Showing papers in "Curator: The Museum Journal in 2006"

An Identity‐Centered Approach to Understanding Museum Learning

Abstract: This paper advances the thesis that museum visitors' identities, motivations and learning are inextricably intertwined. All individuals enact multiple identities, many of which are situational and constructed in response to a social and physical context. Identity influences motivations, which in turn directly influence behavior and learning. Visitors to museums tend to enact one or various combinations of five museum-specific identities, described here as: explorer; facilitator; professional/hobbyist; experience seeker; and spiritual pilgrim. Preliminary findings suggest that these identity-specific motivational categories might help to explain the long-term learning impacts of a museum visit.

Learning for Fun: The Unique Contribution of Educational Leisure Experiences

Abstract: What do visitors want or expect from an educational leisure activity such as a visit to a museum, zoo, aquarium or other such experience? Is it to learn something or to experience learning? This paper uses the term 'learning for fun' to refer to the phenomenon in which visitors engage in a learning experience because they value and enjoy the process of learning itself. Five propositions regarding the nature of learning for fun are discussed, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from visitors to a range of educational leisure activities. The commonalities between learning for fun and other theoretical constructs such as 'experience,' 'flow', 'intrinsic motivation', and 'curiosity' are explored. It is concluded that learning for fun is a unique and distinctive offering of educational leisure experiences, with implications for future research and experience design.

Doing Identity Work in Museums

Abstract: Museum visitors typically look at only about a third of the elements of an exhibition, and often give only limited attention to those. Can visitors really be getting something worthwhile from such partial usage of an exhibition? This article explores how visitors use exhibitions for “identity work,” the processes through which we construct, maintain, and adapt our sense of personal identity, and persuade other people to believe in that identity. Museums offer powerful opportunities for doing identity work, but the visitor does not need to engage with exhibition content deeply or systematically in order to gain the benefits that museum experiences offer for identity work.

Understanding Teachers' Perspectives on Field Trips: Discovering Common Ground in Three Countries

Abstract: The school field trip constitutes an important demographic market for museums. Field trips enlist the energies of teachers and students, schools and museums, and ought to be used to the best of their potential. There is evidence from the literature and from practitioners that museums often struggle to understand the needs of teachers, who make the key decisions in field trip planning and implementation. Museum personnel ponder how to design their programs to serve educational and pedagogical needs most effectively, and how to market the value of their institutions to teachers. This paper describes the overlapping outcomes of three recent studies that investigated teacher perspectives on field trips in the United States, Canada, and Germany. The results attest to the universality of some of the issues teachers face, and suggest improvements in the relationship between museums and schools.

An Analysis of Visitor Circulation: Movement Patterns and the General Value Principle

Abstract: How visitors circulate through museums determines what they will see, where they will focus their attention, and, ultimately, what they will learn and experience. Unfortunately, the consistency of these movement patterns is not readily apparent. This article reviews the literature on visitor circulation in light of the general value principle which predicts choice behavior as a ratio of perceived experience outcome (benefits) divided by perceived costs (time, effort, and so on). Although this principle at first appears obvious, its implications may be more profound.

Museums and the Agency of Ideology: Three Recent Examples

Abstract: Museums are not neutral organizations; they are active social participants. While museums serve many social purposes, fundamentally they define and express major social narratives. Museums are important collections of ideological symbols and perform a special communication as well as legitimizing role. The narratives conveyed by museums are observed as definitive and authoritative, and the objects displayed are understood as emblematic or normative culture. This article examines two museums and a historic site in the United States in the context of their social narratives. Attention is paid to the political implications of recent program decisions. The social and political interactions that accompany these institutions' program decisions demonstrate the ideological purpose of the museum.

The Puzzle of Museum Educational Practice: A Comment on Rounds and Falk

Abstract: Museum practice is in the midst of a fascinating practical and theoretical trajectory. The mandate that museums place education at the center of their public service role has had the effect of framing a new set of questions and—inevitably—problems. If museums have primary value to society as educational institutions, what kind of learning actually happens in them? Jay Rounds and John Falk, writing at the leading edge of this inquiry, explore curiosity, motivation and self-identity as paramount considerations for the special type of learning museums promote. Their analyses present interesting challenges for the museum practitioner, who may observe that people find the pursuit of curiosity pleasurable and value it more highly than knowledge acquisition. The practitioner may conclude that museums have a calling: They stand for the value of curiosity for its own sake, and for that reason will never wear out their welcome.

Building Relationships through Communities of Practice: Museums and Indigenous People

Abstract: This paper explores the theory of “communities of practice” and how the ideas contained in it could be applied to museums, by demonstrating how a key stakeholder group, Indigenous people, have been involved with and engaged in the work of the Australian Museum, Sydney, over the past 30 years. It is suggested that the processes museums have developed in building relationships with Indigenous people, particularly at the practitioner level, could form a template for how museums make themselves relevant to broader communities through active engagement with multiple communities of practice.

John Dewey's “Wholly Original Philosophy” and Its Significance for Museums

Abstract: John Dewey's lifework was to create a philosophy that encompassed both life-experience and thought. He attempted to construct a philosophical system that incorporated life as it is lived, not in some ideal form. He rejected all dualisms, such as those between thought and action, fine and applied arts, or stimulus and response. An analysis of “experience” (defined as almost synonymous with “culture”) is central to Dewey's writing and leads him to emphasize process, continuity, and development, rather than static, absolute concepts. This paper examines the significance of Dewey's educational views for museum exhibitions and education programs, and his complex definitions of relevant concepts, with special emphasis on his interpretation of “experience.” Dewey's faith in democracy and his moral philosophy require that the value of any educational activity depends on its social consequences as well as its intellectual content, a proposition that is discussed and applied to museums. This argument suggests that exhibitions and programs can strengthen democracy by promoting skills that improve visitors' ability to become critical thinkers and by directly addressing controversial issues, taking the side of social justice and democracy.

Grandparents Speak: Museum Conversations across the Generations

Abstract: The research results from the Museum Learning Collaborative (MLC) indicate that learning in museums (defined as conversational elaboration) is strongly influenced by three factors: 1) the learning environment (defined as the response to large design features); 2) conversational engagement (defined as explanatory, analytic and synthetic discussions of objects); 3) group identity (defined as knowledge, experience, and motivation). These results were consistent across different museum types and different visiting populations (Leinhardt and Knutson 2004). This case study uses the experiences and conversations of one group—four members of an intergenerational grandparent-grandchild group—and one dimension of the model: identity. It examines how this particular group of grandparents used the museum setting to take on diverse roles in ways that reflected identities: the role of storyteller (a sharer of information and family knowledge); the role of playmate (a learner and teacher who can enjoy an environment); the role of modeler of caring social interactions (a harmonizer who can experience conversational coherence and dissonance with grace). The conversational segments reproduced here are a means of unpacking the MLC model and exploring the discourse behaviors of this particularly interesting group.

Collecting Culture and the British Museum

Abstract: This article explores the act of collecting from a postmodern perspective by examining the influences of changing times, places, and persons. Considering the British Museum's stages of development and progress, it discusses the life of Sir Hans Sloane and how his actions helped determine the museum's original goals for its collection. The early days of the British Museum provide a clear view into the values of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British society. The focus of the museum's collection has changed over the years with the changing views of academics and society. The museum today still strives to hold knowledge of all things, yet tempers this goal under the pressures of modern theorists and politics. While still desiring to communicate information about the world from vast and complex collections, the museum has shifted its focus to answer questions of ownership and entitlement. Explaining national and world heritage views, the article concludes with a discussion of the ethics of collecting as a primary factor in today's British Museum collection.

Memories of Math: Visitors' Experiences in an Exhibiton about Calculus

Abstract: Handling Calculus is a set of interactive exhibits about mathematics developed by the Science Museum of Minnesota and TERC. The exhibits are designed to engage visitors with kinesthetic, application-oriented, and concept-focused approaches to calculus and pre-calculus concepts. As we examined visitor interviews collected during the evaluation of Handling Calculus, it was striking how often respondents' experiences with the exhibits stimulated memories they associated with school math. Respondents recognized math terms and symbols, reconstructed graphing skills, and recalled fragmentary concepts they had learned in school. In addition, they recounted stories about their former math teachers and the ways in which they had been taught mathematics, as well as a range of both positive and negative emotions they associated with school math. Respondents recognized and valued the hands-on and whole-body approaches used in Handling Calculus, contrasting the exhibits with their paper-and-pencil school experiences. Some respondents wondered if they would have done better at school calculus if their teachers had used the approaches taken by Handling Calculus.

The Value Exchange: Museums and Their Context

Abstract: Today, most cultural institutions realize they are part of a complex and interrelated universe, a community of service and influence. Dynamic museums now participate in a self-conscious value exchange with other entities in their community context. The guiding principle: Provide value first before support is sought. This paper explores the evolution of a value exchange agenda at the Henry Ford Museum as part of a larger, 10-year strategy for transformation to a multi-day, multi-venue national history attraction. The Ford agenda focused on economic value, educational initiatives, and enhanced community consciousness. Working for the community gives us purpose and value and suggests that we, too, can change the world, a little at a time, for the better.

Great Expectations: Museums and Regional Economic Development in England

Abstract: This polemic addresses the political expectations of museums in England. Its starting point is the premise of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that museums make a significant contribution to regional economies, if not to the national economy. Political expediency requires museums to provide evidence for their economic worth. But it could be argued that estimates of museums' economic impact are devalued by being blatantly constructed for the purposes of advocacy. This paper explores various issues that inform the practice of associating museums with economic development. It considers whether the government's cultural policies and aspirations have served to misrepresent (if not exaggerate) the economic impact that museums currently exert, or are deemed capable of exerting. It closes by suggesting that there are some ambiguities in the commitment of the DCMS to the premise that museums are economically important, and by examining implications for the future.

Not Just the Hangars of World War II: American Aviation Museums and the Role of Memorial

Abstract: In aviation museums throughout the United States, World War II aircraft have become crucial objects in shaping a narrative of memorial for millions of people. The museums' warehousing function allows them to be both the long-term home of these wondrous and resonant airplanes, and the collective “hangar” of our commemorations. These museums offer reasons for serious study, since in many respects our mental images of World War II are constructed within aviation museums. This article explores the narrative of memorial through illustrations from four representative institutions, and examines one of the anomalies, the case of the Enola Gay.

A Journey Unlike Any Other: An Interactive Exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract: A Journey Unlike Any Other is an interactive museum exhibition that introduces visitors to the experience of being a refugee. First, the visitor is confronted with hostility from soldiers in the homeland, and later, after an escape, with all the difficulties derived from meetings with police and immigration authorities in the new country. The provocations visitors endure during the course of the exhibition enhance a high degree of perceptual awareness, reflectivity and memory. In the aftermath of their experience, visitors indicate an increase of empathic understanding and experiential knowledge, whereas their interest in information and further background knowledge seems to be unaffected.

Museums as Media in the Emergent Global Context

Abstract: The papers, participants, presentations, and discussions that serve as the source of this special issue of Curator: The Museum Journal bear witness to the fact that museums are not only places to which something radical, even traumatic is currently happening. They are participants, and essentially agents of change, in the stressful, shifting ecology of globalization that has unmoored whole economies, regions and populations. Fundamentally, they are a form of media, in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. This article summarizes the challenges museums face in pursuing their mission as media, and ends with a few remarks about the need to turn some attention in the future to the topic of research.

Lincolns in Latex: Exploring Lincoln's Legacy at the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum

Abstract: This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness,” of horror vacui.—Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality