Lila Staples
The Museum as a Site of Community Valuing:
Teaching Museum Studies Through a Social Justice Lens
A simple but serious concern has inspired my research into the relationship between education theory and museum studies. That concern is the frequent disconnect between theory and practice in the museum field. Despite all of the exciting new thinking that has been done over the past couple of decades in terms of re-visioning the museum,[1] the experience of the everyday visitor still often falls short of an experience of authentic discovery and understanding. [2]
There is significant and necessary work to be done in engaging undergraduate Museum Studies students in dynamic conversation about the role of the contemporary museum in exploring and defining community values. A museum is a lightening rod for issues of social justice. What we choose to collect and display in our museums (be they museums of art, science, culture or history) says a lot about whom and what we value. And what we don’t value. And how we interpret both material culture and cultural ideas. Presenting and interpreting our own culture and that of others are activities fraught with positive and negative potential. This is particularly the case when our museums are so often understaffed with overworked personnel, and when members of museum staff are asked to provide experiences for a pluralistic audience when staff members themselves have often never experienced pluralistic learning. This disconnect is the focus of my research: how to create undergraduate Museum Studies curriculum in which students have constructivist learning experiences.
Defining Constructivism
Let me clarify how I interpret constructivist learning, since it is critical to understanding the positive potential in a museum setting for achieving social justice. Knowledge is the first component of constructivist theory, according to George Hein (1995). The second component is how people learn. At the root of constructivist theory is the concept that we all want to learn and that the best learning environments are ones that connect to what we already know, and that challenge us and subtly (on the part of the teacher/guide) stretch us toward new competence.
Along the theoretical continua of knowledge and learning are countless combinations and shades of gray. But most of the contemporary educational theorists agree that an increasingly complex and interrelated multidimensional world calls for new approaches to learning. My research draws heavily on museum professional George Hein’s theorizing that describes learning as a process of exploring, defining, reflecting, and applying. In a spiraling rather than a linear process, the student continues to build new knowledge. Similarly, the museum visitor builds knowledge through experience. In a museum exhibition the visitor should be led by the curator/teacher/guide through levels of understanding, connecting to what the learner already knows. The visitor adds to knowledge which he/she has already constructed and incorporates the new experience into personal knowing.
Let me give an example. Several years ago the Monterey History and Art Association in Monterey CA put together an exhibition focused on the Little Black Dress as an American icon.[3] Students in the CSUMB Museum Studies class, interning at the museum, asked the question “How can someone from another culture, say a Latina or Japanese visitor, relate to this exhibition when they don’t share the same cultural perspective of the little black dress?” As a result of the question, the museum placed several new additional “costumes” in the display - those dresses from other cultures which parallel the playful dressiness of the Little Black Dress. The cultural barriers to interpretation were crossed.
Connecting Learning Theory to Museums
Universities are sites of learning. Museums are sites of learning. It is critical that our Museum Studies students experience, pedagogically, the constructivist, individual process of engagement that we want them to carry into ethical practices in the field. At California State University Monterey Bay we teach Museum Studies through a Service Learning lens, the result being that our students participate in community internships - from the Monterey Bay Aquarium to the National Steinbeck Center, and including museums of art, natural history and community culture - where they learn from their hands-on work but where they are also trained to respectfully question existing practices at their sites. The internship is truly collaborative, with both the student and the community partner benefiting from the interaction.
To expect students in a Museum Studies program to achieve and understand transformative engagement in a museum through traditional teaching methods involving lectures, note-taking, and testing of knowledge would seem to miss a huge opportunity. The opportunity missed is that of teaching students in the same ways that they will be teaching the museum visitor. Western education is rooted in a long tradition of gathering information from outside of oneself, from the teacher/expert. The museum curator has traditionally been the expert, there to tell us what we need to know in order to understand the value and meaning of that which has been collected, selected and displayed. While Plato described knowledge as something intellectual and separate from, or outside of, the self, and Aristotle based knowledge upon that which is physically experienced, Dewey (1934) in Art and Experience, insisted that learning is neither merely mental nor physical. “In an experience, things and events belonging to the world, physical and social, are transformed through the human context they enter, while the live creature is changed and developed through its intercourse with things previously external to it” (p. 246). Learning goes on in an environment, not merely in it but because of it.
The question is: Does the experience of a constructivist academic Museum Studies learning model, taught through a community-based service learning approach, enhance a student’s knowledge and perception of the museum as a site of transformative discovery? The work of George Hein, following in Dewey’s footsteps, most clearly articulates application of constructivist theory in relation to museum learning. Hein, a leader in contemporary Museum Studies, describes learning as a web, subjective in nature, rather than the objective “truth” sought in theories rooted in Platonic realism. Hein’s web is a way of knowing woven of past experiences, cultural screens, social contexts, and personal interests. Reflection, the critical piece in the Service Learning approach to education, is key. Reflection distills knowledge from experience, for both the classroom learner and the museum visitor.
The Museum and Community
Perhaps a fundamental question is “What is the museum’s relationship to community?” The museum has always served two apparently disparate functions, that of an elite temple of the arts, and that of a democratic institution of enlightenment and education. In considering the beginnings of the museum – which probably stem from the human instinct to gather that which is valued and to display it in ritual form – it is notable that the enlightened contemporary museum, in an effort to reflect the needs and values of diverse communities, often uses ritual format to restore its identity as a public space for people to celebrate, to play, to socialize, to tell stories, and to exhibit festive practices.[4] Is history indeed circular?
Museum theorist Andrew McClellan (2008) explains that the power of museums lies in their ordering of knowledge. As dispensers of methodology, as codifiers of knowledge, museums contribute to a sense that the world is in order, and thus they confer a sense of civic identity. The way that we name and classify things (pots, paintings, jellyfish, jewels) imparts specific meanings to them. It also gives them power, making them that which is real. To name an early adobe in Monterey “The Stevenson House,” because Robert Louis Stevenson is believed to have stayed there for several months in 1875, gives the house, and the community in which it is situated, a tourist value. It is the politics of public memory at work. The naming of things is not necessarily ill-intentioned, but it does have effect. The “treasures” of Tutankhamen has a different meaning than the “belongings” of Tutankhamen. The point here is to help museum studies students understand their own personal biases and perspectives, often so culturally ingrained and subtle as to go unrecognized. Whose stories are being told? Whose are left out?
The Museum Studies students, “burdened” with this perspective of social justice, often face delicate and difficult relationships with their museum sites. For example, several years ago a student was confronted with a publicity poster advertising his museum site. The poster was supposed to represent Central California history. It contained a Hollywood-like image of a lovely Spanish senorita along with a collaged background of historic images such as Spanish conquistadors, their ships sailing triumphantly into Monterey. The poster told the tale of a nostalgic, romanticized Spanish heritage, overlooking the multiple histories of the many cultures which make up Monterey’s past. As John Walton writes in Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey (2001), history is comprised of many often conflicting narratives; an institution claiming to represent the past needs to be willing to offer multiple stories, some perhaps previously forgotten or silenced, in order for a community to have an understanding of itself.
Similarly, students learn to be cautious about interpretation of “others.” We were recently asked, as a Museum Studies class, to help the Asian communities (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino) of Salinas to develop an Asian Cultural Center honoring their various histories. The word “help” was theirs, and one that we avoid in Service Learning as it implies giving rather than sharing. In discussing this invitation to collaborate, Museum Studies students examined what their role would be; they determined that as students trained in museum practices such as display, conservation, exhibition design, registration, etc. they could support the Asian community in uncovering and telling stories with words and artifacts. But it would be their stories, those of the members of the Asian communities, not those chosen or told by students.
The Changing Relationship of Museum and Visitor
Over the centuries, the relationship of museum and community has shifted. The best way to think about the changing relations between museums and communities is to think about how the audience, a passive entity, becomes the community, an active agent (Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine, 1992). The visitor has gradually moved to the forefront of museum consciousness and programming, replacing or assuming equal status with the collection itself as the museum’s raison d’ệtre.
Museum visitors are not a tidy or predictable bunch. Learning in a museum is a process of making meaning, drawing connections, creating storylines based on who we are. It is usually spontaneous and unpredictable, with the visitor directing a process that the museum staff can guide, but not control. Museum education professional Jay Rounds (2006) calls the legitimization of personal experience as a source of meaning no less valid than that of the curator’s knowledge. In terms of Museum Studies practices, students must experience through example how ethical problems arise when the museum perspective is presented as the only way to interpret an exhibition. For example, students begin the semester by bringing in a treasured “artifact,” describing its meaning and value to the others; an old pocketknife is an old pocketknife until we know it was owned by a loved grandfather. Similarly, visitors need to understand how the museum has arrived at its interpretation. The visitor becomes engaged as much as informed. Museum students learn to ask not just “What does a thing mean?” but “What makes a thing meaningful?” This approach tends to avoid privileging one group’s criteria of taste and excellence over another’s.
What the museum field needs is a re-imagining of pedagogical theory to prepare students for future roles as museum staff. In order for the perspective and behavior of museum staff to change, we need to change the theoretical model in which they construct their own knowledge and their understanding of the museum’s relationship to community. A shift in the way we teach Museum Studies, to a community based Service Learning model, contributes to social justice in terms of connecting the museum visitor in meaningful and transformative ways to understandings of ethical representations and interpretations of multiple cultural perspectives. Theory merges with practice.
Works Cited
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Berkley Publishing Group.
Hein, G. E. (1998). Learning in the museum. London: Routledge.
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. New York: Routledge.
Karp, I., Kreamer, C. M., & Lavine, S. D. (1992). Museums and communities: The politics of public culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
McClellan, A. (2008). The Art Museum from Boullee to Bilbao. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rounds, J. (2006). Doing identity work in museums. Museum Curator. Lanham: Altamira Press.
Walton, J. (2001). Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey, Berkeley: University of California Press.
1
[1]1 For example, the work of K.M. Davalos (2001), H.M. Davies, and R.J. Onorato (1997), G. Hein (1998), H.S. Hein (2000), E. Hooper-Greenhill (2000), L.C. Roberts (1997), I. Karp and S.D. Lavine (1991), and S.E. Weil (2002).
[2] My research has involved visiting roughly 20 museum sites over the past two years and talking with staff and visitors about goals and experiences. These observations, along with my experience as a volunteer, trustee, board president, museum guest lecturer, Assistant Professor of Museum Studies – and someone who is continually in museums listening, observing, and reflecting – support my perception of a disconnect.
[3] This was simultaneous with a similar exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC.
[4] In September 2008 the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas set up a Mercado in its atrium and invited the community to join in a free day of festivities focusing on community cultural practices.