these things are most likely to bring in the door people in the demographics that you’d like to turn into regular visitors and lifelong fans?  Which of these products and services–alone or in bundles–might you offer to a limited number of patrons who are particularly attractive to your marketing department?  What, in short, is your cello-side offering?  What might you offer, and at how low a price point, to bring in those who wouldn’t otherwise participate in your events?  I’m not talking about student discounts to bring in young people.  I’m talking about some kind of crazy, coveted, and perhaps quasi-secret discount (secret because it’s marketed only to select segments).

Is your art museum near a large research university, but you’re finding that scientists aren’t coming to the museum in the same numbers as the humanists?  Put together an special evening tour with a wine and hors d’oeuvres reception plus membership package for members of the local university’s Association for Women in Science.  Offer childcare at the event so harried scientist-mothers will find it even more appealing.

Want more middle-class African American families to visit regularly on weekends?  Offer a special event package and family membership to members of an AME church.  Do your research and target this specific church’s interests.  For example, are the parishioners interested in hands-on exhibits about health for their kids? Art installations about green living, with DIY gardening tips? Dialogues about increasing the number of grocery stores in neighboring communities?

Want to attract young, highly educated professionals with the potential of large future income (and donations and board of trustees service)?  Offer a special “thank you for serving our community” offer or event to medical students and young doctors doing their residencies in local hospitals.  Once you have them in the door, if you’re a science museum, you can try to recruit a few of them to participate in a Café Scientifique on health issues of interest to your community or ask for their help in writing questions for, or being auctioned off as a “lifeline” during a pub-quiz-style fundraiser.

Your cello-side people, in short, are those who might not normally make a habit of coming to your museum, but who are curious and need a little nudge in the form of an interesting offer that represents a significant discount over the price paid by your actual core demographic.  Bring these folks in the door with an interesting–and exclusive–experience, and then lead them to higher levels of involvement, participation, and donation.

*No offense to cellists.  Personally, I prefer cello side!

Between 2001 and 2004, when I was working as an educator, exhibition developer, or occasional evaluator for Explorit Science Center in Davis, California, I often found myself standing in front of classrooms of elementary school children.  Chances were about even that one of the girls would say to me, “You’re pretty” or “I like your hair.”  Even some of their thank-you notes to me said such things, scrawled there at the end after “I learned that I will be 5 feet 6 inches tall.”  Boys wrote things like, “I learned dinosaurs poop and it turns into a rock.”  I wish the girls would, to a person, write about coprolites and gastroliths, about hissing roaches and the mites that swarm over giant millipedes’ legs.  In my experience, girls do seem interested in science, but the things they focus on and remember are much more person-oriented and bodily than are boys’ observations.

When I mentioned my frustration with girls and the lack of opportunities available specifically to girls to a staff member at Explorit, she sighed and lamented that many of the center’s science-centered birthday parties have “boy” themes, like “Rockin’ the Earth” or “Dinosaurs and Reptiles.”  She suggested developing a birthday party focused on kitchen science.  And indeed, “Kitchen Chemistry” is one of the science center’s most popular special parent-child classes.  But must girls be left stirring in the kitchen, while the boys are in the multipurpose room making balloon rockets?

While many of the girls in the classes and birthday parties I oversaw seemed truly engaged with the hands-on science presented in the lessons, I wondered how many of them would nurture that interest through their teen years and into college.  Since K-16 schools too frequently fail to inspire girls and young women to pursue science, I want to see if informal science learning might be more successful.  In particular, I want to focus on the opportunities available to girls and young women at museums and science centers.

Over the past three decades, there has been incredible growth in both the quantity and quality of science museums and science centers throughout the United States, and especially in California.  During the same time period, it has become evident that traditional schooling systems have not been entirely successful in engaging young women in science.  While girls are enrolling in some advanced science classes at the same rates as their male counterparts, they still drop out of the “science pipeline.”  I undertook this project to discover what informal science learning activities science centers are developing to ensure that girls are made aware of and encouraged to pursue the incredible lifetime opportunities available to those who choose scientific careers.  This project explores, then, the informal science learning experiences available throughout childhood and adolescence and their success in sparking young women’s desires to pursue scientific careers.

Background

Over the past two decades, feminist theorists have sought to uncover the androcentric, classist, and racist bias inherent in scientific practice and forge new epistemologies to counteract those tendencies.  These scholars have highlighted scientific injustices toward women in the development and structure of scientific research, the collection of data, the interpretation of experimental results, and the reporting of these results to a wider audience.  Although many of these theorists have cited concrete examples of this bias, few have recommended similarly concrete steps that scientists and nonscientists alike might take to transform science into a more inclusive enterprise.

Science studies theorist Helen Longino emphasizes the necessity of crossing this bridge.  “We cannot restrict ourselves simply to the elimination of bias, but must expand our scope to include the detection of limiting and interpretive frameworks and the finding or construction of more appropriate frameworks.”  It is a matter of changing not just the content of science, but its entire context.  In changing the context of science, Longino explains, we are trying to bring it into line with “the values and commitments we express in the rest of our lives” (1987, 60).  In short, if a community values women and the health of all its members, then it must encourage its resident women to participate in science.  But what institutions in a community can provide the framework needed to sustain girls’ and young women’s interests in science?

The answer may be simple.  Many metropolitan areas boast an impressive assortment of museums, science centers, zoos, aquaria, and botanical gardens.  These spaces are critical locations for not only public learning, but also public dialogue on a broad spectrum of issues.   Although much scholarly work has sought to elucidate the sources of social controversies in history and art museums and recommend ways to solve tensions within and between the communities museums serve, significantly less scholarly attention has been paid to science centers and how these museums’ exhibits and outreach programs affect girls’ and women’s perception of, and participation in, science.  This is unfortunate, for the research that does exist has uncovered gendered patterns of scientific learning that warrant greater attention.  For example, studies have showed that in certain learning situations, girls communicate differently than do boys, follow directions better, are less likely to be exploratory and inventive, and are more likely to collaborate with other students (Jones et al. 2000, 760; Diamond 1994, 17).  In addition, in hands-on science learning and science fair projects, girls are more likely to participate in activities involving the human body than are boys, who prefer computers and the physical sciences (Greenfield 1995b, 925; Greenfield 1995a, 735; Kremer and Mullins 1992, 42-43).  In addition, girls in science competitions are more likely to create projects based on library research, while boys undertake experimental research (Greenfield 1995a, 735).  Inside and outside the classroom, older girls, most notably vocationally tracked high school students of color, may not feel welcome in a school’s science community because of (both related and unrelated) social and emotional marginalization (Brickhouse and Potter 2001, 965, 970).  At the same time, many gifted high school girls engage with science enrichment experiences at a rate higher than that of boys (Stake and Mares 2001, 1065).  Such informal learning opportunities need to be expanded.  In particular, adolescents need to be seriously invested in designing exhibits and programs (Lemerise 1999, 9).  Wineman et al. quote one teenager (presumably a girl) as saying “the mall wouldn’t have a chance if the zoo cared about us and let us express ourselves” through hands-on projects about environmental degradation, zoo exhibit design, or environmental ethics (1996, 102).  In their quest to inspire girls to consider scientific careers, some museums have taken the more explicit step of creating slick multimedia projects on the work of women scientists, who are presented in these classroom kits as role models (Diamond et al. 1996, 172).

It is not just girls who must be educated differently.  The literature on visitor studies, while not always easily obtained, is vast on the subject of family learning, and researchers in this field are increasingly concerning themselves with gendered learning and gender equity.  For example, in 2001, Crowley et al. published research results that indicate in their study of  “naturally occurring family conversation, parents were three times more likely to explain science to boys than to girls while using interactive science exhibits in a museum” (258).  Crowley et al. believe such an instructional gap is unintentional.  Still, solutions to this problem must be intentional and carefully targeted.  Other researchers have suggested that parents, and especially “underprivileged urban mothers,” can be made more confident about participating in their children’s learning experiences if the informal science experience adopts familiar contexts such as child care or nutrition (Calabrese Barton et al. 2001, 688).

California’s diverse urban communities pose additional challenges and opportunities for educational outreach.  How does a science museum ensure its exhibits speak to everyone, regardless of ethnicity, class, or gender?  In solving such quandaries, feminist science studies takes a decidedly antiracist stance, and seeks to include as many people as possible in conversations about the role of science in multicultural communities.  Some theorists believe that thoughtfully solving “the woman problem” will in large part take care of “the race problem” as well.  As Sandra Harding explains in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?,

Women need sciences and technologies that are for women and that are for women in every class, race, and culture.  Feminists (male and female) want to close the gender gap in scientific and technological literacy, to invent modes of thought and learn the existing techniques and skills that will enable women to get more control over the conditions of their lives.  Such sciences can and must benefit men, too—especially those marginalized by racism, imperialism, and class exploitation.  (1991, 5)

The stakes are high.  Because they have such a close connection to the public—and often to public schools—museums can serve as excellent launching grounds for such a project, sometimes for no other reason than these institutions have excellent access to young people, whose excitement about and perceptions of scientific endeavors remain malleable.  These students have not yet been indoctrinated into the androcentric notions that pervade much of Western science—notions that serve to oppress vast portions of the world’s population through exclusion from participation in science or policies that endanger the health and lives of specific communities.

We must assess where museums stand now, and what steps they might take to increase the participation of women, and especially women of color, who remain underrepresented in nearly all branches of the natural and physical sciences.

Methods

My examination of museums and science centers took me to science museums and centers of varying sizes in both Northern and Southern California.

In order to obtain a representative sampling of California’s diverse museums, I visited seven science centers of varying scales, geography, and foci, ranging from tiny suburban science centers to the megacenters in Southern California.  This was a labor-intensive but fascinating project that required me to use three primary research methods:

1. Close readings of the exhibits and programs themselves, focusing on their assumptions about gender and gendered learning. My training in literature, cultural studies, and women’s studies has taught me how to examine the assumptions underlying a text.  In exhibits, I assumed that informational panels, instructions, and the design of the individual exhibit activities themselves are all texts.  Additional texts that were available to me included curricula, training manuals, and lesson plans for informal science education programs.

2. Interviews with education, program, and exhibit development staff to understand their perspectives on the science centers’ programs and exhibits. Much of the published literature on visitor studies comes from museum professionals and consultants, not from the academy.  For example, one excellent guidebook, Informal Science Learning: What the Research Says About Television, Science Museums, and Community-Based Projects (1994), was published by a communications research company, not an academic or museum press, and yet its content is thoroughly rooted in academic social science.  Another, What Research Says about Learning in Science Museums (1990), comes directly from the Association of Science-Techology Centers.  It was therefore likely that I would learn the most in this project by networking with practitioners of informal science education, rather than with academic theorists.  My first contacts with museum professionals have demonstrated that they have vast networks of useful contacts, and there are several listservs, including at least one dedicated solely to science centers, on which I solicited further contacts and ideas.

3. Participant observation in science education. From November 2001 to October 2002, I worked part-time as a science education specialist at a small science center with an extensive outreach program.  My experiences took me to innumerable elementary schools in more than two dozen cities; these urban, suburban, and rural schools lay between Foresthill and Oakley, Napa and Lodi.  As I note in my introduction, these excursions allowed me to make extensive observations of girls ages 3 to 12.  In October 2002, I transferred into the science center’s exhibits department, where I was responsible for crafting half of all hands-on exhibits and accompanying signage for the center’s 1,100-square-foot exhibition hall.  This position provided me with a broader perspective and deeper understanding of exhibit development and visitor response.

I decided against summative evaluations or visitor studies because the time and resources necessary to undertaking such research would prohibit me from studying more than one or two centers.  I wanted, instead, to survey the interplay of gender with a full spectrum of science center programs—from public outreach to exhibits to staff training.

To encourage honest responses about gender from my respondents, I promised anonymity to all participating individuals and institutions who requested it.  Few people did so.  Because I am now making this information public on this blog, I have elected to remove any information that would allow someone to identify an individual interviewee or the institution for which he or she works.  In some cases, I changed a person’s title to make it more generic, e.g. director of education.  Funding for museums and science centers fluctuates wildly, and while I certainly would like to effect change in some of these centers, I would not want to jeopardize their programs’ existence through my critique.  That said, I do name institutions when I comment on exhibitions open to the public.

A note on terminology:  Some science center staff insist that their insitutions’ exhibitions and programs differ enough from traditional science and natural history museums that they should not technically be called museums.  The difference is that in a science center, “the needs and interests of children are placed before those of the collections” (Caulton 1998m 6).  Because visitors to a science center (as well as academic practitioners!) are just as likely to call it a museum as a science center, I use the terms almost interchangeably here.  Technically, however, most of the institutions I visited are science centers, not museums.

Exhibition Explorations

One great difficulty in exhibit evaluation, especially of the informal variety deployed here, is polysemy.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine how individual visitors or groups will interact with an exhibit or what information they will take away from it.  Informal learning in science centers is largely constructivist in that hands-on opportunities can be undertaken in any order; there is no “correct” path through an exhibition.  Tim Caulton, author of Hands-On Exhibitions, explains:

The constructivist museum accepts that visitors construct their own knowledge based on their personal, social, and physical context for the visit.  Material is presented so that it meets the educational needs of the visitor rather than the subject of the storyline, the social, political, cultural or historical context, or the properties of the object.  In other words, there is no single way to interpret the material presented….Visitors are encouraged to construct knowledge from the exhibit through personal and social interaction. (1998, 37)

This personal and social interaction is spontaneous in nature, but often predicated on traditional gender roles—and, as Crowley et al.’s research shows, boys are often the beneficiaries of this system as far as science content is concerned, while girls are left to fend for themselves.  Because constructivist science centers try to lead visitors through a process of discovery, rather than direct them to a single “answer,” each hands-on exhibit is designed to be “open-ended,” which means that visitors can experiment with the exhibit in multiple ways.  Such open-endedness further muddies the exhibit evaluation waters because not only will the public use the hands-on activity in ways it was not meant to be used, but the museum encourages such use in the name of discovery.

Although the primary audience for many science centers is elementary school children, adults constitute half of all visitors to interactive museums (Caulton 1998, 27).  It is both appropriate and important, then, to participate in exhibits and read labels from an adult’s perspective, while keeping in mind children’s responses to activities.  I have taken this approach in my forays into different exhibitions.

Science education has a long history of sexism.  For centuries, women were excluded from science labs, lectures, and classrooms.  Science textbooks have long used sexist metaphors and made chauvinistic assumptions about women’s bodies. Jaime Phillips and Kate Hausbeck have demonstrated that today’s geology textbooks make assumptions about the gender and race of their readers, and other feminist scientists and science theorists, such as Emily Martin and Polly Matzinger have uncovered sexist assumptions in traditional accounts of the functions of human fertilization and the immune system.  Since they deal directly with human bodies, it is not surprising that biology and other life sciences have been especially gendered in their language and assumptions.  Surprisingly, only one of the science centers I visited had a current exhibit on the human body, although two others did address ecology.  Perhaps these topics are too controversial in some ways, or perhaps they are too expensive to mount, because they require costly anatomical models or the upkeep of live plants and animals.  Maybe science centers still are catering unconsciously to a male clientele—after all, girls may prefer exhibitions on the human body (Greenfield 1995b, 925).

My study of exhibitions showed that exhibits focused on the physical or earth sciences were least likely to make gender gaffes.  The floor of the large Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, for example, contained dozens of hands-on activities about the physical sciences, including a kalliroscope, a stream table, a magnet wall, a smoke ring generator, a tornado simulator, and a quake simulator.  Casual observations showed that both boys and girls enjoyed the rather physical nature of these activities, most of which went beyond “push-button”  science to engage the visitors more physically.  A visit to the Exploratorium in San Francisco revealed that many of the Discovery Science Center’s exhibits were modelled on activities on the Exploratorium floor.  However, the Exploratorium, with hundreds of exhibits on its floor, was perhaps the most exemplary science center; in the day I spent there, I uncovered not a single assumption about visitors’ gender—not even so much as a reliance on gendered language.

However, the success of these two institutions in creating an environment that is apparently appealing and engaging to visitors regardless of gender does not mean that all physical science exhibits are fail-proof.  A travelling exhibition titled Space Toys at the Discovery Museum Science and Space Center in Sacramento revealed all too well what can happen when an exhibit design team fails to account for gender—as well as fail to provide hands-on activities to enhance visitor learning.  I visited the exhibition, which was designed by the Arkansas Museum of Discovery, on a rainy Saturday, but despite the weather the small exhibit floor was occupied by several families.  To the casual observer such as myself, it appeared that the young girls present had little interest in the displays of space toys, while boys and men of all ages were held rapt by the objects inside the series of glass cases.  While the men pushed their noses against the glass and waxed nostalgic about the toys they used to have, small groups of women and girls tried to figure out how to use the half-dozen hands-on activities included with the exhibit.  Unfortunately, of these, two were broken, one seemed to be missing part of its instructions and was therefore an enigma, and two were little more than push-button and lift-the-panel displays—which, in my experience, fail to engage visitors’ minds and imaginations as much as do truly interactive, hands-on activities.  The other hands-on activity encouraged children to try on child-sized astronaut outfits, although these appeared to be little more than glorified Halloween costumes rather than scientific replicas.  When they grew frustrated with these exhibits, the women and girls moved into the room in which live animals are displayed or into a special room in which visitors could make glitter-filled “space wands”—clearly an attempt to include girls in the exhibit’s content, but I fail to see the science learning in such a task.

In a flyer, the Discovery Museum Science and Space Center claims that “While entertaining your students, this exhibit also educates by meeting California State Standards for Physical, Life, Earth, and Ecological Sciences; as well as Investigation and Experimentation.”  As a former exhibit developer who is familiar with the specific state content standards, I take exception to this characterization.  The exhibit was about material culture and the history of toys, not about space science.  The science center’s staff tried to make the exhibit more scientific by providing visitors with “Search & Find” sheets targeting various grades of elementary school students, but even these sheets are geared more toward boys, with questions about robots, Star Wars, and Star Trek.  While there are certainly girls who enjoy these topics, traditionally these subjects are those with which—thanks to social and cultural conditioning—primarily boys engage.  In an interview, one educator from another institution offered confirmed my fears.  “I teach a living in space class … during the summer time,” s/he said, “and this summer we did notice a particularly small number of girls in the class, and we wondered if there was anything we could do about that, or if we needed to have special programming for girls.  Out of 20 to 22 kids in the class, 5 or fewer were girls.  Space is the stereotypical boys topic.”

It doesn’t help that, with the exception of toys from recent Star Trek series, women are largely not present in Space Toys’s renditions of space travel, and when they are, they must be rescued by men.  Furthermore, the questions provided on handouts to children visiting the exhibition were confusing.  They more about history, marketing, math, and animal adaptation than about the physics and mechanics of space exploration and astronomy.  Who cares which cereal company produced the cereal C3POs, or which Disney character is not on a space ship?  These are marketing questions, not science questions.

An exhibit at the California Science Center in Los Angeles proved equally problematic.  I recall first viewing Mathematica: A World of Numbers and Beyond during my childhood, when the museum was still known as the California Museum of Science and Industry.  I was fascinated then by the cube of lights that could do multiplication problems punched into its keypad by visitors.  I was too young to understand the multiplication, but I enjoyed the spectacle, and I recall being amused as well by the miniature roller coaster that glides around a Mobius strip.

Mathematica was a permanent exhibit from 1961 until 1998, when it was taken down and rehabilitated into a travelling exhibition.  The introductory text on the exhibition wall proclaims that “Mathematica was one of the first truly interactive exhibitions.  Even today, it remains influential.  It won the hearts of teachers and students during its time at the California Science Center.”  Visitors and museum professionals alike have been effusive in their praise of Mathematica, which was designed by Charles and Ray Eames.  In Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions, Kathleen McLean heralds the exhibition as one of the first truly participatory exhibits.  “Mathematica,” she writes, “has not only withstood the test of time (it is as contemporary and attractive today as [it] was 30 years ago), it has also inspired exhibit planners around the world” (1993, 94).

My experience with Mathematica was decidedly different.  In contrast to most participatory exhibitions today, approximately half of Mathematica’s “activities” are sealed behind glass.  This physical removal from visitors was not the most disturbing portion of Mathematica, however.  The exhibition features an extremely large timeline that runs along an entire wall of the exhibition, from ceiling to floor.  Although allegedly depicting the history of mathematics, the timeline fails to name even one woman, even though many women have contributed to mathematics.  A political timeline at the foot of the larger history names only Queen Elizabeth and Joan of Arc.  I mentioned the paucity of women to another female visitor, and she admitted she had noticed the omission and was troubled by it as well.  The panel listing the creators of the timeline mentions only one woman.  Clearly, the exhibit was designed by men for men.

Perhaps most disturbing, however, were the cartoon drawings surrounding the cube of light bulbs.  These cartoons illustrated various mathematical concepts by employing humor.  In illustrating that (A + B) + C does not necessarily equal A + (B + C), each lettered variable was personified.  A and C were men, while B was a woman passed between them.  In depicting the woman as an object to be passed between two men, the exhibition denies women agency of their own.  They are objects, not subjects or practitioners, of mathematics.

The California Science Center exhibit staff did redeem itself, however, with the exhibition across the hall from Mathematica.  The Creative World, a multi-story exhibition, presented physical science problems and asked visitors to solve them.  Among dozens of other activities, visitors could learn about new technologies designed to make cars safer, produce sounds by making objects vibrate, and learn what structures were most likely to survive an earthquake.  Best of all, the Creative World exhibition labels and signs told visitors they “have the power” to solve scientific quandaries by using their creative powers.  The exhibit was textually and physically very empowering, and it was clear the activities engaged children and adults of both genders.  However, I did notice a few of the activity components, such as cranks, were difficult to move, which may exclude the participation of girls and women, who traditionally have less upper-body strength than do men.

The World of Life gallery at the California Science Center was also impressive, for, as in The Creative World, the exhibits introduced visitors to complex concepts through hands-on activities.  These activities were not as physically interactive as those in the Creative World gallery, but graphical representations of people depicted humans of both genders and many ethnicities.  As in The Creative World, labels introduced visitors to male and female scientists of various ethnicities through panels on their work and photographs of the scientists.  Such positive representations of professional female scientists cannot but help encourage girls to consider practicing science themselves.

An exhibition at Explorit Science Center titled Insides Out: How Your Body Works also did a fine job of presenting biology unbiased by gender.  However, boys and girls did use some of the activities differently from one another.  A mannequin at the entrance of the museum floor contained a long tube on which visitors could tug; the tube was several yards long, representing the combined length of the short and long intestines.  The mannequin was female and wore a polo shirt bearing the museum logo.  While both boys and girls seemed to enjoy the designated activity at this station, the older boys also persisted week after week in fondling the mannequin’s breasts, often in the presence of their teachers, parents, and female classmates.  Such a gesture certainly objectifies women, and might make girls on the floor uncomfortable.  Still, the exhibit development staff (I wasn’t yet a member of it) for that exhibition is to be commended for their efforts to bring the female body onto the exhibition floor in a novel way.

Another exhibition at Explorit, titled A Day in the Lab, explored the methodology of science through hands-on activities and through introductions of individual scientists through brief interviews on exhibit panels.  As at the California Science Center, the exhibition staff made a concerted effort to include both male and female scientists, which again is commendable.  The more positive representations of female scientists, the better the chances that girls will be inspired to take charge of science themselves.

Another life science exhibit, Traits of Life at the Exploratorium, introduced visitors to a wide variety of animals, and asked the kind of open-ended, philosophical questions favored by feminist theorists but often not asked publicly by mainstream science.  A label near a hydroponics exhibit, for example, shared these musings:

Human beings have a unique relationship to the world.  We’re part of it, yet we are compelled to reshape it for our needs and desires.  Should we probe, contain, and manipulate living things just as we do metal, glass, and plastic?  What does this need to reconfigure nature say about our relationship to the world around us?  If life is seen through a lens of technology, what is the focus of that view?

Interviews

During the course of this project, I have conducted a series of interviews with administrative and front-line educational staff at most of the science centers I visited.  The interviews allowed me to gauge professionals’ everyday awareness of gender dynamics, as well as informally assess their knowledge of research on gendered learning.  The questions I asked during those interviews are listed in an appendix.

My initial findings suggest that the administrative-level staff at these science centers are aware of the difficulties in getting girls involved in science and have a passing familiarity with the literature on girls and informal science learning, but are often unaware of any solutions to the problem, short of long-term programs that cater to girls or having women as well as men present their educational programs.  An underlying assumption of many of my interviewees seemed to be that gender was a problem, but one that had been addressed adequately in the 1980s and 1990s, while reaching “underserved” communities (read: the poor or people of color) was their current audience goal.  Unfortunately, small science centers generally lack the funding to develop and implement long-term programs to serve either girls or students of color.  Meanwhile, relatively few larger centers have developed programs that cater to girls.

Providing staff members of both genders, as well as addressing gender in staff training, was a concern to most of the educators and administrators I interviewed.

One director of education said her main concern is getting staff to consider the topics with which boys or girls may be most comfortable, and then using that knowledge to better recruit girls into programs that will introduce them to new experiences.  “We do discuss gender,” she explained in an interview, “as far as knowing we want as many girls to sign up as boys do.”  Her first step is to recruit staff that is diverse: “Lots of skin colors, different languages, males and females, age differences.  There’s something to having someone other than an older woman, someone you’d think of as a traditional teacher, doing the education,” she said.  During staff training for summer programs, she said,

we’ll remark upon the fact that boys will be more comfortable with tools, whereas girls may think it’s a challenge and others may not want to participate.  For a lot of newcomer kids who are used to being in anther country, in another culture, there are stigmas involved in doing things that guys are supposed to do, such as working in a machine shop or handling a specific tool.  Ironically, the girls are often much better at handling the tools than boys are.  Girls are better at not barreling into things in middle school like the boys are.  When we go over safety issues, guys don’t hear the safety concerns and aren’t as good at implementing them.  Girls don’t feel as confident, but might be more thoughtful.

“We don’t by any means have the girls working with female staff members, and boys with male staff members,” she continued, “but if a female student feels more comfortable with a female staff member, then that’s fine.  It’s much more organic, and the idea is, the opportunity is there.”  She emphasized that during the summer programs, when kids and instructors need help with a particular tool, instructors will sometimes deliberately seek out a woman to explain the workings of the tool, in an attempt to demonstrate that men and women are equally competent in the machine shop.  For students as well as visitors, she said, it’s inspiring to see girls and women using potentially dangerous machinery.  “Our programming is open for people to observe,” she said, “and the kids using the belt sander or the table saw are in full view of the public.  It’s a little interesting to see a 12-year-old girl with goggles on at a bandsaw.”

It’s not just visiting girls who benefit from this participatory approach to science.  The Exploratorium boasts a world-famous program for high school exhibit interpreters, the Explainer program.  According to a booklet on the Explainer program,

‘Explaining’ can involve anything from an in-depth discussion of scientific phenomena to showing a child which button to push.  The Explainers’ primary job is to help visitors use and understand the Exploratorium’s exhibits and the principles behind them.  On a typical day, an Explainer will spend four to seven hours out on the floor playing with the exhibits, and approaching visitors to offer suggestions, assistance, or explanations.  (Klages 1995, 6)

The Explainers’ training adresses the diversity of visitors to the Exploratorium, and encourages participants to think specifically about both race and gender.  Through a series of role-playing exercises, “the Explainers begin to be aware of other people, and themselves, in a new way,” Klages writes (13-14).

I spoke with someone involved with the Explainers about the experiences of girls in the program.  This staff member emphasized that both male and female participants gain much-needed work experience and social opportunities through the program, but nonetheless said s/he believed girls’ experiences in the program were slightly different than the boys’.  S/he said that girls are responsive to the materials, and are often communicative and articulate going into the program.  They know how to help people, and are excited to learn new things.  “Some are not confident about science topics,” the program representative said, “but with a little coaching they gain more confidence…. Some girls don’t get involved unless asked, however they always have an opinion, so that’s where the coaching piece comes in.  Girls are not necessarily afraid of science, they’re not necessarily interested in science, but like what they’re learning and how they’re learning it, and that it’s different from school.”  The entire process of engaging with new subjects and people increases girls’ confidence, which leads them to offer opinions more frequently, s/he said.

The motives for joining the Explainer program are a diverse as the girls themselves.  “Some join to gain friends.” s/he said.  “Others want to take on new responsibility.  Some do this to get a good recommendation for science.”   Girls, however, are less likely to remain with the program for more than one or two sessions.  During their opportunity to be rehired for a second session, s/he said, half of the candidates for rehiring are male and half are female.  “Usually everyone wants to come back the second time,” she said, “but the third time the girls want to move on.  And I think that’s because the boys are a little behind the girls.  The girls get want they want and move on.  And the guys are more content to be where they are.”

A director of a smaller science museum said s/he has explicitly brought up gender in educational programs at staff meeings.  Four years ago, the center noticed that its summer science camps were composed overwhelmingly of boys.  Accordingly, the program tried to recruit and retain more girls by training the staff on questioning techniques and exercises that may better engage girls with the subjects at hand.  S/he said the mentality of educators in the past had been “Keep that boy busy, the little girl will keep herself busy…. We get more boys with learning challenges in summer camp than we do girls.”  The boys, therefore, may be more demanding of attention.  The staff decided to include some arts and crafts projects—traditionally considered a feminine activity—to attract and engage more girls.  The tactic worked.  The director said, “We found that during those art and craft projects that supported the programs that more questions came from the girls than from the boys about the topic.”

In addition, the director explained, she recruits families into her efforts to retain girls:

We’re actively talking to the parents.  Do you think your girl will be back next year?  What would you like to see more of?  We ask the girls, too:  What did you like most?  What did you like least?  Girls wanted more labs.  Boys wanted to blow up more things, be with the leaders more.

This same director worked for many years in a different role at the California Academy of Sciences, where, s/he said, convincing parents that science was worthwhile for their daughters was key to getting girls into programs.  “At the Academy,” s/he recalled, “we had the Junior Academy, which a program for children up to 15 or 16.  We were noticing that when we offered courses that were involved with physics or chemistry, we got few girls enrolling.”  A typical class for 7- or 8-year-olds, for example, had two girls in a room of 16 children.  The problem, s/he said, was that parents selected classes for their boys and girls, and tended to select classes based on what boys or girls traditionally were supposed to enjoy.  When the Academy offered all-girl classes, s/he said, “we filled those sections in chemistry, physics, and the earth sciences classes.  We increased our numbers of girls in those classes and were still able to fill the open enrollment classes.”

Educated parents are indeed interested in gender equity, said the director of a project targeting girls at an urban science center.

Years ago as a parent, I had a son before I was affiliated with [the science center], and I enrolled him in some programs at other science centers, and I was always struck when he would be in classes where it was predominantly boys, and none of the programs seemed to care, and the other parents didn’t seem to care.  But I didn’t want my son in classes where he was only in the presence of other boys.  To me it really mattered.  To me it’s really significant that on [the science center’s] part they do something about it.  You do a real disservice to girls and to boys if you don’t try to address gender equity.

The director of another small science center was quick to point out that one of the institution’s greatest strengths as far as gender is concerned is that the staff of the museum is overwhelmingly female, with the entire educational staff constituted by women at the time of the interview.  This gendering of educators is important in informal science education, where, as s/he noted, “parental involvement can be very powerful in turning girls away from science.”

These educators are indeed in an excellent position to serve as role models to girls interested in science.   In discussing her significance as a role model, one educator at this same small science center noted that “kids ask me all the time about my education.  To them, we know everything about science.  I had a little girl come up to me after a lesson and tell me she wants to teach science.  She didn’t even know that was an option before I showed up.  Every scientist you see on TV is male.”  It is important to note, however, that these female educators have themselves fallen out of the science pipeline by accepting relatively low-paying, educational (as opposed to research-based) jobs at a nonprofit institution.  All of the educators I interviewed in my first round of questions had degrees in science, and all expressed interest in eventually returning to mainstream science, either by securing laboratory or research positions, or by returning to school to pursue graduate degrees.

Their background in science has served these educators well, not just as teachers of science, but as keen observers.  All of my interviews with science center staff were enlightening, but those with front-line science educators at this particular small science center were the most so.  Although these science education specialists were not familiar with the literature on gender and science, in their hands-on experiences they have noticed the same things academic researchers have.  They made many comments about adults’ interactions with boys and girls, noting that boys tend to get more attention from teachers, volunteers, and parents in both the exhibits and classrooms because the boys are more likely to be disruptive or to use the exhibits in ways they were not intended.  Girls, one educator observed, could be counted on to work quietly—and usually in pairs or small groups—to do “the right thing.”

These educators also noted that socially, outside the museum girls are not encouraged to explore and be active as much as are boys.  Boys are encouraged, for example, to explore subjects that many adults might find “gross,” such as tearing apart owl pellets or coyote scat to find rodent bones, or to examine the tiny creatures that live in pond water.  One educator noticed this dissuasion of girls carries over into classroom expectations; girls, she noted, are less likely to raise their hands in all grades, but their participation in question-and-answer sessions declines precipitously in the fifth and sixth grades.

My interviewees were reluctant to compare informal science learning with classroom education, preferring not to say whether they found one or the other more effective.  However, as Caulton points out, classroom learning

is constrained by the rigidity of the curriculum, by time and by a lack of resources—all of which prevent children from fully exploring their environment.  The interactive exhibition, on the other hand, is rich in artefacts and exhibits with which to explore and experiment, whilst visitors can follow their own interests, unconfined by the clock or the bell, for as long as their concentration lasts.  (1998, 19)

In addition, as the director of the program for girls at the urban science center emphasized, “definitely we see so much about gender stereotypes still being played out in the classroom.  I think in a lot of ways it’s what the kids bring into the classroom because of their own experiences or their own stereotypes and expectations.  So I think in many ways that gender inequity is still alive and thriving in the classroom.”  Programs like the one s/he heads are working to change those assumptions.

Alternative Programs

There are, of course, alternatives to traditional, one-hour classroom outreach programs, exhibit-based lessons for school groups, and interaction with casual visitors during public hours.  Science centers may develop slightly more formal programs that meet over an extended period of time with the goal of getting girls to engage with science and stick with it through high school, college, and beyond.  Two particularly promising programs for girls, Techbridge and FIRST, have been undertaken through Chabot Science Center.

Techbridge acknowledges that most computer technology for young people is designed with boys in mind.  “Take a look at computer games or course offerings and you’ll find that most are designed for boys,” proclaims Techbridge’s web site, “Consider the image of computer scientists portrayed in the media and you’ll also find it isn’t likely to attract many students—girls or boys—to technology”  (techbridge.asp).

Hosted before and after school at five middle schools and three high schools in Oakland as well as at the California School for the Blind, Techbridge provides an important bridge between middle school and high school by helping girls make decisions about how to develop their technology skills inside and outside of school.  The program also works to dispel the image that computer scientists are exclusively male or nerdy by providing the girls with access to professional women who rely on technology in their careers.  These women also steer students toward internships, college preparatory programs, and financial aid.  In addition, Techbridge trains teachers how to engage girls with technology in the classroom (techbridge.asp).

One expert on science centers who has also considered girls and science believes that Techbridge has had a significant impact on girls’ acceptance of science and technology in ways that schools cannot.  Still, that does not mean teachers are not interested in the subject.  “Teachers are too busy,” s/he said.

We’re finding that the girls have great gaps in their understanding that can’t be filled by their counselors because of financial difficulties at the school sites.  The professional development and networking that we’ve been able to support for our teachers has always been very welcomed by the teachers, even though it’s at the end of the school day and they have so much on their plates already; we’ve heard that for many of them it’s the best part of their day.  They want to stay at school because of Techbridge.

Chabot also hosted FIRST, Female Involvement in Real Science and Technology, for a few years under a grant from the National Science Foundation.  In this program, girls and teachers at elementary schools, middle schools, and the California School for the Blind learned to work together as they planned and executed hands-on science activities.  Afterschool clubs of 10 to 35 girls met two or four times each month.  According to FIRST’s web site, “Within the group setting, girls played with building blocks, tinkered with tools, made solar ovens, and observed crayfish under microscopes.” Although the science center’s funding has expired, several schools have continued their participation in FIRST (first.asp).

The National Science Foundation has funded several other programs that sought to involve girls in science, some hosted by museums, others by schools, and still others by nonprofit organizations.  It is not within the scope of this project to discuss such projects, though museums and science centers certainly could borrow ideas from the most successful of these programs and integrate them into their own outreach.  My research makes clear, however, that science centers are particularly well-suited to develop and implement these programs.  Staff at these centers are generally highly educated (many hold masters’ degrees or Ph.D.s), care passionately about the public understanding of science, and have the creativity and talent to create exhibits and programs that reach new audiences.

Improving informal science education and improving access to scientific careers, then, is a matter  of renewing interest in gender at science centers, of foregrounding the needs of girls as well as those of boys.  This means increasing funding to science centers, and especially to those willing to devote staff time to developing greater opportunities for girls and young women.  Admittedly, during a recession (and during the Republican administration during which I researched this paper), such funding can be difficult to come by (Sadker and Sadker 1994, 37).  However, until we prioritize girls’ science education, students will continue to see science as a bastion of whiteness and masculinity—a perception that harms everyone.

Did you like this post?  If so, consider bringing me onto your staff. I’m looking for a challenging career position in a museum or similar institution, but at the moment I’m also available for consultation on education, equity, and staff professional development.   View my CV and contact me: leslie -at- museumblogging -dot- com.

APPENDIX A

Interview Questions for Museum Professionals

The conversational flow of each individual and group interview determined follow-up questions, which may not be listed here.

1.  What is your own background in science?  What was your major in college and/or grad school?

2.  How familiar are you personally with research and theory on gender and education?  How familiar would you say your staff is with this literature or discourse?

3.  How much do you think science centers or museums in general take into account research on gendered learning?  Does your science center consider such studies while developing programs?  How so, or why not?

4.  Has your science center ever partnered with girl-centered organizations such as the Girl Scouts?  How and when?  What was the result of this collaboration?  If your science center has not, why not?  Is there interest in such a partnership?

5.  Have you noticed girls responding differently than do boys to your museum’s exhibits and classroom programs?  Have you made any observations about how parents and teachers treat children of different genders in your science center’s exhibits?

6.  Do you think informal, hands-on science learning opportunities benefit girls more than do formal science learning opportunities?  How so, and why?  If not, explain your experiences.

7.  In any of the science center’s staff or volunteer training programs, is special attention paid to girls or women?  Why or why not?

8.  Do you think there is any connection between the presence of female science educators and girls’ greater interest in science?  What is the gender breakdown of your department’s staff?

9.  Do many teenaged girls or young women intern or volunteer here?  In which departments?  Do you make a special effort to recruit girls or young women to science-centered activities (versus, say, marketing or admissions) at the museum?

10.  For museum staff with science or engineering degrees: Did you yourself have formative experiences in science centers or museums that engaged you with science and inspired you to pursue a scientific field in college?

11.  Any other thoughts on gender and science education?

12.  Do you know of any science centers that offer outreach targeted specifically at girls, so that I might contact them?

13.  Would you prefer that I keep your name and/or your institution’s name anonymous in my research report?

Works Cited or Consulted

Note: interviewees’ names have been removed from this list.  I conducted 12 interviews with staff members of science centers.

Arkansas Museum of Discovery.  n.d.  “Exhibits for Rent: Space Toys.” http://www.amod.org/for_rent/spacetoys.asp.  10 Dec. 2002.

Borun, Minda, Margaret Chambers, and Ann Cleghorn.  1996.  Families Are Learning in Science Museums.  Curator 39, no. 2: 123-38.

Brickhouse, Nancy W.  2001.  Embodying Science: A Feminist Perspective on Learning.  Journal  of Research in Science Teaching 38, no. 3: 282-295

Brickhouse, Nancy W. and Jennifer T. Potter.  2001.  Young Women’s Scientific Identity Formation in an Urban Context.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching 38, no. 8: 965-80.

Calabrese Barton, Angela.  2001.  Underprivileged Urban Mothers’ Perspectives on Science.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching 38, no. 6: 688-711.

California Science Center, Los Angeles.  World of Life, Creative World, and Mathematica.  28 Aug. 2002.

Caulton, Tim.  1998.  Hands-On Exhibitions: Managing Interactive Museums and Science Centers.  London: Routledge.

Chabot Space and Science Center.  n.d.  “Techbridge: Encouraging Girls in Technology.”  http://www.chabotspace.org/visit/programs/techbridge.asp.  10 Dec. 2002.

———. n.d.  “FIRST: Female Involvement in Real Science & Technology.”  http://www.chabotspace.org/visit/programs/first.asp.  10 Dec. 2002.

Crane, Valerie et al.  1994.  Informal Science Learning: What the Research Says about Television, Science Museums, and Community-Based Projects.  Ephrata, PA: Science Press.

Diamond, Judy.  1994.  Sex Differences in Science Museums: A Review.  Curator 37, no. 1: 17-24.

———.  1996.  Multimedia Science Kits: A Museum Project on Women Scientists and Their Research.  Curator 39, no. 3: 172-187.

Discovery Museum Science and Space Center, Sacramento.  Space Toys.  16 Nov. 2002.

Exploratorium.  Traits of Life and other permanent exhibits.  10 Nov. 2002.

Explorit Science Center, Davis.  Insides Out and A Day in the Lab exhibitions.  Winter and fall 2002.

Greenfield, Teresa Arámbula.  1995.  An Exploration of Gender Participation Patterns in Science Competitions.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching 32, no. 9:735-48.

———.  1995.  Sex Differences in Science Museum Exhibit Attraction.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching 32, no. 9: 925-38.

Harding, Sandra. 1991.  Whose Science?  Whose Knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Jones, M. Gail et al.  Tool Time: Gender and Students’ Use of Tools, Control and Authority.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching 37, no. 8: 760-83.

Klages, Ellen.  1995.  When the Right Answer is a Question: Students as Explainers at the Exploratorium.  San Francisco: The Exploratorium.

Klages, Ellen and the Exploratorium staff.  1999.  Facilitating the Framework.  San Francisco: Exploratorium.

Kremer, Kristin Benne and Gary W. Mullins.  1992.  Children’s Gender Behavior at Science Museum Exhibits.  Curator 35, no. 1: 39-48.

Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley.  Within the Human Brain, Math Around the World, and Elephants.  23 Nov. 2002.

Lemerise, Tamara.  1999.  Changes in Museums Benefit Adolescents.  Curator 42, no. 1: 7-11.

Longino, Helen E.  1987.  “Can There Be A Feminist Science?”  Hypatia 2, no. 3: 51-64.

Matzinger, Polly.  n.d.  “The Real Function of the Immune System, or Tolerance and the Four D’s (danger, death, destruction and distress).” http://cmmg.biosci.wayne.edu/asg/polly.html.  9 Dec. 2002.

McLean, Kathleen.  1993.  Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions.  Washington, DC: Association of Science-Technology Centers.

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  Discovery Center exhibits.  28 Aug. 2002.

Phillips, Jaime and Kate Hausbeck.  n.d.  “Just Beneath the Surface: Re-reading Geology, Re-scripting the Knowledge/Power Nexus.”  http://www.scsv.nevada.edu/~promise/poster7-2.htm.  9 Dec. 2002.

Sadker, Myra and David.  1994.  Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls.  New York: Touchstone.

Serrell, Beverly, ed.  1990.  What Research Says about Learning in Science Museums.  Washington, D.C.: Association of Science-Technology Centers.

Stake, Jayne E. and Kenneth R. Mares.  2001.  Science Enrichment Programs for Gifted High School Girls and Boys: Predictors of Program Impact on Science Confidence and Motivation.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching 38, no. 10: 1065-88.

Wineman, Jean, Craig Piper, and Terry L. Maple.  1996.  Zoos in Transition: Enriching Conservation Education for a New Generation.  Curator 39, no. 2: 94-107.

Beyond my post, WestMuse is a terrific blog, packed with good resources and both creative and critical thinking. Definitely visit it, click around, and leave a comment or two.

Late last year, the American Association of Museums released a discussion paper titled Museums & Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures. The report looked back 25 years to 1984 as it predicted what museums will look like 25 years from now. Specifically, the 20-page report examined “demographic trends, changes in the geopolitical and economic landscape, shifts in technology and communications, and the rise of new cultural expectations.”

For example, after pointing out that a larger percentage of the U.S. population will be senior citizen in 2034 than are seniors now, the report suggests museums will not only be accessible to people using walkers or wheelchairs, but will sport larger exhibit labels and will incorporate aspects of universal design as a matter of course. In another example, volatile energy prices will lead museums to

educate the public on how past societies coped and adapted to tectonic shifts in their resources. They will help society learn from history as we cope with a new era of more expensive energy, lower consumption, carbon constraint and climate change. Museums have uniformly adopted green design as a mark of excellence, leading by example and integrating green practices into operations. Some museums operate joint storage facilities designed to minimize energy costs while providing appropriate climate control. More museums establish satellite locations to serve outlying communities, reducing their audiences’ need to travel.

Some of the report’s predictions will come to pass much earlier, I hope. The eco-trends are notable, but even more relevant at this moment, I think–as I contemplate the possibility of my own job falling before the scythe of university budget cuts–is the suggestion that museums become resources for “communities with job losses reinvent themselves in the new knowledge-based economy.” Yes, please–sign me (and the rest of the giant University of California community) up! Indeed, Elaine Heumann Gurian has suggested that museums might serve some of the same functions as soup kitchens in the current downturn. (Be sure to read Marjorie Schwarzer’s reply to Gurian for some very interesting historical context.)

But in order to understand the future of museums, we first must look at their present. And it ends up that even museums aren’t at all in agreement over what constitutes a museum. As Elizabeth Merritt, director of the Center for the Future of Museums wrote today,

What is a museum? As a group, do we really have one unique element or set of characteristics that unite us as a field, while distinguishing us from other types of organizations? Are children’s museums (three quarters of which do not own or use collections) really in the same business as art museums? What about science centers? How much do museums that primarily exist to serve the general public have in common with museums like the Peabody [Museum of Natural History], where the majority of the collections serve a specialized community of researchers?

And collections are just one parameter—there are many others, some very complex and hard to characterize. For-profit museums like the International Spy Museum or the Museum of Sex look just like any other museum to their visitors, but their governance, accountability, and regulatory environment are so different that the National Standards and Best Practices for U.S. Museums don’t cover them.

No discussion of the present and future of museums would be complete without a mention of the following issues:

• What exactly is the function of a museum, anyway?
• The place of amateurs in museums and the (imagined and real) tensions between these folks and the museum’s resident content experts, curators
• Crowdsourcing in museums
• Connecting with community
• Handheld devices, mobile content, and interaction between the virtual, the real, and the augmented
• Matching the degree of innovation offline with the amount of innovation online. (See also this museum response.)
• The place of digital artifacts
• The usefulness and place of gaming in the museum

I think it’s awesome that women are doing so much of the thinking about and planning for the museum of the future and the future of museums. Do you think women think and talk about museums differently than do men because we experience the world in different kinds of bodies?

How do you envision the museum of the future? What do you want your experience to be in and with museums? And how–if at all–would you like to see museums involved in your community?

Think back to a time when you took a risk that succeeded. Now reflect on a time when you tried something and it bombed. What did you or others do differently in the first instance and the second? How did you recover from your failure in the second instance, and what would you do differently if you had another chance?

These are some of the questions posed to participants at the Risk and Reality Helzel Symposium at John F. Kennedy University on Saturday. In the audience were people who have decades of expertise working for nonprofits or in education, as well as a large number of emerging museum professionals, many of them enrolled in JFKU’s graduate program in museum studies (where I teach part-time).

The symposium featured Robert Garfinkle of the Science Museum of Minnesota and Jonathan Katz of Cinnabar, with moderation by museum guru Gail Anderson.

Katz outlined his “Seven Rules of Risk”:

1. Pick your battles. Know your priorities.
2. Be prepared. Use scenario planning.
3. Get outside support.
4. Make decisions. Present the best option to decision-makers rather than three choices.
5. Defend your position and your people.
6. Get client buy-in. Make them think your ideas were actually their ideas.
7. It’s not personal.

For Katz, managing risk means being informed and decisive.

Robert Garfinkle clearly thought differently about risk. Garfinkle headed the team that designed the provocative but very well-received exhibition Race: Are We So Different? Garfinkle, who is white, talked at great length about the institutional, and sometimes personal, risks he faced in collaborating on Race. Among these is the whiteness of the museum’s staff, which may have led to the staff lacking credibility to talk about the social and cultural dimensions of race–as the staff would be speaking from a position of white privilege. For Garfinkle, then, managing risk means having conversations. In his case, it meant going to the communities being represented in the exhibition, listening to their concerns and ideas, and using those ideas responsibly without violating their trust.

Garfinkle said the museum knew it had succeeded if the exhibition was attacked from both sides of the political spectrum. If you take on big things, Garfinkle explained to the students present, you’re going to get attacked. And that, he added, is how you know you’re on the right track.

Near the end of the day, Anderson asked us to write down a personal definition of risk. Garfinkle’s talk, along with my own experiences in the university classroom, led me to define risk as an opportunity to change minds. I think most of the people in the room left the symposium feeling more confident about taking risks and speaking truth to power in large and small ways.

We also penned long lists of tools to help us manage risk on a personal level, in our institutions, and in the museum field. Among my favorites were mentoring, social media networking, confidants in other fields, time and space to retreat and reflect (in solitude or with others), diversifying the field, transparency within an institution, and engaging in civic discourse.

For more, check out Kristen Olson’s post and the comments it drew at the Western Museums Association blog.

Of course, we weren’t the first ones to have considered risk in museums–far from it. A couple weeks ago, UNESCO offered a workshop for museum professionals working in the war zone that is Afghanistan, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions recently published a report on library, archive, and museum collaborations (PDF) with a special section on risk management.

Sarah Rhodes reports that Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology at the Brooklyn Museum recently emphasized the importance of taking risks in digital media.

The American Association of Museums also has published a resource page on how museums can “find calm in a crisis.” The page offers links to resources on job loss, downsizing, management in tough times, fundraising, and other relevant topics.

For an interesting perspective on the risks and rewards inherent in experimenting with museums, check out the writing of museum futurist Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums. Check out in particular her post Questioning Assumptions, which takes a look at some common beliefs about museums and the risks and rewards that might result from moving beyond them.

The AAM resource page and Merritt’s post form an interesting dialogue, asking what assumptions and beliefs we need to reassess in the midst of an economic crisis. What are our core values, and how much can we risk in the name of survival?

Is the current economic climate providing you with opportunities–or challenges–to take risks that you wouldn’t ordinarily take? How do you weigh personal risk against institutional risk?

As an adjunct professor in John F. Kennedy University’s graduate program in museum studies, professional development is frequently at the front of my mind.

By “professional development,” I mean helping students and emerging museum professionals become more thoughtful museum thinkers and makers. I’m talking about learning to think more critically and creatively about both one’s niche within the museum world and the larger system of the museum (or museums). Much of the writing on museum theory and practice can contribute, of course, to professional development, but no number of how-to articles or books contextualizing contemporary museum exhibitions and programming is sufficient in itself.

The difference between learning how to do something in a museum context and developing oneself professionally within the museum field is frequently vast. It’s the difference between reading an article on how to grow tomatoes (and subsequently planting tomatoes) and reading a book like Food Not Lawns and planning a suburban or urban garden that recycles resources via a system of ponds, swales, compost heaps, and seed preservation.

The most effective professional development takes place within systems and networks.  In my experience, the best professional development frequently happens spontaneously, in the form of “a learning community assembling itself on the fly.” I borrow this phrase from Gardner Campbell’s talk for the University Continuing Education Association’s 2009 conference.  Campbell emphasized the importance of catching a thought and pushing it along via conversations and networks–in Gardner’s example, by tweeting  and retweeting on Twitter. “It’s a very playful way to interact,” Campbell said. “It’s purposeful, too. And you can’t control it. You shouldn’t try to shape it too narrowly. There are other things we can do for that. The term paper is not going away. The research project is not going away. . . Pushing the thought along actually lends a kind of vividness, a kind of energy, a sense of shared purpose to whatever you’re doing in a learning situation. It’s quite remarkable.”

I’m a bit embarrassed that I haven’t directly addressed this topic in previously in a blog post. I spend 40+ hours a week in the University of California, Davis, teaching center, trying to get faculty to be, in my mentor Jon Wagner’s phrase, more thoughtful about teaching undergraduates. I also help graduate students be more effective instructors, and I’ve founded a professional development consultancy. In short: I “do” professional development. I also teach museum studies graduate students, inculcating them into the field via an introductory history and theory seminar and by overseeing their master’s theses. I have quite a bit of experience and expertise in what works and what doesn’t in professional development in academic and nonprofit contexts; I’ve just never synthesized those experiences in writing.

In this post, I’m going to look at some best practices in professional development as well as look at the learning communities that are sprouting organically or intentionally from various social media platforms.  By looking at these phenomena, I’m confident we can plot a more deliberate course–and yet one customized for each individual–for the professional development of our students, our colleagues, and ourselves.

Seven best practices in professional development

1. Professional development must be anchored to learning objectives.  Professional development is not about “training” or just being polished and well-informed.  A professional within the museum field is someone who can demonstrate knowledge of the field, yes, but also someone who is an experienced and open-minded learner, someone who

• cultivates broad networks within and across institutions,
• communicates well verbally or in writing,
• is a savvy and generous collaborator,
• exhibits an extraordinary degree of resourcefulness, and
• balances critical and creative thinking.

The challenge comes when we try to specify the desired outcomes of these objectives, when we translate them into behavioral objectives on a professional development plan.  These behavioral objectives will vary depending on the individual’s interests, institutional needs, and the size, focus, and scope of the museum.

For example, specific and measurable learning objectives in a year-long professional development plan as stated by an emerging museum professional who is in education at a small textiles museum but who has an interest in moving into curation at some point in the future might include:

• Determine which research emphases textiles are in demand (either at her museum or in the field more broadly), pick one, and read at least six books and exhibition catalogs, as well as multiple recent journal articles, on those textiles and the cultures producing them.
• Contact relevant journal editors and volunteer to write reviews of recent books of interest.
• Establish a collegial, and preferably a mentoring, relationship with an expert textile cleaner or restorer.
• Start a blog that educates laypeople about specific textiles’ origins, significance, and/or conservation.  Curate a resource page of links to, and a bibliography of, materials on the subject.
• Attend a museum conference that textiles specialists are likely to attend.
• Join relevant associations or research groups in the museum field or textile industry.
• Research undergraduate courses and/or graduate programs that offer hands-on experience with textiles.

2. Conversations are essential to professional development. If you’re working at a small museum, you may find yourself without many people to talk to about what you’re working on. So, for example, if you’re a museum educator who is looking to find more thoughtful methods to interpret a new exhibition, you should be talking to someone who has interpreted an exhibit in a way that intrigued or inspired you, and engaging with the teachers who will be bringing their students to the museum. These aren’t just sound practices in exhibition interpretation; they’re opportunities for you to learn more about what’s going on in other museums and what teachers feel their students aren’t able to get from a traditional classroom experience.

3. Effective professional development stimulates more creative and critical thinking.  By critical thinking, I mean analytical thinking, the ability to break down a scenario or information into its constituent parts and immerse oneself in studying and critiquing the details. By creative thinking, I mean synthesizing information from diverse sources to create something new and interesting. That means, of course, that the best professional development opportunities offer specific case studies for participants to study and address as well as particular problems for them to solve.

4. Professional development allows individuals to create their own networks by introducing them to network nodes in their areas of interest.  A node is someone who is well-connected in their field or across disciplines or genres of museum participation. We all know people like this in our own workplaces, the people with 500 Facebook friends or 2,000 authentic followers on Twitter. These nodes draw on the expertise of their networks with a simple query via Twitter, blog, or e-mail, and connect individuals with one another.

5. The best professional development has both online and face-to-face components. Professional development is local and national and international. Museums should pool resources and collaborate with other institutions in their region for the mutual improvement of their staff members. We see this beginning to happen with the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership’s formation of the Balboa Park Learning Institute. Here’s a description of the project from the IMLS website:

The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, a collaborative organization comprising 24 diverse museums and cultural institutions in San Diego, will establish the Balboa Park Learning Institute (BPLI).  Over the three year project period, BPLI will design a professional development program targeted to the 2,500 professional staff members, 500 trustees, and 7,000 volunteer staff members in the park’s museums.  As BPLI expands, the classes will be made available to museum colleagues and volunteers outside the park. BPLI will develop and present 66 workshops to build knowledge and skills in core museum competencies. Professional evaluation and assessment throughout the
project will prioritize learning needs and refine program delivery techniques. Three symposia will also be offered, bringing together
staff and volunteers from park institutions and beyond to learn about and discuss best practices in museum management and leadership.

Workshops and symposia should emphasize not just content coverage but conversations and connection. These connections and conversations can continue in an online forum, either one specifically set up to further the conversations started at the specific event or a more common tool like Twitter or Flickr.

The platform you choose is important. For example, in my experience, people aren’t going to contribute to a wiki set up for a one-time event, but they might visit a site that aggregates filtered content from their individual Twitter streams or blog feeds. (Select and promote a hashtag (e.g. #aam09) that people can use in their tweets or a tag to use in Flickr and on blogs.) If you have an ongoing project, a group blog or wiki (see, for example, the Smithsonian’s Web and New Media Strategy wiki) might be a better place for everyone to contribute. Or, you might partner with a forum like Museum Professionals to expand the learning that takes place at your professional development events beyond your institution(s) and encourage your participants to engage with professionals from outside your institution.

6. Professional development should be viral. In addition to finding a space for conversations to take place via forums, photo streams, or microblogging, arange in advance with museum blogs to have your staff write about your professional development event in guest posts on others’ blogs. In this way diverse but informed voices can join the conversation.

Similarly, if you missed a conference–say, the American Association of Museums conference or Museums and the Web–be sure to search Twitter for the appropriate hashtag, for example the 2009 AAM hashtag, #aam09. In such conference microblogging streams, you’ll find a wealth of information about what’s going on at the conference, links to conference content, and discussions taking place among attendees–which you should feel free to join in, even if you aren’t at the conference. Many times I’ve been at conferences where the conversations were enriched by people “attending” remotely via Twitter.

7. The best professional development makes space for evaluation. Let’s look back at our hypothetical emerging museum textiles professional in #1.  How shall we go about evaluating the professional’s success in meeting her objectives?  Measuring collegiality, for example, is difficult.  This is a huge topic to address here, but you can expect to see it addressed in a future log post or in one of my museum professional development newsletters.

Ready for more professional development recommendations? Part II of this post, which will focus on social media, is coming soon.

Those of you who know me well know that my husband is an all-around, old-time, self-described “newspaperman.”  He’s done writing, editing, photography, graphic design, web design, telepimping (coordinating a newspaper’s classified-ad and voicemail-based dating service), and anything having to do with “putting the paper to bed”—that is, getting it to the printer.  And in fact, we met ten years ago when I was (briefly) a reporter and he was production manager of a thriving community newspaper.  So there’s a special place in my heart for the American newspaper, and especially the small, independent, scrappy community newspaper.

But there’s also a place in my heart for—and a good deal of my brain dedicated to—museums of all stripes.  And since both museums and newspapers are community institutions that aim to inform, advise, and entertain, there are some lessons—cautionary tales, really—museums can learn from the death spiral of newspapers.  Much of what I say here is basic business common sense, but the decline of the newspaper industry gives us an opportunity to check in with our institutions and brainstorm new opportunities.  Here, then, is my advice:

1. Even in a new media age, don’t water down your original product. For newspapers, the crumbling of their product began several years ago with newspapers trimming the width of their pages, and then the decline snowballed with fewer comic strips and stock listings, consolidation of sections (e.g. business with regional or metropolitan sections), then the removal of certain sections on some days of the week (e.g. no more features sections—bye-bye, Home & Garden—on Tuesdays).  It’s been a death spiral: advertising declined; printing and paper costs rose; newspapers decreased in breadth and depth (literally and metaphorically); people unsubscribed; advertisers saw smaller circulation numbers and pulled their ads; repeat cycle.  Now, whether this product needs to be delivered on paper is debatable, but newspapers needed to find a way to get their content—in whatever form—in front of people without decreasing its quantity or quality.  Don’t let the apparent value of your product decline, even if that product morphs into a new medium.  Remember, “rich media” doesn’t guarantee an enriching experience.

For museums, this means thinking not just about mission, but about what products exactly your primary audience enjoys.  Hands-on exhibits?  Outreach programs?  Tours of a garden or arboretum?  Classes?  Historical reenactment?  In an economic downturn, museum visitorship frequently increases.  Which of these programs will you expand, and how will you know which to increase?  What opportunities will people have to continue their experience and learning after their visit?  As you ask yourself what to build upon, consider this reflection on newspapers from the American Journalism Review:

One of the rules of thumb for coping with substitute technology is to narrow your focus to the area that is the least vulnerable to substitution. Michael Porter included it in his list of six strategies in his book “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.” The railroads survived the threat from trucks on Interstate highways and airlines by focusing on the one thing they could still do better: moving bulk cargo across long distances.

What service supplied by newspapers is the least vulnerable?

I still believe that a newspaper’s most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence. It gains this influence by being the trusted source for locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs. This influence makes it more attractive to advertisers.

By news, I don’t mean stenographic coverage of public meetings, channeling press releases or listing unanalyzed collections of facts. The old hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Now that information is so plentiful, we don’t need new information so much as help in processing what’s already available. Just as the development of modern agriculture led to a demand for varieties of processed food, the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it.

Replace “newspapers” and “journalism” with “museums” and “exhibition development,” and you have some new food for thought.

2. Keep your product in front of your customers. Make “getting together” with your customers at regular intervals a habit. (For newspapers, this meant daily subscribers and the occasional Sunday-only subscribers.)  Make your product or service a sensory experience, and join it with others.  Newspaper readers heard the shifting of pages, felt the flutter of air on their faces as they flung a section open at arm’s length, felt ink dry out the skin on their fingertips, smelled that distinctive “newsprint” scent.  Many people associated newspapers with the taste of coffee or orange juice, the comfort of toast, the rocking of the train or subway, the feel of cold bare feet on the driveway.

How is your museum providing a sensory experience?  How are you going beyond vision and hearing as sources of input?  And with what do your visitors associate your museum—by which I mean things they can’t get from your website?  Think about the smell of redwood trees at the trailhead near your museum, the rush of adrenaline at the moment they first step from the Metro escalator onto the Washington, D.C. Mall to find themselves surrounded by Smithsonian museums, the surprisingly pleasing smell of tar once it’s recontextualized via the La Brea Tar Pits, the occasional gross-out factor of scientists dissecting or prepping oozing specimens in a lab within view of the exhibit floor.

If you do want more visitors to your web site, don’t just tell them what goes on at the museum by offering a calendar of events or a summary of exhibits and experiences.  Instead, share your collections.  Give visitors a taste and encourage them to come see the real thing.

3. If you’re a small museum, don’t aim to be too big.  Instead, embrace the local and hyperlocal. The smaller a geographic area your museum serves, the broader the swath of the population it can serve.  Children’s museums and science centers may need to serve several cities, and their clientele usually age out of their offerings.  Remember: your niche need not be demographic; it can be geographic.  A much smaller museum can focus on one city and surrounding towns, yet provide experiences for a more diverse demographic, including, for example, seniors and new moms whose kids aren’t yet old enough to enjoy the museum. Newspapers that have remained competitive serve all readers.  They haven’t just chased the young in hopes of cultivating a new generation of subscribers to the print edition.  In addition, the most successful newspapers had more female readers than male, even though they didn’t see themselves as targeting women consumers.

Is what’s on your exhibition floor of interest to your visitors because it’s generally interesting, or because it’s locally interesting?  Consider opportunities for furthering civic discourse.  If your town has for years been up in arms over what to do with traffic on one of its main thoroughfares, then your institution should be, depending on its type of museum:

• creating exhibitions with information about traffic engineering and giving visitors opportunities to practice individual and collaborative decision-making.
• telling the history of the street and how the surrounding neighborhoods have evolved, including collecting stories from current and former residents.
• hosting public forums or town hall meetings about the street in question.
• having an arts competition (with (donated) prize breakdowns by age bracket and a special section for professional planners and landscape architects) to craft a new vision of the street in whatever media makes sense (paint, pencil, model, multimedia).

4a. Consider equity of pay and opportunity. At the big newspapers, the investigative reporters and top columnists make a good salary.  Not so much at the smaller papers.  At the (very profitable) community newspaper where I worked in 1999, my starting salary as a journalist was $22,000—and I had an M.A. in English/writing and plenty of clips already to my name—and I didn’t get a day of vacation until I had worked there for a year, and then I only received 5 days each year.  We worked holidays and didn’t have a sick day policy—basically, you went home if you were throwing up in the storage area, er, newsroom.  Our contracts (illegally, I suppose) forbade us from discussing salaries, but I suspect the features editor, who had been there many years, didn’t quite make $40,000.  Mr. MB, who had years of experience but only a high-school education, made upwards of $50,000, and as production manager he received a bonus every time the paper went over a set number of pages because it meant he had to do extra work.  The reporters, who had to write stories to fill the space around the extra ads sold that week, didn’t get any additional pay on the many weeks the newspaper grew.  But you know who was really making buck?  The salespeople.  Some of the display ad folks and at least one of the classified people were rumored to be making six figures.  These folks were investing in additional real estate in Southern California.  Me, I was living with my parents.

Yes, I was the new kid on the block, but I’ve seen this inequity in the ratio of labor to pay in many newspapers.  It’s why young people don’t stick with reporting for community newspapers; they can’t afford it.  Why write articles about parking enforcement for the local paper when I can get another 8-5 job that pays far better, and then blog in the evenings and weekends about stuff I really care about?  No, I’m not writing hard-hitting investigative pieces, but nor was I doing so for my community paper.  So:

4b. If your museum has a lot of turnover in educators and other front-line personnel, ask why. Those kinds of jobs (I’ve had ‘em) are repetitive and tend not to pay very well, so there’s a high rate of burnout.  If you can’t afford to pay your educators and other customer-service employees more, find other perks to give them, such as more flexible schedules, a wider choice of health insurance plans, or the opportunity to work on projects that stretch their knowledge and challenge them, such as writing exhibition labels, brainstorming possibilities for grants, and developing new programs.  Even though I didn’t get much of a bump in pay or resources when I moved from education to exhibit development, the new challenges (e.g. producing a hands-on, inquiry-based, 1,200 square-foot exhibit with a materials budget of $100) and opportunities (getting to work with new tools and think in different ways about audiences) meant I was happy to stay on staff.

Today I work with graduate students who have committed themselves to museum careers.  They’re required to work in museums prior to being accepted to the program, they work for museums while they’re in the program, and they get pretty good placements when they graduate.  But they’re entry- to mid-level museum staff in their 20s and 30s (and, less frequently, 40s and 50s and 60s), and they’re tired all. the. time.  They love the missions of their institutions, but they crave challenges beyond their day-to-day duties.  Give them a chance to impress you by dropping an unexpected, interesting challenge in their laps.  You may be repaid handsomely.  One of my students recently wrote to me asking how much credit she should ask for—and how she should ask for it—as the very large museum for which she works plagiarizes from her thesis in the process of revising its business model.  These young folks (by which I mean people my age! have HUGE ideas to contribute.  I remember being among young museum staffers tossing out really great ideas (IMHO) at staff meetings, only to see the institution take an opposite tack and fail in some significant, programmatic way.  This was particularly true when development people pulled together grant and foundation proposals without consulting front-line educators or program evaluators.

5a. Have multiple revenue streams. Craiglist and Monster.com decimated classified advertising in most categories that had previously been published in newspapers: items for sale, job postings, people-seeking-people ads, etc.  Although admissions may rise slightly during a recession, economic depressions do make museums think hard about revenue beyond the gala fundraiser, the grant, and children’s birthday parties.  Look at your mission and see what products and services you can provide to your community—and beyond—that meet an unfulfilled need.

Find new streams of revenue instead.  I’ll elaborate on some of these in the next section.

5b. Beg, borrow, and steal alternative business models. Changing your business model doesn’t have to mean compromising your mission; it does mean being more flexible and creative in the ways you finance it.  And it doesn’t mean doing the obvious thing.  For example, many paid-subscription papers are considering moving to an online-only subscription- or advertising-based model, or to online articles supported by micropayments. Yet many of the newspapers that are best weathering the economic storm are actually free weekly, hyperlocal papers.  For example, the newspaper company where my husband and I met had two papers: one was delivered to doorsteps in a high-income zip code within a large city, and the other, offered on newsstands, provided news of interest to downtown politicos and businesspeople.  Advertisers in these publications have a very good idea of who’s reading these papers.

Building on these ideas of niche audiences:

• Offer free admission to specific target audiences, sponsored (via ads in e-mails, flyers, and on site) by advertisers relevant to the specific audience. (Caution: I’ve seen display ads in senior newspapers.  They can be very depressing and prone to stereotyping.  Select your advertising partners carefully.)
• If some of your staff have expertise they might offer others in your community, rent them out for a few hours at a time or by the small project at a higher-than-their-usual rate  to businesses, universities, and other nonprofits.  Chances are there’s someone on your staff who knows quite a bit about database management, grant writing, cultivating the lucrative family market, new media, or partnering with other organizations to increase revenue—all high-value skills that are in demand.
• Organize niche conferences in a field related to your museum’s content or location. Bring in sponsors and charge admission. A hands-on children’s museum might host a conference—complete with keynote speakers and submitted panels—on any number of topics, including engaging gifted children in an era of high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind or making learning accessible, inside the museum and out, to children (or anyone else) with disabilities.  A community-facing art museum might put together a conference on art therapy, and a history museum with a newly discovered artifact related to Abraham Lincoln might host a symposium on Lincoln combined with a conference for Lincoln enthusiasts.  Thanks in part to web platforms that handle registration and billing, conferences don’t have to be a nightmare to organize, especially if everyone in your organization pitches in.  (Check out this testimonial about conferences from NewWest:  “Everything on the Website is free, but we have about 1,000 people who pay $150 or $300 or $500 a year for their NewWest experience. This experience comes through conferences and events, which have been a major revenue source and an excellent promotional vehicle for our site. The conferences are content-driven – programming a conference is in many ways very similar to editing a magazine – and thus we see it as part-and-parcel of the journalistic mission, not a distracting commercial add-on. If anything, people like conferences even more when they spend so much time interacting via a computer screen. Conference attendees are our loyal subscribers, and they pay a lot for our content.”)
• Create children’s workbooks to accompany your exhibition, but make sure they’re stand-alone, too.  Offer them as paid downloads or in print versions in your museum store.  Many museums already create pre- and post-visit activities for teachers, so why not expand on these and offer them to visitors (and non-visitors!) instead?
• Make your content available at services like CafePress and Zazzle.  I’ve seen a lot of cool material culture and ephemera I’d love to have printed onto a poster on high-quality paper like the premium posters created with UV-resistant archival inks printed on heavy paper.  Offer links directly from key artifacts to these services, and set up a storefront at each of these services as well.

6. Don’t ignore or dismiss the blogosphere. Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 is packed with fabulous ideas that I’m confident will drive museums over the next decade. Museum Audience Insight offers just what it promises–thoughtful insights on museum visitors. The informatics folks blogging at conference.archimuse.com also point to new developments that can serve as inspiration or case studies for your own museum’s evolution.  PreservationNation keeps museum folks up to date with the latest developments in historic preservation. Signtific is another new source of inspiration on engagement and participation.

What are your thoughts?  What else can museums learn from the decline (or relative success) of newspapers?

Last week the “digilluminati” gathered in Washington, D.C. for an invitation-only gathering of minds dubbed “Smithsonian 2.0.” If you think the word “museum” denotes an institution that concerns itself only with the past, you’re in for a pleasant surprise because many museums the world over have been plunging into the social media waters to extend their learning (and, OK, marketing) opportunities. When an institution as large as the Smithsonian jumps into the 2.0 pool, you can expect there will be more waves than ripples.

According to the event’s website, the two-day Smithsonian 2.0 event explored

how to make SI collections, educational resources, and staff more accessible, engaging, and useful to younger generations (teenage through college students) who will largely experience them digitally. Over 30 creative people from the web and new media world [met] with 30 Smithsonian staff members to generate a vision of what a digital Smithsonian might be like in the years ahead.

The Smithsonian 2.0 blog provides a glimpse into the presentations and conversations at the event. I especially like this to-do list created for the Smithsonian by Bruce Wyman of the Denver Art Museum. There’s nothing on the list that will be particularly revelatory for social media experts or those who read museum + tech blogs like Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0, Seb Chan’s fresh + new(er) blog for the Powerhouse Museum, or conference.archimuse.com, but it’s useful to see all these ideas and tips articulated in one place that I suspect will be read by museum folks from around the country and the world.

Another good source of information about the event is this post on Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog. (Tip: Don’t skip the comments on this post.) Cohen’s dissection of the event–and the (virtual) place the Smithsonian finds itself–is thoughtful. I’m going to quote him at length here because I think what he’s saying bears repeating:

Given my background in mathematics, I began to think of Smithsonian 2.0 as existing between Smithsonian 1.1 and Smithsonian 2.9. That is, implicit in “Smithsonian 2.0? were some incremental moves forward that could be done cheaply and quickly—Smithsonian 1.1—and a very large, expensive, complex project that would lead Smithsonian into Web 2.0 and beyond—Smithsonian 2.9. I believe both of these models can be instructive to institutions beyond the Smithsonian, whether large or small.

Smithsonian 1.1 would involve a much more aggressive use of social media and technology that’s already out there, to begin to take many small steps and make many small experiments using what is currently available. The Smithsonian has already done some of this, of course: the National Museum of American History has a blog, SI has a small presence on Flickr Commons, and museums have begun to tweet.

But these are relatively scattered, uncoordinated attempts, frequently done by younger, tech-savvy SI staffers in their spare time. The Smithsonian should be doing much, much more of this. For instance, given their expertise and excitement about SI’s holdings, it seemed clear to the digerati that every curator should have a blog, even if infrequently used, to recount tales of objects. While visiting the Museum of American History’s vaults, it was clear that a huge audience would subscribe to a weekly or daily video podcast that covered incredible treasures that rarely see the light of day, such as Abraham Lincoln’s handball, or what the Smithsonian just collected and is preserving from the inauguration of Barack Obama.

jtrant made a very insightful comment in response to this post. In part:

there are many stories and many groups wanting to tell them. rather than try to institutionalize diversity, museums need to enable it.

besides, if what my research for steve.museum shows is true, museums *can’t* do this for people, because they don’t think like the general public. when i compared popular tags to museum documentation, more than 80% of the terms were new… and the vast majority of those terms – again over 80% – were considered ‘useful’ by museum professional staff.

public and professional interpretations can and will co-exist… and SI 2.0 is happening outside the Smithsonian as we speak on flickr, facebook and in all the other places people are creating and curating their own culture. semiotic democracy is with us. it may be that the choice is whether museums participate with the people rather than the other way ’round.

You can also learn more about the tensions expressed and explored at the event by listening to Episode 37 of Digital Campus, which, among other topics, takes a look at “the cultural challenge of squaring the curator’s focus on the actual, authentic object with the free-for-all, non-hierarchical nature of the web.”

Nina Simon was surprised when she read the list of people invited to the event:

Do you have any sense of whether Smithsonian is tapping “digerati” of the museum field, like Shelley Bernstein, Seb Chan, Gail Durbin, etc. for advice and guidance? I find it strange that they invited the VP of Target.com but not the heads of technology from large, public museums doing innovative work in this direction already. I was also interested to see how many people came from industry and academia, and how few from the more civic, cultural side of Web 2.0 (I’m thinking of people like Tara Hunt, folks behind MyBarackObama, etc.). Was there a heavy “new business model” focus or was this about delivering on core mission in the 21st century?

Beth Harris was disappointed that women were underrepresented at the event:

I wondered how the “digerati” were chosen. Having recently moved from higher education, to a position as Director of Digital Learning at the Museum of Modern Art, I was disappointed to see that 80% of the guests were men, especially when so many women are doing such great work in this particular area, and in the wider arena of theorizing about technology and culture generally. What strikes me as remarkable is how little the imbalance at the event has been remarked on (I twittered about this a few days ago and got a few responses).

Regardless of who was there and who should have been, It’s time for the Smithsonian to be thinking about more outreach to and collaboration with potential supporters; after all, last week on the Today show on NBC, Bill Kristol specifically singled out the Smithsonian as a pork expenditure that didn’t belong in the stimulus package.

It’s worth taking a look at what the Smithsonian is already doing. It’s no stranger to the web, as its Facebook page demonstrates with its links to 13 Smithsonian blogs, photos on Flickr, Twitter streams, and 17 Smithsonian-affiliated podcasts. These podcasts and blogs make curatorial insights more accessible to everyday folks, but they aren’t, as jtrant points out above, user-generated, remixed, or crowdsourced.

What do you think a crowdsourced Smithsonian would look like? The Smithsonian’s museums, after all, belong to the American people–how do you see people participating? Via steve.museum, the museum social tagging project, once the Smithsonian digitizes its 137 million objects? By creating guerrilla audio tours of the institutions? How would you remix the Smithsonian? And in so doing, would you differentiate between contributions by curators, lay experts, and Joe the Internet Surfer, as museum professional Lisa hopes?