Whose story do museums tell? Researching museums as sites of adult learning
Sotiria Grek
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA 34th Annual Conference, University of Sheffield, UK. 6-8 July 2004
Introduction
Since the 1980s, there has been growing acknowledgement of museums as sites of non-formal adult education. More specifically, greater emphasis on learning has focussed interest on the educational aspect of the post-modern museum. Museums have a long-established tradition of supplying non-vocational and lifelong learning opportunities. Examples of such provision are, first of all, the interpretation of exhibitions, through written and non-written communication of meanings; regular talks, courses and lectures regarding the collections; workshops; outreach work with local communities, residential homes, hospitals and prisons (Moffat, 1995).
However, people now expect a more active, participatory experience in their contact with museums. In part this is related to an increasing interest ¾again since the 1980s¾ in such activities as shopping and eating as significant aspects of the museum visit, often centred on ‘blockbuster shows’ (Prior, 2002). In the UK, alongside the growth of museum education initiatives over the last twenty years, museums are also held to play a significant role in the culture industry market place; consequently, they have tended to apply evaluation techniques of the commercial sector in researching museum visitors.
This paper will investigate how such current evaluative research in museums, using techniques principally adopted from marketing studies, is both limited and limiting; it obscures the wider role museums play in cultural reproduction and impoverishes our understanding of the cultural politics of the museum sector. The paper will examine the possibilities of drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s and Antonio Gramsci’s work to re-orient our thinking on evaluative research in museums and open up the question of museum education to a deeper cultural discourse analysis. Finally, I will consider how such an appraisal might illuminate the methodological ‘blind spot’ in studying not only the educational role of the museum but also the learning experiences of the actual visitors.
Visitor studies: the adult as customer/consumer
Most research in the museum experience has been confined to what is known as ‘visitor studies’ as part of a process of ‘strategic planning for visitors’ (Loomis, 1993, p.13). This type of analysis takes the form of marketing studies, adopting front-end, formative and summative evaluations often incorporating all aspects of the museum visit. Questionnaire surveys are commonly used to analyse both demographic and psychographic characteristics of visitors, frequency of visits, social groupings, educational level and age combined with interests, expectations and motivation, as well as ‘experiential and behavioural outcomes from pre- to post-visit stages’ (Loomis, 1993, p.14).
It is claimed that visitor studies can and in some cases do, support at least three important components of museum mission statements: putting on effective educational programmes; attracting broad audiences; and providing amenities for visitors (Ames, 1993, p.47). However, according to Mark St John and Deborah Perry (1993), criteria for evaluating the learning potential of a museum include the following: analysis of educational resources by looking at the amount of use, nature of users, functions of use and critical competitors; analysis of user perceptions and satisfaction by measuring quality, trust, reliability and value to user; analysis of societal benefits through counting marketability, cost effectiveness and serving the public good.
Marketing departments in museums are flourishing and visitor studies proliferate but the extent to which they engage with St John and Perry’s criteria is open to serious question. We still seem to know very little about what adults experience in visiting museums. In particular, conventional visitor studies seem to be limited in their capacity to engage with an analysis of adult learning in museums. Such surveys are useful when they are confined to quantifiable facts that can be processed without distortion; nevertheless, statistics of this kind mostly represent the museum experience in narrow forms of public accounting, primarily to legitimate state funding, rather than tell us much about what adults learn, value and how they might and do learn from their encounters with museums. The museum experience is perhaps too subtle and complex for marketing research and, as such, attempts to evaluate adult learning in museums through quantitatively driven visitor studies are, in my view, invariably limited. In any case, like most marketing research, visitor studies are often most interested in factors such as cost-per-visitor — which may be important to some but will not help us understand the totality of the museum experience or what learning might take place in relation to it.
What is proposed therefore is an interdisciplinary analysis of museums, the adult experience of visiting them and the construction of meaning, through the utilisation of cultural studies and critical theory to provide a more meaningful way of looking at museums and their contributions to adult learning.
Contemporary museums in the UK and elsewhere claim ‘social inclusion’ and ‘constructive learning’, often at the same time as emphasising their contributions to the economy through, for example, cultural tourism. How can we disentangle these claims and examine adult learning in museums holistically? A critical appreciation of Antonio Gramsci’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories could offer inspiration for generating new ways of thinking about museums and their contribution to adult learning.
Bourdieu and adult education in museums
Bourdieu draws on Marxism to expand materialism to include all social and symbolic goods. He describes the social world as a site of ‘hybrid’ compromises between things and meanings, a notion that could easily be applied to museums. He argues that one has to move from the false notion of the objectivist realism of the structure, which treats realities as already constituted outside of the history of groups, and also from subjectivist approaches, which fail to realise the complexity of the social world; he proposes ‘the return to practice, the site of the dialectic of the opus operatum and the modus operandi; … of structures and habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1990, 52). The habitus is based on the misrecognition (méconnaisance) of the existing power relations as legitimate; it is about the role of a hegemonic domination.
Museums, as products of history, produce individual and collective meanings —more history— conforming to already generated conceptions of the social order. Like habitus, they are the embodied history, and can give access to the active presence of the whole past of which they are products. If they lack the pedagogical practices to give visitors the aptitudes required for the symbolic re-appropriation of their resources, they can only preserve them in their incorporated state. Therefore, they communicate a knowledge that, however interesting, is not disinterested.
Bourdieu and Darbel conducted a study of European museums in the 1960s. The Love of Art is a survey of the European museum-going public, its social and educational background and its attitudes to museums and artistic preferences (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991). They argued against the ‘sacred’ frontier that makes culture an autonomous realm; furthermore, they demonstrated that aesthetic judgement is a social ability by virtue of both its genesis and functioning. Thus, this study offers not only a radical critique of social taste but also an interesting account of the relations of culture and power in contemporary museums. Even though their research was conducted four decades ago, what is remarkable is the way its outcomes could be applied to most museums today and yet, generally, have not been.1
Bourdieu critically questions the ‘logic of predestination’, of a representation of culture aiming at authorising an ‘innate education’. He strongly argued that museum visiting increases with the level of education, and it is ‘almost exclusively the domain of the cultivated classes’. Apart from education, crucial factors of asserting the criteria for museum visiting are socio-economic status or place of residence (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991). Therefore, speaking in Bourdieusian terms about museums today, instead of researching the level of representation of different social groups in museums, it is more essential to examine the degree of opportunity adults have, depending on their specific characteristics, to enter a museum. Reducing admission charges, according to Bourdieu, or claiming social inclusion, according to current museum rhetoric, will not decrease inequalities in the level of education and social position. Taking the argument further, even adopting methods of research taken from tourism studies is misplaced, since tourism is not independent of occupation, income and therefore education. Bourdieu argues that in spite of the importance of the relationship between the level of education and cultural practice, emphasis should be placed in the role of the family in securing what he calls ‘cultural capital’ —the presupposition of any level of education.
According to Bourdieu and Darbel:
To define scientifically the social and cultural conditions of museum visiting and, more generally, of all cultivated leisure activities, is to break radically with the ideology of ‘cultural needs’, which leads some to consider the opinions and preferences actually expressed and recorded by surveys of cultural attitudes or consumption as authentic aspirations, ignoring the economic and social conditioning which determines these opinions and patterns of consumption, and the economic and social conditions which can make another set of opinions and consumptions possible’ (1991, p.106, my emphasis).
Cultural capital, together with Bourdieu’s notion of cultural field, apply to the museum concept in a very interesting way. First, the distance of the world of art from everyday material reality requires a willingness to ‘play the game of art’, that is, refrain from the economic necessity of everyday struggles. Agents are involved in constructing competing ‘fields’ within which their actions have meaning and receive recognition. In the museum field, or any other field according to Bourdieu, people themselves actively take positions, securing recognition within the assumptions of one field and at the same time ‘trading’ recognition with a different field altogether (Bourdieu, 1993). This is what is termed in a different instance, ‘cultural goodwill’, the cultural level of aspiration (Bourdieu, 1990, p.15) Therefore, the field is dynamic, a partially autonomous but also critical mediating schema.
The advantages of using the field concept is its ability to take in a broad range of processes of the production, distribution and reception of meanings in museums. By using the cultural field mode of analysis, one can look at the structure of the museum itself ¾ its logic and operation and its systems of available positions as occupied by museum professionals, trustees, sponsors and different constituencies. Such an analysis of the field of cultural production within the broader field of power and also the social conditions giving rise to particular forms of meaning-construction, links with the work of Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci and adult learning in museums
For Gramsci, education works to secure particular modes of authority by constructing common sense and consent: ‘every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship’. Thinking in Gramscian terms, it is necessary to recognise the ways culture is related to power, education and agency - the politics of persuasion (Giroux, 2000). The importance of hegemony for the role of culture in contemporary society is critical: it defines the field of current cultural politics and conflicts, where the media, information and communication technologies, leisure centres, museums and other cultural institutions have re-discovered the power of representation by shaping self and group identities and distinguishing different conceptions of community and belonging.
Hegemony is not an overt force; if it were, there would be explicit resistance. It is conquered through a specific intellectual and moral dimension, which universalises the sectional interests of dominant groups and ensures that ‘they can and must become the interests of the other subordinate groups’ (Gramsci, 1971, p.181). Museums contribute to this because they legitimate conceptions of order, time and progress; on the other hand, they may help liberate people by opening their eyes to a world other than their own, by making connections and sense of the processes that influence their place in history. However, it is essential to realize that the emancipatory potential of museums is often neglected.
For Gramsci, culture is defined as the work of self knowledge, but not a narrowly individualised self-knowledge focused on understanding solely one’s ‘rights and duties’ or his/her position in place and time. For him it implies awareness and criticism, the ability to think, to take an active part in the creation of history. This precisely is Gramsci’s contribution to a radical adult education in museums: far from simply ‘integrating’, ‘including’ or representing different cultures and minorities, museums can promote the active engagement in creating a new culture, not fragmented and contradictory, but unified and humanistic. Theorising museums in Gramscian terms would therefore mean not only integrating contemporary knowledges of diverse cultures in the traditional body of knowledge, but criticising the power relations between the dominant and the dominated, as they currently appear. Gramsci argues for ‘an open debate on the aims of education and the values on which educational action is based in a given society’ (Monasta, 1993, p.609). A prerequisite for such an educational approach for museums is, above all, analysis of the history of museums and current trends in a more holistic, interdisciplinary manner, in order to look at the ways museums could become fora of public debate and social change for the 21st century.
It seems that the museum world has become very much like Gramsci’s and Bourdieu’s theoretical worlds; nevertheless, I would not suggest that research in museums should seek answers, simply by applying both theorists’ systems. However, they do promote innovative ways of critical thinking on the formation of meaning and history in museums. They can substantially contribute to the development of a research hypothesis, which must address the necessity of re-theorising adult education and learning in museums, not only with a post-modern sensitivity, but crucially with a modernist rigour of critique. On the other hand, exploring the actual museum visit by using qualitative research methods would illuminate adult experiences in the museum and explain the ways meaning is received and elaborated by the public.
(Re)generating adult learning research in museums
An anthropological/ethnographic research approach, informed by Bourdieu’s notion of ‘field’ and Gramsci’s theory of ‘hegemony’, could give museums more adequate feedback from their audiences than conventional visitor studies can, regarding several issues that still act as barriers for adult education and learning in museums, namely lack of partnerships with communities they supposedly represent, resulting in the offer of inappropriate or unattractive opportunities to them; or restrictive interpretations of cultural diversity. Adopting a museographic ethnography, the aim is to identify different cultural patterns in the meanings that people give to their museum experiences, what Sharon Macdonald has called ‘cultural imaginings’ (1993, p.77), in order to search for both common ground and differences between visitors, and a constant questioning of different possibilities and alternative approaches. Methods applied in this direction could be participant observation, a method with long tradition in ethnography, open-ended interviews, or what Lauro Zavala proposes as a ‘narrative reconstruction of visitors’ own perspectives’ (1993, p.82). According to this model, narrative has always been and still is one of the most favourite forms of communication in human nature; after a visit in the museum, selected adults would reconstruct the experience narratively, in order to describe in a free manner the expectations they had before coming to the exhibition (if any), what where their experiences during the actual visit and how has the exhibition affected or not the way they view the subject of display. This method can take us beyond looking only at distinctions between social classes, cultural groups or communities and help us begin to study the educational effects of the experience of visiting museums for adults.