A few people have responded to my recent post Goals for Students to suggest that history museums are likely to focus on content rather than more general skills and understandings (see Anne Dealy’s comment on Goals for Students; others have responded privately). The implication is that school visitors to history museums expect are more likely to expect to leave having learned factual content, as compared to visitors at other types of museums. This may be true. But is it a realistic goal for a single visit? This post continues the discussion about school visit goals by looking more closely at the experience of visitors in the history museum context, and the realities of teaching content.

History museums fall into at least two categories: the historic house, and the exhibition which constitutes a collection of objects. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is an example of the “historic house” model. Visitors to the Tenement Museum are led through the museum’s primary artifact, 97 Orchard Street. Within this historic building a number of apartments have been reconstructed to look the way they might have 100 years ago (plus or minus 20 years), in order to tell the stories of the families who lived there. The experience – like that at many historic houses – is immersive, by which I mean visitors physically enter another time period. This immersion helps visitors understand what it might have been like to live in that time and place.

The impact of the Tenement Museum is not to teach the big-picture history so often taught in schools – the dates of wars or economic crises, the names of Presidents or Governors – but to offer visitors a glimpse into daily life in the past. And, ultimately, the goal (or at least, a goal) is for visitors to understand how prejudice, government policies, and economics impact newcomers to this country, both past and present.

I would argue that visitors to the Tenement Museum are not learning a great deal of factual content. Rather, they are gaining an understanding that is as much about feeling as it is about fact. I would also argue that the immersive, sensory nature of tours at the Tenement Museum and similar museums makes them essential for any student group learning about late nineteenth and early twentieth century immigration.

In contrast, however, I would guess that this experience means little to a school group that is not studying immigration or turn-of-the-century American history, and that tours of historic spaces in general are productive in teaching history only when offered in the context of a larger body of knowledge. A few months ago I observed a second grade class touring life-sized replicas of the Nina and Pinta, two of Christopher Columbus’s ships, docked at the time In Peoria’s harbor. After the visit, I asked a number of students what they had learned. They thought the cannons were cool. Other than that, they had learned very little.

To a large extent, this lack of impact was the fault of the tour guides, who did not have a clear sense of what they wanted to teach, or training in age-appropriate pedagogical strategies. But, equally importantly, the students had little or no context in which to understand the history presented. How could they understand what it was like to live on a ship in the fifteenth century, when they didn’t know what it was like to live on land in the fifteenth century? How could they imagine the decisions Christopher Columbus had to make on board that ship without understanding anything about the history of exploration or the science of navigation?

The second type of history museum collects and curates objects into displays intended to illuminate historical moments. I grew up in Washington, DC, and visited the National Museum of American History with both classmates and my family. I remember the pendulum, the tattered American flag, a room filled with the dresses worn by First Ladies to their husbands’ Inaugurations, and cases filled with television and movie memorabilia: Archie Bunker’s chair, Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

My response, and I think that of many of my peers, was often, “Wow, that’s cool!” I could have watched the pendulum for hours, but I had (and still have) no idea how it relates to the history of the United States. I know the flag was old, but it did not contribute to my understanding of any historical moment or the development of American symbols. And I loved the film and television cases, because I recognized them, and it was amazing to see familiar and famous objects in real life. These responses are typical: often people go to museums for the “wow” factor, to see the real, original objects represented on television or in history books. As Daniel Willingham suggested in a recent interview, these visits serve to excite students, and to make them want to learn more.

In a recent post, Andrea Jones described “Fight for your Rights,” a tour at the Atlanta History Center about the Freedom Riders. This tour engages students in dramatic re-enactment; the intent is for participants to understand that there are multiple responses to a single question or situation, and begin to develop tools for answering these questions for themselves.

I imagine that if a group arrives for this tour already knowledgeable about the Civil Rights movement they might learn information that they can connect with this prior knowledge, which will deepen their understanding: Who became a Freedom Rider, what the Freedom Riders were trying to achieve, what challenges they faced. For a group arriving with historical context, teaching content is a useful and appropriate goal.

Another group might not have not studied the Civil Rights movement before the tour. Students might leave this tour with questions about the Civil Rights movement. Perhaps the teacher helps guide them to appropriate books, or the Eyes on the Prize documentary series, or brings in classroom speakers with first-hand experience of the Civil Rights movement. In this case, the museum visit may not teach content directly, but will lead to content acquisition. An appropriate goal for this group is to spark curiosity and interest.

But often neither of these things happen. Perhaps a teacher feels she needs to dedicate classroom hours to preparing students for standardized tests, but books a museum visit as a break from the drudgery of this classroom work.  Or the teacher spends social studies time studying the space race and the moon landing, and linking to the science curriculum, but visits the history museum because it is a grade-wide trip organized by another teacher. Or the teacher had planned to get to the Civil Rights era by April but they are still studying World War II, and never get past the 1950s in that year’s social studies class. Or a teacher has focused on the biography of Martin Luther King, not realizing that the tour would cover entirely different material. In these instances, a tour with the primary goal of teaching content is futile. For this group, the museum can offer the “wow” factor. And it can set goals apart (but possibly similar to) from the curriculum: Teaching skills related to those needed by historians, such as question posing and critical thinking. Teaching students to be independent museum goers. Engaging students in learning about themselves by considering what they would have done in a given situation, or thinking about what they are drawn to or curious about.

Content can only be taught effectively in partnership with classroom teachers. If museums want to teach content, than they – we – need to find better ways to partner with teachers, and ensure that the work of the classroom and the work of the tour are directly connected. We need to communicate regularly with teachers, either about the work they are doing in the classroom or by offering support for them in guiding their students’ experiences in the museum themselves. When a teacher who is not engaged in a deep partnership with the museum, or who we do not have the resources to communicate with weekly, books a tour, we should offer experiences that we know will have impact regardless of what is happening in the classroom.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

***

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.

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.

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.

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.