Science Museums in Transition

Unheard Voices

Hooley McLaughlin, Judy Diamond, Hooley McLaughlin, Judy Diamond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367787752
• eBook ISBN: 9781351036320
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Science Museums in Transition: Unheard Voices considers how museums can adapt their exhibits, programs, and organizational structures to the diversity of ideas, people, and cultures that speak to modern science.

This collection contains individual expressions by museum insiders addressing a range of particular perspectives – Native American, African American, Latinx, Islamic, Israeli, Danish, white North American. These reflections provide guidance to the museum community as to how their institutions can become more thoughtful, more welcoming to diverse audiences, and more cognizant of the ways that different people incorporate science into their daily lives. As a whole, the book emphasizes the need for museums to engage in dialogue with their visitors – not merely to present them with information – and to offer the opportunities to share experiences, exchange perspectives, and thereby advance science learning through a dynamic and collective process.

Science Museums in Transition is intended to further discussion on how museums address the political and social ramifications of science and, as such, should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of museum studies, science, anthropology, education and history. It should also be essential reading for museum professionals around the globe.

1  Inclusion and relevance in natural history museums

Judy Diamond

Enter the backrooms of any mid-to-large-sized natural history museum and view a magical world of singular specimens and unusual artefacts. Long rows of metal cabinets contain objects that range from the Earth’s rarest to the most common and familiar. The contents of the cabinets and shelves constitute the intellectual foundation of the museum – items classified by taxonomic relationship, age, and sometimes geography, nation, culture, or tribe. There are mounts in drawers, fossils on shelves, wet specimens submerged in formalin, dried plants affixed to acid-free herbarium sheets, and artefacts cradled in foam stands. The collection, naming, and preservation of specimens and the artefacts of material culture delimit the original primary function of natural history museums. Specimens contain slices of the world’s biological diversity in a banked reservoir of DNA. Cultural artefacts embody the ideas and practices of diverse peoples, recording and retracing the evolution of material culture. These collections are resources that allow students and scientists to discover the patterns of life history – identification, diversity, evolution, and sustainability. Life-forms that are not named are not known with certainty to exist. Cultures are invisible or forgotten without the description of their artefacts. It is the mission of research in natural history museums not only to order life’s diversity, but also to make possible its discovery.

This inner world of the natural history museum is a private place, reserved for the community of researchers who contribute to the accumulation of knowledge of life’s diversity and material culture. These collections are shared across the globe in a collective commitment to advancing scientific understanding. The care and preservation of the collections remains as much the function of natural history museums as it was in 1683 when the Ashmolean Museum in England became the first of its kind to open its doors to the public. At first glance, these collections appear timeless, enshrined within the protected walls of their museums. But the foundation of natural history museum collections is no longer stable. As funding from state and federal sources plummets, there is a new sense of siege, and in the present-day push and shove of competing interests, the long-term preservation of museum collections ranks low on the horizon of most politicians.

Natural history museums also have another mission that is reflected in an outer core of priorities and activities. This outer museum is nothing like the solemn, research-oriented sanctuaries of the collections. It is busy, loud, boisterous, artistic, and often commercial. The museum markets itself through its exhibits, programs, public relations, and fund-raising. This outer museum has multiple aims: financial sustainability, community support, education of school children, outreach, and visitation by the public.

Education in some form, or at least the dissemination of ideas, is part of the mission of most natural history museums. Some promote appreciation for science or teach scientific principles. One of the world’s largest natural history museums, the American Museum of Natural History, has the mission: “To discover, interpret, and disseminate – through scientific research and education – knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe.” The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History does not directly mention education in its mission statement: “Understanding the natural world and our place in it.” But under the original mandate of James Smithson, the mission called for, “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men [sic].”

Most natural history museums take a traditional approach to education, using techniques that have not changed since the mid-nineteenth century. As such, education in museums can often feel like a one-way dissemination of ideas: knowledge is dispensed from the museum to students and the public. Outside the realm of museums, American educational systems have vacillated between traditional and progressive forms of education. In traditional education, the teacher or other authority figure dispenses knowledge, usually in the form of factual information. But for more than a century, influenced by John Dewey and others, many educational systems have instead favoured progressive approaches where teachers provide education resources for students to engage in their own intellectual discoveries, usually through inquiry-based activities or social learning. Students are encouraged to create personal meanings, learn in different styles, and think critically and independently.

Natural history museums have generally resisted progressive approaches in their education initiatives. Exhibits reflect the collections, focusing on specimens and artefacts, and labels present factual information about the objects displayed. In this sense, the exhibits effectively give students and the public a sense of the inner museum and thus attempt to make a broader audience aware of collections and research. There is no question that remarkable objects can have powerful emotional impacts. There are recollections from famous scientists that describe how a visit to a natural history museum inspired them to pursue a career in research. The National Museum of Natural History recently displayed an exhibit called, Objects of Wonder, featuring some of the most unusual and beautiful items from their collections. The goal was to generate awe and to create recognition for the uniqueness and the importance of the museum’s collections. Like society’s other iconic objects, such as fine art and architecture, items from the Smithsonian’s collections clearly deserve appreciation.

Large natural history museums have put their awe-inspiring objects to good use, and they are among the most visited among all types of public institutions. But they tend to stumble when it comes to educating students and the public about scientific processes and the nature of scientific inquiry. Museum collections serve as essential reservoirs for the advancement of scientific understanding – through studies of evolution, biodiversity, and cultural diversity. But there are relatively few museum exhibits that effectively educate audiences about these ideas. Natural history museum curators often communicate the scientific aspects of their collections as definitive and static knowledge – an assemblage of facts created by mostly white, male scientists. The life sciences are presented as a set of known quantities defined by the collections, with few clues to how species form, how their populations are maintained, and how they respond to environmental change.

Outside the museum, there is a broad consensus among scientists and educators for a different view: science is not an assembly of facts, but a process of inquiry, persistence, and discovery. Modern science is fundamentally tentative and cooperative, methodologically diverse and embedded into the larger issues of the surrounding culture.¹ To encourage scientific understanding is to create connections between phenomena and personal experience. Scientific understanding involves discussion, argument, reflection, and synthesis – challenging norms and reflecting on bias.

Science is today’s currency for empowerment and social change, and science and technology represent powerful forces that shape the lives of every human on the planet. Yet natural history museums do little to empower the public by making them well informed and infused with a critical understanding of the strengths and limitations of the processes underlying scientific information. The presentation of specimens and artefacts with labels providing identification and facts discourages scientific reasoning, limiting the available avenues for visitors to make personal connections. The method of presentation implies that naming species is the goal of scientific investigation rather than a component of a more dynamic process of inquiry.

Powerful collaborative approaches to exhibit design, where scientists, artists, and educators come together to build on each other’s ideas have been advocated for decades by institutions like the Kellogg Foundation and by visionaries like Frank Oppenheimer and Michael Spock.² Modelled over the years, natural history museums regularly adopt “team” approaches to exhibit development, but in practice these groups are often crippled by imbalances of power and influence. Team members defer to curators’ notions of what information to cover, ceding control of content as if it were a commodity to be accumulated and doled out. Too few museum educators and exhibit designers have the clout or resources to effectively develop the kinds of learning tools that encourage users to reason in new ways.

Some natural history museums are trying to modernize and reformulate their definitions of education to be more in tune with contemporary practices, and their new aims include terms like learner-focused, promoting discovery, empowering learners, and encouraging critical thinkers. But the transition from disseminating knowledge to empowering learners requires more than a change in aims; it is a radical shift, and it requires institutional transformation which, for the most part, has not occurred. Educators and designers contribute experiential knowledge but often with insufficient opportunity to integrate social and cultural awareness and the cognitive processes that drive and expand thinking and learning. And sadly, researchers continue to document how the implicit influences of social class and ethnic exclusion hinder the museum science experiences of students living in poverty and those from minority or immigrant backgrounds³.

Embracing the processes of science requires a change in how museums understand their role as science communicators, embracing cultural and cognitively focused teaching – where the institutions build exhibits and programs based on an understanding of how diverse visitors reason about phenomena, not just on what they should know. What would natural history museum exhibits look like if their educational role was to create independently minded science learners? Would exhibits not only stimulate curiosity but also teach visitors to reflect, synthesize, advocate, challenge, and seek connections between social processes and natural phenomena? It is not a simple matter for a museum to engage visitors with science as it is practiced in real-world settings. Creating effective displays requires bringing visitors into the realm of scientific thinking through inquiry, insight, identity formation, and connections to existing beliefs and experience. The challenge is not only how to display and teach with objects but also how to make them relevant, and in this way, make it possible for visitors to scaffold new experiences onto what is already familiar and valued. Museum staff also need to recognize and respect the diverse and often unfamiliar ways that visitors make meaning from museum objects. Relevance is not just a political or social construct – it reflects a cognitive process that emerges in supportive environments that make learning possible – and it serves as a gateway to lifelong learning in school, the community, and the natural world.

The essays in this volume illustrate how science museums can progress toward inclusivity. The term “science museum” incorporates all of the various kinds of institutions that consider public science education in their mission. In the broadest sense, this includes not only natural history museums, but also science centres, nature centres, botanical gardens, aquaria, and zoos. The essays elucidate the barriers present in these institutions that have resulted in social exclusion and nonparticipation by diverse audiences. They also describe pathways for improvement, presenting exemplary programs that can serve as guides for all museums. The presence of enduring partnerships with local and diverse communities leads to a recognition that there is more than one way to learn science. When Western historical concepts are presented side-by-side with Indigenous and traditional understanding, museums enable all people to see the relevancy of authentic processes of science. This doesn’t imply “doing for,” since inclusion demands “doing with,” and it includes being willing to change practices in order to accommodate different perspectives. But partnerships do not replace the need for museums to build their core leadership and staffing to reflect their local community and a diversity of cultures.

As museums continue their mission of preserving and displaying collections, the essays in this book show how their broader impacts can be strengthened to incorporate relevance, advocacy, and social responsibility. The concept of social justice is highly applicable to science museums as they consider how they reinforce the distribution of privilege and access with their communities. This collection doesn’t attempt to be comprehensive of the voices that need to be heard in museums. But the richness of the conversations conveys a vision of how science museums can achieve long-term sustainability, not through individual advancement but by embracing diversity more deeply and more centrally in all aspects of their operations.

Notes

1Tsybulsky, Dina, Dodick, Jeff, and Camhi, Jeff (2017). The effect of field trips to university research labs on Israeli high school students NOS understanding. Research in Science Education, 1–26. Dagher, Zoubeida R., and Erduran, Sibel (2016). Reconceptualizing the nature of science for science education. Science & Education, 25(1–2): 147–164. Abd-El-Khalick, Fouad (2012). Examining the sources for our understandings about science: Enduring conflations and critical issues in research on nature of science in science education. International Journal of Science Education, 34(3): 353–374.

2Oppenheimer, Frank (1972). The exploratorium: A playful museum combines perception and art in science education. American Journal of Physics, 40: 978–984. Spock, Michael (1988). What’s going on here: Exploring some of the more elusive, subtle signs of science learning. In Science Learning in the Informal Setting: Symposium Proceedings, edited by Paul G. Heltne and Linda A. Marquardt, 254–261. Chicago: The Chicago Academy of Sciences.

3Dawson, Emily (2004). “Not designed for us”: How science museums and science centers socially exclude low-income minority ethnic groups. Science Education, 98(6): 981–1008. Brown, Bryan A. (2004). Discursive identity: Assimilation into the culture of science and its implications for minority students. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41(8): 810–834.

2 Re-exhibiting Africa at the Penn Museum

An interview with Penn Museum curator Tukufu Zuberi

Monique Scott

Museums have historically reduced Africa and African objects to a seemingly static, dark, and dusty prehistory. African peoples, subsequently, are often denied the modernism, complexity, and dynamism they so richly deserve.¹ I’ve studied representations of Africa in anthropology exhibitions for almost 20 years and worked in anthropological education at the American Museum of Natural History for almost ten years. For much of that time, I was frustrated by the lack of opportunities to create new exhibitions that represent Africa. It was incredibly rewarding, then, to become a curatorial advisor to the Penn Museum’s renovation of their permanent African gallery, an inspiring and daunting undertaking. The new exhibition, scheduled to open on 28 September 2019, will showcase the Museum’s rich African collection, which is among the largest African ethnographic collections in the country.²

The Curator of the new Penn Museum’s African gallery is the distinguished Sociologist, Tukufu Zuberi, the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Penn. From the first moment Dr. Zuberi recruited me to the project, he spoke passionately about his desire to make this exhibition of Africa unlike any other. He was committed to probing the dark history of white colonization and putting that history on display. He wanted to radically change negative perceptions of the continent and its people. In the museum world, this felt revolutionary. It felt like a call to symbolic arms that could truly help to decolonize imaginings of Africa. I spent the summer of 2017 working with Bryn Mawr students in the Penn Museum archives, tracking down the history of the African art and artefacts in the Penn Museum collection, and indeed locating the legacy of colonialism and exploitation that haunted much of the collection.

However, the process of radically reinventing the African c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributor biographies
• 1 Inclusion and relevance in natural history museums
• 2 Re-exhibiting Africa at the Penn Museum: an interview with Penn Museum curator Tukufu Zuberi
• 3 Science, Islam, and critical thinking: lessons for Museums
• 4 Museum mantras, teachings from Indian country: posterity is now; failure is an option, and repatriation is a foundation for research
• 5 Ensuring our people have a place that feels like home
• 6 Reflections on empowering youth in science museums
• 7 Promoting responsible citizenship in science museums through student curated exhibits
• 8 Conflicts between traditional knowledge systems and Western science: do we need to revise our thinking in order to engage youth from all heritages?
• 9 Navigating worldviews
• 10 Youth and the challenge to define the museum of the future
• Index