Patterns in Practice

Selections from the Journal of Museum Education

Susan K Nichols

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781880437001
• eBook ISBN: 9781315422879
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This comprehensive anthology features 47 selected articles from the Journal of Museum Education plus ten new introductory essays by leaders in museum education and related fields. The articles and essays explore some of the fundamental issues concerning the role of education in museums today, from serving diverse communities to motivating visitors in an informal learning setting. The book is divided into five sections which 1) trace the evolution of the museum education profession; 2) explore the field's theoretical base; 3) consider methods of research used; 4) provide examples of how theory is translated into practice; and 5) summarize issues relating to professional development. Sponsored by the Museum Education Roundtable

Coming of Age

Introduction
The Museum's Role in a Multicultural Society

Claudine K. Brown

Culture in a societal context is the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon a person's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. Museums in American society are primary repositories devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of cultural artifacts and objects of lasting interest and value.

As we approach the 21st century, museums around the globe are beginning to examine whose culture is being preserved and whose is not, from whose point of view the story is being told and whose point of view is being suppressed or distorted, whose culture is being respected and whose culture is being demeaned. In this country we are confronting these issues head-on as we watch the face of the nation change. We are living with the knowledge that by the year 2000 the word "minority" will have a completely different meaning, and we are espousing the notion of a cultural plurality.

The primary issues for museums of all types are cultural equity and equal access. In confronting these issues, the many cultural institutions that purport to interpret American life and the artistic endeavors of American people are beginning to reexamine the entity we call "the community."

Who Are Our Communities?

I have been concerned for some time at the easy codification of "the community." By definition, a "community" is an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location. These individuals often share a common history or common societal, economic, or political interests. The community is not solely an ethnic group, a neighborhood, or the residents of a defined area. From the moment that we are born we find ourselves integrally involved with one community or another and with many different communities simultaneously.

In museums, the term "community" often refers to that audience whose needs we are not meeting: the poor, or in some instances specific ethnic groups. In truth, a community is any group of individuals who have the potential of being members of an institution's visiting public. As Barry Gaither and many others have recommended, if we were to draw concentric circles around our institutions, we would be able to identify potential visitors by their proximity.

Once we have identified groups with fairly easy access to our institutions who are not attendees, we must concern ourselves with whether our offerings are of interest to them and concurrently whether they have reason to believe they would be welcome at our institutions.

How Do We Presently Serve Diverse Communities?

Over the past few years, many of us have tried a variety of methodologies to engage the interest of a wide range of ethnic groups and to encourage their visitation of our institutions. We have done special mailings and advertising for culturally specific exhibitions and programs to targeted communities; we have initiated collaborative programs with schools having a particular ethnic makeup. We have sponsored cultural festivals and special events; and we have offered outreach programs in underserved communities. We have convened focus groups, advisory boards, and in some instances brought non-European Americans onto our boards of trustees. We have hired more diverse staffs and recruited minority interns.

We have nonetheless often seen only minimal progress; and we have also witnessed some disturbing trends. Often these new audiences come to our institutions for programs and exhibitions that reflect their own cultures, but they do not return for other high-quality programs concerning other cultures. Some institutions have engaged in major membership recruitment efforts and targeted ethnic social organizations. The results have more often than not been most discouraging. Additionally, if the entire staff of an institution is not made aware that a particular underserved audience is being courted and should be made welcome, we have sometimes faced a situation in which the vision of management is not shared by the support staff and target audiences are the unwitting recipients of ill will on the part of guards, information desk staff, food service employees, and other service providers. Our efforts have frequently been hit or miss and seasonal, and the responses of our desired new audiences have been similar.

I suggest that we can attribute this lackluster response to our efforts to two distinct factors. The first is inconsistency. When an institution only programs for African Americans during Black History Month, it is no surprise that the largest turnout of black Americans is in February. I have also heard colleagues complain that when they do programs with signage for the deaf, deaf audiences rarely attend. There is a certain arrogance at work when a public program staff member does one program each month with signage, assuming that of all the institution's offerings this is the only program that appeals to deaf audiences. And as most programs with signage do not solicit response, we often assume that attendance is poor when in fact it may not be. If we begin not with black history or signage as a goal but with the notion of community within the context of social and human development, we will be able to define approaches to audience development that acknowledge ethnic and ability differences while taking into consideration similarities that grow out of the human experience.

The second issue that affects our inability to maintain "ethnic" audiences once we have gotten them through our doors involves our very limited way of viewing these groups. Our seduction of and newfound love for a new ethnic group each season gives rise to what one of my colleagues calls the flavor-of-the-month syndrome. This syndrome also suggests that there are easy ways of programming for these groups because their issues are simplistic. Often the scope of our programming involves booking a dance company, doing hands-on ethnic crafts workshops, having a great ethnic icon speak, and arranging for bilingual interpreters. While I don't seek to diminish these programs, I do fault the programmers for frequently failing to represent more than one point of view, for dealing with the issues of these cultures in isolation and not as they affect others, and for being reluctant to listen to youthful and radical voices.

Alternative Ways of Viewing Communities

It is our inability to view non-European persons within the broader community context that most hinders our efforts in the area of effective audience development. With this in mind, I would like to consider four types of communities that are representative of the broader American experience. Though not bound by ethnicity, these groupings enable us to identify ethnic enclaves within a social, historical, and developmental context. Further, these groups give credence to the complexities of the human experience and enable us to look at Latino men as fathers, Asian women as managers, Caribbean men as educators, and African-American women as union organizers. This method for considering our communities allows as to look at ethnic groups by examining the many roles that they play in the many communities they find themselves in. The four communities I will focus on are the family, peer groups, educational communities, and the neighborhood and workplace.

Family as Community

The community of family imparts the fundamental body of learning that shapes our formative years. Within the context of families we learn speech, how to stand upright, social interaction with others, and common courtesy. Our families can of course include the many individuals who contribute to our well-being, who are also known as our extended families.

While many museums have family programs, most don't look to these types of programs as endeavors geared toward increasing participation by more diverse audiences. Family programs are ideal for this purpose, but they must be reconsidered in terms of their structure if they are to become mechanisms for audience development. These programs must be responsive in terms of time, space, cost, and logistics so that they can accommodate family groups having different types of lifestyles and needs. Types of programs I recommend include:

■ parent-child programs in which parents have briefings alone as well as time with their children so that they can take a competent leadership role in the shared experience

■ foster grandparents co-parenting programs in which children interact with seniors and single adults who function as interpreters or facilitators in regularly scheduled programs

■ special programs for noncustodial parents that facilitate their understanding of their children's needs in a nonthreatening interactive manner

■ programs for volunteers and interns that provide child care.

All these programs look at ways of serving families that recognize parents and children in the role of teacher and/or learner. They are also programs that see museums as service providers as well as places where visitors can come to learn, be entertained, or just relax.

Peer Group Communities

Peer groups can be educators who are off during the summer, adolescents doing a class assignment together, or friends just looking for something of interest to do together. They can be seniors from senior citizen centers, tourists, docents from other institutions, or Brownie troops engaging in activities that will help them get badges. Peer groups often share particular commonalities. They are often of similar age; they have shared interests, commitments, or purposes; and they sometimes have similar expectations based upon their common orientation to our institutions.

Within ethnic communities there are social clubs, civic organizations, service organizations, and block associations that attend to the articulated needs and concerns of their members. There are also many types of informal gatherings of neighbors and friends who form peer groups as a result of proximity, common purpose, and shared interest. The interests and concerns of these formal and informal groups need to be identified and considered as they relate to the mission, collections, and programmatic possibilities of an institution. They can then be translated into viable programs and exhibitions that can be culturally specific, cross-cultural, and cross-class.

Educational Communities

While museums have enjoyed continued success with school groups, mostly with elementary school audiences, there are other age groups and educational constituencies we know are neglected or underserved. There are many successful programs for adolescents, and most museums offer internships for college students. I would nonetheless suggest that the term "educational institution" needs to be more broadly defined and the mechanisms for collaboration need to be reconsidered and expanded on.

Educational institutions serve a wide variety of audiences, many of which are overlooked when we engage in audience development initiatives. Special attention should be given to continuing education and certificate programs. Often large segments of underserved communities have not had opportunities for educational advancement, and they are frequently in programs that take place after work hours. Efforts need to be made to accommodate these groups.

There are other natural collaborations we should consider. American history museums are ideal venues for new immigrants who are studying to meet citizenship requirements. Teachers in these programs should be invited to use our institutions. College professors should be encouraged to teach sessions or entire courses in museum galleries, and they should be offered classroom space when it is available. Alliances should be made with community centers, especially where there is an underserved population that does not speak English. Museums should make an effort to have ongoing foreign language programs that address issues of importance to these groups in their new communities. Such programs can provide historical understanding of the environment new immigrants find themselves in and can offer them an opportunity to share their traditions with their neighbors.

Neighborhood and Workplace

While we are making sense of our place in a school community, we have the concurrent responsibility for coming to terms with our neighborhood community. In our neighborhoods we begin to deal with definition of personality that is influenced by our race, class, and age; by our proximity to and interaction with other communities; and by our overall neighborhood personality. Neighborhoods are imbued with personality when we ascribe the following terms; urban or suburban, inner-city, middle-income, or gentrified. All of these factors help to shape one's sense of self and the role one plays in a neighborhood community. Our school and neighborhood communities represent those places where we spend the greatest amount of time and make bonds that last for a lifetime. Accordingly, every museum should see itself as a neighborhood museum. If an institution is not accessible to the individuals who must of necessity pass by its portals each day, then it is not a truly public institution.

Once we reach adulthood, there are a number of environments that can become communities and affect how we perceive ourselves. The primary entity that affects us in this manner is our work environment. But we might also be strongly influenced by other environments that we might find ourselves exposed to as a matter of personal choice or need, or necessity, or societal determinant. These might include hospitals, recreational facilities, correctional facilities, religious institutions, recreational facilities, and cultural institutions. In many of these places, we learn a language, a culture, rules, and sometimes a specific way of dressing. Our very survival is dependent upon our effective mastery of the tasks set before us and our grasp of the political situations that we find ourselves in.

Our Communities Are Not Homogeneous

In the world of work we find ourselves confronting issues daily that are often the premises for museum exhibitions, but these exhibitions are not pitched to us as workers. Exhibitions that deal with process, history, collecting, recording data, creation, and interpretation are all issues we face in the workplace. New materials in die construction and technology industries have found their way into art museums. Political issues being interpreted in history museums have antecedents in contemporary issues. Common objects we use today were preceded by similar objects made from different materials. Societies throughout the world have created mechanisms and systems for solving problems that have applications in the world today. Objects of beauty and wonder transcend ethnicity, race, and class.

What I am saying in a more concrete way is that:

■ African-American children from Southeast Washington, D.C., would come to see "Dinosaurs Alive"

■ workers of all ethnic backgrounds would find something of interest in a Jacob Lawrence or Lewis Hine show

■ anyone with an interest in nature or the environment might see something worthwhile in a painting by Albert Bierstadt or Vincent Van Gogh.

There is no val...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• COMING OF AGE
• REFLECTING ON THINGS AND THEORY
• CONSIDERING THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE
• PUTTING PLANS INTO PRACTICE
• THINKING ABOUT OURSELVES AND OUR FIELD
• Contributors
• Index