Learning Conversations in Museums

Gaea Leinhardt, Kevin Crowley, Karen Knutson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135640378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What do people learn from visiting museums and how do they learn it? The editors approach this question by focusing on conversations as both the process and the outcome of museum learning. People do not come to museums to talk, but they often do talk. This talk can drift from discussions of managing the visit, to remembrances of family members and friends not present, to close analyses of particular objects or displays. This volume explores how these conversations reflect and change a visitor's identity, discipline-specific knowledge, and engagement with an informal learning environment that has been purposefully constructed by an almost invisible community of designers, planners, and educators. Fitting nicely into a small but rapidly expanding market, this book presents:
*one of the first theoretically grounded set of studies on museum learning;
*an explicit presentation of innovative and rich methodologies on learning in museums;
*information on a variety of museums and subject matter;
*a study on exhibitions, ranging from art to science content;
*authors from the museum and the academic world;
*a range of methods--from the analysis of diaries written to record museum visits, to studies of preservice teachers using pre- and post-museum visit tests;
*an examination of visitors ranging from age 4-75 years of age, and from known and unknown sample populations; and
*a lens that examines museum visits in a fine grained (1 second) or big picture (week, year long) way.

Part I

Conversations: A Year of Learning

The first section of Learning Conversations in Museums uses a wide lens and a broad brush to describe museum learning. Part I moves from the voices behind the scenes at museums, to the voices that mediate between exhibits and visitors, to the voices and thoughts of the visitors themselves. The chapters take as a point of contrast more than one exhibition or one version of an exhibition, and place that within the overall lives of the visitors. The chapters focus less on the specific objects of a particular exhibition and more on the role of museums, responses to the learning environment of the museum, and the impact of exhibitions.

Part I opens with the year-long ethnography of the construction of a temporary art exhibition. In this chapter, Knutson traces a portion of the design process, following the planning and installation of one complex and innovative show. By moving through the different perspectives of four of the major actors, Knutson traces the transformation and emergence of converging goals. She documents the classes of experiences afforded by the exhibition, how visitors are perceived by museum staff, and concludes with an extended example of decisions and compromises surrounding the installation of one key element in the show.

The second chapter, by Abu-Shumays and Leinhardt, explores the particular responses of two docents to three different exhibits. The chapter examines the structure and function of their conversations in light of the centrality or distance of the docents to the content and setting of each exhibit. The conversations are analyzed by noting how the language of these friends changes from short, listlike, evaluative exclamations in some circumstances to longer, more engaged explanations in others. The authors present a model of object based reasoning whose central components are identification and interpretation.

The chapter by Ellenbogen describes a family that home schools their two children, making extensive use of museums as one of several key learning environments. In the process of documenting the family’s use of a local science museum and other learning environments, Ellenbogen expands our understanding of how museums might be used as educational environments. She explores the definitional tensions between formal and informal learning and traces how shared interests and learning agendas are negotiated across place, person, and time. The chapter challenges us to reconsider concepts of formal and informal, and learning and play.

The Leinhardt, Tittle, and Knutson chapter focuses on diaries written by eight frequent museum goers. By exploring these intra-individual conversations, the chapter provides a counterpoint to the more traditional sense of conversation as inter-individual activity. Four constructs were used to interrogate the diaries: purposes of the visit, institutional frames, core experiences, and cognitive tools. Younger diarists tended to visit museums for open-ended or floating purposes, while senior diarists were more focused. Younger diarists tended to use tools of identification and narrative while senior diarists more often used tools of analysis.

Sociocultural theory reminds us to remain cognizant of the many layers in which a particular activity is embedded (Rogoff, 1998). To use the analogy of a camera, as researchers, we can focus with a wide angle and try to see as much of the full picture, historically and interactively, as possible. Alternatively we can focus closely on the minutia of one exchange. Regardless of the level of the grain size we choose, we must be mindful that there is detail overlooked in the broad picture and intertwining settings overlooked in the narrowly focused picture. This first section of the book contains chapters that take the wide-angle view. But we use that wide-angle in several different ways. In the chapter on designing an exhibition, we emphasize development over time. In the chapter based on visitor diaries, we emphasize variation and examine the cumulative effects of museum visits over time. In the chapter on families’ uses of museums, we see how the museum takes its place among a number of cultural and intellectual resources over time.

References

Rogoff, B. (1998). Cognition as a collaborative process. In D.Kuhn & R.S.Siegler (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language (pp. 679–744). New York: Wiley.

Chapter 1

Creating a Space for Learning: Curators, Educators, and the Implied Audience

Karen Knutson
University of Pittsburgh

One of the major insights gleaned from studies of museums within the last decade is the notion that museums and museum exhibitions are not neutral—that, in fact, exhibitions are ideologically based and rhetorically complex arguments (Bal, 1996; Bennett, 1995; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992). This recognition is beginning to impact studies of museums, and some preliminary work on museums has explored the ways in which museum mission (Duncan, 1995; Gurian, 1991), architecture (Yanow, 1998), and even label copy (Coxall, 1991) might affect the reception of resulting exhibitions. These studies suggest that “presentation is more than window dressing” (Roberts, 1997), yet at this point researchers know relatively little about the decision making that happens behind the scenes and how beliefs about the nature and goals of museum experiences, exhibitions, and audiences impact, directly and indirectly, resulting exhibitions.

Research on museums, and on art museums in particular, has tended to focus on visitor interaction with specific exhibit features, or on analyzing the effectiveness of innovative educational programs. These are important studies, but I suggest that a closer examination of the curatorial framework—the intentions, strategies, and beliefs that inform the development of exhibitions—may provide valuable insight into our understanding of how art museums construct learning experiences.

This chapter has two goals: to provide a rich description of the process of the development of a major temporary art exhibition, and to analyze the curatorial framework for this show—the ways in which museum professionals and the consultants involved in the process imagine their audience. What impact do the collection, layout, signage, and visitor services have on the experiences of visitors? Given the complexity of the informal learning environment of a museum, the “free choice” learner (Falk & Dierking, 1992), and the varied agendas that visitors bring to the museum (Doering, 1999), research on museum visitors has had, by necessity, to consider the museum messages at their most gross level. What we tend not to see, or to explore in our museum research, is the fact that exhibitions are, in fact, designed. Exhibitions are not the hapless combination of objects within a space, but rather they are complex rhetorical events that operate on many levels. They are the result of a long and careful process of decisions and deliberation, of solutions devised in response to explicit goals and agendas, mediated by practicalities, unforeseen events, implicit beliefs and values, and the limitations of time and budget. The decisions made during the creation of exhibitions reflect foundational beliefs about what it means to educate and what it means to know.

This chapter reports on an ethnographic study that examined the conversations and decision-making process as a curator works with other museum staff, including an architect, the installation staff, and museum educators, to create an art exhibition. Through the course of developing this exhibition, the conversations that evolved reflected these professionals’ beliefs and values about art and about learning about art in museums. Later, when we, as museum researchers, listen to visitors’ conversations, there are traces and echoes of these originating curatorial conversations. The process of listening in and tracing the conversations of museum professionals during the design of an art exhibition sheds an interesting light on how museums function as learning environments.

With these issues in mind I began a yearlong ethnographic study of the design process for an art exhibition that opened April 7, 2001 in Pittsburgh. Light! The Industrial Age 1750–1900, Art & Science, Technology & Society was jointly curated between Louise Lippincott of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and Andreas Blühm of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, as a special exhibition to be shown only at these two venues.¹ The show was a large-scale project for the Carnegie Museum, and it represented four years of research by the curators. Light! 1750–1900: The Industrial Age, Art & Science, Technology & Society, was, as the name suggests, a broadly based and complex exhibition. As the curators put it:

Light itself doesn’t change physically. Therefore a history of light is really a history of the human perception, understanding, and manipulation of light. (Blühm, Lippincott, & Armstrong, 2001, p. 11)

Consisting of over 300 works, including both scientific objects and block-buster paintings (e.g., works by Turner, Van Gogh, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others), the show presented a novel and multifaceted approach to the subject of light. In addition to dealing with the complicated notions of the science and technology of light, the show also considered broader themes about society and the impact of technology on daily life during this historical period.

From the beginning, staff felt that the combination of art and science put forth in the show’s content called for a new and innovative approach to the design of the installation and to the development of programs. The subject matter was envisioned as providing an opportunity to blend the intellectual story of the history of light told from an artist’s point of view with the kind of discovery-learning experiences usually found in science museums. To this end, the show in Pittsburgh included five illustrative displays that presented scientific principles or concepts concerning the developing understanding of light in this period. For example, a prism showed refraction and the spectrum, and a Rayleigh tube illustrated how the atmosphere’s particles affect the color of the sky. Elsewhere in the show visitors could use a hand-held camera obscura or a photometer,² two scientific devices that artists used to help them with their goal of more accurately representing the world. Large sandwich-board signs explained the science behind these displays.

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to follow the development of this unique exhibition. I became involved in the process as work on the catalogue was ending and plans for the physical show were just beginning. At the time, I had been working with the Museum Learning Collaborative at the Carnegie Museum of Art conducting research on visitors to the Aluminum by Design: From Jewelry to Jets exhibition and asked if I might observe the development of the Light! exhibition. The curator graciously agreed. She felt strongly about the potential for this exhibition, with its ambitious aims, diverse objects, and hands-on activities. She believed the exhibition would be challenging, both for the institution and for the art museum world in a broader sense. The curators created a story that looked across disciplinary boundaries. The inclusion of hands-on elements within the exhibition space challenged traditional notions of art exhibitions that deal with historical art.

Art critics gave the show very positive reviews first in Amsterdam, where the London Telegraph reported that it was “the show to see” during the season (Dorment, 2000). The Pittsburgh installation received similar reviews (i.e., The Wall Street Journal), and the catalogue was also celebrated with an American Association of Museum Publications Design award. The show’s attendance figures, both in Amsterdam and in Pittsburgh, reflect these accolades.

My interest in studying the Light! show does not, however, primarily concern the content of the show, but rather the ways in which the exhibition was crafted, and how the various staff members contributed to its successful final result. Staff members had particular goals concerning the learning experiences offered in this show, and this I felt would offer an interesting opportunity to conduct research on education within an art museum context. Art museums, I suggest, offer particular challenges to the museum learning community, where research has, thus far, focused primarily on science museum exhibits (e.g., ASTC, 1993; Borun, Chambers, & Cleghorn, 1996).

Art museums pose special challenges for the museum researcher. What we need to keep in mind is the fact that, unlike the case of educational science museum exhibits, which convey extant science knowledge to the public, the temporary exhibitions presented in art museums contribute to the discipline of art history even as they share “known” information with the public. Art curators are active and central participants in the academic discipline. Temporary exhibitions are a valued way in which knowledge is generated for the field of art history. And so, although the educational role of art museums is vitally important, curators must also speak to a scholarly audience. This fact, coupled with the historic elitism of museums as preserves for the enlightenment of the upper middle classes (Bennett, 1995; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992), can result in exhibitions that speak primarily to an educated audience, while those without the relevant background knowledge are left feeling excluded and alienated by the experience (Bourdieu & Darbel, 1991). In a large-scale study of art museums conducted in 1986, Elliot Eisner and Stephen Dobbs pointed out the resistance to more visitorfriendly measures in art museums, and while changes are happening, this paradoxical relationship between art museums and the visiting public still exists (Rice, 2001). Speaking of museums in general, Roberts (1997) suggested, “one of educators’ biggest challenges has been to deal with the fact that even ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Conversations: A Year of Learning
• Part II: Conversations: An Afternoon of Learning
• Part III: Conversations: A Moment of Learning
• Author Index
• Subject Index