The Columbus Museum of Art has spent the last seven years rethinking the museum’s value and the visitor experience. Much of this work is documented in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of Museum Education. Rethinking value and visitor experience has led museum staff to reconsider school programs, including the field trip.

Cindy Foley is the Executive Assistant Director and Director of Learning and Experience at the Columbus Museum of Art. Caitlin Lynch is a teaching artist for school programs at the Columbus Museum of Art.

When Caitlin first reached out to me, she told me that you are in the process of rethinking your school programs. Can you tell me more about this?

Cindy: About seven years ago we started to wonder: What value does the Columbus Art Museum (CMA) bring to our community? Working with Jessica Luke, we generated questions as guideposts to moving forward. One of those questions was, “Is the field trip the future of our relationship with schools and teachers?” We believed it was not — there had to be something more impactful.

To test this we decided to embark on two strategic initiatives that we would research: A redesign of an ongoing program and a new program. The new program, Project Pivot, started with a call from the Arts and College Preparatory Academy (ACPA). They said, “Have you ever wanted to do something totally experimental, and never had a school to work with? We’d like to be that school.” We were taken by their openness to risk and exploration. We used the invitation to imagine and design an ideal partnership with a school and teachers – one that was – a partnership rooted in trust, joint vision, and commitment to experimentation, that would function very differently from the transactional model of school field trips or school outreach.

Cat: That pilot year looked vastly different than the fifth year, which this report documents. The first year was rooted in the needs of the school.  The guiding theme was chosen by school and museum educators. We met with students every Wednesday for four months, mostly in the school itself. Students visited the museum a few times. The takeaway from that first year was the value of the relationships developed between CMA and ACPA educators.

Cindy: We were so excited by how the teaching artists demonstrated and encouraged new ways of teaching and partnering. When we reflected later, we realized that the creativity we had aimed for was evident, but primarily between CMA and ACPA educators. The next phase of the program was possible because we had established that relationship, but the program needed to shift so that students were doing the creative thinking.

Cat: By the final year, a shift had taken place in how we facilitated the experience to allow the students to lead their learning. The project was really just a loose scaffold for students to plug in their interests and develop ideas. We met with students almost every week at the Museum. A few times we met at the library to do research, or at other sites around town.

Cindy: Here’s how we describe Project Pivot now: Students, teachers, and teaching artists work together to develop ideas, conduct research, and translate their creative thinking to experiential interactive and socially driven art and activities.

Cat: The final projects are events students put on, which are open to the community. They are always interactive and sometimes feature performances, games or music. One event involved a mermaid telling fortunes; another had snacks that you had to pass a challenge to get to.

Cindy: The whole purpose of the project was to get the kids to imagine: What are experiences we want to have?

Here are some of the key factors in the success of the Pivot Project:

• The projects are co-created between educators at both institutions.
• As students’ interests develop, that’s what leads the curriculum. So teachers don’t know from week to week what they will be dealing with.
• We rooted the project in essential questions and inquiry. 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.
• Pivot projects are collaborative and project-based, not individual assignments.
• We used the city as our campus. We used the library. And as students’ interests develop, they might visit a tattoo artist or a spiritualist. We sought out resources to support them in trans-disciplinary research.
• Pivot was rooted in the notion that artists are voracious researchers. We held students to high standards around that.

In our research, we looked at outcomes around creativity, critical thinking and problem solving. Those outcomes proved difficult to capture and assess. Our evaluators, Jessica Luke and Jeanine Ancelet, were able to measure a number of skills and habits that fall within Positive Youth Development Frameworks like increased competence, connection, caring – outcomes related to personal and social development.

Before we discuss how Project Pivot is influencing your ideas about field trips, tell me about the second program – the one that you redesigned, which is helping you rethink your relationship with schools.

Cindy: A version of our Artful Reading Program has been around for 40 years. All 5000 fifth graders in Columbus City Schools (CCS) come to the museum as part of this project. Six or seven years ago, we determined that we had to make changes to address declining participation in the district as well as what we viewed as the essential need that we weren’t effectively addressing – impacting critical thinking skills.  Leadership from both the museum and CCS vowed to significantly change our Artful Reading Program field trip model and pair it with research to determine if our new outcomes and outputs could garner deeper impact. The changes we all committed to were:

1. Monthly meetings between CMA and CCS educators. About four CCS art teachers serve as liaisons with the schools and lead professional development for the other 80 or 90 art teachers in the city. They work with us to design professional development around creative and critical thinking, rooted in themes like idea generation or developing comfort with ambiguity. The teachers also learn to use our thinking routines.
2. We require that each class have a pre-visit led by CMA docents, during which they teach students and educators the thinking routines.
3. We co-create a post-visit activity with our CCS liaisons. The project is facilitated in the schools by the art teachers. This proved to be challenging for them. The educators were more familiar and comfortable with step-by-step lessons with predictable products. We really pushed for project- or challenge-based activities rather than activities in which students create objects that look like “art.” For example, one project allowed students to work in groups to create their own board games.
4. We decided we needed an annual Columbus City Schools Day for Families – a day to celebrate the relationship between the schools and the CMA. This day now averages 3000 visitors.

So the goal of this field trip program is to change teaching in the schools?

Cat: Yes. What we are interested in is changing how we are valued, and the culture around museum use and visits. You can’t change a culture without a relationship, and to have a relationship, you need a common language. And right now, the common language we have is field trips.

Cindy: We are six years into this redesigned program now, and educators see us as a lifeline. We offer them coaching, advocacy and empowerment. They don’t want to go back to the old field trip model, but we had to gently trick them into this model. The field trip is now just a tiny piece of the larger picture of impact.

So how are these programs impacting your school visit program?

Cat: After five years of evaluating the impact of Project Pivot, we are taking this year to really think about how it will influence our next projects. An important part of this process is taking time to have these conversations and to think.

Cindy: We are coming to terms with the idea that field trips will always be a portion of our work, but they are no longer our bread and butter.

So why do it? Why offer field trips?

Cindy: Because… at this point primarily because our community still asks for it. We actually don’t overtly advertise our tours, and we haven’t seen any significant drop in tour numbers. I think the bigger question is how much energy we put into the one-off field trips.

Cat: We always try to circle back on our larger mission of creativity. Our pre-school visits, Artful Adventures, used to be about playing in front of art. It’s still very much about play, but over the past couple of years we started to make the provocations more open-ended, and build in reflection. We ask kids: What did you see? What did you hear? What does this mean? We wanted to make them more aware of their own creative thinking.

Cindy: Dewey said, “We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.” We are thinking about how to better embed reflection in field trips. We have done some experimenting. Last year we invited two schools to be what we call “museum schools.” We gave memberships to all of the students, so that they could come for as long as they wanted, as often as they wanted, and use the museum as they want to. One progressive suburban school came eight times, each time reflecting on how the museum impacted their learning and leaving evidence of their thinking behind in our classroom.

Cat: We want schools to see value the way that we see value. That’s why we do the work with the 5^th grade teachers – to ensure that the experiences are part of a larger plan for student learning. We want them to think, “How the museum can be valuable beyond a break from teaching?” But until we have that common ground we don’t really have the canvas on which to experiment.

Cindy: I had this conversation with Ken Kay, the former Director of P21 and one of the architects of the idea of 21^st century skills. He said that instead of catering to schools, we need to be modelling what is possible in learning and education, so we give schools models and hope. This is one of the philosophical shifts we make, away from producing lesson plans and field trips. It’s a difficult shift: Museums have always felt that we are a secondary educational tier, but informal learning environments are needed to lead and take an important seat at the top tier.

When we decided to zero in on creativity, it became our lens for impacting learning and experience in our spaces and our programs. When we announced this change, we were shocked by the number of school principals and superintendents that called asking us to advise or help them. They knew their cultures were suffering, because their staff were so wigged out by testing, and their teachers so focused on content. They didn’t have clear pathways for how to change that, and they wanted our help.

Field trips are problematic. But how do we mine them for something better? How do we allow them to advance our work in some way?

In a recent blog post on ArtsFwd.org, you said, “We don’t need new models, we need a new mindset.” Can you share your thinking around this?

When I was invited to Barry’s DinnerVention and asked to respond to the topic “Broken Models: Picking Up the Pieces and Moving Forward,” I took a literal approach, and looked up the definition of a model. I found that a model is essentially a best practice that is predictable and replicable. I was sort of disturbed by that. Going into a conversation with leading thinkers in the arts, I felt it was fruitless to be thinking about best practices, because I have a strong belief that we are in an era where best practices are of limited use.

Why is that?

At EmcArts we talk a lot about complicated vs. complex problems. Complicated problems, like building a rocket, have a solution. That solution might take time and research, but they are knowable, solvable. Complex problems have a non-linear, non-rational relation between cause and effect. Only later can you go back and tell the story of how something unfolded.

We live in an era of complexity. This has to do with shifting technology and demographics, and our new expectations of the world. In an era in which the problems are complicated, best practice is great. But in an era governed by complexity you need a different approach, one that prizes questioning, experimentation, reflection, openness to conflict, diverse perspectives, and recognizing the system of complexity in which you are operating. We are moving out of an era of best practice into an era of emergent practice. To be open to emergence you need to be open to a different mindset.

A few people who responded to my blog post on this topic have argued that this mindset is in and of itself a new model. That’s fine. But it’s very different than a model that describes a replicable set of behaviors.  It’s more of a set of approaches that can be adapted.

How do you know whether a model – field trips, for example – needs to be tossed or rethought?

Ronald Heifetz, who developed the model of Adaptive Leadership, makes a distinction between when something needs a technical (or incremental) fix – more of, less of, better – versus an adaptive response, which involves cracking something open and rethinking assumptions, coming up with something discontinuous, throwing out a model in favor of new mindset.

Heifetz says (and I’m paraphrasing) that if you have thrown all the technical fixes you can at a problem and it’s still broken, that’s how you know you need a different kind of approach, that you might need to let go of an old model. But if you’ve thrown all the technical stuff at it and it hasn’t improved the program then you might need a new mindset.  For example, cultural organizations often say they want more diverse audiences, and try many fixes, but these fixes aren’t as successful as they’d hoped. That’s a signal that the model itself needs to be questioned. The problem is, of course, that if you spend all of your time on the technical fixes, you can exhaust your resources before you try a new approach.

One way to examine whether a model is broken is by unearthing core assumptions. For example, core assumptions might be, “the best place to learn about art and culture is at the museum,” or “spending a day to take a field trip is worth the time because of how much more amplified the learning experience is in the museum.” You’ve got to surface and name these assumptions, so that you can discuss them with all stakeholders — teachers, administrators, museum educators, parents, students.

Models evolved because at one point, they were the best solution. So it makes sense that people would want to hold on to the idea of a model. Teachers would want to hold onto field trips, because it’s what they’ve always done. It is much harder to call up the museum and say, I want something you’ve never done before that works better with the logistics and goals of my job as an educator.

Over time the conditions changed, and that thing that was working becomes no longer useful. But the assumption that field trips are the best exchange between teachers, students, and museums is so far beneath the surface that it no longer gets discussed. To wrench that assumption back to the surface to contest it is difficult. It requires looking at data, real trends in the environment.

What data or trends are useful to look at?

One kind of data would be existing numbers around participation. If you have evidence that participation is declining, that’s powerful evidence.

Another piece of data might be to look at every teacher who brought students for a field trip last year, and see how many come back. If teachers aren’t returning, why?

At EmcArts, our approach is to get everyone — students, parents, museum professionals, teachers — together, to explore, what it would mean to let go of the field trip? To live in an ambiguous space? Then, we design experiments around doing things differently, to see what stakeholders can learn.

Once a cultural institution decides to establish a “new mindset,” how does it go about doing this?

To me, a model is replicating a set of actions. A new mindset requires you to draw on a set of practices that position you to be nimble. It is about questioning, embracing ambiguity, experimentation, systems thinking, reflection.

The field trip model has been around for a long time. What would happen if we let that go? There would be a great deal of ambiguity about what lives in the space that that leaves. It takes a certain mindset to allow for this. Institutions that best live up to their values in the long run are those who are good at coming up with strategies that are radically divergent from or a radical renewal of what they have done before.

Jody Madell teaches 9th grade at the Lyons Community School, a school serving 6th through 12th grade students in East Williamsburg Brooklyn. She is also the co-director of the school, and has been at Lyons since 2007. Before Lyons, Jody taught for seven years at the New York City Museum School.

Why should schools visit museums?

Without field trips, many students at my school might not be exposed to the great cultural institutions of the city – lots of kids rarely leave their neighborhoods. We like to take kids to different places, so that they can see what’s out in the world.

In part our museum visits are academic; I would like students to learn specific things that I am teaching about. But also, we want them and their families to know that this is something that’s available to them in the city.

How do you use museums?

We take field trips every week, although they are not all to museums.

In 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grades we have units that culminate in museum-based presentations at the Brooklyn Museum. Teachers from each grade have a three-hour professional development with an educator at the Brooklyn Museum. The museum educator works with the teachers to plan the unit, including 1-3 visits that the museum educator will guide. During these guided tours the museum educator models giving a tour using objects, so that sixth graders can see how it’s done. We worked Rachel Ropeik at the Museum for years; she was recently promoted so now we are working with Adjoa Jones de Almeida.

We have been so happy with the professional development from the Brooklyn Museum – we really love that place. Each year they adjust to our needs. Last year, both 6^th grade teachers were new to 6^th grade; one was a brand new teacher. So Rachel showed them objects in the collection and modeled object-based learning. Another year, they might talk about what worked, what didn’t, what’s a skill you want to work on, what do you want to work on with the kids.

A few years ago, Rachel observed that the Lyons teachers were making the trip too much like school, using five-page worksheets with lots of questions. Rachel pushed teachers to rethink their worksheets. She wanted them to allow the kids to have conversations, even if it was going to be messier; to slow down, have discussions with other kids about the objects.

Are all your museum trips to the Brooklyn Museum?

In the 9^th grade we study world religions. We spend a lot of time on this – months. We visit places of worship, and also the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met has an impressive collection of art from world religions, so we go there throughout the project to study objects.

For their final project, we have the kids bring a parent to the Met and give them a tour. We want students to identify a theme, something to compare across religions. For example, how do different religions represent God? What are the powers of the Gods? They have to pick objects for their tour, and think about questions that the person they will be touring around might have. By that point the kid knows the museum well enough to show the parent around, and the parent gets to see the museum.

Why do you use museums for this final project? Why not have kids write an essay comparing religions?

It’s an engaging project. With religions, objects are so important. By interacting with the objects you get a sense of the religions that you wouldn’t get from reading or a power point. And the project offers an emotional experience that leaves students excited about religions other than their own.

Do you ever book guided tours for your students at different museums?

Teachers at my school are very skeptical of going on a museum tour led by someone we don’t know. We pretty much never book tours led by museum staff.

Our kids can be difficult to manage, especially for a museum educator who does not know their academic needs or interests.  One museum wouldn’t let me book a self-guided visit, so the tour was led by a museum educator, and it was terrible. The educator couldn’t communicate well with the kids. She might have been fine with another group of kids, but there was no clear lesson, and the kids felt like the tour was purposeless. And one-off visits can be difficult even when they are taught by great museum educators because they don’t know exactly what the kids need.

Also, because of the way we use field trips at Lyons, they are very linked to the classes the kids are taking. So it’s not like we’ve been studying a subject for eight weeks, and then we go to the Met. Instead, teachers are really trying to use the museum to continue the instruction of content – it’s more woven-in than a one-off would really help with. For example, when we study Hinduism as part of world religions in the 9^th grade, in the classroom I will explain attributes of a god, and we’ll compare different images of that god. Then we’ll go to the museum and do something similar. The kids know what they are supposed to be doing because of the previous lesson; they don’t need tons of direction. Museum educators can’t do this – they don’t know the kids or the classroom work.

If you taught at a different school – with a different population, and without weekly field trips – do you think you would book guided tours?

I don’t think so. My own kids get taken on field trips that involve walking around museum all day. At my daughter’s elementary school it seems like field trips are fun, but they are not vitally contributing to education of the kids.

Sometimes I wish that I could take my students to a random exhibition that sounds interesting. Two years ago the Brooklyn Museum had an exhibition of work by Mickalene Thomas – a really cool show, enormous pieces with sequins all over them. I felt like kids would really love it. Rachel led a professional development for teachers and introduced us to the show. She suggested that we should just take some seniors to the museum to see the show, but no one ever did it.

What advice would you give teachers about planning field trips?

I would tell them not to consider taking kids to a museum on a guided tour if you can’t work with the museum educator in some way before going.

Assuming that the trips are integrated into the curriculum, I would advise teachers to pick just a couple of objects that are going to help the kids understand some aspect of the content that you can’t really teach as well in the classroom. The most common mistake that someone new to planning trips makes is to take students to see too many things.

Teachers need to go to the museum themselves to plan. When I plan trips I look at the museum website first to orient myself, but then I visit the museum to see the work in person and learn more about it. It is important to have that experience yourself with the object, figure out what will be exciting to kids, what will inspire them, what’s physically around the objects that could be brought into a discussion. If we have a planning day at school I’ll try to go and visit museums and plan. When I go to the museum I try to make a map of where objects are. I try to plan two student trips with one visit on my own. I don’t plan the whole lesson, but I pick the objects.

When I started working at the Museum School, my colleague Rebecca Krukoff just took me to museums and talked to me about art. We had experiences in museums together. That’s the model the Brooklyn Museum is following, as well – they want teachers to have experience in the galleries.

I think it’s really important to frame programs around a question that gives it a compelling reason to exist. I don’t think we should learn anything “just because.” So when I start designing, I read everything I can get my hands on about a particular topic, and then ask, what is this really about? What is here that is so interesting, and so unanswerable?

Andrea Jones is the Director of Programs and Visitor Engagement at the Accokeek Foundation in Accokeek, Maryland. Before working at Accokeek, Andrea was Education Specialist at the Atlanta History Center.

Why should museums offer school tours?

I worked as a teacher in two different public school systems before moving to museums. Although there are a lot of teachers doing innovative things, the basic structure of public education does not engage students in the things that matter – museums are better set up for that. Museums can disregard testing and assessment, and focus on inspiring students, igniting their interest, and exploring bigger questions about the human experience. Students should be hungry for more when the program ends. They should be filled with questions that they want to go answer on their own.

Museum tours go wrong when they try to be like schools. I respect the teachers who go into museum tours with an assignment for their students. It shows an attention to detail – they are really trying to get kids to pay attention. But if the museum has designed a dynamic program, you don’t need an assignment to keep kids’ attention. I encourage museums to throw out the old guided tour. It’s didactic, it’s often boring, and we know it doesn’t work. I don’t think we should be “covering” content like the schools do. It’s not our job to teach the entire Civil War. Museums are a place to get the gears turning.

How do you “ignite interest”?

Part of my formula is to create a narrative storyline and to involve kids in role play that requires decision-making. We just launched a new tour at Accokeek which poses the essential question “Which modern inventions are worth their cost to the environment?” Here is the set up: Imagine that a group of humanitarian time travelers went back to 18^th century Maryland and placed modern objects around a colonial farm to help the family that lives there. The humanitarians left a flashlight, pesticides, toilet paper, a disposable lighter – things that they thought might help this family. Students on the tour are told that they are Eco-Explorers, and their mission is to go back in time, find these objects, and decide whether to confiscate them, bringing them back to the future before they are discovered by the colonial family. And students are asked to make these decisions by weighing the objects’ environmental impact against their relative benefit to the family.

Some things may be worth the environmental cost. This tour was inspired by the conversations I heard at Accokeek. Some visitors would say, “See how awful it was back then, and think about all the modern conveniences you have now.” But the conveniences have an environmental price. We are all dependent on fossil-fueled cars, electric light . . . even toilet paper. The point is that there are certain moments in history – certain forks in the road – where we adopted these things. What if we had it to do over again? Would we? The question is important because these forks in the road are happening today.

When we go to the grocery store and make decisions about what to buy, most of us take into consideration some aspect of the environmental cost. How much you do that depends on the person. Some people say recycled toilet paper is really pushing it. We make decisions every time we purchase a product or decide not to purchase it, or throw something away.

Our aim is to  help kids build the skills they will need to make these decisions, while teaching them history and environmental science. We don’t claim that there are right answers:if a group of students decides to leave the disposable lighter in the past, if they think the benefits outweigh the environmental impact, then we leave it.

You mentioned that this tour is framed around an “essential question.” Good essential questions are incredibly difficult to craft. Tell me more about how and why you use essential questions for school tours.

I didn’t really like history – my content area – until I was in my late twenties. History in school was about regurgitation of names, dates, and facts. I realized later that history was boring me because it wasn’t about something. So I think it’s really important to frame programs around a question that gives it a compelling reason to exist. I don’t think we should learn anything “just because.” So when I start designing, I read everything I can get my hands on about a particular topic, and then ask, what is this really about? What is here that is so interesting, and so unanswerable? I test out questions with people in the office and with friends. If people want to talk and argue, then I know it’s a good question.

I once heard a speaker who said that there is really only one essential question, which every other one fits in, and that is “who am I?” These questions help us figure out “how do I feel about this?” My question about modern inventions and environmental cost – that’s about each of us trying to figure out what WE are willing to do.

Would you say that the goal of a museum visit is self-discovery?

I never really thought about it like that. It’s a huge component. I am always trying to figure out, “Who am I?” There is not a definite answer – it changes every day. The more you learn about the world, the more this knowledge helps you to figure out who you want to be in the world.

Your tours are very theatrical. Can you talk about the design process?

I think about four different ingredients. Experiences need to include multiple perspectives and an emotional connection, and be participatory and thought provoking. Theater is a vehicle that allows experiences to involve all of these.

I consider the age group of the audience, the spaces I have to work in, and what’s going to be compelling. For example, when designing a “Fight for Your Rights” tour about Civil Rights, I wanted to focus on school segregation because it’s about school-aged people, and what it took to overcome segregation. But I couldn’t figure out how to make that something that all the students could participate in, something more dynamic than just splitting kids into two different rooms..

So I migrated to the story of the Freedom Riders, because it’s about people on a bus, the adventures that you have on the way, feeling danger on the bus together. We (the Atlanta History Center) could make a bus façade out of wood, we could use regular chairs from our classroom, we could use a power point projection to show what you would see outside the bus window, and speakers for sound effects like angry people and explosions outside the bus. We could create a high impact experience that would elicit emotion.

The essential question was: Do you have what it takes to be a freedom fighter? This was inspired by watching Eyes on the Prize with my partner. As we watched footage of people being attacked we were asking ourselves, would we – both of us are white – have stood up for black people in that era? We had a really long conversation. We wondered if maybe it’s different for us than for people who don’t have the privilege we have. What about people who are working really hard, unable to take a break to go on a protest? We started talking about class issues. Thinking about how the answer may be different for different people. So that’s why I created different roles for the students to play in the simulation. Theater is a powerful tool for altering perspective.

When we first spoke, you were advocating for scripted tours. Can you talk about what the scripts are like, and what’s open for the students and educators?

Every time there is an opportunity to interact things can go in unpredictable ways. We have a sit-in simulation in the Fight For Your Rights tour I just described. In the simulation a restaurant owner, Lester Maddox, is trying to get protesters out of his restaurant. He is yelling at them, telling them why they shouldn’t be there. Testing their will to stay. Different things happen every tour. Once a group of students decided to start chanting about the 14^th amendment. In that case the interpreter playing Lester Maddox can’t use the script.

The script we give to the interpreters is in pieces – paragraphs, lines that an interpreter can insert depending on what kids are doing. But the interpreter has to be the character, and do what the character would do. So they definitely have to think on their feet.

Here is another example – at the Atlanta History Center we had a Cherokee tour that involved an interpreter playing a Cherokee grandmother standing by her grandbaby’s grave. The Cherokees – the kids – are marching along the Trail of Tears when they encounter this grandmother who can’t leave, because the Cherokee mourning custom is to stand by the body for seven days. The kids have to decide what to do. One group suggested that she dig up the baby and take it with them. It sounds crass, but this is perfectly logical to a second grader. So the actor had to think about how she would respond to that. Another time a kid said, “If we convert you to Christianity you’ll have different rules.” The kids gathered around and said a Christian prayer. That’s them – the students – being in role. The interpreter has to respond as his or her character. People think that scripting means the program becomes robotic. But on the contrary, this type of scripting results in a different experience every time.

You said earlier that one of your four tour components is that it is participatory. That is a very popular idea right now. Can you talk more about what “participatory” means to you?

Think about a kid at science center. The educator asks for a volunteer, and a kid comes up and holds something, or maybe touches something so his hair stands up on end. The kid just participated, but they haven’t learned anything from their participation, or grappled with anything. They were just a prop. I want people to feel something from participation, more than just embarrassment.

Jay Rounds is the recently retired founding director of the Graduate Program in Museum Studies at the University of Missouri St Louis. He is also an anthropologist and a former museum practitioner, notably serving as Chief Curator of the California Museum of Science and Industry, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, and Executive Director of the Museum of Creativity. Jay has written numerous articles applying organizational theory and intellectual history to museum practice. He is currently writing a book which argues that museums are in a moment of paradigm flux.

I heard Jay speak at the American Association of Museums (now American Alliance of Museums) annual meeting a number of years ago. I asked to interview him for this series because his ideas about paradigm shift relate to the heart of this investigation – questioning whether the way in which we work with schools makes sense in our current context, and whether there are new ways of thinking about this work that might be more helpful in the 21^st century.

(Note: A special thanks to Jay for this post. Although it looks like an interview, it reads more like a well-written article, thanks to Jay’s extensive editing, which he did to ensure that these complicated – and, I believe, very important – ideas were clear.)

I have been asking people why schools should visit museums, and everyone has a different answer. Many of the ideas are not even compatible with others. Why is it so difficult to get agreement on what we should be doing?

That’s a good description of the whole museum field these days. Everyone is faced with an unmanageable number of demands. There seems to be an endless supply of people telling us what we ought to be doing. No museum could implement all of those changes simultaneously. In the first place, we don’t have enough time and resources. More significantly, some of the voices are telling us to change in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with the changes demanded by others. So we can’t do everything, and we can’t be everything, all at once. We have to make choices.

 Why are these choices so difficult for museums to make?

That question really is at the heart of my research. First of all, I want to dispose of one common misperception. Museums aren’t having these problems because they are museums and there is something uniquely wrong with museums. It’s not because museums are non-profits and need to start operating like businesses. All types of organizations, including businesses, go through the same patterns when they’re in similar situations.

What kind of “situations”?

What we are experiencing now is an episode of what I call “fundamental change”—a rare, deep discontinuity that revolutionizes the fundamental practice in a field or discipline. In scientific disciplines (which are a type of organization), Thomas Kuhn called such change “paradigm shifts” or “scientific revolutions.” Other researchers have identified similar discontinuities in a wide range of fields.

Of course organizations change all the time; but most of the time they change within the boundaries set by the paradigm of their field. For instance, one big discontinuity occurred when automobiles replaced horse drawn carriages. More than a hundred years later, auto manufacturers are still working out all the possibilities of the basic invention. Cars are changing all the time, but they’re still cars.

So paradigm shifts or fundamental changes are relatively rare. In American museums there have only been two such changes; we now, presumably, are going through a third episode, though it’s not yet completed. The first episode occurred right after the Revolutionary War, when a new type of uniquely American museum was created. The exemplar for this paradigm was Charles Willson Peale’s museum in Philadelphia, which opened (in stages) in the 1780s. That museum concept dominated practice through most of the 19^th century, but by 1870 new museums were appearing that disavowed the old paradigm. After a period of “paradigm crisis,” the new paradigm finally took form around the turn of the century.

That episode created the museums that we all grew up with in the 20^th century. And once again, the final third of the century saw that paradigm come under attack. The process is continuing today.  It seems likely that the pattern will hold, and that sometime soon a new paradigm will emerge that will unite the field again.

How does this account for all of our conflicting ideas about school tours in museums?

The paradigm cycle accounts for the fact that there are such conflicts; but the actual substance of the conflicts reflects some more linear trends in society. Think about the cycle first.

It’s important to recognize that a paradigm is the property of the discipline or field as a whole; it’s what defines the discipline. Individuals become members of the field by affiliating with that paradigm. It doesn’t make sense to say that an individual “has a paradigm,” or that a single museum has a paradigm. Rather, an organization is recognizable as a museum because it practices within the paradigm of the field of “Museums.”

When you work within a discipline or field that has a stable paradigm, it’s easy to know what to do, how to be productive. The paradigm specifies what the work is that needs to be done, and the legitimate ways to go about doing it. It also provides the intellectual or theoretical structure that says why it is worth doing those things, and gives assurances that if you do the work well, you will get the expected results. You don’t have to spend time arguing with colleagues over why you’re all there. You can focus your creativity on becoming more effective and efficient in exploiting the possibilities opened up by the paradigm. A physicist knows how to do physics because she has learned the current paradigm of physics, and practices within that paradigm. (She of course is free to do something else, but then she is not a physicist.) Most professionals spend their entire careers working creatively within an established paradigm. It’s a gratifying way to work because it enables you to get right to work on tasks that you know are meaningful, and ensures that others will know how to value your contributions.

In periods of change, that comfortable consensus deteriorates. Doubts about the efficacy of the old paradigm are voiced; the authority of the experts comes into question, because that expertise is defined by the paradigmatic technologies that are now coming under attack. Freed from the discipline exerted by a stable paradigm, competing ideas proliferate, championed by professionals who had been marginalized in the old technology. As the technology and the goals it serves become increasingly ambiguous and uncertain, there is no longer any overriding principle for deciding which ideas are better than others.

There’s an exciting quality about such times, since there are all these new ideas being debated and new possibilities are opening up.  But it can also be a very frustrating time, because you’re subjected to all these competing demands. How do you choose which to follow?

The cycle is completed when a new paradigm emerges and gains widespread acceptance. It unifies the field in a way that seems to resolve all of the issues raised by the failure of the old paradigm, and it enables people to once again get to work without having to argue over what the work should be. Most people find this to be a big relief.

All that defines the process of fundamental change, but in itself it doesn’t tell us anything about the substance of the changing ideas. For that, we need to look at the historical context of the paradigm shifts.

Can you say more about “the historical context”?

In my book I trace the changes in American museums in concert with changes in American prisons and American schools. When I see all three types of institutions changing at the same time, in similar ways, responding to the same social conditions, and drawing on the same sets of fundamental ideas, then I think that a high level of confidence in the interpretation can be justified. Like American museums, American prisons and schools were reinvented circa 1800, reinvented circa 1900, and went into a new period of paradigm crisis in the late 20^th century that is continuing today. In each case, the period was one of high social stress in American life. Each episode followed a major war: the Revolution, the Civil War, Vietnam. Each period was one of doubt and a sense of danger to the society, a time when things threatened to fall apart. In each case, Americans became intensely interested in ideas about how to stave off chaos, how to ensure the preservation of an orderly society by principles that were consistent with the prevailing social ethics and concepts of social justice.

Peale’s museum and its followers were created in the context of Enlightenment social contract theory. A century later, those theories were replaced with new ideas rooted in Evolutionist social theory, and the sociological functionalism that it matured into. Today we have rejected central tenets of Evolutionist thought, but we don’t yet have a consensual replacement.

Most fundamentally, what has changed from one period to the next has been the idea of the proper relationship between society and the individual. America after the Revolution was centrally concerned with establishing justification for the liberty of the individual citizen. The founders were working to eliminate the vestiges of all the years of living under monarchical power, and to show how social order could be maintained in a free society with limited government, through the rational thought and actions of virtuous citizens.

By the end of the 19^th century America had changed radically, and had lost faith in the power of the rational individual mind in the face of the uncontrollable forces of urbanization, mechanization, immigration, and the massing of wealth in the hands of the “robber barons.” Evolutionist thought now declared that society was prior to the individual, and that society made the individual into the citizen required for an orderly social life. Society would hang together because the “melting pot” would socialize all citizens into a common culture that each person deeply internalized.

But now we have embraced the ethical imperatives of a multicultural society. Differences are to be respected and even celebrated. Social scientists tell us that individuals do not internalize a culture that then determines their actions; rather they acquire elements of multiple cultures that they deploy strategically in differing situations. But while these ideas have been widely accepted, we do not yet have any persuasive theory of how order can arise out of difference rather than sameness. And that’s why we don’t yet have a new paradigm for museums, or prisons, or schools. Such institutions, to be perceived as legitimate in their own times, had to align their paradigms with the dominant social theory that explained an orderly and just society.

I realize that this sounds very abstract and probably unclear to boot. It’s a complicated argument that requires comparing different institutions across different periods of time. That’s why it needs a book-length treatment.

I find it fascinating. Can you talk about how one idea has changed across the different paradigms?

Sure. Let’s focus on the idea of “rationality.” We hear that all the time these days, such as in the comment that museums need to act more rationally, the way businesses do. That is one of the so-called “new ideas” that is touted as a new paradigm for museums, but is in fact an old idea that was part of the old paradigm.

The key is that the concept of rationality has changed radically over time. During the Enlightenment period rationality was understood to be a quality of the individual mind. Social order was ensured if each individual fully realized that God-given capacity for rational thought, because each person would rationally conclude that his or her self-interest was best guaranteed by helping maintain the social contract. The educational theory of the time described the mind as consisting of the will, the emotions, and the rational intellect. People with poorly developed rationality were slaves to their willfulness and emotions, and so were both sources and victims of constant disorder. Schooling was based on the principle of exercising the “mental muscle,” strengthening the intellect so that it could control the will and the emotions. Peale saw his museum as contributing to that strengthening of the intellect, though he focused on encouraging the study of natural history, rather than the study of the classics recommended by most educators. Criminal codes and penitentiaries were designed to make certain that a person contemplating wrong-doing would do his “rational calculus” and reach the conclusion that the pain to be suffered would exceed the benefits that might be gained.

The dislocations of the Civil War and the huge changes in the American economic system undermined the conviction that the rationality of the individual mind could even understand the forces driving social change, let alone control them. Where the Enlightenment philosophers saw free-willed, rational individuals thinking up the social contract—and so creating societies—the Evolutionists completely reversed the priority. The society came first, and created the individual in its own image, as the type of orderly citizen needed to sustain the society. Relative to the free-will doctrine of Peale’s time, Evolutionism was a very deterministic concept. But rationality did not disappear; rather, the locus of rationality shifted from the individual mind to the collective mind—that is, to the culture, where all the knowledge produced and experience gained over the ages was pooled together. While the individual mind was very limited, an individual could act with relatively high rationality as a participant in the culture. Social order would be achieved because all citizens would learn the same things, and would think in the same way, and so would naturally agree on all the things that counted for social order and justice. Science, as the most highly rationalized element of the broader culture, would provide a reliable guide in all things. The focus of schooling turned from reliance on the teacher as a model of individual rationality, and drill to strengthen the muscle of the mind, to inculcating a curriculum that taught all students the essence of the common culture. Museums were reconceptualized as protectors and conveyors of that common culture, and the penitentiary was replaced by the reformatory, which provided remedial socialization for those who didn’t get the message the first time through the system.

In its turn, that conception began to fail in the latter half of the 20^th century. The expectations that science would provide effective answers to all social problems became obviously problematic, exacerbated by the follies of the science-based planning systems applied to the Vietnam War by the “Best and Brightest.” Social theorists declared that individuals did not internalize the culture in the deep, deterministic way proposed by functionalism, and the Civil Rights movement began to challenge the belief that all citizens should be socialized into a common culture. The rationality of the collectivity—of the culture or of the organization—was shown to have to its own limitations and dysfunctions, just like the individual mind. Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize for his concept of  “bounded rationality,” while psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman documented the systematic errors that affect our thinking.

So now we are in the crisis of the old paradigm, when competing ideas proliferate but we have no way to judge which is better than another. Museums are told to become more efficient; but “efficiency” was a central concept of the old paradigm, epitomized by the Scientific Management movement of the early 20^th century. We are told to teach a “common core” curriculum, but that again looks backward a hundred years, and is hard to reconcile with our multi-cultural society. Nor can we swing back to Enlightenment thought, which aimed to assert the power of the rational intellect over the will and the emotions, for modern psychology shows us that the emotions and will are essential to practical reason.

In sum, our problem now is not to choose among either of the previous two paradigms, but to find a way to transcend the very nature of the choices that they presented. And that depends on rethinking our basic assumptions about the “proper” relationship between society and the individual, and how, out of that relationship, we can find a new basis for social order that is consistent with our acceptance of cultural and individual differences. If “education” is a definition of a process for connecting society and individuals, we need to think beyond education to recreate our museums for the new world. The starting place for the museum field, I think, has to be in rethinking our assumptions about what happens when a museum visitor encounters our exhibitions or programs.