All posts by Chelsea Emelie Kelly

A Museum Educator’s Takeaways from Museums & the Web 2015

April 16, 2015 Chelsea Emelie Kelly 2 Comments

As someone whose interests, skills, and even job title (Manager of Digital Learning) sit squarely between two areas of museum work—education and technology—I think pretty much nonstop about the relationship between the two. This year, I had the great fortune to be able to attend the 2015 Museums and the Web conference (MW or #MW2015) in Chicago, IL, and think out loud with hundreds of leaders, practitioners, and students passionate about museum technology.

I am active in the Museum Education Division of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) and usually attend the NAEA convention, but this year I was excited to step away from my home base of museum education and into the world of digital. I was not disappointed: I found my tech nerd people (you should have heard the nostalgic sigh when someone showed a GIF of old-school Hyperlapse in action).

However, this is not a post about digital nerdery, so if you understood not a word of that previous sentence, don’t be scared. From here on out, this is my attempt to bridge the areas of digital and education in museums. Here are some of my key takeaways from the MW2015 Conference.

Museums and the Web does conference swag right. Check out those tote bags. Photo by the author.

Twitter is a magical thing

One of the best things I ever did for my career was sign up for Twitter, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to become more involved in the field. It has helped me make deep and vast connections with colleagues I never would have encountered otherwise, from all over the museum field and into art history, academia, and K-12 learning. I now use Twitter as my primary source for museum, art, and tech news; as a place to share resources; to talk about issues in the field; and to store my thoughts during conferences. At MW2015, I was finally able to meet many of my “Twitter colleagues” in person. As someone who’s more introverted, it made approaching someone I’d never met before much easier when I could lead with “I’ve followed you on Twitter forever!” and pick up a conversation where we left off online. I could see the same being true for a student or emerging professional.

And, not gonna lie, it’s both fun and weird to be recognized from Twitter when you’re at a conference. It’s like your own little celebrity moment when you introduce yourself to someone and they exclaim, “Oh! I follow you on Twitter and was hoping I’d meet you!” (Insert blushing emoji here.)

Museum technologists publish—and therefore legitimize the “musetech” field

Museum technologists publish. This topic has been bubbling up both at this year’s NAEA (read Dana Carlisle Kletchka’s speech here) and among the museum educators present at MW2015.

At Museums and the Web, presenters can host professional forums and workshops, but they can also present papers. For paper presentations, you write and submit a formal paper that goes beyond “show and tell” of a project and focuses on theory and practice. At the conference, you’re bundled into a session with two other author-practitioners who wrote on similar topics, and the three of you share key points. These engaging talks give technologists the opportunity to formally publish in their field, a boon for their institution and impressive internally to senior staff. Wrapping publishing into a conference also opens doors for emerging professionals and students to participate in the organization more deeply.

But more than that, it legitimizes museum technology. Emily Lytle-Painter used that turn of phrase when I mentioned how impressed I was with the publishing arm of the conference, and it was an “a-ha!” moment for me. Publishing in this quantity and with such dedication—plus offering the papers online, for free, for anyone to read—helps the museum field at large see how important tech is, because it connects theory with practice.

Michelle Grohe (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and I are thinking about how to adapt this to the field of museum education, and I am hoping to have some ideas to pilot this summer. So stay tuned, and please feel free to get in touch with me if you’re interested in this topic.

The author presents on teen programs at the conference along with Hillary Cook (Art Institute of Chicago), Barry Joseph (American Museum of Natural History), and Sofie Anderson (Antenna Labs). Photo by Peter Vega

We need to be better at translating and advocating for our work

One of my coworkers told me about a moment in the Linked Open Data session where the speakers were asked to do an “elevator pitch,” as if to their director or board, about the benefits of linked open data. Afterward, the audience was asked to raise their hand if they were convinced. Just one person did–in a room of nearly a hundred.

When my coworker—one of our fantastic IT (information technology) staff—told me this anecdote, we had a great discussion about the topic of translating what we do for non-technical staff. One of my biggest pet peeves about the museum field as a whole is that we use specialized language that visitors don’t understand. On top of that, we often use our own content-area words that our colleagues might not understand—curators use art history terminology, educators use teacher-speak, and digital has a host of terms drawn from tech. It’s so easy to forget that others might not know our vocabulary, and few of us are brave enough to ask our peers what the heck a mandala, parking lot, or API is.

Educators are great at knowing our audience on tours; let’s apply that to our own institutions by explaining what we mean when talking to our colleagues, as well as not being afraid to ask coworkers to define their terms. Another tool is metaphor, which Tracey Berg-Fulton suggested at the conference—she “translates” by using art history examples to explain tech to curators, and puts curator needs into tech speak for IT. When we translate what we mean, we gain powerful allies and advocates.

We grapple with the same issues—so let’s collaborate more!

There were countless themes and issues that surfaced during Museums and the Web. Technologists such as Peter Samis (SFMOMA) are thinking about storytelling in the digital sphere. We’re grappling with focusing on process vs. the object, as evidenced by a talk on museum makerspaces by Desi Gonzalez, which in turn sparked a sideline Twitter debate about visitor motivation. Developing projects that aligned with institutional mission came up again and again—as a guidepost, as a tool for advocacy, as a way to develop buy-in from colleagues. And we’re struggling with how to define impact and evaluate digital projects—how do we avoid “anecdata” (anecdotal non-data) and really dig deep into showing change?

I’m sure that more than one of these topics resonated with you as a museum educator–so it’s no surprise that I think we should collaborate more internally, cross-departmentally. The museum technologists leading the deepest organizational change and the most impactful projects are those who have strong collaborations cross-departmentally. So if you’re not already, reach across the aisle of your museum and foster relationships with your tech folks–then we can innovate together rather than separately!

It doesn’t have to be a huge, scary endeavor: start small. Have coffee with one of your museum’s digital/IT staff to learn a bit more about his or her job, and let them know what you do. Don’t be afraid to ask questions—your genuine curiosity will go a long way. Find existing projects that you might be able to support, and share what you’re working on. See if there’s a cross-departmental meeting like a Technology Team you could join, or invite your new IT pal to join in an education meeting.

Digital leaders are often museum change leaders

Finally, one of the biggest threads of the conference was about how change is affecting our institutions (you can track lots of different conversations at #MWChange). You’ll notice that “digital” wasn’t in that sentence, but it seems to me that organizational change is, at many institutions, being spearheaded by digital staff. I think this is because digital projects are often catalysts that force museum staff to rethink business as usual. Keir Winesmith (SFMOMA), Michael Parry (Powerhouse Museum, Sydney), Dafydd James (National Museum Wales, UK), Seb Chan, and Aaron Cope (both from Cooper-Hewitt) all led sessions that focused on or touched on institutional change as a result of digital projects. I highly recommend checking out Keir, Michael, and Dafydd’s excellent slides.

Their stories all rang true with one of my favorite books on change and leadership, Leading Change by John Kotter. Kotter proposes eight stages of organizational change, and asserts that it’s a long-term process that requires deep buy-in from all areas and levels. His theory resonates deeply with the change strategies put forth at MW2015. Both Kotter’s book and the papers written by these presenters (here and here) are well worth a read for those of us thinking about deep change in our institution and in the field at large.

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I’m sure you’ll find that there’s lots of overlap between our work as museum educators and the work of our colleagues in technology. After a week with some wonderful museum technologists at Museums and the Web, I guarantee that there is a lot we can learn from each other to invigorate our practice and better serve our visitors.

PS: I also had the pleasure of presenting at the conference with educators Hillary Cook (Art Institute of Chicago) and Barry Joseph (American Museum of Natural History), organized by Sofie Anderson (Antenna Labs)! We talked about digital in teen programs, and you can read more about our session on Barry’s blog.

Featured header image: A shot of the closing reception at the beautiful (and massive) Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Photo by the author.

Museum Tech

Beyond Digital: Open Collections & Cultural Institutions

November 6, 2014 Chelsea Emelie Kelly 15 Comments

This past June, I participated in a two-week workshop at Harvard University’s metaLAB called Beautiful Data: Telling Stories with Open Collections. Thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation, the metaLAB brought together over twenty curators, technologists, educators, and scholars to grapple with how we might use publicly available data from museum collections in our work. In the first week, speakers as varied as digital museum specialists to experience designers to scientists who study vision all pressed us to think of our work in unexpected contexts. In the second week, we took what we’d discussed and applied them to projects of our own.

Over the past four months, I’ve let the ideas and theories of Beautiful Data percolate in my visitor-centered soul, and I’ve come to realize this: although open collections is a movement born in the digital realm, I believe its principles are essential to how a 21st-century cultural institution can reach visitors today—whether virtual, physical, or personal.

What are Open Collections?

“Open collections” is a museum technology term that refers to a museum (or more appropriately, a GLAM—gallery, library, archive, or museum) “opening” all of collections data for anyone to freely use, reuse, or distribute it. In this context, data refers not only to an image of an artwork in a collection, for example, but all of an object’s “metadata” or supporting information, such as artist, time of creation, subject matter, size, medium, and so on. If the collection of your museum is digitally open, you release an API (application programming interface) that allows programmers to easily pull that data into lots of different contexts, such as websites or apps. The idea, according to the OpenGLAM movement, is that it allows “users not only to enjoy the riches of the world’s memory institutions, but also to contribute, participate and share.” (For a more in-depth explanation of museum APIs, check out this blog post from the SFMOMA Lab.)

Metadata sounds like tombstone information—in other words, that basic information that lives on a museum label, and on its own, might not necessarily be that compelling. The magic of open collections data, though, is that through technology, all those individual bits of information can be packaged together and unpacked, visualized and disseminated in different ways. In short, like many of our most successful museum education programs, the cool stuff happens when you release it into the wild and let people play.

Perhaps the most famous example of a museum opening up its collection is the Rijksmuseum, which in 2011 published an API and allowed free access to high-quality images of its artworks. But most stunningly, it not only allowed, but loudly encouraged anyone who wanted to create new interpretations of those artworks, from coffee cups to clothing. They even hosted a contest on the huge handmade marketplace website Etsy.

Another great example is by Florian Kräutli, one of my fellow Beautiful Data participants, who took Tate’s open collections data and visualized it—noticing that over half its collection is by J. M. W. Turner, prompting him into a rabbit hole of discovery into exactly why that is (you can read his blog post on the project to find out more). Museums are supporting this type of play in-house, too: the Cooper-Hewitt team has a treasure trove of ways they’ve used their collections data on their blog, including a search-by-color tool and “Robot Rothko” (which is just as awesome as it sounds). As his final project, Beautiful Data participant Richard Barrett-Small, formerly of Tate, built on the Cooper-Hewitt’s color tool to create Colour Lens, a color visualization explorer for multiple museum collections.

In short, the big idea here is that open collections allow cultural institutions to complete their educational missions: not only showing our objects to as many people as possible (no matter where they are in the world—thanks, internet!), but giving people ownership of our collections and spaces by welcoming them to engage in any way they can dream up.

Investigating Transformative Experiences with Art

Let’s turn back to my personal experience at Beautiful Data. It’s rare that museum staff are ever able to think about the what ifs and why nots, to set aside time to imagine, play, and prototype. Happily, at Beautiful Data, we had two full weeks to do exactly that.

As a visitor-centered museum educator, I think a lot about the humans experiencing our institutions. As a visitor-centered museum technologist, I think about people too, albeit those in the ether of the web—no less real than my students, though often more anonymous. At Beautiful Data, though, we went extremely big-picture—this meant discussions of data visualizations (graphical ways to show stories about data), institutional collecting patterns and preferences, and thinking about how not just staff but organizations could collaborate together through comparing and sharing their collections data.

To be honest, this sometimes frustrated me. As one of two educators in the group, I was always asking, “but what about the people who will actually use this information?” That question was certainly on the minds of other participants, but I came to realize that “users” could just as often mean internal staff members as external visitors.

With all this in mind, for my Beautiful Data final project, I decided to tackle an idea that has been a seed in my work for some time: amassing stories or personal connections with works of art from museum visitors, and seeing what patterns I could find about how people interact with collections. I posted a survey asking people to share their “transformative experiences with works of art,” and waited to see what I’d get.

I was struck by the stories I received. Regardless of length or whether the respondent was a museum professional or a scientist, even if they had only seen the work one time, each story was full of heart—beautiful, nostalgic, sometimes wrenching connections between a work of art and the person’s own life.

Despite a week blissfully surrounded by all things nerdy-tech (read: 3D printers, APIs, and Lytro cameras), instead of building a minimal website or massaging the words into data, I instead was compelled to handwrite key phrases on paper, print out full responses and images of their chosen piece, and pin them to a wall. My project quickly turned into a completely physical installation: a purposefully unscientific data visualization of the responses people had submitted.

Documentary photos of my installation can be seen through the photo gallery below, or you can visit my album on Flickr.

Some stories were long, others just a handful of cryptic sentences. Some had art historical, factual descriptions backing up their thoughts; others never looked up a single extra bit of information about the artwork after they saw it. Some ruminated on the object for many years; others were hit in the gut all of a sudden upon turning a corner.

For all that, every single story had two things in common. In each, there was a deeply personal reason behind the individual’s connection to the artwork, and each was written in a tone of reverence—towards the power of these images to arrest a person, to stir up unexpected thoughts or feelings, to stick in their mind for years and years afterward.

Open Collections—Beyond the Digital

When my teen program started up again this fall, I brought my students into the Milwaukee Art Museum galleries to look at a single work of art for an hour (you can read more about this process here.) As usual, I noticed the high schoolers opening up to each other, to new ideas, and to finding ways that art relates to their everyday life—whether a photograph of Milwaukee or a landscape by a Baroque Italian painter. These discussions are guided by the students—I might throw in some useful facts to open up the conversation, but they take the lead. As a result, on any given day, we might relate artworks to religion, politics, narratives, families and friends, or even moods and feelings.

During these sessions, the teens are given permission to engage with these objects in a manner entirely new to them: instead of the 7-second “drive by” glance, they’re encouraged to bring their own opinions, thoughts, and questions to these artworks.

This fall, as I watched the students unfold these pieces and their own thoughts every week, and as I thought about my own project at Beautiful Data, I started to realize how intimately connected my discussion-based teaching style and experience-based project are to the big ideas behind the open collections movement.

In the realm of digital, opening collections data and encouraging people to play with it allows for deeper engagement in and participation with our collections. For my teen programs, which take place physically in the museum, the same goal holds—for my students to feel comfortable engaging with and connecting with the collection. For my Beautiful Data project about transformative experiences with works of art, each respondent was open to having an experience with a work of art that turned out to be intimate and meaningful.

Too often in the museum field, we become siloed. The cross-pollinated conversations and projects at Beautiful Data with folks from many different museum departments helped me see that most of the time, we’re all saying the same thing.

We all want our collections to be open to the public. We all want to give visitors opportunities to engage with objects. All that said, the devil’s in the details, as they say, and, as I learned from fellow participants at Beautiful Data, “openness” might mean different things in different contexts, or to different people within our institutions. For a museum technologist who’s part of the OpenGLAM movement, it might mean creating an API for her institution’s collection. For a curator, it might mean presenting art with minimal labels to allow visitors to bring their own thoughts to the work. For an educator, it might mean hosting a monthly “slow art” day, facilitating a one hour conversation about a single work of art. For a visitor, it might mean taking a selfie with a work of art to share with friends on Instagram—or perhaps having a life-changing, transformative moment with an object—or maybe exploring the collection online even though they live halfway around the world from the institution itself.

If we’re all saying the same thing, then why does it sometimes seem like we’re not on the same page? It might be because we’re speaking slightly different languages (after all, our departments borrow from our content areas—whether technology terms, art history/academic jargon, or educator-ese). It might be because when we are speaking together, we’re only hearing what we want to hear instead of what the other person is actually saying. It might be because we’re not taking time to speak to each other at all.

I can tell you firsthand with Beautiful Data under my belt that it’s worth it to step outside the comfort zone of our own department. Internally, let’s challenge ourselves to learn new vocabulary and have discussions with others outside of our own departments. That way, our principles and beliefs can start to be shared among staff in different areas. When we speak the same language internally, we’ll have the power to push our institutions into a new paradigm, as Jay Rounds discusses in a recent article on Museum Questions, or as Mike Murawski suggests in his article about museums embracing a “digital mindset.”

And externally? Open collections, at its core, is about access to our institutions—whether digitally through collection APIs, physically through innovative programming in our galleries, or personally through highlighting the stories of people who have had powerful experiences with objects. Opening access in this way can be scary, because it can sometimes mean giving up some control, such as rights, an authoritative institutional voice, or even the context and purpose of looking at artwork. But those risky moments are also when great change has the potential to occur. If we want our collections to be relevant and meaningful in the 21st century, we must be brave enough to open up our doors—physically and virtually—to support, encourage, and celebrate the profound and magical experiences with art that happen next, whatever they might be.

Spotlight on Practice, Teens in Museums, Video

How Can Museums Change Teens — and Vice Versa?

August 25, 2014 Chelsea Emelie Kelly 7 Comments

Written by Chelsea Kelly, Milwaukee Art Museum

Over the past four years, I have worked with hundreds of Milwaukee-area teens who love art, and who, over their time in teen programs at the Milwaukee Art Museum, grow to love museums as well.

I have always had a sense that my students grow over their time at the Museum. This year, though, to really study that growth, we designed our longstanding Satellite High School Program as a year-long experience to explore exactly how weekly sessions at an art museum might change the thinking of our teen participants. To that end, our program outcome for students was that they would show an increased ability to reflect upon their own experiences and performance.

Evaluation is a grey area—much like teaching and interpretation—and we as educators need to use multiple methods in order to get a fuller picture of what’s going on with our students.

This means I’ve been thinking a lot about evaluation: How do we show change was made? Years ago, I thought evaluation was more or less a prickly, black-and-white, necessary evil that forced me to use altogether too much math. But over the past two years, I’ve come around to believe evaluation is completely the opposite (though math is still important!). Evaluation is a grey area—much like teaching and interpretation—and we as educators need to use multiple methods in order to get a fuller picture of what’s going on with our students. And further, these methods can be tools to help our teaching, improving programs and our impact on students.

In the end, I found I needed to use reflective practice myself to understand how my students were changing, and to explore and experiment with a number of different methods for articulating their growth. In this post, I’ll share a few of the methods we used in the Satellite High School Program this year to explore how our teen interns changed through reflective practice.

First… What is Satellite?

The Satellite High School Program is a year-long internship for sixteen teens ages 16 to 18 from diverse high schools all over the Milwaukee area. Once a week after school, they come together at the Museum and explore how art can be made relevant to our lives today. They participate in “object studies” (hour-long discussions on a single work of art), behind-the-scenes career talks with staff, and resume-writing workshops, and also mentor elementary school students in tours of the permanent collection.

Teens create a final project that has a real-world impact on the Museum. They choose a work of art in the Museum Collection, research it, and form their own interpretation of the piece. In past years, students have created responses in visual art, writing, or performance. This year, the students used iPads to create videos on their work of art, explaining what the work means to them and how it changed their thinking or art practice. You’ll see a few of those videos later in this post.

Friends, family, and teachers of the Satellite interns watch their final project videos at the program celebration. Photo by Front Room Photography

Core Evaluation

Let’s start with the core evaluation method we used for the program. We were lucky to work with one of our teen program funders, the Milwaukee Public Schools Partnership for the Arts & Humanities, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Urban Initiatives and Research (CUIR) to develop the outcome above and to establish a tool to measure it.

We settled on one-on-one interviews, doing a “pre” interview on the first days of the program in October and a “post” interview on the final days of the program in May. Each student was privately asked the same set of questions in the pre- and post-interviews, meant to get at their ability to reflect on their experiences in the program. I scored each interview on a rubric that measured level of detail in their responses, and then we compared their pre-program score to their post-program score to see if they had improved.

At the end, every student did improve in their ability to reflect—their answers got significantly more detailed. As someone whose default is to be a more qualitative thinker, it was rewarding to use the rubric to see their interviews as data, in a quantitative, more tangible way.

But as helpful as this was, it’s still just one method of evaluation. Being able to explain in detail is certainly one aspect of successfully being able to reflect. But as I listened to their responses, and thought about what I had seen in the students over the course of the whole year, I realized there is much more to reflecting than just detail. Their responses used stronger vocabulary, they expressed sophisticated ideas, and they asked more and deeper questions. How could I articulate that kind of change?

Unexpected Data

Happily, along the way, we also found that we had collected some unexpected data which helped me more concretely see the change in my students.

Exit Slips

At the end of each session, teens used a web app on their iPads called Infuse Learning to fill out a quick exit slip survey. Exit slips are an easy way to take the pulse of your students at the end of a session. For Satellite, they answered the questions “What is something you learned today?” and “What are you still wondering about?” Though different from our interview questions, these certainly also support reflective practice by thinking back on the day’s session.

As the year went on, I noticed that the teens ‘ responses were growing more sophisticated: they were longer, they used more art vocabulary, and they realized that they might not be able to answer questions definitively, if at all. At the suggestion of Marianna Adams, who specializes in museum research and evaluation, I tried running these responses through two readability tests to see if that would quantify the sophistication of these responses. One test produces the sample’s Fog Scale Level, which measures syllable count and sentence length (a score of 5 being readable, 20 being very difficult). The other was for the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, which approximates the average grade level necessary to read and understand the text.

For the first question (“What is something you learned today?”), students’ scores jumped considerably in Fog Scale and Reading Level. Since these tests measure syllable count, sentence length, and grade level, this corroborates with what I found in the core evaluation.

But I was surprised to see that when I tested responses to the second question (“What are you still wondering about?”), students’ scores actually dropped! Yet if you read their responses, there is a drastic change—for the better.

Take Student D’s responses. In his early answer, he asks a relatively basic art historical question about distinguishing one type of art from another. In his later response, he is thinking deeply about the purpose of art and how we even decide what art is. And while Student F uses high-level art history vocabulary in her first response, it’s without context; later on, she’s thinking about how two seemingly opposite concepts may have something in common after all.

The scores of these comments may have decreased, but I’d argue that their reflective quality increased—the teens ask big questions that might not have an answer; they ditch high-level vocabulary to more informally muse on philosophical questions of art, destruction, and race. Running these responses through the tests helped me see, again, that while tools can be helpful, they’re ultimately just one tool—we need more than one to paint a bigger picture.

Videos

To round out that image, I’ll share one final unexpected evaluation tool: the teens’ final project videos as well as a talkback session they conducted at their video premiere.

For their final project, each student chose one work of art in the Museum Collection and looked at it, researched it, and talked about it with others for seven months. (Given that most visitors spend under 10 seconds looking at art in museum galleries, this is a feat in and of itself!) They distilled a school year’s worth of thinking into brief, 2-4 minute videos that answered what the work meant to them, what it had meant to others, and how their own thinking had changed as a result of looking at the piece—all questions with, of course, that familiar reflective bent.

The teens also participated in a talk-back/Q&A at the celebration where we premiered these final projects. Guests—museum staff, teachers, family, and friends—asked the group questions about their experience. If you like, you can watch the teens’ videos, along with the Q&A, in the YouTube playlist below.

Impact — Can Museums Change Teens?

So: does all the above—interviews, exit slips, readability tests, and final projects—add up to a full image of the impact that a year’s worth of reflective practice can have on students?

Brandon answers a question during the Satellite premiere Q&A session. Photo by Front Room Photography

I’m not sure we can ever paint a full picture of student growth in intensive programs such as this one. I do think combining all of these tools can help, though—especially if the evaluative tools actively support the goal of the program. The interviews, exit slips, and activities were all intentionally structured to be reflective, related to the outcome itself. This relevancy was key, not only in genuinely evaluating the program’s success, but also in supporting the students’ abilities through the methods themselves. It’s also important that we educators make the program goal transparent to the students. The Satellite interns knew from the beginning that they were working on reflective ability—this helped prime them to think reflectively from the get-go.

As far as impact beyond reflective capacity, I also want to share a few quotes from the teens themselves about their time in this program:

“The videos help us think deeper about what we do—so even in school I think deeper about what I’m doing or why this was made or why this happened.”

“I learned that I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. When I first saw my piece I just thought it was a bunch of different colors and didn’t really think about it actually having a meaning. But now I’ve learned that it actually has a super cool meaning behind [it], and I never would have learned about that meaning if I hadn’t taken the chance to explore. So I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.”

“We had to give tours and I found out that I really like to work with children and art at the same time. I would like to pursue a career in art education for elementary school students.”

“I was able to change and evolve my way of thinking, now being able to look past the obvious… I learned that art holds all the answers to any questions anyone may have, you just have to search for it.”

From the other evaluation tools, we saw that the students developed their ability to reflect on themselves and their own performance. But as seen in the comments above, they were also able to develop skills reflecting on the world beyond them—the world of art history, their future careers, how they interact with other people. All of these are ways of thinking that are valuable for their futures, as they go to college, discover their passions, and pursue meaningful career opportunities.

Can Teens Change Museums?

I’ve shown how this program helped these students grow in many ways. What about the Museum itself? Have these students had an impact on our institutional practice?

Institutions move at a slower pace than most programs, and if change and impact are complex to measure in sixteen individual students, then it’s multiplied tenfold for an organization that serves hundreds of thousands visitors a year. Even so, over the past few years, the work of teens in our programs has slowly but surely worked its way into the daily fabric of the Museum. Teens have interviewed artists on behalf of the institution. They have advised docents on ideas for giving tours to high schoolers. Their video projects will be part of on-site and online Collection Resources at the Museum, as well as our Archives, for all visitors to access while learning about works of art.

Ultimately, evaluation and impact are ongoing, a grey area that has a lot in common with the act of teaching itself. When done well and intentionally, evaluation doesn’t just show if we’ve met a goal. The tools we use to evaluate ideally become part of our teaching practice, because they reinforce the very abilities we are trying to help our students develop.

As for what I’m still wondering about? This year, our evaluation methods for the most part required the teens to have specific existing skills, such as writing for the exit slips or proficiency in using an iPad (though we did have video-making workshops as part of the program). I’m thinking about other ways to holistically gather data. For example, given that much of our evaluation methods emerged from teaching tools, should I document or film our discussions with works of art and find ways to analyze them? I’d love to hear any ideas or tools you’ve used to evaluate your programs, just as I hope this post has inspired you to take a fresh look at your teaching practice and find unexpected ways to see the growth in your participants.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHELSEA EMELIE KELLY: Manager of Digital Learning at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she develops educational technology initiatives and oversees and teaches teen programs. She is passionate about using gallery teaching and technology to foster relevancy for art museums in the 21st century. She has previously worked at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Art & Historical Center, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Chelsea is a graduate of Vassar College and holds an M.S.Ed. in Leadership in Museum Education from the Bank Street College Graduate School of Education, where she was a Kress Foundation Fellow. She is also the founder and co-editor of The Art History Blog. Chelsea’s postings on this site are her own and don’t necessarily represent the Milwaukee Art Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

OpenThink

Have You Ever Had a Transformative Experience With Art?

June 23, 2014 Chelsea Emelie Kelly Leave a comment

Have you ever had a transformative experience with a work of art?

I’m collecting as many stories as possible about the experiences people have had with artworks. Please share your story (anonymously if you like) at this Google Form.

Want to know more about this project?

Photo by Brian Koprowski. Creative Commons Attribution -NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.

Over the past year, I’ve started to think more and more about what the relationship is between objects, contextual/historical interpretation, and our human experiences with them. This interest began after I myself had a transformative experience with a work of art that greatly changed how I think: Agnes Martin’s Untitled #10 at the Milwaukee Art Museum. In a teen program discussion, one of my students helped me see the connections between Martin’s work and meditation practice. As I continued to look at the piece on my own and reflect on our group comments, I began to recognize that being with Martin’s painting was when I started to become more comfortable living in ambiguity — a transformative personal and professional turning point.

More broadly, from my teaching practice, I have noticed that our collective understanding of art objects is greatly enriched when we consider both art historical/contextual information and our own personal reactions and interactions with objects. We bring our own background when we look at and interpret art objects (whether we’re alone or in groups)–and I’m interested in how those experiences help us better understand the objects themselves, as well as how these objects can help us create meaning within our own lives.

Although I could not attend the NAEA Gallery Teaching Marathon this spring, I had hoped to explore the topic of transformative experiences with art objects with the Marathon group. The survey above and this very blog post is my digital attempt at exploring this topic with a wider group. I hope you will share your stories with me, and as I collect them, I hope to better understand and share what it means to bring objects, people, and information together. I’m not yet sure what we’ll find — perhaps there will be patterns, perhaps not — but I am sure that looking at these stories as a whole will get us started on considering these questions.

So, I hope you will join in this experiment with me and share your own story! Please feel free to share the survey with as many folks as you like — the more stories, backgrounds, and people, the better.

Thank you for contributing!

Experimenting in Museums, Spotlight on Practice, Teens in Museums, Video

Letting Go and Opening Up: Teen Voices in Art Museums

January 9, 2014 Chelsea Emelie Kelly 12 Comments

By Chelsea Emelie Kelley, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Patty Edmonson, Cleveland Museum of Art

When museums share interpretive control of their collections, amazing things can happen. Many museums are reimagining how visitors can interact with and engage in their collections, through technology, after-hours adult programming, and even hacking (both sanctioned and independent).

Recording video content with teens as part of the Teen CO-OP program at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Teen programs provide a very different kind of opportunity for museums to experiment with interpretation. Because many teens participate in multiple programs for extended lengths of time, they become advocates and resources for our museums and its collections. Teens at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art have been part of two experimental interpretive strategies that go deeper than one-day-only programs, providing not only learning experiences for students involved, but powerful tools and content for their institutions.

From the museum educator’s perspective, we—Chelsea Emelie Kelly at the Milwaukee Art Museum and Patty Edmonson at the Cleveland Museum of Art—originally connected because both of our programs create video content featuring teens for our collections. However, we’ve come to see that there are more connections and applications to what we’re doing than simply producing object-focused, teen-made videos. We share our programs and projects below, and we’re now thinking about how we can make use of this content beyond teen audiences. Read on and share your thoughts with us!

Teen CO∙OP at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Patty Edmonson, Intergenerational Interpretation Specialist

The Teen CO∙OP started in 2013, and it’s the Cleveland Museum of Art’s newest teen program. We chose ten students from a pool of applicants to participate in a two-week summer session, where we trained them to work with the public and create their own programming. They use these skills during our monthly family days, called Second Sundays. CO∙OP members work in our interactive gallery, Gallery One, answering visitor questions and starting conversations about art and the museum. During these events, they also help with studio projects, pass out the teen guide they made, and create Vine videos. The CMA is working toward a more visible teen presence and authentic teen voices.

Video has been a tool for us to hear these teen voices and get students to think about storytelling in museums. During our summer session we created short films with a local production company, North Water Partners. Each student began by choosing an artwork and we interviewed them about their initial reactions before they knew very much about the piece. After these first interviews they read about their artworks and we talked about historical context. We asked them to complete a series of small tasks: choose three words that describe the artwork; describe this to someone who can’t see; write a tagline for the artwork; tell a story about this artwork; make a Vine about it. These tasks became pieces that they could include in their storyboards. Some also created their own typography or imagery to incorporate into their video.

One of the biggest challenges was balancing fun and appropriateness. I wanted the students to feel comfortable being silly, but there were several moments when we stopped to talk about respecting the art and museum. We also went out on a limb by letting the video content come from their ideas and observations, not solely art historical information. We are not creating mini art historians here. That said, we did have to navigate one interpretation of a portrait with a shadow that looked like a bruise. The student was interested in creating a story of a battered woman, but we stepped in to talk about why this story might not be the best one to imagine, and spent time looking at more portraits and their shadows.

Through these videos, the teens learned to look closer. They seemed excited that their observations were valid and their confidence grew. I also saw their public speaking abilities improve after being behind the camera, which can be tough. One of our big goals was to capture an authentic voice, and we chose not to correct language that museums wouldn’t normally approve, like “I’m finna to the grand ball” (as in fixing to go). I felt that by letting their real voices come through, we let them know that they can be themselves in a museum.

We hope to show these videos on our website, and you can see some of the good and bad Vines under the account, CMA Teen CO-OP. Our plan next summer is to make content that can better fit into our app, ArtLens.

Satellite High School Program at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Milwaukee Art Museum Satellite Program group, 2013-14

Chelsea Emelie Kelly, Manager of Digital Learning

The Satellite High School Program is an art history focused weekly gallery program at the Milwaukee Art Museum for sixteen arts-interested teens from the Milwaukee area to connect with works of art and each other. As part of the program, teens choose a work of art in the Museum collection to study and interpret, and share their ideas in a final project. Over the past year, we’ve experimented with how they share using video in two very different ways.

In the spring 2013 program, teens had one semester to choose a work, study it, and make a creative response to it, in visual art, writing, music, or media of their choice. I wanted to be sure their work was shared with a wider audience, so I used my own personal DSLR camera to film them with their artwork and creative responses. I had them write their own voiceover explaining their piece, their connection to it, and their response project, making sure that the video was just about one minute long for quick, easy consumption. Here’s just one of their videos, featuring Joel:

That project was successful, but I wanted to turn much more of the creation over to the teens themselves. I knew I had a chance to do just that when we received funding to buy a set of iPads for the Education Department.

This fall, as part of a school year-long program, a new group of teens had a different task: they shared their personal connections to their work of art through a video they created on an iPad. Over the course of the semester, they created video blogs (vlogs) reflecting on their changing thoughts about their work of art. They also received “readers” with basic information on their work of art or artist, and led a group discussion with all the Satellite students about their piece to get others’ opinions and thoughts. At the end of the semester, they created midterm videos piecing together with their reflection vlogs to show their evolution of thought. Here is ZouaPang’s video:

Teens continually asked themselves what they were still wondering about, and much changed over the course of the semester. When asked what she learned after an early session, Alana responded: “I learned how to better analyze paintings.” Her answer to the same question at the last session of the semester was much richer: “I learned a lot more about how to analyze art and research which I think is really cool because now instead of just looking at a piece and saying ‘pretty picture’ I notice more things about the pieces I see.” Alana’s video—and all her research and analysis!—is below.

One-to-one iPads came with their own set of challenges. Instead of solo weekend troubleshooting with DSLRs and iMovie, I found myself with a wonderfully excited group who wanted to use the iPad for much longer than I’d anticipated! In fact, I learned that students about doubled the time I usually allotted to use the iPad comfortably and feel good about their work.

Next semester, the same group of students will continue to explore their artwork and create more formal videos for a wider visitor audience about their work of art. We’re going to kickoff the semester with some visitor studies: teens will go into the galleries and do a card-sort exercise with Museum visitors to discover what people actually want to know about works of art (thanks to Marianna Adams for this activity!). Then we’ll pool our data and discuss how we might format our videos for a larger audience, as well as how the teens think we should share the content.

Your Thoughts?

We’re now in the phase of thinking about what we can do with the content our students have worked so hard to create. We know their voices are important and engaging, and are thinking about how best to share them. Since ArtMuseumTeaching.com is a forum for practice, we would love to open our questions up to all of you. What other purposes might these videos serve? Would they be interesting to other audiences? Where and how should these videos be shared? Please share your thoughts with us, as well as comments or questions, below!

Google+ Hangouts, Spotlight on Practice

Hangout with NAEA’s New Online Peer-to-Peer Initiative

November 21, 2013 Chelsea Emelie Kelly 2 Comments

By Chelsea Kelly, Manager of Digital Learning, Milwaukee Art Museum

Have you ever gotten home from a conference abuzz with excitement about all the new ideas, people, and programs you’ve learned about and discussed? If so (after you finally recover from all that intense thinking), I’m betting you then thought: “Wow, it’d be great if I didn’t have to wait a full year to get a taste of that again.” Well, that’s exactly why we began a Peer-to-Peer Initiative for the National Art Education Association’s Museum Education Division — to use technology to connect with colleagues and share our ideas and programs in an informal way, outside of conferences.

We’re pleased to announce a pilot series of Google+ Hangouts On Air in the next month. These Hangouts will highlight current work in our field in the conference-like spirit of sharing, discussion, and best practices. (Minus the week-long period of exhaustion and hundreds of emails in your inbox to catch up on afterwards!)

So, please join us for any or all of the below Peer-to-Peer Hangouts this month! Each is about an hour and they are open to all museum educators, regardless of whether you’re an NAEA member.You can find detailed login information for each Hangout on the NAEA Google+ Page.

Tues, Nov 26 | 4 PM EST
Social and Interactive Programs for Adult Visitors
Molly Kysar (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Katie Hill (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), and Jaime Kopke (Denver Art Museum)

Tues, Dec 3 | 4 PM EST
Discussion: “Teaching in the Art Museum” in Practice
Amy Kirschke and Chelsea Kelly (Milwaukee Art Museum)

Fri, Dec 6 | 1 PM EST
Model of Practice: Professionalizing and Integrating a Docent Program
Mark Osterman (Vizcaya Museum and Gardens)

Tues, Dec 10 | 4 PM EST
All Together Now: Talking about Teens and Museums
Gabrielle Wyrick, Cecelia Halle, and Aric Oak (ICA/Boston)

Fri, Dec 13 | 1 PM EST
Art Museums and the Common Core State Standards
Claire Moore (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Sara Egan (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), and Theresa Soto (Getty)

Fri, Dec 20 | 1 PM EST
Artists as Audiences
Michelle Hagewood (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Some friendly reminders on how to Hangout — be sure that you sign up for, or activate, a Google+ account (not just a Gmail account). You can’t actually “hang out” if you don’t have Google+! Find instructions here. Once you’ve got an account, add NAEA Museum Education Division to your circles so you can easily join in the Hangout event. And if you need more details on how to Hangout, there are some more materials on how to join in on the NAEA Museum Education Division page (scroll down a bit to find the resource).

And of course, once you’re hanging out with us or after you watch an archived Hangout, join the conversation on Twitter using #MusEdPeers!

Since this is a pilot, we’d love to hear feedback from you as the Hangouts launch. Similarly, if you have an idea for a future Hangout, post it on our Google+ page or contact Michelle Grohe or me.

We can’t wait to Hangout with you soon!

Editor’s Note: As ArtMuseumTeaching stays connected to NAEA’s Peer-to-Peer Initiative and all of these fantastic Hangouts, you’ll be able to find discussions and links to post-hangout video archives here, as well, on this sites Google+ Hangout section. So let’s all get connected, and spread the word!

Teens’ Vision for Docent-Led Tours

November 30, 2012 Chelsea Emelie Kelly 2 Comments

Sara shares her thoughts on Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant's "Evening on the Seashore—Tangiers." Photo by Nate Pyper. — Sara shares her thoughts on Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant’s “Evening on the Seashore—Tangiers.” Photo by Nate Pyper.

How do we engage teenagers at art museums? Our museums offer powerful classes, internships, and multi-visit programs–but their reach is limited. For many teens, their first (and sometimes only) exposure to an art museum is through a school field trip. There are already a number of great conversations on this site posing suggestions and challenges for ideal school tours, which consider the needs and perspectives of the museum educator and the classroom teacher.

But what about asking the students themselves?In summer 2012, we did just that at the Milwaukee Art Museum. A group of fourteen teen interns teamed up with ten docents to delve deep into what can make a school tour successful and engaging. They worked to jointly share ideas and troubleshoot concerns. The session was such a hit for both groups that we decided to bring back five of those students this fall to share their thoughts with our full docent corps–all 100+ of them!

We taped the dialogue so that we could share the teens’ ideas as faithfully as possible. The video below shows the five summer teen interns in dialogue with our docents. The teens quickly do a check-in/icebreaker with the docents, describe the summer program, and facilitate a Q&A session.

What I found particularly powerful about the teens’ suggestions is that they are not only relevant to teen audiences–these tips can be used for younger and older visitors, too. In the spirit of continuing the conversation begun by these young people and our docents, I’d like to offer some of my own take-aways:

Take the time to get to know each other (even if the tour is only an hour). Over the summer, I began our sessions with a “check in” activity, inspired by the Milwaukee Writing Project, as a way for us to get to know each other. If you know your audience, you can tailor your tour to their interests from the get-go. As Rosehaydee said in the video, it can bring the group together and set a friendly tone.
Be aware of your group–and do what they want to do. Be in tune with your group and their reactions: if something’s not working, move on rather than pressing it.
Be yourself. Share your passion, and be friendly and relaxed. As Sensei said, if you are enthusiastic about what you’re discussing, chances are good that your group will respond to your enthusiasm.
Museum tours can be intimidating. Teens are aware that docents and educators are extremely knowledgeable; and it’s scary to offer your thoughts in front of not just a docent but also your peers. To support conversation, Steven suggested using clear, simple language (without being patronizing), and Rosehaydee encouraged us to acknowledge student voices, even if they’re not the “right” answer, so teens know they’re being heard.
Technology is a tool, not a goal. When asked if museums should use more technology to engage teens, responses were mixed. Yes, technology is cool and lots of teens use it–but not all teens have access, and technology is not always successful or necessary. If the activity can be done equally as well or better in analogue format, it’s probably not worth it to try to use a gadget. But if it’s something that can only be done with technology–like Skyping with an artist or out-of-town group–then take the time to give it a try.
Remember that we all learn differently. To combat teen boredom, Rosehaydee suggested calling on specific individuals to get them to pay attention, but Sensei noted that sometimes it can be just as effective to try a pair-share or solitary writing activity. This reminded me that museum educators and docents have a responsibility to provide many different kinds of learning opportunities for our students. We need to know when to support and when to gently challenge them.
Respect the group; think of them as family. One of my favorite suggestions from the teens over the summer was for docents to think of the teens as their children or grandchildren. To me, this gets to the heart of working with any visitor that comes into our space: respect them–their prior knowledge, their interests, their reasons for coming to museums in the first place. We can learn from visitors as much as (if not more than!) they can learn from us.

Sometimes, as we plan programs and tours, educational goals and strict standards can overshadow the much more abstract magic that can come from engaging with works of art. I’m glad these young people remind us of the steps we can take to achieve that “bigger picture”: a museum experience that is supportive, interesting, and fun. Such experiences help teens know that museums are places where they can be themselves, connect with peers who also love art, enrich their thinking, or simply take a break from a busy day of school.

Art Museum Teaching