The Museum Experience Revisited

John H Falk, Lynn D Dierking

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781611320459
• eBook ISBN: 9781315417837
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The first book to take a "visitor's eye view" of the museum visit when it was first published in 1992, The Museum Experience revolutionized the way museum professionals understand their constituents. Falk and Dierking have updated this essential reference, incorporating advances in research, theory, and practice in the museum field over the last twenty years. Written in clear, non-technical style, The Museum Experience Revisited paints a thorough picture of why people go to museums, what they do there, how they learn, and what museum practitioners can do to enhance these experiences.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Contextual Model of Learning

Museums of some kind exist in every developed country, and are becoming increasingly common in less-developed countries as well. Worldwide every year thousands of new museums are created and tens of thousands more are being expanded or enhanced. We estimate that more than a billion people, young and old, alone or in groups, visit a museum of some kind every year. In the latter quarter of the twentieth century, museum attendance grew exponentially. For example, in the United States in 1980, roughly 40 percent of the population visited some kind of museum annually; by 2000 the number had climbed to 60 percent.¹ Although museum attendance has leveled off in recent years, it has not dropped significantly, with the exception in the United States immediately following the events of September 11, 2001, and again at the beginning of the recession of 2008.²

This book is about these museum experiences. We consider the totality of the experience, from the moment the thought occurs to someone that visiting a museum might be a good idea, through the visit itself, to the recollection of the experience days, weeks, and even years later. Most significantly, we examine museums through the lens of the people visiting. We accomplish this goal by describing what visitors do in museums and why they do what they do. However, we also consider the thorny issue of why some people do not visit, exploring this from both an individual perspective and a societal one, since who visits museums or not, and why they make the decision they do, is directly influenced by how the cultural institution “museum” is perceived within a particular society or segment of society.

For those who do use these institutions, the book also considers the consequences of those interactions. What do people take away from these experiences; what benefits, if any, do they derive, both individually and collectively? This is an important question with discussions of public value and accountability in the air. Looking in from the outside, are museums fulfilling their role as trusted social institutions and community stewards? Is their work fully and meaningfully connected to the fabric and true needs of the communities in which they reside? Importantly also, as we better understand the interactive, dialogic nature of these experiences, what resources, motivations, and assets do visitors bring to their museum experiences, and are museums open to sharing authority with, as well as learning from, their visitors?

Our perspective begins outside, examining the museum institution from the vantage point of a potential visitor and society member. It then moves inside the museum, describing how visitors interact with the objects, ideas, and intended goals of the institution. Finally, it moves outside again, looking back at the museum as one institution among many, all situated within a complex community. Importantly, this final vantage point directs us back to the reasons people visit museums in the first place, and the role they play in society; thus our journey is not linear but circular.

Although our journey represents but a brief introduction to the museum experience, we will strive to communicate the remarkable complexity of the interplay between people and institutions. Also since museums are characterized by their unique collections, exhibitions, and programs, our discussion will of course include these aspects of the experience, however only to the degree that they shed light upon the museum visitor’s experience. We also will examine the dual reality of museums in the twenty-first century—a reality situated both in the physical bricks and mortar world of tangible objects and buildings and in the virtual world of digital technologies and social media. When this book was first written in the early 1990s it was easy to focus solely on bricks and mortar museums. Twenty years later one cannot ignore the increasing importance of the virtual world to museums; we recognize this new reality and have tried to address it as much as possible given that this aspect of the museum experience falls by and large outside our area of expertise.

Throughout this book we use the term “museum” to refer to a wide range of free-choice/informal educational institutions, including art, history, children’s and natural history museums; zoos, arbore-tums, botanical gardens, science centers, historic homes, interpretive sites like national parks, visitor centers, archives, and a variety of other exhibitions and collections. As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, the very definition of what constitutes a museum is not only changing, but is being challenged by the creation of a range of new institutions calling themselves museums. Some of these institutions do not have any of the traditional characteristics of museums, such as collections or exhibitions. Given our visitor-centered perspective, though, what constitutes “museum” for potential visitors is more important to us than the content, presentation, or design. Differences between professionals working in museums and the visitors with whom they interact unquestionably exist, and we will discuss these, too. For the most part, though, our focus will be on the similarities and common patterns that make the museum experience such an interesting topic to explore. These patterns are influenced by a number of factors, including how the public perceives museums in general, and a given museum’s value in particular, the varying expectations, experiences, and knowledge each visitor brings to bear upon their visit, what the visitor actually sees and does while in the museum, and the social and cultural contexts in which the visitor is immersed before, during, and after the visit.

In an attempt to present a comprehensive yet coherent image of the experience, we created a model designed to help represent the common and unique strands of the museum experience; a framework designed to acknowledge, reveal, and organize its complexity. Like any model, it is an effort to depict reality, but is not real in and of itself. Instead, it is a tool to guide our study and analysis of this complex system. The model we created twenty years ago, the Contextual Model of Learning,³ has proven to be just that, a convenient aid in explaining and comprehending the museum experience.

Contextual Model of Learning

Given the multiplicity of visitors and museums and the uniqueness of each, trying to understand why visitors go to museums, what they do there, and how they make meaning from these experiences is a significant challenge. We have conceptualized the museum visit as involving an interaction among three overlapping contexts (Figure 1).

Although we can separate and discuss these contexts as more or less distinct entities, in reality they always interact and connect with each other. The whole that we call the museum experience can only be understood when all the pieces are considered together, because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. These contexts are:

1. The Personal Context;

2. The Sociocultural Context; and

3. The Physical Context.

All museum visits, as well as the meaning brought to and taken away from them, can be understood as occurring at the intersections of these three contexts. Utilizing this framework to understand the museum experience has proven to be not only an informative way to make sense of the complexities of the museum experience from a visitor’s perspective, but also a valid way to empirically measure the interaction and relationship of the numerous factors that contribute to museum visitor behavior and learning.⁴

Figure I.

The Contextual Model of Learning

The Personal Context

Each museum visitor’s personal context is unique, incorporating a variety of experiences and knowledge. These include varying degrees of experience with the institution of museum generally, as well as experience with, and knowledge of, the content and design of the specific museum being visited. The personal context also includes the visitor’s developmental level and preferred modes of learning. Importantly, this context also includes differences in individual interests, attitudes, and motivations for visiting. These characteristics shape what experiences an individual seeks out for self-fulfillment, influences the needs and assets he brings to the visit, and ultimately what he enjoys and appreciates about the experience. These characteristics are embodied in the personal agenda with which each visitor arrives—a pre-defined set of interests, beliefs, needs, and often anticipated expectations for what the visit will be like and result in. Personal context variables enable us to recognize and understand many of the differences we observe in who does and does not visit the museum, as well as how visitors behave and learn when they do. Personal context variables also help us understand how and why individuals develop specific personal visit narratives, narratives that support memories of, and learning from, the visit that typically last weeks, months, and even years.

The Sociocultural Context

Visits to museums occur within a sociocultural context; one aspect of this context arrives with the visitor herself, and another is embodied within the institution itself. In the first case, all people are born into, and develop within, a cultural milieu, a milieu of shared beliefs, customs, values, language, and thought processes. Depending upon one’s cultural background (race-ethnicity, socioeconomic status, country of origin), one has different perceptions of museums in society, and if one does visit, one likely experiences the museum differently as a result. Cultural differences among individual visitors are complicated by the fact that museums themselves are created by people with cultural values and beliefs that shaped their decisions about what they deemed to be valuable, worthy of keeping and caring for, and important to communicate to visitors. The value and belief systems underlying the museum can be consistent with those of its visitors or not. In addition, this aspect of the sociocultural context can also provide insights into who visits museums or not, and why they make the decisions they do.

In addition to cultural factors, every museum visitor is strongly influenced by social interaction factors within the museum. Most people visit museums in a group, and those who visit alone invariably come into contact with other visitors and museu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword—Marsha Semmel
• Preface
• 1. Introduction The Contextual Model of Learning
• I. Before the Visit
• II. During the Visit
• III. After the Visit
• IV. A Professional's Guide to the Museum Experience
• V. Beyond the Visit
• Appendix
• Notes
• Reference
• Index
• About the Authors