Museums might just rule the world afterall

Yesterday, a new series about museums in the 21rst century aired on NPR's All Things Considered. It was their lead that caught my attention: More people visit museums each year than attend all major sporting events combined (baseball, basketball, football and hockey).

This seems counter-intuitive, but the numbers they cite are quite convincing (140 million verses 850 million). The most interesting part: as someone who studies museums I never even would have thought to do this calculation. I was already so clearly convinced that sports outweighed museums as an influential institution in this country that I was blind to the idea.

I shudder with the impact this statement has on me. I am not devoting my life to something frivolous. For several years, I would get into vicious conversations with an old college buddy who studies sports. He would argue that the role professional sports played in people's lives was hugely important. That the phenomenon of sports was so widespread and far-reaching that you couldn't argue with its potential to impact and change lives. That might be true, but his subtext was always "and museums in no way stack-up to sports," a statement that, now, no longer seems true. Museums are right up there. 850 million right up there.

Of course, the sports number is not accounting for people that watch on TV, but the museum number is not accounting for those reached by museums' outreach efforts. Right here in my own community, the local science museum often uses its resources to put on free community events (science walks, talks, themed crafts and demonstrations at street fairs) that reach many more people than those that actually find their way into the museum. The attendance number also does not account for the outreach museums do at schools, taking their programs into classrooms - an outlet that reaches millions of schools kids every year.

So, people of museums, raise your heads high. Your work matters. It matters 850 million times.

Politicking in museums

People really seem to get the idea that museums need to think deeply about their responsibilities for displaying scientific controversy ("how do we capture the controversy around stem cells?" "what should we be saying about evolution?"). However, lost in discussions I heard at ASTC was an urgency to reflect on their responsibilities for political advocacy in regards to pedagogy. Historically, science museums were largely responsible for one of the only successful introductions of a large-scale pedagogical change in how science is learned and taught. They successfully opened-up, socialized, and legitimized the interaction of people with phenomena, ideas, and things in ways schools have never been able to. This was a hugely important part of their mission: Provide alternatives to school science.

What worries me now is the lack of interest that this goal inspires in current museum folk. As an example I provide No Child Left Behind. This piece of legislature aimed at public schools is starting to leak into museums. There are multiple reasons for this, but primary among them is that schools are being heavily pressured to pass tests and so are pressured to provide students only with experiences that can be justified as helping them pass those tests - and if museums aren't helping to do this, then they aren't priorities. As a result, 'providing' standards-based exhibitry becomes a priority, in order to attract school visitation.

Fine, we all need revenue, but really, museums doing S T A N D A R D S?. . . does anyone else think that is totally wacky? Instead of providing a clear alternative to schools and challenging the limits placed on schools by government and society, museums are conforming to the norms of science learning and teaching legitimized in school science. How does this fundamentally change the role of science centers in society?

I think the political question museum folk need to be asking themselves is how to remain responsible to the original mission of the science museum: To provide alternatives to school science. In many senses, this is the high-stakes political question museums need to grapple with. What counts as legitimate science learning? And how can museums offer solid alternatives to the limited scope of schools? How can we re-centralize a pedagogical mission in science museums?

Organizing for 'science' in science museums

It is difficult to think about the ways in which science museums are organized - often their idiosyncrasies are implicit or masked by the seemingly common sensy -ness of them: "of course this the way a science museum is organized, how else would it be organized?" The idea that science museums are about science is fairly pervasive. People know science museums are about science. And yet, it is not immediately obvious to me what about the organization in a science museum is really linked to 'science.' Admittedly, there is often a loose association around disciplinary themes (i.e. biology, physics, psychology), but this is more representative of a 'schooled' version of science than of science practice or science culture outside the schools. There is also a strong bent towards question asking (although we could stand for more studies of this, something along the lines of a study that would allow me to make the claim "people tend to ask more questions in a science center then they do in other museums, at home, or in afterschool programs" or "people, when prompted by a researcher, claim that science centers are places to ask questions"). The Exploratorium is certainly capitalizing on this expectation; running trials with open-ended exhibits and explainers trained to point out to visitors that the exhibits they are working with are particularly good for investigating questions, and even going so far as to attempt to implement rules about exhibit play that give priority to anyone who has a question to ask, and investigation to carryout. This sort of play prioritization creates an interesting hierarchy of activity at an exhibit where 'just messing around' isn't as important as 'having a genuine' investigable question to answer.'

So, perhaps there are some bits and pieces of 'science' that we might be able to talk about as part of the organization of a science center. Still however, recent experience (at the Bay Area Institute: a collective of researchers and practioners interested in informal learning) working with a group of individuals attempting to answer the question 'what counts as science' reminded me that even among like-minded individuals (a rare place to be) there is no distilled answer to the question. This leaves me in a pickle: How can we make sense of science center organization around science when we cannot even agree on what this might mean?

Not "Cooperation," but "Coordination"

Richard Alterman just published a piece in Cognitive Science: an interdisciplinary journal on the ways that coordinated activity between people invites the emergence of conversational structure and shared representation, which turn out to be important for developing a shared view (often called intersubjectivity) of collective work. This, in turn, allows for progress (always something we seem interested in) and expansion of activity.

Why is this interesting to museum folk? Well, for one, it might be interesting to reframe conversations about exhibit design to include discussions about their ability to provide for 'coordinated activity.' If we take Alterman's account to be believable, then exhibits that provide for coordinated activity will also allow the emergence of conversational structure and shared representation, which then invite opportunity for increased intersubjectivity, and eventual escalation of 'progress' (however you, I, or those playing with the exhibit might define this) and expansion of what's getting 'done' (something I wholeheartedly want to encourage - as exhibits often seem to illicit repetitive, short-lived activity with very finite endpoints, rather than expansive, differentiating activity).

I also want to point out that a lot of the literature on museum learning and activity has, in the past 10 years, focused on the importance of creating enough space for families to participate as a group (increased counter-space, viewing angles, multiple 'stations,' etc), while this work is not discontinuous with Alterman's observations, I think Alterman is pointing to the potential for an even broader interpretation of coordinated activity than just "inter-family." What if we could focus on exhibits that produced "intra-family" interactions as well? To what degree would this multiply the effects of progress and expansion of activity?

As an interesting side-note to this pondering, see Museum 2.0's dappling in questions of "partially limiting barriers," which begins to theorize some mechanics of experiences that allow for, otherwise unlikely, social interactions.

Cavemen didn't have classrooms

Check out this story on cavemen not having classrooms and the 'logical' conclusions about modern education one might draw from such an observation.

While, from an academic standpoint, holes could be poked in this argument, it is generally one line of reasoning that leads to a pretty solid conclusion in favor of museums as good learning environments (see The nature of learning and its implications for research on learning from museums for published material on, essentially, the same topic).

What I find really valuable in such arguments is the foregrounding of action. Such a focus draws our attention away from knowledge 'production', and starts to refocus it on activity as the primary piece to learning. This is, by no means, a new observation, but it is one that we need to keep repeating, because it does not seem to have sunk into the public consciousness about learning (i.e. - No Child Left Behind is essentially a massive program designed to emphasize 'knowledge production,' at the expense of robust action in schools. It even goes so far as to completely ignore the 'how' part in favor of a sharper focus on the knowledge-as-outcome part). Perhaps a better way to think about it might be to frame "knowledge" (or better yet, knowing) as a healthy side-effect to participation in action.

caveman drawing from www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/.../caveman1.jpg/view

Serious question: Are we mostly about science content? Or what?

One of the themes likely to run through my posts is a search for a clean and easy way to talk about what it is that science museums are supposed to 'accomplish.' After four full years of reading articles about learning in museums, and finding that the vast majority of them nervously conclude that people don't really learn the kind of science we render valuable on pencil and paper tests during their visits, I am left with a serious dearth of serious stabs at an answer to this question.

What I have found is some serious anxiety in the field, and a lot of serious money put into trying to figure out exactly how re-work science museums in order to create the causal link between a visit, and a 'better' set of science concepts. Perhaps this isn't the only way to conceive of public value to a museum visit?

Is "wow" enough?

Today I visited the Vasa Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. I have to reflect upon museums in general after visiting this museum, the one place in Stockholm everyone told us we couldn't miss. Upon entering the Vasa your eyes adjust to the manufactured darkness and mystery, and you are greeted with an impossibly large, nearly ghostly wooden ship. It is the reconstructed remains of a 333 year old war ship built by Gustof Adolfus in his war against Poland. It, unfortunately, never made it out of Stockholm harbor, as it was poorly balanced and blew over in the wind the first time its sails caught a full gust. The ship was salvaged in the 1960s, and painstakingly preserved before being towed into a building built specifically for the purpose. Quite the feat. However, after walking through the doors, letting my eyes adjust and having that one heart-stopping moment of seeing a huge, neatly displayed ship in front of me, I was at a loss for what exactly I was supposed to do in this museum. I mean, I know I was supposed to read all about the sinking and the salvaging, watch their little documentary, and generally educate myself about this great bio-historical-engineering coup-de-gras, but it wasn't obvious what was important about this, or why I should do this after the initial 'wow' moment. My instinct here, is that the Vasa museum put a lot of time/ effort/ money (the holly trinity in public works) into manufacturing the experience I had when I walked in the door, and not a lot into what comes afterward. I am very familiar with the emphasis placed on the 'wow' moment by museum practitioners, but I also wonder if its over emphasis is at the detriment of a more robust experience. This is, of course, dependent on our definition of an 'experience.' The wow moment is definitely a type of experience, but it does not necessarily add anything to one's ability to contribute to a more just, democratic society. What then could a museum like the Vasa do to reconstruct the sorts of experiences it offers? My sense is that this is highly dependent on the design of the museum, and not just something that can be tweaked after-the-fact. What an artifact like the Vasa has to offer a social project of education is a different question than what it has to offer as an object of amazement. I do not posit that these two things are un-related, but it seems quite clear to me that one is more than the other, while at the same time evasive of generalization, which is the fundamental problem in most attempts at public education.