The Reflective Museum Practitioner

Expanding Practice in Science Museums

Laura Martin, Lynn Uyen Tran, Doris Ash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429655708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

The Reflective Museum Practitioner explores a range of expansive and creative ways in which the concept of "reflective practice" has been applied in the informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning environments of museums and zoos. It seeks to demonstrate how such a process can inspire lifelong learning in practitioners, to the benefit of practitioners and visitors alike.

Presenting six projects that employed reflective practice, the contributors examine how each project has encouraged and sustained reflection, and the outcomes thereof. The projects cover a wide range of different practitioners—including administrators, scientists, educators, and other front-line and back-room staff—who work at different junctures of their organizations. Collectively, they raise key questions about changing communities of practice in Informal Science Learning institutions. The projects and concept of "reflective practice" are fully defined and contextualized by the editors, who offer in-depth analysis, along with a cultural-historical activity theory framework, for understanding how changes in museum practice unfold in an institutional context.

The Reflective Museum Practitioner offers museum professionals insight into "reflective practice, " as practiced by other institutions in their sector, providing practical examples that can be adapted to their needs. It will also be of interest to scholars and students focusing on science museums, or professional practice development in museums.

PART I

The Nature of Reflective Practice in the Context of Science Museums

INTRODUCTION

Laura W. Martin, Lynn Uyen Tran, and Doris Ash

Reflective practice is viewed as inspiring lifelong learning in one’s professional work and improving effectiveness in how we do our work. In the education sector, it has been predominantly applied in formal school settings, but, here, we look at how reflective practice is used in the educational work of informal science learning (ISL) settings, e.g., science centers, zoos, and aquariums. The term “museum” is also used to collectively refer to these designed environments. Beyond being useful to educators individually, reflective practice is also an important tool for institutions aspiring to encourage enhanced professional development. In the case of museums, this might apply to gallery staff, program staff, collaborating scientists, exhibit designers, and administrators. Using this edited book as a platform, we continue and extend the conversations the contributing authors in this book initiated at the American Educational Research Association’s 2013 annual conference in San Francisco, CA and at the Association of Science and Technology Centers’ 2014 annual conference in Raleigh, NC. We invite readers to reflect on these reflections and advance the conversation.

The book is organized into two sections. In Part I, we address the following questions: What is reflective practice? What does it look like when you try it? How come it works? What supports it? Chapter 1, Lynn Uyen Tran reviews how reflective practice has been defined and why it is such a valuable tool for professional development. We learn about the ways the work has been applied in the education field more broadly, and what its implications are for ISL settings. While key characteristics of a reflective practitioner have been identified, we learn that there are a wide variety of approaches to encourage reflective skills. Tran reviews the underlying reasons for why the methods should work and look at how we, as practitioners and researchers, can adapt the model to our particular situations.

Based on her experiences with a series of research and practice projects in museums over the years, Doris Ash then identifies a framework for understanding how changes in museum practice unfold in an institutional context, as a result of reflective practice. Ash’s projects all used similar tools and theory for encouraging and sustaining reflection but, as a body, raise key questions about changing communities of practice in ISL institutions. We see, for instance, how the use of technology can facilitate how practitioners reflect and change. We also learn that as staff members make changes, they uncover contradictions and come up against traditions in their institutions that limit their ability to reform the institution’s practices. She proposes a revised standard model for how reflective practice can be developed.

At the end of Part I, Laura Martin, who developed and directed educational programs, argues that the projects documented in this book are not simply practical examples of educational projects. They are examples of how workplace learning happens, for which there is a rich history of theory and research. We learn that efforts to change how people do their work lead to changing institutional identity and that the efforts need significant institutional support if they are to take hold. Martin introduces activity theory, as a way to understand how workplace learning unfolds and how it can be sustained.

Part II presents details of six diverse projects rooted in reflective practice, touching on many key functions of ISLs:

• visitor interactions
• extended programs
• educational collaborations across institutions
• program design
• working with outside advisors

These case studies are each a thoughtful example from a variety of nationally funded projects that offer many useful lessons for ISL settings on how projects embody reflective practices and institutional change. Spanning from 2006 to 2018, these projects reflect investment and dedication in reflective practice for the informal science education field across multiple levels: professionals, institutional, and governmental. Each case study is organized with parallel structures describing its Background, Goals, Program Model, Challenges, Successes, and Final Thoughts.

We suggest that readers look for how each project defines reflective practice; what theoretical basis they have for their model; and, for the specific lesson the project contributes to our knowledge of how reflective practice works in these settings.

In Chapter 4, Christine Reich, Scott Pattison, Vrylena Olney, Marjorie Bequetter, Sarah Cohen, Elizabeth Kunz Kollmann, and Rae Ostman describe a process they used—Team Based Inquiry (TBI)—to review programs and approaches within a large national network of museums. TBI is an iterative inquiry cycle of action. Reich et al. describe the series of reflective workshops the central project team went through over the years, and the model they train museum staff to use. They suggest that such TBI has been and can be used in many different contexts. Here, reflective practice is a means for staff to engage in co-constructive self-reflection to maximize the internalization process. The authors show how a recursive inquiry model can be adapted to different kinds of programs and undertakings. Specifically, readers learn how different staff groups build time into their routines to engage in reflective practice.

The case study featured in Chapter 5 emerges from a shifting climate of accountability and evidence-based programs. Bronwyn Bevan recounts the Museums and Afterschool: Principles, Data, and Design (MAPDD) project where museum staff, learning scientists, and after school program staff worked together to identify indicators of high quality STEM learning in after school programs. The project involved collecting video-data at each site andthen engaging in structured joint analysis to view the data together, discuss, debate, and make meaning of how the activities, environment, and facilitation evidenced in the video supported young peopls’s productive STEM engagement and learning. Through several cycles, the project team developed tools and rubrics for identifying appropriate practices and design principles. In this case, reflective practice is a group activity where researchers and practitioners come to shared agreement about they observe, what is happening, and how they know it. Their collaboration created a first generation of tools that were later developed into resources widely used by MAking and Tinkering educator in the US and abroad.

In Chapter 6, James Kisiel, Andee Rubin, and Tracey Wright describe the Zoo and Aquarium Action Research Collaborative (ZAARC), a project designed to confront the lack of career ladders in ISLs, staff turnover, and the isolation of line staff from decision-makers by piquing staff members’ professional curiosity through research. They engaged staff at six institutions, having them investigate questions about activities and visitors. The project took a developmental approach, scaffolding the research questions so that, eventually, the staff felt empowered to design their own studies. In ZAARC, reflective practice is structured through a process of asking questions about specific practices. The project model adopts a co-constructive approach of encouraging expertise through collaboration on research. We learn about: how busy staff found time and tools to capture visitor responses; what is feasible to carry out; and what administrators learned in this project.

Over the past eight years, Lynn Uyen Tran and Catherine Halversen have been refining a model of helping scientists and, now, museum professionals communicate with the public through extended, modular coursework aimed at creating communities of practice through shared language, habits of reflection, and traditions of continued professional learning. In Chapter 7, the program directors (Tran and Halversen) and the evaluators (Maia Werner-Avidon and Lisa N. Trahan) share the iterative process they undertook to develop the Reflecting on Practice (RoP) program. They describe the principles of their approach, their process, and what they discovered to be the program’s strengths and what they learned about participants’ and institutional cultures working with museums nationwide. Reflective practice here involves sharing experiences, thinking about and applying pedagogical ideas from the literature, trying out and observing strategies for supporting informal science learning. Key to the work is the centrality of professional community and the relation between the goal orientation of learners and the strength of the learning outcomes. The authors discuss the culture of the institution and whether it provided resources and autonomy to staff for being critical and reflective of practices.

Doris Ash and Judith Lombana, and educators at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa working with ethnically diverse visitors designed and tested a series of reflective professional development tools to help museum educators engage with and co-construct strategies based on scaffolding in the zone of proximal development. Chapter 8 reviews how the REFLECTS project participants collaborated with families from non-dominant populations, focusing on ‘noticing’ the resources visitors brought with them and then responding appropriately. A library of videotaped “teachable scaffolding moments” was produced, as were two written guides for reflective practice, one for practitioners and one for mentors. Reflective practice involved staff reviewing their own video-taped interactions, in order to collaborate more effectively with visitors from culturally and linguistically diverse populations. The approach is based on cultural historical activity theory, which predicts the effectiveness of zones of proximal development to further professional learning. The project supported time for staff to do reflective work and tried to create materials that would be useful for other museums and circumstances.

In Chapter 9, Meena Selvakumar looks closely at a program model that helped museum educators provide techniques, including reflective practice, to scientists, historian, and artists interacting with the museum visitors. Portal to the Public (PoP) developed a series of workshops, materials, and an approach to supporting communication strategies and personal connections between people working in different institutions and the public. The study illustrates the reflective practice of scientists as they identify their own meaningful memories in informal settings, through feedback from teens and other end-users. The approach is of learning by doing: engaging scientists (and museum educators) in inquiry-based and communication activities driven by constructivist theories and visitor identity and motivation work. PoP fosters mutual respect, particularly by scientists of museum educators as well as the time investment that facilitates longer term commitment by scientists.

Finally, in Chapter 10, the editors co-author the final chapter where we examine what can be learned from the projects as a whole to advance the field and improve professional practice in the informal science learning sector. We hope the practical examples as well as the underlying theory and history of reflective practice allow our readers to reflect on their own circumstances and design their own successful approaches to effective informal science education.

1

THE HOW AND WHY OF REFLECTIVE PRACTICE FOR SCIENCE MUSEUM PROFESSIONALS

Lynn Uyen Tran

In recent years, a deeper understanding of how learning happens has contributed evidence and recognition that informal science education institutions (such as zoos, aquariums, museums) are places that support significant learning (National Research Council (NRC), 2009), especially science learning (Robelen, 2011). People come to these places to learn and through the free-choice nature of these environments, over time and repeated visits, people do, in fact, learn ideas, facts, and skills, as well as develop interests in science and become motivated to pursue careers in science (NRC, 2009). What has received less attention, however, is recognizing science museums as places that support learning and knowledge sharing among staff, and where staff, especially the educational professionals, learn about, develop, and adapt their professional practice as the work itself changes.

Educators in science museums are involved in a diverse range of tasks and responsibilities, but a basic aspect of their work involves designing, developing, and facilitating learning experiences for the visiting public. To do so, educators work at the intersections between the public, objects (exhibits, organisms, and artifacts), and the knowledge and culture the objects or experiences represent (Tran, 2008). While research on instructional practices in science museums is limited, studies reveal an interesting dilemma in light of what we know about good teaching practices: informal science educators can be pulled toward both instructor-centered and learner-centered techniques.

Observational studies show that educators’ teaching approaches tend to be task-centered and educator-centered. These approaches include: long explanations that do not address learners’ prior knowledge and experiences; frequent use of scientific jargon; striving to teach many scientific ideas during a short amount of time; and offering limited opportunities for learners to engage in discussions (Cox-Peterson, Marsh, Kisiel, & Melber, 2003; Tal & Morag, 2007). The prevalence of these knowledge-transmission approaches may be due to a variety of reasons ranging from inadequate preparation to teach in informal environments to what could be a result of the often one-shot nature of the interactions with their learners.

At the same time, there is research indicating that informal educators are aware of and attempt to accommodate their learners’ interests, abilities, and needs (King, 2009; Tran, 2007). As a part of a lecture, for example, they tell stories and use analogies to communicate scientific concepts (Zhai & Dillon, 2014). They sometimes help learners make sense of the science content by re-phrasing, repeating, and eliciting explanations from learners (King, 2009; Zhai & Dillon, 2014).

Reflective practice in learning communities can help practitioners work together to challenge dominant notions of teaching and learning, differentiate practices andstrategies for engaging with diverse audiences, and support ongoing professional development (Allen & Crowley, 2014, p. 18). Moreover, emerging evidence from professional development programs designed specifically for educators in museums show that reflection, nested within a community of practice, can result in self-reported changes in educators’ practice toward less didactic and more learner-centered interactions (Allen & Crowley, 2014; Ash, Lombana, & Alcala, 2012; Tran, Werner-Avidon,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• PART I: The Nature of Reflective Practice in the Context of Science Museums
• PART II: Case Studies
• Index