I used to blog about museum work on my academic website. Since that page has gone away, I am using this space to repost some of my favorite bits. These posts were written in 2012-13.
London in Brief | Originally posted March, 2013
So the HAM flew all five graduate student task force members and our two fearless leaders to London for the week to conduct peer institution research. Phew! I’m still processing what I learned (and still trying to stay up past 10pm), but here is what I learned so far:
We learn when we relax. Play is deadly serious. Museums are people’s leisure activity. Therefore, the museum experience should be social and fun.
Ethan Lasser, Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums, enjoying Heatherwick Studio’s Spun Chair at the V&A
Learning is a conversation, a dialogical way of understanding. When we want to understand each other or a work of art, we must speak, ask questions, and listen actively.
Art History graduate student Sarah Grandin actively listening to Art in Education grad Ju-Hye Ahn “push back” at the British Museum
Learning is lifelong and lifewide.
Learning is a change in behavior or attitude as the result of reflection on experience.
Museums are not neutral spaces. They communicate values, so museums must communicate with intention.
“Our Londinium” at the Museum of London, a redesign of the Roman Galleries co-curated by young Londoners (2012)
Reciprocity between the institution and the community is a process.
Brutally honest visitor feedback at the Tate Modern
Ethics are expensive.
You don’t want kids to feel like they can flunk the museum. The most important thing is to make kids feel like adults are listening.
To have an impact on schools and communities, work with teachers.
The goal of museum education should be to make museum educators obsolete.
What can I say? London kicked our butts.
Ju-Hye, HGSE grad Caitlin Gianniny, and I “HAM”-ing it up at Somerset House
Looking back on this post, I can understand now how formative that trip was for me. Recently, I saw Corinne Zimmerman at the Gardner Museum; she reminded me how jazzed I was after our visit to the University of Leicester (where I am now studying for my MA in Visitor and Learning Studies). She told me that, while waiting for the train, I kept shouting — “I feel like a radical!”
I used to blog about museum work on my academic website. Since that page has gone away, I am using this space to repost some of my favorite bits. These posts were written in 2012-13.
How do different learning experiences alter visitors’ perceptions of what belongs in a museum? | Originally posted February, 2013
This paper, co-authored with Ju-Hye Ahn, was written for Shari Tishman‘s “Active Learning in Museums” course in January 2013. Ju-Hye and I conducted a study at the Sackler Museum to investigate the impact of active learning experiences on visitors’ perception of what belongs in a museum. By offering two different types of structured learning experiences (one information-based, one inquiry-based), this study sought to understand how active engagement advances a visitor’s understanding of an artwork and enhances her aesthetic perception.
Furthermore, we obliquely studied the the museum as a site of knowledge-production, and asked viewers to interrogate curatorial choices. By evaluating whether Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled belongs in a museum, visitors reflected on the purpose of museums themselves.
I used to blog about museum work on my academic website. Since that page has gone away, I am using this space to repost some of my favorite bits. These posts were written in 2012-13.
What is the role of “the expert” in inquiry-based, constructivist learning? | Originally posted February, 2013
I took a course with Shari Tishman at the Harvard Graduate School of Education about “Active Learning in the Museum.” In our readings and discussion, structure emerged as the key to successful learning experiences, both constructivist and inquiry-based. In his chapter on educational theory, George Hein makes this provocative statement:
“I believe that constructivism places more, not less, demands on the teacher to provide rich and rewarding environments in which learning can take place.” (page 39)
Nina Simon’s TedX talk deeply engages this question of structure; as Simon demonstrates, designed opportunities and special tools invite the audience to produce something meaningful. Ron Ritchhart’s “Cultivating a Culture of Thinking in Museums” fleshes out the forces shaping group culture, and many of these fall under the domain of the discussion facilitator (communicating expectations, allocating time, routines and structures).
The Harvard Art Museum Task Force recently took a fieldtrip to the Gardner Museum, and we asked the education staff where rigor comes from in the VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) curriculum. Many of the strategies are echoed in Ritchhart’s article: paraphrasing, use of appropriate vocabulary, choice of object, time and repetition. So, clearly, inquiry-based learning depends on the finesse of an experienced and committed educator. What is the role of the disciplinary expert, then? On the one hand, the role of information in inquiry is critical here. My disciplinary expertise allowed me to answer a question spontaneously asked aloud by a visitor at the Getty — I provided information, and she was intellectually satisfied. I think we agree that information can be leveraged to extend inquiry; facts are not evil in themselves. On the other hand, I am interested in habits of mind and their relationship to disciplinary expertise. In many ways, the first few years of graduate school in history is a process of enculturation: we were taught, formally and informally, to think like historians. We think about authorship and reception. We are critical of claims about universality. As a premodernist, I am especially skeptical when people throw around words like “reason” and “science” and “modernity.” This is different from the content of my expertise: it’s not fact-oriented, but rather thinking-skills-oriented. Is it possible to teach disciplinary thinking dispositions in way that is consistent with inquiry-based learning? I suspect so.
Titian. Europa, c. 1560-62. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Massachusetts.
On a related note, I am getting interested in museums as sites of knowledge and sites of knowledge-production. There is a strong Foucauldian critique lurking behind this topic, of course. How do museums structure objects, space, text, and movement to create knowledge? And how self-aware are they? I suspect that exhibitions are more explicit about this than permanent installations. I would like to design a learning experience for my final project that tackles this issue, but I may be the only one in the class who is interested in this stuff. I sort of wish I were at Berkeley in the 1980s, sometimes.
I used to blog about museum work on my academic website. Since that page has gone away, I am using this space to repost some of my favorite bits. These posts were written in 2012-13.
Curatorial Authorship and/vs. Participatory Museums: What the What? | Originally posted December, 2012
On Tuesday, members of the Harvard Art Museums’ Graduate Student Task Force (from now on, HAM GST) met with Susan Dackerman, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, to talk about her practice. She conceptualized her role in a succinct and powerful way; as a curator, her job is to figure out “what to do with the knowledge embodied by individual objects” and deploy that knowledge in museum spaces, exhibitions, and publications. Curators infer meaning from materiality. Part of Susan’s job, of course, is to mount installations and exhibitions (both she and Rob Mawry drew a sharp distinction between these two). While a installation (often from the permanent collection) makes a statement, an exhibition is thesis-driven. That is, a curator’s task in designing an exhibition is to activate the meaning of art objects to visualize broader arguments. What’s more, Susan feels a responsibility to communicate artists’ decisions through exhibition design. Objects “work” differently in different contexts; works are active agents in the production of meaning because artists make choices. By carefully placing works in juxtaposition, Susan creates different meanings as a curator. Susan is a curatorial author, not only by choosing objects, but also by designing the spaces and textual environments in which the objects are encountered.
Museum spaces seem naturalized, but, as Susan pointed out to us, there are strategies that curators employ to make the “work” of museums invisible. The lack of awareness around curatorial authorship cuts off museum visitors from deep engagement with objects and spaces. Therefore, Susan is in the process of developing a training program to teach museum fellows how to read museum environments, how to look at them as authored spaces. This orientation toward authorship then feeds into the development exhibition-making skills; fellows will learn how to facilitate meaning-making for audiences through the lens of curatorial authorship.
We looked at some of these choices-in-action in the Recent Acquisitions gallery of the Sackler. Susan was responsible for installing Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled, a monumental woodcut print depicting six African-American men in a quietly domestic setting reminiscent of seventeenth-century genre scenes. By interrogating Susan about her choices in front of her object in her gallery, it became really clear to us how an awareness of choice in museum spaces deepens the looking experience. Untitled is displayed on one wall (and a little bit); Susan explained how that “little bit” creates a sense of volumetric space in the piece. Corinne Zimmermann, the Senior Educator at HAM, explained how many of the installation choices “work” when she gives tours; after climbing up the stairs, viewers are confronted at first with a slice of a panoramic city scene. From the other entranceway, the central figures are framed by the doorway before visitors enter the space. Sarah Grandin, a grad student in the history of art and architecture, pointed out that the hanging of this artwork (alone in an otherwise empty gallery) was reminiscent of controversial exhibitions in the Salon. Ethan Lasser, Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator of American Art, interrogated Susan about the burden of interpretation: Who is responsible for making curatorial authorship visible? Should transparency be built into the design of the exhibition, or should audiences be educated enough to see through the “invisibility cloak” of curatorial practice?
Needless to say, when I saw Nina Simon’s post about “Work In Progress” at the Santa Cruz MAH, I was immediately intrigued with this idea of transforming a space from “a museum of products to a museum of process.” Is there a difference between curatorial authorship and curatorial process? Our orientation toward audience meaning-making is different at the HAM than at the MAH; curators like Susan are interested in communicating “what I want you to learn,” while Nina Simon’s perpetual beta approach sees venues like museums as content platforms rather than content providers.
Here is my big question: If we are interested in making curatorial authorship transparent, and if active learning in art museums makes experiences “sticky” and meaningful, why not jump on the participatory museum bandwagon and let audiences do the curating? Maybe that’s not right for our university museum. It’s a good sign, however, that HAM is having these conversations. And I am so, so lucky to be a part of them.
mindful museums 