Exploding the concept of the art history survey text, Beth Harris and Steven Zucker developed Smarthistory.org to bring art and art history to life through close looking, collaborative conversation, and multimedia digital learning. Saying “bye, bye” to the professor standing up at the front of a dark classroom lecturing for hours, this site engages the 21st century learner and opens up the images and stories of art history to anyone with an internet connection or mobile device.
Beth and Steven best describe the power of the Smarthistory.org approach:
“We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to students, museum visitors, and other informal learners than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our visitors to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them.”
For the past 2 years or more, I have been working with docents and educators using a strategy I first encountered through Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog a post on “Developing Questions for Visitor Participation.” This approach to developing questions — for which I give full credit to Nina Simon, the guru she is — has helped shift my own mentality towards the role questions play in museum teaching. When I first read Simon’s blog post, it was before her book The Participatory Museum was published, so I was citing her blog as the source of this great exercise that has since become the “bread and butter” of developing questions in my own work.
If you take away one thing from her approach to developing questions, it would be this:
“This is the golden rule of developing questions for visitor dialogue: you must be truly interested in their answers. If you don’t care about the answer to the question, why on earth should anyone else?”
Her list of the “right” types of questions can also get educators and docents generating questions that matter, instead of regurgitating questions that we all know the answers to. Here is Simon’s list of good questions:
questions that trigger an immediate response
questions that induce grappling
questions that motivate authentic expression
questions that draw from personal experience
questions open to anyone
questions that are speculative (“what if?” instead of “what is?”)
questions that produce answers that are interesting
We’ve had some incredible sessions with docents and teachers where we will use this approach to brainstorm and test questions in the galleries. Back in 2009 (the first time I used this strategy with our new docent class), a small group selected to work with the painting Factories at Clichy by Vincent Van Gogh.
Factories at Clichy, 1887
After developing several questions, there was one that bubbled to the surface as particularly engaging and interesting. The group asked, “What do you think this landscape might look like today?,” and I remember everyone wanting to share their own response, striking up quite a conversation in front of this painting. The question was simple, triggered immediate responses in everyone, drew from personal experiences, and allowed us all to speculate. It also made some complex connections with the environmental and urban issues that artists like Van Gogh were actually dealing with back in the period of modernization and rapid urbanization of the areas surrounding Paris.
If you bring Nina Simon’s “golden rule” of developing questions for visitor dialogue into your own work, please share your experiences and “Add to the Conversation” below –>
Last year, in 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art launched the thematic multimedia series called Connections as a way of connecting visitors (mostly online visitors) to the voices and personal perspectives of their staff — ultimately creating new connections with artworks in the collection. I immediately began following the series, clicking on the multimedia/audio links each week. The series certainly models a way of connecting artworks across collections and time periods through the personal or intellectual links we can make. Its episodes on themes such as “Fatherhood,” “Texture,” and “Bad Hair” help museum novices (and lifelong visitors) reconnect with the simple, human element that is at the core of our interactions with art.
Art Museum Teaching 