Category Archives: Experimenting in Museums

Building Community: Reflections on the Ohio Museum Teaching Mashup

August 31, 2015 Mike Murawski Leave a comment

Written by Patty Edmonson, Intergenerational Interpretation Specialist, Cleveland Museum of Art; and Hajnal Eppley, Assistant Director, School & Teacher Engagement, Cleveland Museum of Art

Inspired by the Museum Ed Mashup in New Orleans, Cleveland hosted the first Ohio Museum Teaching Mashup at MOCA Cleveland on August 10. Hosts from a cross-museum team (Nicole Ledinek from MOCA, Gina Thomas McGee from Akron Art Museum, and Bethany Corriveau Gotschall, Patty Edmonson, and Hajnal Eppley from the Cleveland Museum of Art) planned a day-long event with multiple rounds of gallery experimentation and discussion.

As hosts, we were excited about working together and were energized by the planning process, but we weren’t sure how successful this event would be in terms of attendance. Previous mash-ups and throw-downs in New Orleans, Denver, and New York took place when educators were already close geographically, or gathered for an event. Would people from other cities really want to travel all the way to Cleveland for this mashup?

The answer was a resounding, “Yes!” Forty museum and university educators, classroom teachers, and volunteers from cities such as Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Detroit joined together to experiment, share ideas, and play in MOCA Cleveland’s galleries.

Hosts and participants commented that one of the most important components of the event was the opportunity to meet new colleagues and collaborate. While some larger cities host frequent regional museum education or art education professional development, many of us in Midwestern museums have not had these opportunities. Several participants commented that they were unable to attend conferences and, particularly for those in smaller institutions, they sometimes felt a sense of isolation. For many of us, this event was the first opportunity to meet colleagues in the region and lay the groundwork for future collaborations.

Experiments in the Galleries

We divided the day into two experimenting sessions, modeled after the New Orleans experience. After a quick introduction in the morning, randomly-drawn groups of three received an artwork and planned their experience in 45 minutes. “I found that I was easily able to let go of the desire to understand where they [fellow experimenters] came from and what strengths they brought to the table, instead focusing on working together with whoever happened to be in my group to develop an experience. I’ve been thinking about how that kind of experience is particularly useful in understanding how to approach collaborative work, compromise, and flexibility at my home institution,” reflected one of our experimenters.

Each team executed their plan in six minutes, and then we gathered for a quick recap. After the event, we asked teams what it was like to serve as an experimenter. One summed up the role as “part mad scientist, part educator, part visitor, part experiential development nerd.” Another said:

“Experimenters are willing to take risks…regardless of whether their activities are perceived to be successful or not they are willing to go with the flow and let their assigned artworks guide the experience, embracing spontaneity instead of shying away from it.”

Because this was the first regional gallery teaching experiment and we knew we were asking some participants to step out of their comfort zones, we wanted to provide an opportunity for reluctant participants to observe first, and join the experimentation later in the day if they felt inspired. After lunch we repeated the format of the morning with a shorter planning period. Groups devised experiences for us to embody art, create stories, explore process, and look in refreshing ways.

Instagram photo by @heep - — Instagram photo by @heep – https://instagram.com/p/6NlzbTSOBs/

One gallery experience designed by Maria Iafelice (Toledo), Kate Blake (Toledo), and Joan Kohn (Cleveland) involved the architecture of the MOCA building, designed by Farshid Moussavi. Experimenters asked participants to share words they would use to describe a stairwell and then use their phones take pictures of various perspectives of the stairwell as they climbed. At the top, participants were asked to pull up one of the photos they took and physically place their phones together where their photos connected. The result was a participant-generated photo collage inspired by the space surrounding us.

Instagram photo by @heep – https://instagram.com/p/6NWewRSOBI/

Take Aways

As hosts, we had a number of takeaways. We were truly impressed with the flexibility and creativity of our group. Although I participated as an experimenter in New Orleans, it was equally gratifying to sit back, feel the energy of the moment and watch the magic happen as colleagues worked together! It was especially impressive to see ideas developed between teams of people from different backgrounds—museum educators, classroom teachers, volunteers, and students. Gina reflected:

“I felt really proud to be a part of a special community.”

The format for this event was not brand new. The experiences and discussions we completed together may not all have been radical, trail-blazing gallery experimentation, but this was not the goal. For Midwestern museum and art educators, this event felt like a true beginning to the building of our professional community.

For more pictures, videos, and posts from the event, visit: https://storify.com/heepp/ohio-museum-ed-mashup

Experimenting in Museums

Art Museum Teaching Mashup – Cleveland

July 1, 2015 Mike Murawski 2 Comments

Do you want to try something fun while stepping outside of your comfort zone? Join us this summer for the first Northeast Ohio Museum Teaching Mash-up!

Inspired by the NAEA Museum Teaching Mash-up (which you can read about here and here), this gallery teaching experiment offers the chance for Ohio museum educators, students, teachers, and community members to connect, interact with art, and learn from each other in a supportive group of colleagues.

WHEN: Monday, August 10th – 10am-3pm

10-10:15– Welcome, discussion, Experimenter sign-up
10:15-10:30– Introduce format, draw names of group members, assign artworks
10:30-11:15– Experimenter planning time, gallery exploration time for participants
11:15-12:15– Museum Teaching Mash-Up Round 1
12:15-1:30– Debrief, lunch on your own, sign-up for Lightning Round 2
1:30-1:45– Assignments for Lightning Round 2
1:45-2:05– Lightning Round Planning, gallery exploration time for participants
2:05-2:45– Mashup Lightning Round 2
2:45- 3:00– Closing discussion
3:00– Happy Hour at area restaurants for all who are interested

WHERE: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106

WHO: Museum educators, students, teachers, community members, and all who are interested are welcome! This event is designed to bring together people from a variety of experiences. Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone who may be interested.

What should I expect?

For this event, expect the unexpected! Interested educators sign up, are assigned to random teaching groups of 2-3 colleagues, and receive object assignments. After an hour-long prep period, teaching groups will present a 5-7 minute gallery experience for the rest of the group.

Why participate?

Although we are geographically close, we rarely get the opportunity to observe each other and, better yet, work together in the galleries! Take this time to refresh your own practice, get inspired to experiment at your museum, and get to know colleagues across the region. Try out techniques you can use to create unique, engaging, and fun art viewing experiences for your visitors and students.

How Can You Be Involved?

As an Experimenter:

If you are interested in taking a risk and being a part of one of the small teaching groups that tackles this challenge, please contact Hajnal Eppley (heppley@clevelandart.org ) by August 1st.

As a Participant:

If you’re not quite up for experimenting yourself but want to be a part of the event, you are welcome to join as a member of the audience. (If you’re unsure, you’re also welcome to watch the first round and join Lightning Round 2 after lunch!)

As a Promoter:

Please share the event with anyone who might be interested. Tweet, Instagram, blog, and email your heart out! Before and during the event, use the hashtag #ohiomashup so we have a collective record of our experiences.

Join us as we experiment, take risks, and see what happens!

Patty Edmonson, The Cleveland Museum of Art

Hajnal Eppley, The Cleveland Museum of Art

Nicole Ledinek, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

Gina Thomas McGee, Akron Art Museum

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Header Photo: “Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland” by Erik Drost, Flickr.com, CC BY 2.0

Experimenting in Museums, Spotlight on Practice

The Creative Spiral: Evolving Practice in the DMA’s Art Spot

May 26, 2015 Mike Murawski 5 Comments

Written by Jessica Fuentes, Center for Creative Connections (C3) Gallery Manager, Dallas Museum of Art

The creative process is often described as cyclical and sometimes, when I’m in it, it can feel like I am going around in circles, ending up where I started. Hopefully, when I come back around that circular process, my ideas have evolved so though I may be in a familiar place I am truly somewhere new. Perhaps the path of the creative process is then more like a spiral, repetitious yet constantly moving forward. This concept not only illustrates an important artistic process that we want to share with visitors to the Center for Creative Connections (C3) at the Dallas Museum of Art, but also it describes the methods we employ as our space evolves. The creative process is an inspirational component of C3 and it is exemplified through the Art Spot, a hands-on art making area.

A Brief History

In 2008, the hands-on art-making area within the C3 exhibition Materials and Meanings was called the Materials Bar. With a total of eighteen standard and tall seats, the space was designed as a communal area for visitors of all ages. The Materials Bar provided a hands-on experience of the creative process engaging visitors with an inspiration wheel, videos that modeled techniques, materials that encouraged play, and a reflective label writing component. The materials provided were similar to or related to works of art on view.

In 2010, C3 presented its second exhibition, Encountering Space, which involved a complete redesign of the entire C3 and transformed the Materials Bar into the Space Bar. Though it remained a hands-on making area, the focus on the new exhibition theme was evident in the inspirational prompts and reflective labels. Prompts challenged visitors to “transform a cube of space” or “build a sculpture with positive and negative space.” The label cards not only encouraged visitors to reflect, they also introduced vocabulary about space through a word bank. Additionally, the seating was expanded to accommodate twenty-six visitors.

In 2012, C3 transitioned away from themed exhibitions and towards a more fluid process of rotating works of art. Along with our process, the physical space changed, reflecting the end of Encountering Space and the beginning of a simplified graphic identity to reflect the DMA brand. With additional seating for a total of forty-four visitors, the area was renamed the Art Spot: Anytime art-making for everyone. Since then, we have experimented with different approaches. For a year we focused on one work of art, Family Portrait 1963 by Martin Delabano. Although we changed the materials and prompt every couple of months, they always related back to the work of art. The following year we explored the broader idea of creativity. We provided unconventional and everyday materials (like red plastic cups, spoons, paperclips, and twist ties) and challenged visitors to make something new and unexpected with them. More recently we have made connections between the Art Spot materials and our wall of visitor-submitted images with themes like Textual Awareness or Flowers.

Commonalities and Spiraling Forward

For me, the creative process can be simplified to four steps: inspiration, exploration, creation, and reflection. With each iteration of the making area in C3, we come full circle. We start with an idea—a theme like materials, space, or creativity— or a work of art. Next, we explore the possibilities of that idea and play with what it might look like. Then, we construct it for visitors to experience, and finally we reflect on the actual visitor experience. Over the years, the various iterations are in many ways similar, but with each new endeavor we learn and revise. In each iteration we were inspired by visitors, and hoped to inspire visitors — as art museum educators, we place an importance on encouraging visitors to connect with works of art. Furthermore, the area has always been about three-dimensional making and the creative process. In our upcoming redesign, we are sticking with these tenants, but are approaching them in different ways.

In the past we strived to inspire participants with the art on view in the Center for Creative Connections, though we found this can be difficult when the works of art are not directly adjacent to the making area. Often visitors come straight to the art-making area without looking at the works of art or, if they spend time looking at works of art, they may not be thinking of those objects when they arrive at the making area. When we installed Family Portrait 1963 directly in the Art Spot, we hoped that visitors would be more prone to draw inspiration from the work. We found that despite its positioning and large size, it quickly gets lost behind a sea of visitors when the Art Spot is full.

Art Spot with “Family Portrait 1963” and crowd of visitors

In the upcoming redesign, we are installing more works of art in the Art Spot and are strategically placing them near the tables where participants will be creating. Furthermore, the cases housing these works will have prompts directly on the glass to provoke thought and discussion about the materials, design, and process. These kinds of prompts can help visitors get into the making mindset, a way of critically looking at and exploring materials.

Also, our approach to choosing works of art has shifted. In the past we chose works of art that exemplified a concept and might inspire visitors to create. This time we are taking our inspiration from our visitors. Over the past few years we have documented the kinds of creations made at the Art Spot. We know that, regardless of the theme or materials, there are common items that are made: rings, animals, flowers, hats, and woven objects. So, we started with those observations and chose works of art that visitors might more easily relate to and that had some evidence of both the materials and the method of making.

LEFT: Pre-Columbian Single-Spout Strap-Handle Vessel from DMA collection. RIGHT: visitor creation displayed in Art Spot

Finally, we will continue to encourage the creation of three-dimensional objects, but rather than having one set of materials, we will offer different materials at different stations that relate to the nearby works of art. This will offer some variety so that visitors have more options.

Looking Ahead

When the Art Spot reopens in the next week, we will continue to ask for visitor input and revise, because being an experimental space means that we are constantly evolving through the creative process. We will document the creations visitors make; read the reflective statements they write; talk with them about the works of art, the materials, their creations, and their overall experience to get a sense of what aspects of the new design are working and what we may revise.

How Do You Do It? Share Your Thoughts

How would you describe your creative process?

How do your programs, activities, and gallery spaces change and evolve?

Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below, and let’s collectively reflect a bit more on our planning and reflection processes for these types of creative, experimental spaces in museums.

Experimenting in Museums, Spotlight on Practice

Experiments with Abstraction: Museum Throwdown in Denver

May 20, 2015 Mike Murawski 1 Comment

OK, so it’s time for another Museum Teaching Throwdown, this time in the Mile-High City of Denver! Next week, as museum education leaders from across the country gather in Denver for the Bank Street and AAM convening “Leading the Future of Museum Education,” I wanted to take advantage of the amazing group of educators and thinkers to experiment in the galleries (that place where all of our theory and practice comes to life). For this gathering, we’ve decided to work with the Clyfford Still Museum as our laboratory for the evening, experimenting with different ways of engaging abstraction. Let me start with the event details, followed by more information about the experimenters and what you can expect.

WHEN: Thursday, May 28th, 6:00-7:30pm

WHERE: Clyfford Still Museum, 13th Ave & Bannock Street, Denver

EXPERIMENTERS:

Joanne Lefrak, Director of Education & Outreach at SITE Santa Fe
Seema Rao, Director of Intergenerational Learning at the Cleveland Museum of Art
Nicole Stutzman Forbes, Chair of Learning Initiatives & Art League Director of Education at the Dallas Museum of Art
Victoria Eastburn, Director of Education & Programs at the Clyfford Still Museum
yours truly (yes, I’m involved this time, not just MC-ing from the sidelines)

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT

Simple, thoughtful, creative risk-tasking is still the name of the game for this Denver-based Museum Teaching Throwdown, but we’re utilizing a very unique museum space to focus in on how we engage with abstraction. Thanks to Victoria Eastburn and her team at the Clyfford Still Museum, we’re able to collaboratively explore the work of a single artist and use these direct and intimate gallery spaces as a laboratory for museum teaching.

Students participating in the InStill program at the Clyfford Still Museum. Photo by Jensen Sutta

Since opening in 2011, the Still Museum has already begun to experiment with a variety of ways to engage students and audiences with Still’s abstract paintings, including public program series such as “One Painting at a Time” and immersive, activity-based school programs such as “InStill.”

The museum teaching gathering on May 28th at the Still Museum will involve a series of short gallery experiences followed by a brief reflection on the entire experience and the importance of this type of in-practice experimentation.

We hope to see you in Denver, or you can follow along on Twitter at the hashtag #museumthrowdown!

Experimenting in Museums

Museum Teaching Mashup: Join Us in New Orleans!

March 12, 2015 Mike Murawski 7 Comments

Calling all experimenters! Calling all educators (in museums, classrooms, colleges)! Are you tired of the same old, same old? Interested in playing outside of your comfort zone? If you are headed to New Orleans for the National Art Education Association or based in New Orleans — and looking for a fresh, fun, experimental way to connect with art and with other educators — we’re mashing it up at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art on the evening of Thursday, March 26^th.

WHEN: Thursday, March 26th – experimenters gather at 6:00pm, everyone else gathers at 7:00pm

WHERE: Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp Street, New Orleans — gathering on 5th Floor at both times.

Join us and throwdown your experimental best with students, colleagues, and members of the NOLA community. We’re opening it up to everyone – you don’t have to be a museum educator or an NAEA attendee. Fan of the Ogden? Casual museum-goer? K-12 art teacher or college faculty? Person who’s just curious? Join us in shining new light on selected objects in the collection, and connecting with other educators interested in collectively pushing our teaching practices.

Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans

The Challenge

We’re doing this because we fall into safe patterns in our lives. Why fix something that isn’t broken? Why change our teaching style and methodologies if they are ‘working’? Unfortunately, playing it safe also leads to stagnancy. So let’s shake up the museum experience, throwdown style. Bring your best, but also walk away with fresh ideas and perspectives.

We want to think together and outside of our comfort zones. Try something that scares you and work with someone you’ve never worked with before. That night, interested educators are invited to meet up at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art at 6:00pm, at which time we’ll create small teaching groups, get randomized object assignments, and receive prompts to rapidly prototype short experiences with these objects. Each group will get 45 minutes to plan a 5-7 minute experience to share with a public audience that night. Starting at 7:00pm on the 5th Floor, each group will share their 5-7 minute experience with their assigned object in the galleries — inviting NAEA attendees, educators, students, museum visitors, and the NOLA community to participate in this rapid succession of arts experiences.

After we make our way through this series of in-gallery experiments, we invite colleagues to grab dinner afterwards to reflect on our experiences together, new connections, and burning questions. There are several great restaurants within a short walking distance of the Ogden (and we can make some recommendations the night of, if people are interested).

How Can You Be Involved?

AS AN EXPERIMENTER:

If you are interested in being a risk-taker, and being a part of one of the small groups that tackles this challenge, please contact Jen Oleniczak at jen@theengagingeducator.com in advance of March 26th. We want to hear from you before we all get to New Orleans! We’ll all need to be at the Ogden (5th Floor) at 6pm to form teams and begin the challenge.

AS A PARTICIPANT:

If you’re not quite up for experimenting yourself but want to be a part of these experiences, everyone is welcome to gather at the Ogden (5th Floor) at 7pm. We’re also excited to be opening these experiences to the larger Ogden audience that evening. Please share this event with everyone, including educators from outside the Museum Division of NAEA.

* * * * *

Will every experience work be a success? Probably not, but we’re not trying to creating the perfect program – we’re trying to push our comfort zones and our ideas of how to approach museum objects. When we constantly try not to fail, we never succeed. And, as educators, its important for us to designate safe spaces for risk-taking and experimentation in museum teaching.

So let’s throw it down New-Orleans-style and see what happens!

Jen Oleniczak, The Engaging Educator

Rachel Ropeik, Brooklyn Museum

Deborah Randolph, Southeast Center for Contemporary Art

Ellen Balkin, Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Mike Murawski, Portland Art Museum

Experimenting in Museums, In Theory

We Don’t Need New Models, We Need a New Mindset

September 25, 2014 Mike Murawski 3 Comments

Editor’s Note: I have been following EmcArts ever since they announced their first round of Innovation Labs for Museums back in 2011, and have had the pleasure of meeting with their staff as well as those working with the ArtsFwd initiative. I was also fortunate enough to be invited to attend the Association of Art Museum Directors meeting this summer in Dallas, where Richard Evans gave a great presentation on innovation as part of that organization’s thinking around education. The team at EmcArts and ArtsFwd is working to help make a break with our patterns of “business as usual” and develop new capacities and mindsets to tackle the major adaptive challenges facing museums in the 21st century. The post below by Karina Mangu-Ward does such a fantastic job of highlighting this shift in practice and ‘mindset’, to use her word. I thought it was worth sharing with ArtMuseumTeaching community as a way for museum professionals at all levels of their organizations to reflect on the models and mindsets underlying our practice as well as the real challenges we face. I invite readers to comment below about how you see these models operating at your institution, and how you might help support change towards a new mindset in museums.

Written by Karina Mangu-Ward, Director of Activating Innovation at EmcArts

Reposted from the blog at ArtsFwd, an online community of arts and culture leaders committed to doing things differently in their organizations in order to stay relevant and vital in a changing world.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been selected as a guest at the Dinner-vention 2, organized by Barry Hessenius of Barry’s Blog and WESTAF. On October 9, I’ll join seven other dynamic, forward-thinking leaders in the arts to discuss some of the most pressing challenges across the field. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and engaging in what should be a spicy conversation.

To prepare for the Dinner-vention, Barry asked all of us to capture our preliminary thinking in a briefing paper that responds to the topic: “Broken Models: Picking Up the Pieces and Moving Forward.”

I’ve shared my briefing paper below. I encourage you to read the papers of the other seven guests, which you can find here.

What’s a model, exactly?

I’m a very literal person, so the first thing I did when tasked with this briefing paper was look up the definition of “model.”

Model (n): 1) A standard, an example for imitation or comparison

OK, got it. A model is like a blueprint. Or a recipe. So, this Dinner-vention is a debate about standard or best practices in our field. We’re taking a long hard look at the routines we’ve replicated again and again because they work, or at least they’re supposed to, or they once did.

What models are we questioning?

My next step was to plainly state what I see as the old model in each of the areas Barry mentions (plus I added strategic planning, evaluation, and artistic development).

However, I assume every model evolved to meet a particular challenge. So I also tried to name the challenge I think we’re facing right now in that area. For me, there’s nothing worse that poor problem definition. We can reform our models until we’re blue in the face, but that’s useless unless we get clear about the future we want and the challenges we’ll face in getting there. Only then can we answer the question: why aren’t our models working?

I think this was a useful exercise, so I’ve shared the results below. It’s wide open for debate. My hope is that it serves as a starting place for a shared understanding of the standard practices we’re questioning and the real challenges we’re faced with as a field, so that we can begin to understand whether our approaches are the right ones.

In each case, I see a stark disconnect. The old models we’re using aren’t matching up with the deeply complex challenges we’re faced with right now.

Income/Revenue

Old model: Ticket sales + government + foundation + corporate + wealthy patrons + small donors + endowment income = Balanced budget
New challenge: To generate new sources of sustained revenue and capital

Audience development

Old model: Sell subscriptions and market shows
New challenge: To engage new and more diverse groups of people in meaningful arts experiences

Governance

Old model: Give/get boards focused on fiduciary oversight and maintaining stability
New challenge: To cultivate boards that are partners in change

Evaluation

Old model: More ticket sales, more revenue, bigger budget, nice building = Success!
New challenge: To evaluate the success of our organizations based on the value they create in people’s lives

Leadership development

Old model: Attend leadership conferences and seminars, build your network, wait for your boss to finally leave/retire/die. (Alternatively, change jobs every year.)
New challenge: To develop a generation of new leaders equipped with the tools they’ll need to tackle the wickedly complex challenges the future has in store

Artistic development

Old model: MFA programs, residencies, commissions, occasionally a grant, get a day job
New challenge: To support artists in making a living and a life

Strategic planning

Old model: Decide where you want to be in 5 years. Outline the steps to get there in a long document no one will read.
New challenge: To plan for the future in a way that allows us to stay close to our core values and make incremental improvement while also making room for experimentation, failure, and rapidly changing conditions.

Funding allocation

Old model: The money goes to whoever the funder says it to goes to. Usually bigger organizations run by white people in major cities.
Our challenge today: To distribute funds in a way that is equitable, geographically diverse, and creates the most value

Note: I decided I was too ignorant in the areas of creative placemaking, advocacy and arts education to weigh in. I’ll leave that to my colleagues.

Here’s my main argument

Over 60 years in the field, we’ve developed standard practices, or models, in all these different areas. They worked for a while. Now they don’t. This has given us a false notion that we need new models in each area. This is wrong.

Models, best practices, recipes, and blueprints work only when your challenge has a knowable, replicable solution. Sure, there are some challenges that fit this mold. I’d argue that having a great website, designing an effective ad, doing a successful crowd funding campaign, and producing a complicated show are all challenges where best practices, models, and experts are really valuable. You might not know the solution, but someone does, and you can find it out.

But what happens when there actually isn’t a knowable solution to your challenge? When there is no expert, no model to call upon? When the only way forward is through experimentation and failure?

I’d argue that every one of the big challenges I name above falls into the realm of complexity, where the search for replicable models is fruitless. There isn’t going to be a new model for generating revenue that the field can galvanize around that will work for every or even most arts organizations. Nor is there going to be a long lasting model for community engagement that can be replicated by organizations across the country. For the deeply complex challenges we face today, there simply isn’t a knowable solution or model that can reliably help us tackle them. These kinds of challenges require a new way of working.

We don’t need new models, we need a new theory of practice

Instead of new models, I’d argue that we need a new theory of practice, one that champions a different set of priorities in how we do our work.

Our old models imply a vision of success that’s rooted in growth, stability, and excellence. They drive us towards efficiency and competition by perpetuating an atmosphere of scarcity. They are not as creative as we are.

What if a new vision of success in our field could prioritize resilience, flexibility, and intimacy? What if we could be enablers, not producers? What if we could harness the abundance of creative potential around us?

This new vision of success doesn’t demand consensus around a new set of standards, best practices, or “examples for imitation,” it demands a new way of thinking and acting that empowers us to shift and change our routines all the time, as needed.

A proposed theory of practice for the future

Here is my call to the field: a proposed set of practices that align with the world as it is today, not as it was before:

Let’s get clear about the challenges we’re facing and if they’re complex, treat them as such
Let’s ask hard questions, listen, do research, and stay vulnerable to what we learn.
Let’s question our assumptions and let go of what’s no longer working.
Let’s embrace ambiguity and conflict as a crucial part of change
Let’s bring together people with different experiences and lean into difference
Let’s experiment our way forward and fail often
Let’s recognize the system in which we’re operating.
Let’s rigorously reflect and continuously learn

In conclusion

When I set out to write this post, I wanted to question the premise that a conversation about “broken models” could even be useful in a time when expertise, excellence and replicability are the values of the past. I wanted to propose that we move past the very notion of models – let’s jettison the word itself from our vocabulary.

In the end, I guess you could call what I’ve proposed a kind of “new model.” But I’d rather think of it as a new mindset.

Read more about Innovation Stories, the National Innovation Summit, and tools & activities you can use in your own organization by connecting to the ArtsFwd blog.

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About the Author

KARINA MANGU-WARD: Director of Activating Innovation for EmcArts, Inc. Karina leads the development of ArtsFwd, an interactive online platform that extends learning about innovation among arts leaders and organizations nationally and internationally. She took on the role of Director of Activating Innovation in August 2011. In addition to her work at EmcArts, Karina is a New York based producer and filmmaker, whose projects include an original web series, an interactive online documentary series, promos, how-to videos, and event videography. She received her MFA in Theater Management & Producing from Columbia University, where she wrote her thesis on the strategic use of online tools and technologies for arts organizations. She holds a BA from Harvard College.

Experimenting in Museums, Spotlight on Practice

Evaluation Can Be Fun

August 1, 2014 Mike Murawski 10 Comments

Written by Marianna Adams, Audience Focus, 2014 Educator-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Cross-posted from mariannaadams.blogspot.com

One of the great luxuries I value about my time here at the Gardner Museum has been the opportunity to have rather leisurely and unstructured conversations with museum educators here and at other museums in the Boston area. I appreciate the value of not always having an agenda and not needing to solve a problem. We bounced ideas off each other and I always came away with a fresh perspective, a deeper conviction in my intuition, and lots of new ideas. Our talks often meander around the relationship between a museum experience or program and how we choose to evaluate it. A few themes have emerged from the conversations so far.

There is Life Beyond the Survey

Over the years I have not made a secret of how much I don’t like written questionnaires, paper or online, despite how much I end up using them on evaluation projects. Why? The written survey is the most difficult methodology to do well. It’s the default methodology that most people think of when planning an evaluation and most of them are tedious and poorly focused. It’s a blunt instrument that cannot capture much in the way of subtlety and nuance (and life is so much about nuance). In recent years, with the plethora of online survey programs, we are drowning in surveys so survey-fatigue is a reality. Most surveys are really asking for the visitor to tell us that we did a good job (e.g., How satisfied were you with this experience?) and not enough about how the visitor values or benefits from the experience. Besides, the written questionnaire usually does not reflect the spirit of the experience we’re trying to evaluate, bringing me to my next point.

Match the evaluation method to the experience.

Imagine yourself at a museum’s “evening hours” event. There is a great band, wine, engaging activities going on throughout the galleries, good friends, and a happy crowd of people of all types and ages. The atmosphere is both relaxing and energized at the same time. As you stroll towards the door to leave the museum, someone hands you a piece of paper. It’s a survey asking you to evaluate this time you just had and it smacks you out of the pleasant, liminal state you spent several hours dropping into. That’s an example of how the survey methodology is not well matched to the quality of the experience you just had.

So what methodology might better align with the evening program experience you imagined yourself attending above?

First you start with what you want to know and why.

So often we select the methodology before we figure out what we want to know and why. We decide on surveys or focus groups when those may or may not be the best ways to collect the data. Often we collect more data than we know what to do with. Here’s an example that came up in a recent conversation:

Like many art museums, the Gardner offers several community nights with free admission throughout the year and these events are very well attended. Primarily, the Gardner wants to know if these events are indeed attracting people from communities close to the museum. Yes, we could easily get zip code information via a written questionnaire. The problem is that we tend to throw in a lot of other questions that we don’t really need the answer to. The other area of inquiry the Gardner would like to know about revolves around how visitors connect to the museum. So let’s keep those two data points in mind, residence and connection, as we think about how to get useful information.

Think creatively about ways to get that data and match it to the spirit of the experience.

How could we get zip code data and not make people fill out a survey?

Imagine a big map (maybe near the wine bar because most everyone would go there), with zip code areas and neighborhoods clearly identified. Give people a small colorful adhesive file folder dot and invite them to put it on their zip code. It becomes a fun, social activity and, for some reason, people like to find themselves on a map. It’s simple and inexpensive. At the end you have a picture of the zip code distribution of your audience. You could do this for other evening events and compare the maps.

What about the ways visitors connect to the museum?

One methodology that I love to experiment with is embedded performance assessment. This means that visitors don’t realize they are providing evaluation data, even when we tell them, because the process is engaging on it’s own. At a workshop for the Gardner Museum education staff this week, artist-in-residence Paul Kaiser inspired us all to explore new ways to engage visitors and possibly end up with some interesting evaluation data.

Paul first introduced us to the concept of collaborative writing, using the example of Japanese renga poetry. He then provided us with a set of words — rising, distant, enclosed, fold, release — and asked us to take the spirit of renga into the galleries, substituting the verses for objects, spaces, or views based on that set of words. We did it and were struck by how beautifully the experience honored the spirit of what Mrs. Gardner did in the ways she arranged objects to suggest ideas or relationships.

We played with ways to use this activity with visitors, discussing ways to engage families and adult visitors at community nights in something similar. Perhaps if we created a more playful set of words to match the feel of these events, visitors would find it enjoyable. We brainstormed possibly having a place where people could post their responses and read what others thought about. Having these responses could be a rich data source that helps us better understand ways that visitors make connections to the museum. We were jazzed!

What are some unconventional ways that you have collected rich and useful data about the visitor experience?

ABOUT AUTHOR

MARIANNA ADAMS is President of Audience Focus Inc. Her professional roots began in K-12 public and private school teaching (fine art, English literature, social studies, and special education) and segued into museum education where she headed several education departments in Florida museums. She founded Audience Focus Inc., in 2007 after 12 years of conducting evaluation, research, professional development, grant proposal writing, and concept development for the Institute for Learning Innovation. Her degrees are from George Washington University (Ed.D.), University of South Florida (M.A.) and Mercer University (B.A.). In her spare time she is an avid yoga practitioner and teacher.

Experimenting in Museums, Museum Tech, Spotlight on Practice

#captureParklandia: A Dive into Social Media & Place-Based Digital Engagement

July 29, 2014 Mike Murawski 5 Comments

Editor’s Note: As I near the end of my second year as Director of Education & Public Programs here at the Portland Art Museum, I find myself more interested than ever in how a museum can connect with its community and its place. Even before I arrived, the Museum was already envisioning itself as a platform for community dialogues, conversation, engagement, and critical thinking in relation to its collection and exhibitions (this certainly was something that drew me out here). And in the past couple years, the team here at the Portland Art Museum has continued to work with the Portland community in new and unique ways to be a museum of its place, not just a museum in its place. The following post by Kristin Bayans and Justin Meyer describes our current project entitled #captureParklandia, designed as a way to spark thinking about parks, gardens, and experiences with green spaces in our own community — in conjunction with the stunning exhibition Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden about the art, design, evolution, and experience of Paris’ most famous garden. Through this social media photography project, museum visitors and the public community are encouraged to share their park experiences and memories, but also to discover new park spaces and think about them in a new light through the lens of the Tuileries. With art serving as a catalyst, projects such as #captureParklandia — in addition to our robust series of programming this summer — allow the museum to serve as a platform for public engagement and community dialogue around issues relevant to the life of our city and its region. While there have been recent questions about the validity of a project like this for an art museum, I firmly stand behind the success of this experimental project in social media and place-based digital engagement. Please add your voice below in the Comments section, as it is always important to have an open dialogue about these issues as we face them in the ever-changing landscape of museums in the 21st century.

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Written by Kristin Bayans, Interpretive Media Specialist at the Portland Art Museum, and Justin Meyer, Portland Art Museum Education Intern and PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan

#captureParklandia is the Portland Art Museum’s most recent dive into a large-scale social media project. Created in tandem with the special exhibition The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Gardens, Portland Parks and Recreation, and the Portland Parks Foundation, #captureParklandia is both an online and in-gallery experience. #captureParklandia’s pie-in-the-sky goal is to get Portlanders to play with the museum and connect in new ways. Through this playful interaction, Portlanders will begin to think of PAM as their museum, not just a museum.

#captureParklandia Works Like This

Anyone with Instagram can tag their photo of a park in Portland with our hashtag (the project’s name). All of these photos are displayed on both an up-to-date feed, as well as geolocated on a map of Portland via the Museum’s webpage for this project. In the exhibition gallery, particularly captivating hashtagged Instagram photos are displayed digitally in a dynamic web application, Slidely. Twelve unique photos, selected by our partners from the thousands of tagged submissions on Instagram, were printed as one of twelve individual “Portland Park” trading cards (120,000 cards were printed in total). Trading cards have the project’s hashtag, advertise the work of Portland Parks and Recreation, and give visitors to the in-gallery experience something to take with them.

Screen shot of #captureParklandia’s Instagram gallery via the web app Slidely

Go Forth and Get’em

Perhaps the most important step to putting this project together was recruiting members of InstaPDX (Portland’s Instagram social club) in-person during one of their pub meet-ups. It was a bit awkward at first; we were essentially speed-dating with members of the group, going from one person to another describing the project and asking for their participation. Within 24 hours of our pub appearance, the project received hundreds of Instagram tags! Shelley Bernstein, Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology at the Brooklyn Museum was 100% correct about the power of seeking out audiences within their own communities, when she stated “… after all, why should we expect them (web based communities) to come to us?” (Bautista 178).

It was clear that by no means were we going to be “besties” with InstaPDX, but at least we might be relegated to “cool relative” status (the one you are jazzed to hang out with once in a while). Sadly, this is one of the plights of being an authoritarian figure institution; (cue dramatic music) the…“Museum.” Firm in our desire to cultivate a relationship of mutual respect, we invited members of the InstaPDX community to the press preview of Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden. In addition, we chose a handful of InstaPDX members’ #captureParklandia images to be printed on our park trading cards, working in conjunction with Portland Parks and Recreation. This infuses our project with more crowd-sourced content, exposes museum visitors to the talent of community photographers, and validates the work of artists outside the museum.

Screenshot of Instagramer sheri__lynne’s account.

#captureParklandia is part of the Portland Art Museum’s ongoing strategies to engage audiences. Like us, several museums have been experimenting with crowd-sourced tagging and picture sharing platforms since the early 2000s. What is revolutionary about these approaches is that they are powered by the kind of community engagement Shelley Bernstein was talking about: seeking out audiences on their own turf and on their own terms. Institutionally, there is power in demonstrating a different and effective way of communicating with Portlanders, as well as discovering that some Portlanders who don’t traditionally interact with the museum welcome the opportunity. As Ed Rodley, Associate Director of Integrated Media at Peabody Essex Museum, has said — this is an actual way to have a rich varied relationship with people over time.

In-gallery experience for #captureParklandia at the Portland Art Museum.

#captureParklandia draws upon what Susan Smith Bautista describes in her new book Museums in the Digital Age as a place/experience, or a way of seeing the world through interconnected networks of space and time. With projects that expand the traditional experience of a single, in-person visit to a gallery, the Portland Art Museum can become more than a building or a collection of objects. The Portland Art Museum can become a part of someone’s learned experience and their lives.

Yes, And

#captureParklandia is still afoot. We have been gathering social media analytics and in-gallery observations, which have all been pointing to the success of this project via the digital engagement (high levels of participation in the hashtag as well as enormous outreach via social media) as well as the analog ways in which people can interact (with a large mural-sized in-gallery map of 200+ Portland parks, as well as through the trading cards that visitors can take with them). So far it has been AMAZING, but is it still a little too safe? Social media is busy, multifaceted, and opinionated. The Portland Art Museum’s in-gallery presentation is very streamline and curated at a certain level.

“Museums are empowering their visitors with new digital experiments that allow common voices to be heard in the same space as curators.… The empowerment is bracketed within a deeply hierarchical space where the museum retains final authority over curation, installation, didactics, acquisitions of works, and more.” (Bautista 229).

Does this actually matter to our visitors? Is creating a platform enough? Does this keep us at arm’s length from our visitors, continually relegating us to “cool relative” status? Koven Smith of Kinetic Museums gave this some thought. We’d love to hear your thoughts about these issues.

From August to September we are hosting a weekly themed #captureParklandia Instagram contest. Please email kristin.bayans@pam.org or justrm@umich.edu if you are interested in what happens next. The exhibition The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Gardens is on view at the Portland Art Museum through September 21, 2014. If you are not in Portland, check out #captureParklandia online or watch our series of public programs that continue to address the art, history, design, and future thinking around parks, gardens, and green spaces all summer long.

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ABOUT AUTHORS

KRISTIN BAYANS: Interpretive Media Specialist at the Portland Art Museum where she produces interpretive media learning experiences — mobile, web, and in-gallery — for the Object Stories project, special exhibitions, and the Museum’s permanent collection; and curates exhibitions for the Object Stories gallery. Most recently, she served as Senior Educator for the Vernier Technology Lab for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and as an Assistant Educator for the Smithsonian’s Mobile Learning Institute. She holds an M.A. in Museum Studies from The George Washington University and an M.A. in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Outside of work she chases her dog Felix around the park, sketches, “sings” karaoke, and plays board games. Kristin’s postings on this site are her own and do not necessarily represent the Portland Art Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

JUSTIN MEYER: PhD candidate in Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, conducting research on the relationships between art museums, communities, and cities. Justin recently completed a certificate in Museum Studies at the University of Michigan, as well as a Masters Degree in Urban Planning as a Wallenberg Scholar. He also holds degrees in engineering and environmental design from Stanford University and the University of Cambridge, respectively. During the spring and summer 2014, Justin worked as a graduate student intern with the Education department at the Portland Art Museum. In his spare time, he freelances as a professional singer in the Portland area and volunteers at the Oregon Humane Society. Justin’s postings on this site are his own and do not necessarily represent the Portland Art Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

Experimenting in Museums, OpenThink, Spotlight on Practice

Barriers to Family Engagement in Museums

July 22, 2014 Mike Murawski 11 Comments

Written by Marianna Adams, Audience Focus, with Elizabeth Margulies, Museum of Modern Art

Cross-posted from mariannaadams.blogspot.com

All three families scheduled for last week had to cancel or reschedule so it gave me some time to think and have some great conversations with museum educators around the country. What emerged as a theme for me this week was thinking about challenges to facilitating exciting, authentic co-participation in family experiences. I’ve invited Elizabeth Margulies, Director, Family Programs and Initiatives, at MoMA to chime in as she has some valuable reflections to share.

Since 2004, the USS Constitution Museum has been actively involved in experimenting with and evaluating techniques that foster family engagement. Currently their IMLS-funded project “Engage Families” seeks to identify characteristics of family programming that result in active intergenerational engagement, enjoyment, and learning in museums and libraries. To assist that effort, I implemented an online survey of museum and library professionals around the country in November 2013. Two key findings emerged that will be the focus of this post: 1) professionals value and want to create fun, authentic, opportunities for visitors of mixed ages and interests to co-participate and learn together; 2) accomplishing this comes with many challenges. We want to address two frequently cited challenges here.

1. It’s Really About What You Value

The most frequently cited barrier to achieving their vision for engaging family programs in the USSCM study was lack of resources – specifically time, money, space, and/or staff. Interestingly, whenever I ask museum professionals what prevents them from doing anything this is often the first response. For me, these resources will always be in limited supply, therefore, they become expressions of what we value. For example, we might say that regular exercise is important, but unless we really value it, we will not juggle our personal budgets and complex schedules around to get to the gym or that yoga class.

MoMA is proactively addressing how family programs are perceived and value within the organization by engaging in a cross-departmental dialogue.

As Elizabeth Margulies explains:

Retail, Publications, and Education began meeting over a year ago to see how we might build on the success of some publications written by Education and developed by Retail. In our conversations we realized that we could use some help defining what we all wanted and we hired an outside consultant, Stephen Gass of The Gass Company to work with us. The goal is to articulate the personality and voice of the programs, experiences, and products MoMA creates for kids and families along with the values that drive our decisions. It’s been gratifying to find that everyone thinks this is a worthwhile effort. We wouldn’t have known how important everyone felt the child/family audience was if we didn’t bring them all together to discuss it.

If lack of resources tends to be your main reason as to why you don’t have the kind of family experiences you say you want, then this is where your work has to start.

What are ways that you have been able to shift the culture of your organization towards a more family-friendly position?

2. But Parents Won’t or Don’t Want to Participate!

Museum and library practitioners express concern and even frustration at not being able to get the adults to engage or to engage “properly.” This always raises the question “What is proper?” When I have felt like being the “bad” grandparent and check my phone, it’s mostly because I’m bored. Either I’ve been separated from my wonderful granddaughters or what we are being asked to do is uninspired and/or disconnected from what’s important in the artwork.

It always comes back to intention. If we want co-participation across generations then everything we do has to support that intention. I’ve heard from that when they clearly and consistently communicate the expectation that adult caregivers participate, they have better engagement within the groups.

Certainly we want families to feel comfortable doing what they feel is best. There always needs to be room for groups to engage as much or as little as they want. As the educators at MoMA and the American Museum of Natural History advise, if we communicate clear intentions early and often then we will see more co-participation and enjoyment. More importantly, if what we are asking groups to do is compelling then there will be more engagement. Studies suggest that some parents want to hand over the experience to the program facilitator. We always have to graciously accept that some people don’t want the experience we’ve provided. In that case, if we are true to our intentions they will self-select other programs that better suit their needs. It’s also why a variety of youth and family programs is advisable.

But enough about the parents/caregivers. I want to focus more on the responsibility of the museum educators who deliver experiences designed to encourage co-participation and engagement. Some museums are able to hire experienced museum educators for their family programs, giving greater consistency and depth to the experiences. For many museums, family programs seem to be shuffled off to the youngest, least experienced facilitators who are given almost no mentoring on how to engage intergenerational audiences effectively.

In the UK Kids in Museums is “compiled entirely from visitors’ comments. It’s a practical and powerful tool to encourage and support museums, galleries, and historic houses around the country” to more successfully engage family audiences. For example, a few points from their Manifesto speak to the importance of the educator’s approach:

Be positive and do away with the word ‘No’. Tell visitors what they can do at the door, don’t pin up a list of things they can’t.
Share storieswith each other. Listen. Families can be experts too.
Don’t say ssshhhush! If kids are being noisy, ask yourself ‘Why?’ Is it because they’re excited? Great! Then capture that excitement. Is it because they’re bored? Then give them something meaningful to do.
Say ‘Please touch!’as often as you can. Everyone finds real objects awesome. Direct kids to things that can be handled, teach respect and explain why others can’t.
Give a hand to grown-upsas well as children. Sometimes it isn’t the kids who are shy – parents need your support too. Produce guides, trails and activities so everyone can join in.
Be aware of different families’ needs.Use your imagination with signs, symbols, and words understood by all. Design everything you offer to be equally accessible to disabled and non-disabled visitors alike.

The educators for MoMA’s family programs have developed a range of guidelines and self-evaluation tools to support their family educators. Most importantly, family program facilitators are asked to:

Reevaluate. After your program, think about why families might not have participated as you hoped. Possible reasons:

Adults didn’t know they were expected to participate;
Adults weren’t asked to participate or work with their child until too late in the program;
Instructions weren’t clear about what parents were supposed to do, or the activity, discussion was too difficult (even for the adults);
The gallery has too many distractions or logistically doesn’t give families enough room to do what you’ve asked;
There is a language barrier;
Families couldn’t hear you.

PLEASE SHARE

What strategies do you use to facilitate greater co-participation within and across family groups?

ABOUT AUTHORS

ELIZABETH MARGULIES, Director, Family Programs and Initiatives, Department of Education, joined The Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Elizabeth designs, develops and oversees MoMA’s wide array of Family Programs and resources including gallery talks, workshops, artist talks, film programs, digital projects, activity cards, games, audio guides and the Museum’s interactive space, MoMA Art Lab. She collaborates with MoMA Retail and Publications, on children’s books and products, and in 2010 with Cari Frisch, co-authored, Make Art, Make Mistakes: A Creativity Sketchbook. In 2012, she collaborated with colleagues in Education, the Museum’s Digital Media and Graphic Design Departments, and Rendor Monkey, to launch MoMA Art Lab, an app for the iPad. The app won a 2013 Webby Award in the Education & Reference (Handheld Devices) category, and a Parent’s Choice Silver Honor for app design. Before coming to MoMA, Elizabeth worked in theatrical and television production. She holds a B.S. in Theater from Skidmore and a Master’s of Education from Bank Street College of Education. Elizabeth has taught in both public and private schools in New York.

Experimenting in Museums, OpenThink, Spotlight on Practice

Falling in Love with Your Visitors

July 15, 2014 Mike Murawski 6 Comments

Written by Marianna Adams, Audience Focus, 2014 Educator-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Cross-posted from mariannaadams.blogspot.com

I know this sounds a bit too new-agey but it’s what keeps coming up for me after my first full week in my residency at the Gardner Museum. Three families came to the museum this past week and the best way I can describe the experience is that I just fell in love with all of them. They arrived so excited and in good spirits, even if some of the children were a bit wary at first. Their openness to new experiences reminded me to be more open in turn to their unique ways of visiting and looking at art. A few reflections are shared below (while the experience are real, the names of the family visitors have been changed).

It’s About Choice & Control

One of the first things I learned from my mentors, John Falk and Lynn Dierking, was that visitors like and need choice and control in their museum experience. When I checked back with the families a day or so after their visit, the one consistent remark was how much they liked doing their own thing. Cole (age 10) told his mom, who had not been able to come to the museum, that he liked the visit because “they let us do whatever we wanted.”

One thing visitors like to choose is the pace. Eva, who visited with her two sisters, and her grandniece, Suzie, (age 7) and grandnephew, Chuck, (age 12) said she liked the “very relaxed pace” of the visit and added “this is a great way to come to the museum together.” A rather quick and focused pace was set by 8-year-old Zuri because she wanted to use the family guide, while her father and brother, Cole, (age 10) were happy to keep up. In another family, Baylor (age 10) had recently discovered audio guides and he immediately plugged into one during the visit. This slowed the pace down considerably. As his mother wrote to me the next day, “Using the audio guide really clicked in for Baylor last summer, and has totally changed our museum experience, allowing us both to have more private and quiet looking times as well as more social looking.”

Kids See the Darndest Things

I am continually fascinated by what draws children’s attention and this week’s visits were no exception. Typically it is not what educators tend to include on tours. For example, Suzie was first taken with the missing head on a statue in the courtyard. Throughout the visit she commented on how many statues were missing heads and arms. This caused us all to heighten our attention to what was missing. When we passed along a hallway to go upstairs she paused at a niche housing several stone and marble heads a long with a sculpture missing all limbs and the head. She said, “Oh, so this must be where they keep the heads” and calmly walked on.

Because the Gardner is one of the few museums lit primarily by natural light, and there are many cases with small, fascinating objects and notes, sometimes things can be difficult to see. Even though, there were opportunities in all the groups where they were straining to see something they did not ask to use the flashlights. or magnifying glasses. Sometimes I would shine the light where they were looking and everyone in the group would gather round and spend more time looking and talking. Reports from families a few days after the visit suggested that the flashlights were a big hit, even though they never directly asked for them.

They “Stumped the Chumps”

Children frequently stumped us all with their insightful questions that we couldn’t answer. When that happened, all of us, adults and children, got involved in the conversation, equally contributing bits and pieces of what we knew and speculating on all the possible answers. Yes, I could analyze these interchanges and point to how they are modeling critical thinking, good inquiry, and how children need to see that no one has all the answers, but I’m not. They were just beautiful moments of people coming together and puzzling out something. I want to leave it at that.

What About Content?

It’s challenging for educators to intentionally lighten up on content in any museum experience, even though research continually finds that family motivations for museum visits is NOT to learn new knowledge. Families seek an enjoyable time together that serves as a sort of family glue, creating memories that they continue to share. Certainly parents and children like to learn things but it’s not the focus or reason for their visit.

At the beginning of the visits this week, I let families know that I did not have any plans for them, I just wanted to wander around with them, that I didn’t know the collection but there was a Gardner Museum educator with us in case there was anything they wanted to know. Having a knowledgeable person with us proved to be a popular feature for families, for when questions came up Julia Brucker and Michelle Grohe were there. I’m grateful for their skilled ability to know just when and how much to engage so that the experience stayed in the family and was not diverted to the educator. That said, the families did not automatically think to ask the educators when a question arose. In most cases, after listening to families wonder out loud about something, I suggested asking the museum educator, which they eagerly did and it enlivened the conversation. I’m not sure why this is the case and together with families enjoying but not asking for the magnifying glass and flashlight, it feels like a pattern might be emerging. I will see if it continues in this week’s visits.

At one point a group intercepted a gallery volunteer roaming the gallery for just this purpose. The volunteer noticed that Suzie and Chuck were interested in a silver encased ostrich egg and talked to them about it. This brief interchange warmed my heart as the volunteer was focused totally on the group’s interest and experience. She had no agenda except to facilitate visitors’ interest.

Implications for Practice

Realistically we can’t accompany every family group in this way, but it feels increasingly important that we, as educators, connect with audiences on more than an intellectual level. Finding practical ways to fall in love with the visitors seems key to me. When we connect with visitors on a deeply human level then the way we design experiences will change. When we start to see visitors as thoughtful, insightful friends who are eager to explore what the museum has to offer, we stop seeing them as security risks or potential dollar signs. I invite you to find your own ways to authentically connect with your visitors and share what happened.

Note: All the photos were taken with Blynk a tiny time-lapse camera during the family visits. This little gadget is now my new best data-collecting friend. And the “Stumped the Chumps” reference is a nod to Car Talk.

ABOUT AUTHOR

Experimenting in Museums, OpenThink, Spotlight on Practice

Towards a More Mindful Practice

July 8, 2014 Mike Murawski 36 Comments

Written by Marianna Adams, Audience Focus, 2014 Educator-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Cross-posted from mariannaadams.blogspot.com

Amid many possible areas of exploration I considered for my residency at the Gardner Museum, I decided to see if I can bring more mindfulness to my own thinking about families in museums. Through my research and evaluation on families in many types of museums and my experience taking my granddaughters (currently 6 & 7 years old) to museums, I have been struck by what Ellen Langer refers to as “mindless” practice. It’s when we keep doing the same thing over and over without questioning the underlying pedagogy or assumptions. We stop paying attention and go on autopilot. Nothing very interesting can happen in that place.

I know that there are increasing examples of innovative and thoughtful work by museum educators in the area of family programs and I encourage you to share those ideas with us here. Yet over the years of both watching and participating in family museum programs three key questions keep emerging for me.

Where is the family in family programs?

Figure 1: I did this awkward little drawing as a composite memory of many family programs in different museums. While this is from my experience, try a Google image search for "family programs in art museums” and you will find, amidst lots of pictures of kids making art, some images that have this same basic choreography. Yes, the odd tilt of the painting bothers me too. — Figure 1: I did this awkward little drawing as a composite memory of many family programs in different museums. While this is from my experience, try a Google image search for “family programs in art museums” and you will find, amidst lots of pictures of kids making art, some images that have this same basic choreography. Yes, the odd tilt of the painting bothers me too.

First, what is billed as a family program often turns out to be a program for kids but the parents/caregivers have to stay with them. Adults are rarely engaged in a meaningful way and connections within the social group are neither acknowledged nor fostered. For example, when a family program facilitator takes families into a gallery, they often sit the children on the floor and the adults (either because they don’t really know what else to do or because they don’t want to sit on the floor) stand around in a semi-circle behind the kids. For me, this is a clear example of an invisible pedagogy. We are teaching adults that this experience is for kids and adults need not participate. When I talk with family program educators, they usually say they want adults to engage in the program. Sometimes they go so far as to imply that it’s the fault of the parents, as in “They won’t get off their cell phones.” Having been one of those adults at a family program who dearly wanted some sort of diversion and thought often about pulling out my phone, I ask, “What are we offering to the adults that is more interesting than their mobile devices?”

A host of questions emerge for me that I would love some e-conversation about: Why do we repeat this model over and over again? Does our training push us towards a developmental model where we know only how to program towards children or adults, but not both at the same time? Is the skill of encouraging parent child engagement one that is better fostered through other disciplines and thus should we be looking at best practices in other disciplines such as social work or psychology?

Why do we use a school model of discussion and interaction in family programs?

I’ve watched many well-meaning facilitators sit or stand in front of a work of art and make eye contact with the children almost exclusively. Not only does this tell parents to stand back but children quickly figure out that they are supposed to look at the facilitator and most of them conform. Children are asked questions and they raise their hand to answer, just like in school. Families tend to have fluid conversations, a lot of give and take, and while we might remind a child to not interrupt we rarely ask our children to raise their hands when having a conversation around the family dinner table. Why then do we default to the school model in the museum experience?

Even more frustrating is that this school model draws attention away from the objects and instead focuses attention on the educator. I’ve taken time-lapse photos and the average time spent looking at the art when sitting in this configuration is about 2-3 seconds – total, unless of course a child is not paying attention to the facilitator and looks at the art anyway.

How does the experience leverage the uniqueness of the museum?

The most important issue for me is that too many of the activities we offer in family programs don’t maximize the value of what the museum has to offer.

Engaging people of all ages in hands-on activities in the galleries can be a wonderful way to guide them into a deeper appreciation of the artwork. Yet, I’m concerned because too often the activities don’t connect very well with the artwork or the way the artist worked. I keep asking, “Why is this activity happening in the museum?” Most of what I see could be done anywhere and, sometimes, would be more effective without the visual distraction and noise of the gallery. I wonder, do we continue to under-maximize the uniqueness of the museum because we aren’t clear on what that is? Or do we operate on the assumption that families aren’t able to grasp it?

What will be my focus at the Gardner Museum this summer?

Figure 2: Sam Bates a.k.a. Smug, Girl with Magnifying Glass, Glasgow, Scotland.

As I continued to think about these issues I realized I was focusing only on how the educators planned and implemented programs. I began to wonder if I, too, have gone on autopilot. I know what kind of family experiences I’d like to see in the museum but, as I frequently warn my colleagues, using ourselves as a representative for the general visitor is not very smart. So, during the month of July I’ve invited families to come to the Gardner and allow me to accompany them.

I won’t have an agenda, lesson plan, protocol, notebook, or audio recorder and I plan to allow both the “educator me” and “evaluator me” to recede to the background. I want to explore facilitating “with” families rather than “for” them. I want to pay more attention to invisible pedagogies – both how the physical space itself instructs and how actions from people (me included) communicate behaviors and attitudes. I will invite the families to begin where they want to. I will have a few things with me, such as a flashlight for dark corners, some sketching materials, and magnifying glasses but I may not ever pull them out. I’m imagining, for instance, that as conversations evolve the need for things like that magnifying glass will naturally arise and I will, much like Mary Poppins, slide it out and hand it to the adults so they can facilitate the experience for their family.

Admittedly I’ve had moments of near panic just thinking about the unstructured quality of this experience. I have no idea what will happen and have to trust that if I stay mindful, sensitive, and observant that I will notice new things and be filled with wonder. I’ve invited local museum educators to come hang out with me. They can’t bring notebooks either and they have to agree to talk with me afterwards and write up a reflection of their experience.

The family visits begin on Wednesday, July 9. Meanwhile, I invite your comments. I hope I’ve raised some hackles one way or the other. If everyone is nodding in gentle agreement then I haven’t pushed enough buttons.

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Bookshelf, Experimenting in Museums, Field Notes, Spotlight on Practice

Meeting the Future Head On: Future Reports, Trends, & Next Practices

May 16, 2014 Mike Murawski 3 Comments

“The purpose of strategic foresight is to prime your imagination to envision different futures — some of the many ways that the world could evolve into more than an amped-up version of today.” – Elizabeth Merritt

What does the future hold for museums? What are museums (or, more accurately, the people working in museums) doing right now that deserves to be shared, examined, and reflected upon? How can museums think more critically about their role in the transforming landscape of education — now and in the years ahead? We all have these questions floating through our minds, but may not often have the time and space to chew on them or hear others’ thoughts. I, myself, have a pile of printed reports, trend watches, and ‘future of museums’ readings sitting on my desk, and every once in a while I glare at it and wish that I could absorb it all in a few minutes like Neo in the film The Matrix. Without superhuman powers, though, I decided to dive into that pile this week.

In an exceptional Museum-iD post gathering perspectives from global museum innovators in response to the question “What will museums be like in the future?,” Adam Rozan from the Oakland Museum of California remarked:

“… museums will thrive, using challenges as opportunities to test new business and engagement models, and, in doing so, meeting the future head on.”

So it’s in that spirit that I wanted to bring together and share a group of resources from the past 6 months that present and analyze trends, future thinking, and ‘next’ practices in museums and education that help us meet the future head on. I hope that you find this list useful, and please add additional resources, links, and ideas to the Comments section below — allowing this to become a more organic resource. Let’s dive in, shall we…

Visitors engaging with a sea of all images that were posted on Flickr during a 24-hour period and dumped into the exhibition space in the "What's Next" exhibition at the Future of the Photography Museum in Amsterdam. Photo by foamamsterdam — Visitors engaging with a sea of all images that were posted on Flickr during a 24-hour period and dumped into the exhibition space in the “What’s Next” exhibition at the Future of the Photography Museum in Amsterdam. Photo by foamamsterdam

Next Practices in Art Museum Education

Intended to take us beyond “best practices,” Next Practices in Art Museum Education is a new compilation of information from the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) member museums and their innovative approaches to engaging the public with the arts through diverse learning opportunities. Next Practices incorporates 100 case studies of the recent and ongoing educational programming that its member museums have designed and implemented.

The resource underscores the many forms art museum education can take, and provides practical and inspiring ideas for future programming at institutions worldwide. The resource represents a much-needed survey of the exceptional educational practices happening in art museums across the country, and ranges across ages and types of engagement & learning.

NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Museum Edition

Released in November 2013, the NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Museum Edition examines key trends and technologies in the museum sector, as well as significant challenges that museums are faced with in adopting these technologies. The report hones in on six emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in education and interpretation within the museum environment:

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): given the increasing number of people who take their smartphones and other devices with them everywhere they go, the BYOD movement is an effort to move away from a top-down system of providing devices toward a practice that instead provides the networks and frameworks through which museum visitors interact with a range of content on their own devices.
Crowdsourcing: A method of gathering ideas, information, or content from a wider public community around a shared goal — capitalizing on the power of collective intelligence and public knowledge, as in the case of Wikipedia. Crowdsourcing strategies are being used by museums to curate exhibitions, gathering metadata around artworks or artifacts, promoting community engagement, and crowdfunding new projects.
Electronic publishing: Near and dear to my heart, electronic and digital media are continuing to redefine the publishing avenues of museums, tapping into modern digital workflows and social media activities to develop new forms of content and significantly extend the reach of that content beyond the limits of traditional print. Beyond making these electronic platforms available to anyone, the report identifies the next phase of electronic publishing as linking these platforms together to produce new types of content.
Location-based services: Enabled by WiFi access points, GPS, RFID tags, and crowdsourced positioning technologies, location-based services are now available to deliver up-to-the-moment information that is related to a particular spot — guiding visitors through spaces, directing them to exhibits and objects that match their preferences, and triggering information and content specific to the visitor’s exact location in the museum.
Natural user interfaces: While we are already familiar with technologies and devices that respond to the natural movements of gestures of the human body (taps, swipes, arm motions, and natural language), there are prototype technologies being developed that extend these capabilities and combine facial expression and gesture-sensing technology with voice recognition that could allow museum visitors to interact in an increasingly natural fashion.
Preservation and conservation technologies: While museums have always addressed issues of preserving and conserving cultural heritage, these practices are being challenged by questions around how to preserve and conserve via digital materials as well as working with digital and time-based media — requiring new approaches and new skills that bring in electronic and multi-disciplinary perspectives to digital preservation efforts.

I was fortunate to be part of the 44-member Advisory Board and the process that helped identify these technology trends currently affecting the practice of museum education, interpretation, and visitor experience, and I look forward to the next annual report in this NMC series.

TrendsWatch 2014

Center for the Future of Museum’s annual forecasting report, TrendsWatch 2014, summarizes six emerging trends identified through CFM’s research and the Dispatches from the Future of Museums, CFM’s free e-newsletter. The report explores how each trend is playing out in the world, investigates what this means for society and for museums, shares examples of how museums are engaging with this trend, and suggests how museums might respond. Here are the six trends/topics that this report identifies:

“For Profit for Good: The rise of the social entrepreneurs”
“Synesthesia: Multisensory experiences for a multisensory world”
“A Geyser of Information: Tapping the big data oil boom”
“Privacy in a Watchful World: What have you got to hide?”
“What’s Mine Is Yours: The economy of collaborative consumption”
“Robots! Are Rosie, Volton, Bender and their kin finally coming into their own?”

The report’s author, Elizabeth Merritt, writes in her introduction:

“As you read about these six trends, think about how they will shape the world, what it would be like to live in the world they may create, and how you and your organization might respond…. Personally I think the most important and challenging question question is raised in ‘For Profit for Good’: How big an impact do museums want to have on the world, and how can we ensure that the good we do is good enough?”

A great read, and certainly a report to look forward to each year from CFM. And speaking of CFM, here are a few more resources and future thinking items from their realm.

Building the Future of Education: Museums and the Learning Ecosystem

Coming out of a convening organized in September 2013 by the American Alliance of Museums (AAMC) and The Henry Ford, the “Building the Future of Education: Museums and the Learning Ecosystem” report includes essays by educators, students, researchers and reformers that summarize and explore how leaders from the worlds of education and museums can work together to integrate the nation’s assets into what they call a ‘Vibrant Learning Grid.’ The convening and report asks the big question: How can museums and schools collaborate to create a new future for education?

The report pulls together leading thinkers and related case studies that focus on this and other core, burning questions, addressing a range of issues that include:

investing in greater capacities to support and manage partnerships
strengthening family engagement and envisioning parents as co-learners
building open learning networks across community institutions
leveraging digital learning and collaborative technologies

The report ends with a powerful “Call to Action” that came out of the second day of the convening, with some practical suggestions for moving the conversation forward and enacting change. They share several ideas, including increasing awareness, sharing information, disrupting conventional thinking about the educational landscape, and implementing radical experiments that increase the role of museums in an expanded view of education.

Guide to the Future at the 2014 Annual Meeting

For those of you heading to Seattle this weekend for the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), there are lots of great sessions, panels, and events to attend that bring together leading thinkers to discuss the future of museums as well as existing trends. The CFM’s Elizabeth Merritt shared her insights recently via the CFM blog, and I encourage you to take a look (even if, like me, you are not attending the AAM conference this year). You’ll find sessions discussing almost all of the reports I list above. If I were attending AAM this year, one of my top picks would be “Crowdsourcing to Community Sourcing: Engaging Visitor Input” with Jeff Inscho, Lori Phillips, Daniel Davis, and Petra Pankow.

Share Your Thoughts

What are some of your ideas about the future of museums, and the ‘next’ practices that will help museums thrive? And what are your thoughts about these types of reports and publications that spotlight ‘innovation’ and ‘future thinking’ — are they limited in their scope, or helpful as we all reflect on our own practice? What sources do you look toward when thinking about new ideas, experiments, and projects?

Experiments in the Galleries

Take Aways

“I felt really proud to be a part of a special community.”

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What should I expect?

Why participate?

How Can You Be Involved?

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A Brief History

Commonalities and Spiraling Forward

Looking Ahead

How Do You Do It? Share Your Thoughts

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The Challenge

How Can You Be Involved?

AS AN EXPERIMENTER:

AS A PARTICIPANT:

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What’s a model, exactly?

What models are we questioning?

Here’s my main argument

We don’t need new models, we need a new theory of practice

A proposed theory of practice for the future

In conclusion

About the Author

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There is Life Beyond the Survey

Match the evaluation method to the experience.

So what methodology might better align with the evening program experience you imagined yourself attending above?

First you start with what you want to know and why.

Think creatively about ways to get that data and match it to the spirit of the experience.

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#captureParklandia Works Like This

Go Forth and Get’em

Yes, And

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1. It’s Really About What You Value

2. But Parents Won’t or Don’t Want to Participate!

PLEASE SHARE

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It’s About Choice & Control

Kids See the Darndest Things

They “Stumped the Chumps”

What About Content?

Implications for Practice

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Where is the family in family programs?

Why do we use a school model of discussion and interaction in family programs?

How does the experience leverage the uniqueness of the museum?

What will be my focus at the Gardner Museum this summer?

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“The purpose of strategic foresight is to prime your imagination to envision different futures — some of the many ways that the world could evolve into more than an amped-up version of today.” – Elizabeth Merritt

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A Forum for Reflecting on Practice