Schools and Museums: Goals for Students

This week, I am beginning the process of reflecting on the past 25 posts about field trips. In this post, I am interested in goals and value: How do the many contributors to Museum Questions answer the question, “Why should school groups visit museums?” What do their answers tell us about the current state of museums, museum education, and school field trips?

To the extent that there is consensus around anything in the “Schools and Museums” posts, it is that museums need to have clear goals for school programs. Teachers require clear purpose. First-grade teacher Meghan Everette said, “Field trips got a bad rap because they were just fun outings … there wasn’t any purpose in it.” And education experts emphasize the importance of clear outcomes and good program design: Learning scientist Kylie Pepper noted, “We all have goals, and it is important to make these goals explicit. The more we simplify and understand what we are reaching for, the more we can think about designing toward those end games.”

What do we mean by goal, or purpose? These words (along with the word “outcome” and “benefit”) are often used interchangeably in the museum education field to describe what visitors or participants gain during the course of an experience. When thinking about field trip design and the gains we promise schools and teachers, it is essential to think about what we want for all students. An individual student might leave with a burning curiosity about dinosaurs, or an interest in becoming a curator, or the determination to sign up for a sculpture class (and Daniel Willingham describes this important aspect of well-designed field trips, as well as how to further this impact). But when we talk about the goals (or purposes, outcomes, benefits) of field trips we are talking about the collective ‘why.’ Why should students visit museums? Why are field trips of value for school groups?

It turns out that museum educators have a wide range of lofty ideas about the value of field trips for students. Six ideas gleaned from blog posts are listed below; the names in parenthesis refer to the educators who shared these ideas, and link back to their posts:

  • UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD: Students will understand where the world around them comes from (David); students will question the world around them and the decisions people make (Andrea);students will learn about the community in which they live (Elisabeth);
  • ASKING QUESTIONS: Students will know how to ask questions about the past, in order to contribute to a functioning democracy and become an active participant in the world (David).
  • SELF-UNDERSTANDING: Students will understand themselves better (Andrea); students will access and feel ownership of a “third space” in which students are free to be themselves (Ben); students will find role models (David).
  • CRITICAL THINKING: Students will practice critical thinking skills (Claire); students will process ideas and make connections to other knowledge (Paula); students will think about abstract ideas (Anna).
  • INTERPERSONAL SKILLS: Students will practice or learn interpersonal skills such as tolerance and empathy (Anne); students will learn how to articulate experiences and listen to others (Brian H.);
  • INDEPENDENT MUSEUM VISITORS: Students will learn how to be independent visitors to museums (Jackie; notably, a number of people commented on this post supporting the importance of this goal).

What do these goals tell us?

We primarily see field trips as developing transferable skills.

Four of these six goals are about honing theoretically transferable skills – question-posing, critical thinking, interpersonal skills, and the ability to visit a museum independently. We see museums as places in which students can learn to think and feel independently.

Assuming that museums effectively teach one or more of these skills within the museum environment, will they really transfer to other environments? We know very little about this. A few studies have been done: Mariana Adams, Susan Foutz, Jessica Luke, and Jill Stein, with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum showed that critical thinking learned in a school program transferred to the students independent experience in a museum. Randi Korn & Associates and the Guggenheim Museum demonstrated that critical thinking skills learned in classroom-based discussions about art transferred to discussions about literary texts. But in general, experts question the likelihood of transfer, noting that it is very difficult to achieve and that it is most likely to happen with explicit program design (see, for example, Hetland and Winner, 2004; Catterall, Critical Links, 2002 – in particular note pages 151-7; Perkins and Salomon,1992).

Students participating in a program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Students participating in a program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

We privilege understanding over knowledge. 

Traditionally, education goals are phrased as what students will know, understand, or be able to do after (and because of) a lesson. There is very little about “knowing” in the goals listed above; rather, educators want students to understand themselves or the world, and to be able to think critically, ask questions, relate to others, and visit museums.

It is notable that museums in the 21st century are not committed to teaching visitors – or at least not school groups – about the art history, history, or science that drive collections and exhibitions. Ben Garcia organized the Museum of Man’s exhibition “Monsters,” which focuses on where images and ideas about monsters come from, and how they spread; however, Ben’s goal for field trips is self-understanding rather than anthropological knowledge.The Metropolitan Museum may invest a great deal of money and effort into an exhibition about medieval tapestries or Cezanne’s images of his wife, but field trips are not framed around helping students to understand these topics. Rather – at least in the eyes of David Bowles, who plays a key role in training educators and shaping tours – they are about posing questions and understanding the world.

The rejection of content knowledge as a goal for field trips evidences what Jay Rounds describes as paradigm shifts. When museums were first founded, they were situated in very different contexts than 21st century society. But these shifts are slow and difficult, and – argues Rounds – we are in the middle of one now. So on the one hand, we believe that museums collect in order to organize and sort the world, and that they are institutions which generate greater understanding of this world through disciplinary research. But on the other hand, 21st century museums, and in particular contemporary museum educators, value individual response over disciplinary expertise.

In a recent National Art Education Association Museum Education Division Peer 2 Peer “hangout” on the topic of readings for training staff to lead tours, one person asked about whether inquiry-based philosophies were shared by co-workers institution-wide. This question was greeted with a few laughs and – it seemed – the general consensus that educators’ goals for visitors are generally not shared across other departments. This will come as no surprise to us. But it is important to note, because there are two implications:

1. The broad and disparate list of understandings that we may (or may not) be teaching make it difficult to effectively advocate for these goals within our museums. Ongoing conversations about these goals, real research into whether and when they are possible, and why and whether they are important to different museums, might help us to better understand and advocate for certain visitor outcomes.

2. Because departmental goals are at odds with each other, there is often a disparity between exhibition design and program design. This may compromise program effectiveness and clarity of messages about value for the visitor.

Exhibition of tapestries on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014
Exhibition of tapestries on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014

We don’t actually care about the school curriculum.

Only one interviewee – teacher Brian Smith – suggested that the goal for field trips was to support the school curriculum. Anna Cutler very clearly articulated the concern that supporting the school curriculum was antithetical to the larger vision of most museums: “If your purpose as an organization is to amplify and provide for the curriculum, then invite schools to do that. But I don’t think most cultural institutions are set up to do that – they are set up to invite broader thinking in the world.” Clearly, however, many school districts require museums to articulate how field trips support curriculum standards. Aligning the field trip with the curriculum is thus a communications issue: it falls (or should fall) into the category of marketing rather than program design. Cindy Foley and Caitlin Lynch, from the Columbus Museum of Art, described the relationship of a multi-visit program to the curriculum: “While I’m sure everything could be mapped to standards, that was not our intention and we did not allow that to interfere with the direction of our work.” That “mapping” – articulating how a field trip can support the core curriculum or school standards – is an interesting exercise in understanding points of convergence between school and museum goals. But goal-setting is something different: It is the process of understanding, articulating, and designing programs to ensure that students are learning something of value, as defined by the museum.

The study shared by Jeanne Hoel, which surveyed 66 art museums, found that almost all museums deemed supporting Common Core learning outcomes as a priority. This is an indicator that museums are more committed to ensuring that schools will book field trips than they are to identifying their own priorities. I don’t mean to suggest that marketing is unimportant – just that it should be understood as marketing, and not be used to guide program design or evaluation.

Screen shot from a video explaining the common core, at http://www.corestandards.org/other-resources/statements-of-support/
Screen shot from a video explaining the common core, at
http://www.corestandards.org/other-resources/statements-of-support/.

Back to you, dear reader

Are the 25 contributors to this series representative of the diversity of views held by museum educators, teachers, and experts in related fields? Probably not, although I hope it’s a good start.

I would like to turn this question back to the readers of Museum Questions. Are the goals listed above useful? Do they capture the primary reasons you feel people do or should visit museums? Are there any that you feel are particularly important? Are any missing? As a field, are there two or three rationales for visiting museums that we can advocate for more broadly?

Equally important are the implications for these goals. An upcoming post will look at the strategies suggested by blog contributors, and how they align with goals. If you accept these as our goals, how should our school visits look? What should the experience of school visitors to the museum be like, and how can we achieve this?

But will YOU be here? An argument for tours that encourage life-long museum-going

This is the fifth guest post in the Schools and Museums series. Jackie Delamatre has been a museum educator for over a decade. Until this fall, she was an educator at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. She recently moved to Providence, RI where she is an educator at the RISD Museum. She also writes teacher curricula for the Guggenheim and the International Center of Photography.

My own comments are in italics at the end of the post.

 

Jackie Delamatre

Imagine a school trip to a library. Students are ushered in, told the rules, and then read three pre-selected books. Any questions unrelated to those books are answered perfunctorily. It is made clear that the focus should be on those three books rather than the library as a whole. The books are all related (perhaps only tangentially) to what students are learning in school.

Does this seem like a successful library trip?

Students have not learned what a library can be for them, how they can use a library, or how they could approach the space on a return visit. Students have not experienced the joy, surprise, and discovery of looking for and checking out a book that appeals to and interests them. No one has even modeled how to do this. Libraries, for them, are now places where people read them books and conduct conversations in a group about the books. Why return? The experience cannot be replicated on their own.

Candida Hofer, Trinity College Library
Candida Höfer, Trinity College Library Dublin I, 2004

 

In a typical art museum tour, students, brimming with excitement, enter this new and unusual space. Many have never set foot in an art museum before. Many have never even seen an artwork up close. The space itself raises hundreds of questions for them:

Where do you get these artworks? How do you get them in here? How do you hang them? What would happen if I touched an artwork? What did the artists use to make them? How long did it take to make? Are they real? Is that the frame the artist chose? How much do these cost? Why is this considered art when I could do this myself? Can I go to the gift shop? When and where do we eat? When can I go to the bathroom? If I came back, would you (the educator) be here?

Many of these questions go unanswered. But what if we refocused? What if the primary goal of a museum visit were to foster an understanding of, appreciation for, and techniques for being future visitors in a museum?

Why are we replicating the teacher-directed nature of most classrooms in informal learning institutions?

What if we left space, and designed lessons, in order to foster the natural questions that students bring to the museum?

Many museums place curricular connections high on their list of goals for school visits. We worry that teachers need to justify their field trips to administrators by citing these connections. I have talked to hundreds of teachers before their school visits and in my experience, the majority of teachers do not want or need to shoehorn a connection to their curriculum into the visit. Instead, they most often cite the desire for their students to be “exposed” to the museum. On the face of it, “exposure” sounds quite shallow. I imagine flipping a slide on for a couple seconds and saying how happy I am I have “exposed” students to that artwork. But, in truth, I think teachers hope that their students will visit the museum and see that it is a welcoming, accessible space that they can return to independently or with friends or family, a space that they now have the tools to explore with or without guides, a space where they can contemplate not just art but their lives, history, spirituality, community, social justice, and political issues, to name just a few.

But how will students ever feel they can return on their own if our lessons are so educator-directed? So often, at the end of a tour, I have encouraged a student to come visit again and they have turned to me and said: But will you be here? I’d like to think this was because they liked me, but instead, I think it is because the way we lead school tours makes students feel as if they can only visit a museum with a guide. I believe there is a place for educator-directed group conversations on a tour because I think that is one way to help students see how much they can observe and interpret without extensive knowledge of art history. But why are we focusing so much on this one tool?  And why is the primary tool we are using something that cannot be replicated upon return?

What if our primary goal were to encourage students to be life-long visitors? How would that affect our tour design? Perhaps students would be brought into a gallery space, asked to find an artwork they are attracted to, and given one of the following informal learning challenges:

  • Tell a friend why you like or dislike it, or write about why you have this opinion.
  • Tell a friend what you notice about it, or own your own list words to describe it.
  • Sketch the artwork or free-write about it.
  • Let the object launch you into a creative response (i.e. a monologue from the perspective of one of its subjects, a drawing of a more contemporary take on the image).
  • Ask “what if” questions about it (i.e. what if it was a different color or palette, what if it were in a contemporary setting) and talk to a friend about the possible answers.
  • Ask questions about the work to yourself, a friend, or a small group.
  • Read the label and think about which questions it answered for you and which questions still remain. Think about how you can find answers to these questions.

Or perhaps students would be allowed to explore an exhibition or the entire museum on their own and asked to ponder it in these ways:

  • Write as many questions down as you can think of, share them in a small group, pick your group’s most pressing question and ask it of the whole school group
  • Wonder about an exhibition and how it was organized. Wonder about the curatorial choices. Which choices would you have made differently? Debate these choices with a friend.
  • Think about what makes you comfortable here and what creates discomfort. Design a change for the galleries that would increase your comfort.
  • Think about museum roles such as curator, conservator, or exhibition designer. Give students descriptions of these museum roles and ask them to write questions for each person.

Certainly, many of these techniques are already built into the best guided museum tours, but what if they were given more importance? All of these activities involve free choice. They involve independent looking, or looking in pairs or with small groups. They are general techniques, applicable to most objects and museums. They can be replicated independently upon a return to the museum, helping students see that they don’t need us to be there to have a fulfilling experience in the museum.

I am not proposing throwing out educator-directed moments or visual literacy as a tour goal. Instead, I imagine – as one possibility – a tour in which students are given one of the above prompts when they enter the museum. They can work in pairs or independently. Then the group comes together and discusses the experience. What did they discover? What other questions or thoughts did the experience bring up? Next, the group might look together at one artwork in order for students to see how a group conversation can go from observation to interpretation and bring to light so much about an artwork that independent looking alone might leave dark. Next, the group is dispersed again, this time with a choice of independent or pair activities before a final reflection as a larger group. Some students might choose a creative response, others judgment, others pure observation. Or, perhaps, like a Montessori classroom, different activities like this would be set up across the museum for students to choose from. Either way, through these student-directed moments, all will have an experience guided by their own interests and one they could apply on a return trip.

Panini - Picture Gallery

***

Over the past decade, based on teaching hundreds of tours, I have come to believe that certain age groups pose categories of questions. Fourth through sixth graders ask questions about how the museum functions. High school students want to know why something is considered worthy as art and worthy of space in the museum. Understanding these natural, developmentally-specific questions could help us as we design museum experiences for each age.

With this in mind, I propose a call for collaborative action research. Any museum educator who is reading can help – even if you just see one school group in the next few months. Before you have even started your tour, ask your students what questions they have. Write them down along with the group grade level. Share them in the comments to this blog post, or email them to me at jdelamatre–at–gmail.com.

I will compile and analyze the questions. Check back here in a few months for the results. And while you’re at it, look at the questions you have collected and think about how these natural questions might dictate a new approach to school visits – one more consistent with students’ interests. I can’t wait to hear your ideas.

I love this call for collaborative action. So often we think of research as expensive, or intimidating. What Jackie is suggesting is so simple – ask the kids a question, and collect the answers. I hope that many readers will email her about participating.

I also want to call attention to the way in which Jackie is aligning goals and strategies. If we want tours to accomplish X, we must do Y. How much more interesting it is to be intentional about those goals, and creative about how to accomplish them, than to struggle to teach to goals that we are not as committed to! If you have alternate tour strategies that you think would help kids become life-long museum visitors, please share them in the comments below.

 

Status Update: Facebook as a Reflection Tool

The Schools and Museums series has featured a variety of perspectives on what field trips might mean for students. This post, by David Bowles, takes on that question from a slightly different angle, asking what the kids themselves express interest in. David was interviewed for this blog in September. As Assistant Museum Educator for School Programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, David gives occasional tours to school groups. After each tour, he shares a moment from that tour on Facebook. In this post, David mines those posts for what we can learn about field trips from the students themselves.

This essay is cross-posted with Art Museum Teaching, a collaborative online forum for reflecting on issues of teaching, learning, and experimental practice in the field of art museum education. Art Museum Teaching is published and edited by Mike Murawski.

My own comments are in italics at the end of the post.

 

 

david pic

This blog post is about listening and reflection. As a museum educator, my job is to listen. On a good tour, I learn about as much about art from visitors as they learn from me. I also learn something about their lives. But often it seems like these moments evaporate. So for the past two years, I have been posting some of the most indelible teachable moments from my gallery experiences on Facebook.

I limit myself to one moment per tour. I try to stick to the facts, and not interpret the child’s ideas in my own words. I describe the context succinctly, and stick to a few sentences at most. I imagine reflecting on the teaching experience with someone who has never heard of the field of museum education – so no jargon allowed. When it makes sense, I include a visual of the artwork that sparked the teachable moment.

The moments I capture tend to be funny, which is why they make good Facebook posts. But they also highlight important moments of discovery, and often mark pivot points in gallery conversations. I try to focus on what Piaget might have called moments of disequilibrium – those wonderful, maddening moments when you discover for yourself that what you thought was simple, is not.

Here are three such experiences, some thoughts on what I’ve learned about school tours and student visitors along the way, and tips for anyone interested in giving this a try.

 1. Fear of the Unknown

FBPost1

 “A 7th grade student on a tour in the Ancient Egypt galleries this morning pointed out that he would rather be chased by mummies than velociraptors.”

I think the young man’s logic was that mummies chasing him through the Museum were likely to shuffle along slowly, while raptors are nimble pack hunters (as anyone who saw the kitchen scene from the original Jurassic Park can attest). He makes a valid point. This comment sparked a stimulating conversation among the class about fear of the unknown. We sat in the dimly lit gallery surrounded by sarcophagi and other tomb equipment unearthed along the Nile, and other classmates chimed in with their honest reactions to the unfamiliarity of the experience. After several other students also expressed fear, one young lady allowed that she “sort of liked being scared.” I asked her if it felt “safe scary” and she nodded. The young man whose comment started the conversation smiled at her and nodded as well.

These students feel slightly scared by the unknown Egyptian galleries filled with mummies and other ancient artifacts. But they are attracted to the unknown. The unknown in a museum setting, like the unknown in movies, is “safe scary.” For them, what is interesting about this space at the Met is not the connections they can make to their school curriculum, or the comparison between the ancient and the contemporary, but the opportunity to exist temporarily and safely in a space outside of the safety and routine of the everyday.

2. Time Travel

FBPost2

“6th grade student, after discussing a sculpture of the historical Buddha: “So, is the Buddha like the Doctor? Doctor Who I mean.” Mind expanded.”

If you’ve never watched Doctor Who, close this browser and go watch some. The Doctor is an extravagant, brilliant, and charismatic alien who explores the universe trying to help the helpless, ease suffering, and generally leave things better than he found them. His ship, the TARDIS, can travel anywhere in space or time. Since he seems to like Great Britain, he comes to Earth a lot. Coincidentally, the show is produced by the BBC, so the Doctor is invariably British, as are his plucky human companions. The Doctor is a troubled hero, whose views on the universe are often transcendent as well as maddening.

On some level, the young lady who asked me if the Buddha was anything like the Doctor understood that the story of the Buddha, like the story of Doctor Who, is about creating an impossible narrative of characters who can save the world. On another hand, she may have been reaching for a way to connect historical information about the Buddha (i.e. he really existed, he was a prince, he traveled throughout India and Nepal, etc.) with the more incredible aspects of his story (i.e. his description of concepts like samsara and nirvana, his awakening or enlightenment, etc.) She seemed interested in the Buddha not as a representative of another culture but as a superhero, an embodiment of the type of figure that could save the world. In short, I think she saw a role model

3. Love and Marriage

FBPost3

“2nd grade student this morning after hearing that Theseus ditches Ariadne after they escape from the Minotaur: “Well, maybe he was too young for marriage. I mean, you shouldn’t marry someone you just met. You should like, get to know each other first. But it was still mean of him.”

Like the Greek myths that inspired it, this discussion offered an interesting analysis of human behavior. After telling these students the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, I asked students what they thought of the story’s ending. The first flurry of responses focused on abandonment and notions of fairness; everyone agreed that Theseus made a bad choice. Well, nearly everyone. I pushed for dissent, and asked if anyone had another point of view. This young lady had been sitting silently for a while, and when she did speak it was with energy.

On some level she was trying to make Theseus’ decision to abandon Ariadne acceptable. On a deeper level, I wonder if this student, like the young lady who compared the Buddha to the Doctor, was thinking about role models. As you can see in the comments left by my Facebook friends, Disney’s ‘Frozen’ explores these ideas very effectively as well. Whether or not this student had seen the movie (and I suspect she had), it was a powerful reminder to me about making room for respectful dissent when interpreting works of art. Students really absorb the lessons that they learn from movies, so it makes good sense to keep tabs on what those lessons are – and what ambiguities they might offer.

So what patterns have I noticed about kids’ interests at the Met?

1. The Unknown

Many of these conversations involve discovering new frontiers, and the thrill and fear that accompany real, authentic exploration. As long as the fear of the new doesn’t overwhelm the group, it can be very productive if acknowledged. There’s a lot to be said about the transformative power of discomfort; just ask an oyster.

2. Role Models

Humans are social animals; we look to others for tips on how to behave. Many students are searching for role models, and some have found them in fictional characters. These young people are looking for ways to connect these characters and their worlds to the real world around them, and they will do so at the first opportunity.

3. Contemporary Connections

Museum educators often talk about contemporary connections: strategies or concepts that help visitors understand something unfamiliar by tying it to something personally familiar from today. When students initiate their own contemporary connections, they often do so in unpredictable ways that can be surprising, humorous, or subversive. There is something to be said for letting students make their own connections instead of doing it for them. Kids will bring pop culture with them into the museum regardless, so ignoring its power means missing opportunities for authentic discussion.

Keeping up-to-date on popular trends among young learners can really help make genuine connections that make complex ideas accessible. It can also highlight key misunderstandings about objects or the stories objects tell. For example, the idea that you should get to know your future partner well before committing is a very particular approach to marriage, presumably not one endorsed in most ancient societies.

Some Takeaways for Museum Educators

1. Really Listen.

Focus on what students are really saying when they respond to your questions, not just what you think they mean. This is hard. Use the words they use to define academic terms and abstract concepts. If a student’s comment strikes you as snarky or disruptive, lean in to it. Find out more. Let them know you’re interested in their thinking. Give them space to explain. If they don’t want to explain to you, consider asking them to turn and talk with some of their peers. Listen to what you hear, and think about how it connects to your own ideas about the content or lesson.

2. Let students drive the conversation.

My boss sometimes talks about how effective museum educators need to be a ‘Guide on the Side’ rather than a ‘Sage on the Stage,’ and this is vital to effective gallery teaching. Use a light touch to keep the conversation moving. Stay goal-oriented, but don’t get so attached to your goals that you lose sight of the importance of the process of discovery for your participants.

3. Ask for divergent thinking.

Seek out dissenting ideas so that you are encouraging participants to think both deeply and individually. Some works of art open themselves up to a wide range of possible interpretations without ever committing to just one – examples might include many modern and contemporary art objects. Other works of art, like a Gupta period Buddhist sculpture or ancient Roman sarcophagi, have very specific meanings that their makers intended; there are incorrect understandings of some works of art, and that is important for us to acknowledge. Those misunderstandings are often great starting points for real inquiry if you can help students ground their misunderstandings in the visual elements of the artwork! Either way, seeking out divergent thinking empowers students to discover and craft the complexity of interpretation for themselves.

4. Reflective Practice needs others

I think the capacity to reflect in action (while doing something) and on action (after having done it) is an important part of professional practice. Both are hard to do, and both benefit greatly when other people can be sounding boards. I find these status updates help me slow down and think about the choices I’ve made. Better yet, doing so gives me immediate informal feedback.

Give it a try!

 

This post really highlights for me how much we can learn from students – not only about our collections and the world, but about what successful teaching looks like. I will be thinking for quite a while about both role models and “safe scary” in the museum experience.

Another way to learn from students is to interview them. I have had the experience of observing tours, asking educators what they thought students learned, and then interviewing students to find out they did not process any of the information educators hoped for. This type of feedback can be very helpful, if the educator uses it to understand what interested students, and to think better about how to convey the ideas that they wanted to get across.

What is the purpose of a Happy New Year blog post?

Why interrupt regularly scheduled programming to blog a new year’s message? There are three reasons that come to mind:

1. To note a hiatus in posting.

The next new Museum Questions post will be on January 5, 2015. In the meantime, if you need something to read, here are a few older posts that you may have missed:

The Moth: A student perspective on field trips

What do we talk about when we talk about art?

Arts Education Elevator Speech

Norman Rockwell, Vacation's Over
Norman Rockwell, Vacation’s Over

2. To share news and updates.

Museum Questions update: There are two more guests posts in the Schools and Museums series, to be posted the week of January 5th. After that, look for a few analysis posts wrapping up this series. Then posts will likely slow to bi-weekly for a while. But in a few months, look for a new extended exploration – likely on evaluation, gathering feedback, and what makes information useful.

My own update: Beginning on January 5, 2015, I am taking on a new role: Director of the Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum. This museum will open to the public in June 2015. I look forward to exploring questions related to opening a new museum, and to children’s museums more generally, on Museum Questions. (How do you create a culture of access and equity in a new museum? How can we measure success in ways other than visitor numbers and income? What is the role of parents in a children’s museum? What do we mean by play?)

playhouse
Drawing of an exhibit planned for the Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum.

3. To wish everyone a Happy New Year, and best wishes for a wonderful 2015!

 

mark twain quote - blue

Schools and Museums: Interview with Kylie Peppler

Kylie Peppler is Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Director of The Creativity Labs at Indiana University Bloomington. An artist by training, her research focuses on the intersection of arts, new media, and informal learning.

Kylie Peppler

How does your research relate to museums?

I’m a learning scientist, which means I study learning in real world contexts. A lot of the settings I have been looking at are science and children’s museums, spaces that allow for tinkering and play. Kids go to museums because they have an interest in something. I’ve been looking at what kids can learn through these open-ended experiences. What’s important about the museum space is that it allows for social interaction and participation.

One of the issues coming up in this work is that we want to compare the museum experience to a 90-minute classroom experience, and what we are finding is that they are not the same. Different things happen in this change of context: the museum is social, and students are encouraged to move around. In addition, the museum provides a sense of novelty, which we know is important for learning. Also, in the museum, children watch and are inspired by other kids playing around them.

Museum science exhibits place a heavy emphasis on hands-on, novel approaches through play.

What happens if children did not choose to go to the museum – if they are brought there on a field trip? Perhaps on a guided museum tour?

A guided tour is very different than an open-ended experience, which a lot of museums are moving toward. In an open-ended experience, children get to choose what to explore, the order in which they look at things. Choosing how you go about the process of exploring the museum is actually an important form of choice-making.

As for tours – the Exploratorium has studied docent and student interactions, and found that successful docents try to connect what the kids understand to the object and to something else more broadly.  This is “connected learning.”  A good connector will take something that the kid is noticing and connect that to something really large. Docents are tapping their own expertise, but also connecting it back to what the kids know and understand.

What role do you think teachers should play in these visits? Should they be guiding the tours?

Students have a sense of novelty with a museum educator. There are some gifted docents and guides that have a richness of things to share. When I’m traveling with a geologist, and they start interpreting the landscape, all of a sudden I see geology as a transformational subject. It is rare for kids to interact with people in these fields.

The teacher should be encouraged to ask questions, be musing along with the kids. It is valuable for students to see their teacher as a learner, too.

Grinding New Lenses summer program at Depaul University.
A teacher and student engaged in an “e-textiles” project together.

Sometimes it is difficult for teachers to be learners – they are busy with management issues, keeping an eye on students and making sure they behave appropriately.

That is an indicator that something is not working in the tour. Something is not high quality in that environment. In a high quality environment the teacher reports a sense of Zen.

Stress usually comes from designing a program with too many things for students to think about. Is there a way for them to relax? Is there a way to think about personalizing the experience? Often there’s something stressing the kids in a way that should be thought about and redesigned.

A lot of what I do as a learning scientist is I look at the environment and experience, and think about how it can be designed differently. There is often a huge cultural divide that we have to cross, so having a little bit of play-based experience prior to seeing the work can really be helpful. For example, students going to see a James Turrell exhibition might start with flashlights so they can play, become more ready to see the exhibition.

Fine arts museums in general have difficulty in engaging hands-on play. A lot of times this is because we want to preserve the environment. But we forget that kids need some sort of base experience to make sense of what they are going through. The Wallace Foundation was really encouraging this hands-on learning in the New York area, and museums would not take it up, so they moved their work into science museums and after-school centers. Revenue has shifted over time because of this reticence. What we know about high-quality learning is that it needs to be more tangible. You don’t really understand what it means to carve stone until you carve stone. I have seen Native American obsidian blades on display many times, but I didn’t really understand until I tried to carve a blade from obsidian myself.

Carving Obsidian
Using soft hammer percussion to carve obsidian

So good tour design includes a hands-on activity?

The best design is to engage in this hands-on exploration in the classroom before the visit. A teacher could conduct a classroom experience first – kids could make African Masks as a way of understanding mask-making experiences. But it can be part of the museum experience – start the visit in a room where kids can play with stuff. This also allows the museum educator to see the kids’ starting places. It’s a way to get to know the kids. The tour guide can informally interview kids during this process to get a richer context for the tour. And the hands-on experience becomes a reference point, a shared experience, to anchor the tour.

Hands-on experiences after the museum visit still provide value, but they are not as productive. Research shows a 30% gain in learning outcomes if you provide the activity first. Conducting the activity afterwards is still a gain – if you never get the hands-on piece then the experience is not as consequential an experience – but the order of presentation does have a high impact on the learning outcome.

There are a lot of directions, and missteps, a tour can take – too much information, a lot of noise that could be presented to the kids. Which do you actually want to pull out? What are the big ideas that you want to pull across? Which of these threads do I pull on? I’m looking for the threads that actually get at the big ideas. From an educator perspective, it’s important that you know which ones to pull on.

How important is it that these big ideas relate back to the classroom?

Connection is important. This is why we want the teacher to experience it with the students, so they can connect it back to the curriculum. They can see the kinds of questions that are emerging for students.

Here is something we know about high quality parenting: Watching Sesame Street in and of itself not consequential to kids learning. It is consequential if you watch Sesame Street with your parents. Why is that? Because of connected learning – when I travel with my child to another environment, I connect back to it.  It is a way of creating a common language with your kids.

Part of a high quality learning experience is that you have a connector that can continue in that child’s life. It takes the educator to draw those connections. Our research is showing that kids learn things in one context, but have trouble transferring it to another context. Unless we make those connections for the kids, they won’t make them.

What if the teacher is only with half of the class in the museum, and the other half is with a chaperone?

It’s really important that people co-experience things together. What are some quick ways to create that on museum tours? Is there a way to keep the group together? For the teacher to spend half of the time with each group? To bring the groups back together? These are design principals we are thinking about.

What tips do you have for museums in thinking about these design principals and strategies?

There is a great book that I wrote the forward to, by educators from the National Writing Project, called Teachers as Designers; you can see a pdf of the full book here. It starts to reposition the teacher as designer of learning experience. This is what the teacher does – they have an artistry for how they design for each of participants, constantly diagnosing children’s needs and the class as a whole. They lay out the classroom, the order of instruction, the day, the tools and materials. There are all sorts of ways that teachers make conscientious design decisions.

As a learning scientist I decide on what outcomes I value. These are big ways that we know that our programs can be transformative – for example, aesthetic awareness. How do you design for aesthetic awareness? We all have goals, and it is important to make these goals explicit. The more we simplify and understand what we are reaching for, the more we can think about designing toward those end games.

I want to empower your readers to think about themselves as being able to run their own design experiments. I’m going to take two classes and try two different things. What works better and why? I’m going to run an experiment where a docent leads one tour and a teacher leads another. Which do kids like better and why? You can find this out by talking to kids. Also, what do you as an educator prefer? Museum educators are part of the system. Which tour was more manageable, less harried? Keep a log. Create metrics that help you know if you are designing well. Behavior issues can be a metric. So can repeat returns.

A lot of times the education field just doesn’t have enough information. Running formal studies is good, but running small design experiments is really informative.

To Pay or Not to Pay: A 2013-14 Study of Museum Practice

Recently, five museum professionals took it upon themselves to conduct a survey of museums and the issue of paid vs unpaid educators. These intrepid professionals were Jeanne Hoel, The Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; Barbara Bassett, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Sheila McGuire, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and April Oswald, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. Jeanne shared the findings from this study on December 10th, at a National Art Education Association Museum Education Division Peer 2 Peer Google Hangout dedicated to the topic of paid and unpaid museum teaching staff. Jeanne’s full power point presentation is here.

Paid eds and volunteers

Of the 66 museums that responded to the survey, 62% use unpaid educators, 24% use a hybrid model (they work with both paid and volunteer educators), and 14% use all-paid staff. Most museums, then, rely at least partly on volunteers to lead tours.

The study also asked, “What do you want students to take away from their tour experiences?” Below is a chart sharing the student outcomes museums shared, the percent of museums that stated this as an outcome (in parenthesis), and the percentage programs that felt they achieved these goals, separated into paid and unpaid educator programs.

chart - outcomes

 

What is important or interesting in these findings, as relates to the Museum Questions exploration of field trips?

  1. The most commonly reported student outcome for school tours, by far, is teaching common-core related skills. Only 14% of museums have as their goal that students should return on their own.
  2. Museums self-report that they do not always achieve the student outcomes for their programs. In fact, volunteer-led programs (which, including the hybrid models, constitutes 86% of all programs surveyed) succeed at teaching common-core related skills only 63% of the time. This seems to me to be a very low success rate. When looking at success at reaching some of the other stated outcomes, such as encouraging students to return on their own, or having a positive experience with museum personnel, programs score even lower.
  3. Volunteers lead most programs, and volunteers score lower at achieving program goals almost across the board (the exceptions are encouraging return visits and expanding art historical understanding).

When setting out to explore field trips, I posed a number of questions: What do museums offer students in the context of school visits? How do we articulate a benefit that makes sense to teachers and administrators charged with educating children? How do we make these benefits visible? And how do we deliver these programs to school groups in a way that makes sense given the structure of the schools themselves?

Program success is a critical component in the exploration of what museums benefits offer students. This study shows that a large percentage of museums do NOT think that museums are succeeding at offering the intended benefits to students. This leaves museums with three options:

  1. Continue offering a product that fails approximately half the time
  2. Rethink the design of existing programs, in order to better achieve student outcomes
  3. Consider new models, and possibly new outcomes, aligned with what museums want to achieve and possibilities for achieving them.

I welcome thoughts from readers on the implications of these findings, and the options available to museums. If museums are reporting that they often do not achieve stated student outcomes, what should they – and we as a field – do next?

Thanks to Jeanne Hoel for her help with this post.

Schools and Museums: Interview with Anna Cutler

Anna Cutler is the Director of Learning at Tate in the United Kingdom. Before joining Tate Anna was the director of Creative Partnerships Kent, where she was involved with research into learning in the visual arts.

Anna Cutler

 

Why offer school tours?

Students’ horizons have been so concertinaed into one perspective – museums offer an expanded vision of what life could be. Art asks “what if,” and there is almost nowhere in the curriculum to ask that these days.  And field trips are important even if kids are just getting on a bus and talking to each other — research shows that children have five minutes of conversation in a six hour school day (in lesson time). The positive benefits of field trips are really high, given children’s daily trudge through subjects, which are not very exciting to them in my experience and research.

We want to support teachers to extend their ideas and the curriculum content – we don’t want to deliver it or reflect it. If your purpose as an organization is to amplify and provide for the curriculum, then invite schools to do that. But I don’t think most cultural institutions are set up to do that – they are set up to invite broader thinking in the world. We have extraordinary works with an aesthetic and intellectual yield – a rich way of abstract thinking, coupled with an environment that students rarely get, in public, with each other, where they are invited to have dialogue about abstract ideas.

But purpose does matter. If you go with a low-level purpose, you’ll have a low-level experience. If you are going to a museum to do more school, you’ve missed the point. If you are going to reaffirm curriculum, everybody will lose out, because museums offer so much more. And it’s the “so much more” that we should be looking at.

How is the Tate thinking about field trips?

I have this little equation: “time + space” over “content + method” = quality of experience.  The four things that we can change in the galleries, to make them different from schools, are time, space, content, and method.

We have a space called the Tanks, huge amazing spaces where oil used to be held. We realized that in the Tanks we had to do a completely different program for people. So we changed our model, and we’ve done a week of working with schools. Everyone tells me no school will do this – dedicate an entire week to the museum – but it turns out that they are happy to do it.

A class stays with us for a week, and we invite the children to make an educational intervention for the public. One group (in a project entitled Misguided) chose to make a version of a Children’s TV show about the art works on display. By the end of the week they were the most expert people in the building about what was in those galleries, and their film was a fascinating, significant intervention.

One of our questions for the Tanks was, what is an audience? Part of this is thinking about school groups as members of our audience who are alive and kicking and with brains of their own to respond – a group of wonderful, inventive people who have something to share. If you think like that you have extraordinary potential in the museum.

My team are keen on performativity – actions of learning in the galleries that give others ownership of the space. Being with young people in a space and using it differently impacts the public visitors that are there. It shifts the social relations in the space, which is quite interesting.

Misguided class
Students creating the “Misguided” video in Tate galleries.

Do you offer shorter guided experiences as well?

We also do one-and-a-half or two hour workshops. We offer these three days per week, not every day. We try to spend the other two days each week making resources, online materials, things that can extend the experience of schools that visit, and for schools that cannot visit.

What can we do in an hour? Inspire. Offer a really extraordinary experience that students have an emotional reaction to. Teach them how to learn for themselves. What can you do within an hour that invites children to see what questions they need to ask?

I do deeply believe in the process of learning as experience over time. However, I once went to a session on evaluation for one hour with Steve Seidel and I learned more in that hour than I’ve learned in my life about that subject. And I’ve seen a 10 minute Beckett play, which didn’t need to last 90 minutes to be one of the most exceptional things I‘ve ever seen. So it depends what you do in that hour. It would be great to do, wouldn’t it, to see just how little time you really need to make something amazing happen?

We always work with artists now. Ten new artists every year, who work with schools. We now ask visiting schools what they want to get out of the visit. That question is transformative. Then the artist is responsible for taking students to places in the museum where they can explore those ideas.

The Tate is in a very privileged position, in that groups will come even if you do not offer what teachers ask for. What do you see as the implications of this for smaller museums?

We don’t tell teachers, “We don’t do this, we won’t connect to your curriculum.” We tell them what we do offer, which is beyond what teachers can do in the classroom. Which seems to be much more exciting. Teachers who have decided that they are going to bring their students to the museum, who bother to make this happen, are already committed. So why not do something really great?

We have trained staff on the phones, and they talk to every group about what they want. So it’s an incredibly bespoke experience. I respect the fact that this takes time and money and people, but saying this visit will suit the letter of the curriculum – I’m not sure if it does, or if that will get the children back in years to come. In the last year we have seen a huge increase in the percentage of schools that ask for a return visit within the year. In one instance it’s gone from from 22% to 85%. Something seems to be working.

What are the costs of field trips for the museum and the school?

It’s about £1.50 or £2 per student visitor, after everything. It’s not a huge amount of money we have. We have 750 kids visiting a day across sites (most on self-guided tours, but always given resources by Tate).

But it’s a numbers game, isn’t it? Every museum is judged by the number of people coming through. If you have a million kids coming through for a bad experience, is that value for money? The Tate is quite brave to support quality over quantity.

I’m really interested in your question about cost and benefit. Because you would have to work out the cost / benefit for any individual. It costs us millions of pounds for exhibitions serving millions of visitors (sometimes). Why do it? Why provide this opportunity for anyone?

There is an assumption behind the discussion of cost and benefit, that these school subjects have more value than a visit to a museum and that something will be lost or need compensating if they visit. I know that some teachers do feel hacked off when there is a trip that interrupts their lessons – but not all schools feel this way. Some feel that museum visits are a benefit and an important part of children’s broad and holistic learning experience. So it’s about values, as well as what experience you get when you are there.

The Finnish have the least hours at school and do the best academically. I was ill and off school for practically two years just before my exams and passed them all (not brilliantly I grant you). I had to ask what the point of school was. It’s got to be more than passing or failing exams.

So if you are talking about value for money, then you must ask: What are the values that underlie questions of value, learning and culture?

Joint Statement from Museum Bloggers and Colleagues on Ferguson and related events

A few weeks ago, Gretchen Jennings reached out to a number of bloggers to discuss what we could do to address events in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Staten Island. These bloggers, including myself, decided to collaboratively draft a joint statement.

Writing a collaborative statement with people you do not know is challenging. In the end, this document includes one line that prevented me from adding my name as a signatory: “As mediators of culture, all museums should commit to identifying how they can connect to relevant contemporary issues irrespective of collection, focus, or mission.” I personally believe that museums should align all actions with their mission, which should relate to collection or focus. And I think that a connection can be found between any collection and contemporary life, but that these connections need to be carefully considered and developed. 

Despite not including my name below, I am sharing this statement for two reasons. First, I think it is an important statement. Second, I think it noteworthy that this group of museum professionals gathered to create and release a statement. As noted below, “As of now, only the Association of African American Museums has issued a formal statement about the larger issues related to Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. We believe that the silence of other museum organizations sends a message that these issues are the concern only of African Americans and African American Museums. We know that this is not the case.”

Durant - A Museum is political 2
From “What #isamuseum” by artist Sam Durant. Screen shots grabbed without the artist’s permission and with apologies. Add your own answers at http://www.isamuseum.org/

 

The recent series of events, from Ferguson to Cleveland and New York, have created a watershed moment. Things must change. New laws and policies will help, but any movement toward greater cultural and racial understanding and communication must be supported by our country’s cultural and educational infrastructure. Museums are a part of this educational and cultural network. What should be our role(s)?

Schools and other arts organizations are rising to the challenge. University law schools are hosting seminars on Ferguson. Colleges are addressing greater cultural and racial understanding in various courses. National education organizations and individual teachers are developing relevant curriculum resources, including the #FergusonSyllabus project initiated by Dr. Marcia Chatelain. Artists and arts organizations are contributing their spaces and their creative energies. And pop culture icons, from basketball players to rock stars, are making highly visible commentary with their clothes and voices.

Where do museums fit in? Some might say that only museums with specific African American collections have a role, or perhaps only museums situated in the communities where these events have occurred. As mediators of culture, all museums should commit to identifying how they can connect to relevant contemporary issues irrespective of collection, focus, or mission.

We are a community of museum bloggers who write from a variety of perspectives and museum disciplines.  Yet our posts contain similar phrases such as  “21st century museums,” “changing museum paradigms,” “inclusiveness,” “co-curation,” “participatory” and “the museum as forum.”  We believe that strong connections should exist between museums and their communities. Forging those connections means listening and responding to those we serve and those we wish to serve.

There is hardly a community in the U.S. that is untouched by the reverberations emanating from Ferguson and its aftermath. Therefore we believe that museums everywhere should get involved. What should be our role–as institutions that claim to conduct their activities for the public benefit–in the face of ongoing struggles for greater social justice both at the local and national level?

We urge museums to consider these questions by first looking within. Is there equity and diversity in your policy and practice regarding staff, volunteers, and Board members? Are staff members talking about Ferguson and the deeper issues it raises? How do these issues relate to the mission and audience of your museum?  Do you have volunteers? What are they thinking and saying? How can the museum help volunteers and partners address their own questions about race, violence, and community?

We urge museums to look to their communities. Are there civic organizations in your area that are hosting conversations? Could you offer your auditorium as a meeting place? Could your director or other senior staff join local initiatives on this topic? If your museum has not until now been involved in community discussions, you may be met at first with suspicion as to your intentions. But now is a great time to start being involved.

Join with your community in addressing these issues. Museums may offer a unique range of resources and support to civic groups that are hoping to organize workshops or public conversations. Museums may want to use this moment not only to “respond” but also to “invest” in conversations and partnerships that call out inequity and racism and commit to positive change.

We invite you to join us in amplifying this statement. As of now, only the Association of African American Museums has issued a formal statement about the larger issues related to Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. We believe that the silence of other museum organizations sends a message that these issues are the concern only of African Americans and African American Museums. We know that this is not the case. We are seeing in a variety of media – blogs, public statements, and conversations on Twitter and Facebook—that colleagues of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are concerned and are seeking guidance and dialogue in understanding the role of museums regarding these troubling events. We hope that organizations such as the American Alliance of Museums; the Association of Science-Technology Centers; the Association of Children’s Museums; the American Association for State and Local History and others, will join us in acknowledging the connections between our institutions and the social justice issues highlighted by Ferguson and related events.

You can join us by…

  • Posting and sharing this statement on your organization’s website or social media
  • Contributing to and following the Twitter tag #museumsrespondtoFerguson which is growing daily
  • Checking out Art Museum Teaching which has a regularly updated resource, Teaching #Ferguson:  Connecting with Resources
  • Sharing additional resources in the comments
  • Asking your professional organization to respond
  • Checking out the programs at The Missouri History Museum. It has held programs related to Ferguson since August and is planning more for 2015.
  • Looking at the website for International Coalition of  Sites of Conscience. They are developing information on how to conduct community conversations on race.

Participating Bloggers and Colleagues

Gretchen Jennings, Museum Commons
Aletheia Wittman and Rose Paquet Kinsley, The Incluseum
Aleia Brown, AleiaBrown.org
Steven Lubar, On Public Humanities
Mike Murawski, Art Museum Teaching
Linda Norris, The Uncataloged Museum
Paul Orselli  ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog
Ed Rodley, Thinking About Museums
Adrianne Russell, Cabinet of Curiosities
Nina Simon, Museum 2.0
Rainey Tisdale, CityStories
Jeanne Vergeront  Museum Notes

Durant - A Museum is for everyone

 

Schools and Museums: Interview with Anne Kraybill

Anne Kraybill is the Distance Learning Project Manager at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where she is developing an online for-credit course for high school students in the state, and eventually the nation, to take online. She was formerly the Museum’s School and Community Programs Manager, where she oversaw the implementation of the Willard and Pat Walker School Visit Program and initiated a random-assignment evaluation measuring the impact of a one-time visit to an art museum.

Anne.Kraybill

The research on field trips to Crystal Bridges is important and widely circulated. You looked at, and found you had impacted, students’ critical thinking, historical empathy, tolerance, and interest in art museums. Why did you choose these four areas to measure?

When we first met with Jay Greene and Brian Kisida, we had not identified the outcomes of tolerance or historical empathy. That evolved as the research evolved.

At our initial meeting they asked questions about what we hoped the program might accomplish. We felt that on a tour, students learned how to look at and make meaning from works of visual art. This process required an exchange between the educator and the learner. And I say that somewhat ironically, as I constantly find myself in the position of learner, as students share observations I have not yet discovered.

We initially settled on measuring the following: knowledge acquisition, the desire to return to art museums, and critical thinking. Jay, Brian, and then-doctoral-student (now bonafide Ph.D.) Daniel Bowen shadowed tours to listen in on what was discussed. Our tours are not scripted, but there are approximately four artworks that everyone on a particular tour will view and discuss. The tours are student driven, meaning that student observations and ideas are central to the conversation. The student observations and inferences provide the basis for what context and relevant information the educator will provide. So in the end, students learned some information about the work of art, based on their ideas and interests.

Even though our tours are uniquely based on the exchange of observations and ideas elicited from each group, there are patterns that emerge. Students notice similar visual cues, such as the swastika in Rosie the Riveter, or the small flying squirrel in Mrs. Theodore Atkinson. The observations, and the information provided as a result of these observations, formed the basis of multiple-choice knowledge acquisition questions. When treatment and control groups took this part of the test, the kids who came on the fieldtrip knocked it out of the park. They remembered a lot about what they learned, even though they didn’t have too. There was no test, no homework; they just remembered this information because it was memorable.

Around that time, I had started working with teachers on enhancing students’ affective domain. The research team and I felt that it was important to measure this aspect of student learning, so for the second half of the study the knowledge questions were replaced with questions related to tolerance and historical empathy.

More importantly, what we choose not to measure was standardized test scores. No one thought it was plausible that a one-hour tour would result in an increase in scores on a test taken in the spring. The field trip was not designed for that.

What your study proves is not that field trips lead to increased critical thinking, historical empathy, tolerance, and interest in art museums, but that Crystal Bridges field trips lead to increased critical thinking, historical empathy, tolerance, and interest in art museums. What are the components of a field trip there? What are the design elements that you think were critical to your findings?

I have written a bit about this in Art Museum Teaching, and more formally in the Journal of Museum Education. Bottom line, our tours are student driven. While we have specified stops, the meaning-making is completely dependent upon what the students share. This requires that prior to the start of a tour we emphasize that the tour is all about them and their ideas. It also requires that our educators are skilled in facilitation. I don’t care what methodology one adheres to (except for the pure lecture), and I think most practitioners incorporate a combination of strategies, but I do care that the tour is student-centered and the facilitator have thorough training and ongoing review. This can be done with volunteers if they agree to be consistently observed and constructively critiqued in their practice, though the staffing required to evaluate a large group of volunteers make this difficult.

For more detail on our training program and what the tours look like, you can read the JME article Inside the Black Box.

school group at Crystal Bridges
A school group at Crystal Bridges. Photography by Stephen Ironside.

I understand that one of the ways Crystal Bridges makes trips easier for teachers is to take care of many of the logistics, such as transportation. What are the logistical responsibilities Crystal Bridges has taken on?

Thanks to the unprecedented generosity of the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation, Crystal Bridges has a $10 million endowment to provide teachers with 100% reimbursement towards transportation and substitute teachers. In addition, we provide every student with a lunch. This makes the burden much less for a classroom teacher and allows specialists, who typically don’t get to attend fieldtrips (especially elementary arts teachers) to join their students in this experience. Lunch is a critical component. Even if we didn’t offer lunch, we would need to figure out a place for groups to have a brown bag. Teachers can’t schedule a trip and feed their students 2+ hours after they normally eat. If museums don’t have a space, try and coordinate with a site close by.

You told me that you embarked on this research with the idea that you would convince school administrators of the value of field trips. However, none of the areas you mentioned is part of the Common Core Curriculum, nor is it tested on standardized tests. Do you think this research is meaningful for school administrators? If so, how?

While our tours are not specific to standardized state testing, they are very much aligned with the Common Core standards such as providing evidence, speaking and listening skills, etc. You actually cannot avoid the standards on an interactive, student-driven tour. But there are a lot of other things that are happening on our tours that cannot be captured by the Common Core standards, things that I think parents, teachers, and administrators care deeply about. So if we care about these other things, then we ought to start measuring them, and do so in a rigorous manner that can hold up to scrutiny. I think administrators might be grateful to have data other than the test scores to present and use.

Standardized tests in the future actually might measure critical thinking and some of the other skills we hope to inculcate in students on a tour. This is not to say that the tour should ever be used as a means of preparation, but as states implement PARCC or Smarter Balance tests, it will be useful to know if there are deficits in certain areas that teaching from works of art naturally cultivate. Both of these tests have far more open response items, and require students to look for evidence and provide justification.

In an earlier conversation, you mentioned that there are a number of non-cognitive areas that museum visits might impact, and that you think museums and researchers might look at. Can you speak about some of these?

When we teach in a museum, we stick with an artwork for some time. Students are asked to dig deep and find more. This is quite the opposite of the 2.5 second flyby taken by most visitors. Students are also asked to exchange ideas – sometimes opposing ideas – with each other. So the idea of tolerance is one museums cultivate all the time through their programs and interpretation.

I am also interested in our ability to help the learner to imagine new possibilities. This I think is so important for people who have a limited experience with the world, and I think that is why we had larger effect sizes for students in rural homogeneous populations. Recently, a football player from Amity, Arkansas visited Crystal Bridges. It was his first time to an art museum. After his tour, we asked him what image resonated the most. He said Our Town, by Kerry James Marshall. He had never understood or even imagined what life was like for African Americans, particularly in the Civil Rights era. Museums, and the objects they contain, can be transformative for students – if and only if the experience we provide allows for that.

As for other areas we might look at: James Heckman studies malleability in early childhood. The Toledo Museum of Art has been doing a lot with early childhood education and have started some preliminary research regarding vocabulary acquisition. This is vitally important as children in low-socio economic households arrive in kindergarten with “word gap.” My dream research project would be a longitudinal study that starts with an early childhood intervention and persists through early elementary school.

Angela Duckworth’s research focuses on skills such as persistence. Art museums also do a lot with teens, and I think there is a lot of research that can be done to see if we are able to help cultivate skills like persistence that are vitally important in secondary education.

Students in front of Kerry Marshall's painting "Our Town" at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Students in front of Kerry James Marshall’s painting “Our Town” at the Crystal Bridges Museum. Photography by Stephen Ironside.

Is Crystal Bridges embarking upon any new research projects?

Currently, we are looking at the effects of a week-long teacher professional development program upon student outcomes. There has been lots of research about teacher’s impressions of professional development and what constitutes quality professional development, but there has been very little about the effects these programs have upon students. There has also been very little research that I am aware of on teacher professional development in museums. We hope to find out if the program impacts non-cognitive skills such as collaboration and cooperation, critical thinking when looking at a work of art, and enthusiasm for learning history, to name a few possible outcomes.

In addition, we are in the midst of building a for-credit online course for high school students. We plan to do an observational study to understand student impressions of the course. Based on that data, a more rigorous research design will be implement in the in the fall. Stay tuned for results!

Should museums respond to the grand jury verdicts in Ferguson and New York City?

I am taking a break today from my ongoing exploration of field trips to explore a currently pressing issue. I will return to the subject of schools and museums on Thursday.

Over the past ten days, I have been part of discussions – largely taking place on social media, which is worth contemplating in a separate post – asking the question, “How should museums respond to the grand jury verdicts related to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner?” These discussions have led me to a more basic question: Should museums respond to events such as these? By “events such as these” I mean moments of political crisis, not natural crisis. These moments are caused and defined by injustice. They are different from a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or a hurricane, in which there are no sides to take, only collective grieving.

The impetus to respond to political crisis is both personal and institutional. On a personal level, many of us want to respond, want to challenge our feelings of helplessness and anger. We want to do something to help. We want to be part of making the world a better place, we want to fight injustice.

On an institutional level, we want our museums to be relevant. At moments of crisis, it feels like “relevance” is synonymous with being involved in that crisis in some way, with helping to soothe and heal. If museums ignore such a crisis, does that make them irrelevant?

Photograph posted on twitter by Motor City Muckraker and reposted by The Wright Museum.
Photograph of protesters responding to Eric Garner’s death, posted on twitter by Motor City Muckraker and reposted by The Wright Museum.

There are two ways in which museums might respond to a moment of political crisis. The first is to take a stand, to fight for what we believe is right. The second is to create a space for dialogue. These two responses are antithetical to each other: An institution cannot simultaneously position itself politically and be a space that welcomes all perspectives. But the responses require similar conditions. Both responses require a museum to have laid the groundwork of considering how their collection and exhibitions relate to important contemporary social issues. And both  responses require that museums be equipped to facilitate discussions that may be far outside our expertise.

Laying the Groundwork

If you want to dismantle racism and shift the power of your racial privilege then understanding your positionality and how your identity impacts your personal life, teaching practice and values has to happen.

-Keonna Hendrick, Facebook, December 4, 2014

On Saturday, I attended a workshop on “Critical Cultural Competency and Anti-Racism.” The workshop had been scheduled prior to the grand jury verdicts. It was hosted by a local Episcopal Church, as part of a larger initiative of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, working in partnership with the workshop leaders, an organization called Crossroads. The Diocese has clearly made a commitment to addressing issues of race, as evidenced by its ongoing relationship with Crossroads. The workshop was introduced with a videotaped welcome from the Bishop of Chicago contextualizing the workshop in the larger mission of the church. And on the website of the Diocese of Chicago, anti-racism is the first item under the menu-bar item “Building the Church.” (Please note, I am not Episcopal, and do not intend to promote the Episcopal Church, although I was very impressed by their work on anti-racism.)

The call for museums to respond to Ferguson and Staten Island is not, to my understanding, being led by leadership in museums. Scrolling through the twitter feeds of the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors, there is not one reference to these events, nor one call to action. The Crossroads anti-racism workshop called on participants to step back and take a distanced perspective on society, including its power structures and “framework of dominance.” To look deeply and meaningfully at racism, we need to critically examine our own institutions. Most museums are largely staffed by white people. They often evidence a difference in the color of administrative and support staff. They are run by boards made up of the “One Percent”. Until we can make change in our own institutions, any effort to address issues such as the Ferguson grand jury verdict will be artificial, and will be perceived as such. These efforts could weaken instead of strengthen our claim to relevance.

Along with critically examining our own institutions, museums must take time in moments not fraught with crisis to understand how our work relates to contemporary issues of importance. Science centers must think about the demographics of scientists and engineers, and how they can play a role in diversifying these fields. Historic houses must look at the lives not only of the residents of the house, but of those who made this life possible. Who built the house? Who were the servants? How were these people treated?

This is hard work. How does The Frick Collection spin connections between its phenomenal art collection, and the elegant palace of Henry Clay Frick, and the lives of most of its visitors? How does the Art Institute of Chicago articulate connections in a way that is visible to visitors, and to the public of Chicago?

Building Expertise

Museums are clearly positioned to get people together and talking. And when it comes to issues that resonate on a social level (people-to-people, not people-to-nature [like Hurricane Sandy], for example), how can we simultaneously encourage open discussion and risk-taking among ourselves and with museum visitors while also remaining sensitive to cultures we don’t know and experiences we don’t have in common? That’s what makes this different from Hurricane Sandy. Ultimately, with all salient events (Ferguson, Hurricane Sandy, 9/11, etc.), there’s a responsibility that comes with opening up these kinds of conversations–are we as museum educators trained and equipped to navigate these conversations effectively?

-Ashley Mask, Facebook, December 5, 2014

Even in museums that have made an institutional commitment to connect collections and institutions to contemporary life, staff may not be trained to lead programs that relate to hot-button social issues. Over the past decade or two, the Brooklyn Museum has established its commitment to African American artists, displaying a Kehinde Wiley painting in the entrance hall and featuring retrospectives of artists such as Jean Basquiat and Mickalene Thomas. According to its website, the Museum currently features the installation Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement. This installation of recent acquisitions features art from a movement that, according to the Museum’s website, “sprung up in the U.S. as the cultural expression of Black Power politics. Its leadership, which included poets, playwrights, musicians, and fine artists, rejected the dominance of the largely white mainstream art establishments that undervalued their work as black artists and created a radical alternative artistic movement based on social and political ideologies rather than narrow aesthetic dictates.”

Wadsworth A. Jarrell, Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1971, on view in the current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo from http://superselected.com/exhibitions-featuring-black-artists/ and labeled for reuse according to Google.
Wadsworth A. Jarrell, Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1971, on view in the current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo from http://superselected.com/exhibitions-featuring-black-artists/ and labeled for reuse according to Google.

With an exhibition such as this one on view, visitors may start the conversation. I think it would be difficult to look at a painting of Angela Davis this week and not think about Michael Brown and Eric Garner. A tour in which visitors spontaneously started to talk about Brown and Garner would be an example of a museum providing a safe space for discussion.

But when that conversation is initiated, the educator (or other front line staff member) needs strategies for responding. Crossroads’ staff training and careful curriculum development were evident in their staff preparedness and structure (all workshops are taught by a pair, one of whom is white and the other, a person of color), careful scaffolding of ideas, and handouts. The Brooklyn Museum has an excellent education department, and tours are lead by staff and paid interns who go through extensive training. But to my knowledge that training does not include strategies for facilitating politically loaded conversations about current events, or ongoing lectures about current events. How do we facilitate a conversation that may include opposing, and heated, perspectives? How do we maintain a safe space while allowing people to disagree? How do we correct misunderstandings and faulty assumptions that emerge in conversation? How do we guide these conversations to help people better understand each other and the world we live in? This is no small feat, and one that few of our front line staff are trained for.

Most museums do not have the capacity for mediating moments of social crisis. In order to build this capacity, museums would be well-served to look inward, and to understand their own missions, cultures, and systems of power. Museums that decide they must address categories of political and social events would then need to commit resources to meaningful, ongoing staff training. Only then will we be prepared to respond when the next political crisis occurs.

Earlier in this post I asked, if museums ignore such a crisis, does that make them irrelevant? Is it imperative that every museum begin the work of institutional assessment and capacity building? When I began thinking about this issue, my answer was no. There are lovely museums, museums that I would eagerly visit, which do not seem to care at all about the contemporary world. But as I further ponder this issue, my answer has changed. Museums do not have to be relevant. Like lovely jewels, they can be wonderful places to visit, full of beautiful objects. They can be interesting, and informative. But if a museum wants to be relevant, than it does indeed need to situate itself in the contemporary world, and create a space that not only allows but inspires difficult and interesting conversations with visitors.

Thanks to Monica Marino of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for starting a rare, truly useful conversation on Facebook. And look for an upcoming post from blogger Gretchen Jennings on this topic.