A New Language for Museums
By Maggie Russell-Ciardi
This article was published in Museum News May/June 2006
In 1917, John Cotton Dana challenged museums to be more inclusive institutions. By serving only a small section of the population, he argued, museums run the risk of becoming obsolete; in order to be vibrant and dynamic institutions, museums must serve the diverse populations who live in their communities.
While we have come a long way since 1917 in making museums more inclusive, community-oriented institutions, most museum professionals would agree that there is still much work to do before we can truly say that we have met Dana’s challenge.
Need for Museums to Serve New Immigrants
One audience that museums must serve more effectively is new immigrants. There are approximately 28.5 million immigrants residing in the United States today, which means that about one out of every 10 people living in America was born in another country. In many urban areas, the percentage is even higher. In New York City, for instance, it is four out of every 10 people. It is undeniable, then, that if museums—particularly those in urban areas—are to serve the people who live in their communities, they must serve immigrants.
There are myriad barriers, however. One of these is language access: most museums’ signs, tours, and education programs are in English only, which may deter those who are not yet fluent in English. Another is that the admission fees are often prohibitively expensive for immigrants struggling to make a living. Yet another is that immigrants, many of whom work very long hours, may not be available during the hours most museums are open to the public.
And there is an even more significant barrier. It is the prevailing, and unfortunately fairly well founded belief in many immigrant communities that museums do not reflect their cultural heritages or speak to their experiences. Partha Banerjee, formerly of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, an advocacy organization in New York City that strives to ensure that immigrants are active and influential in civic affairs, explains, “Immigrants do not see themselves reflected at most museums, so they don’t think that museums are for them.”
Museums that are committed to serving the new arrivals in their communities must systematically eliminate all of these barriers. But how do we do this effectively?
A Successful Model:
The Shared Journeys Program
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, an institution that is deeply committed to engaging diverse audiences, has found a way. Through an innovative program called Shared Journeys, the Tenement Museum has eliminated many of the barriers that previously prevented immigrants from accessing its resources and, more than that, engaged them not just as visitors but as active partners.
The museum’s mission is “to promote tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a gateway to America.” The museum is a five-story tenement building that was home to approximately 7,000 immigrants between 1864, when it opened as a residence, and 1935, when it closed. During tours of the recreated apartments of several families that once lived in the building, staff interpret those families’ stories and engage visitors in considering their own understanding of immigration past and present.
The Shared Journeys program takes place at the museum after hours, offering a series of six two-hour workshops free of charge in the evenings to any adult ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) class in New York City.
Each of the six workshops in the Shared Journeys program focuses on a different issue that was important to immigrants in the past and continues to be relevant today. The topics have changed over time based on conversations with immigrants about their most pressing concerns. Current workshop topics are: 1) Coming to the United States; 2) Making a Living; 3) Housing Conditions Then and Now; 4) Immigrants and Social Welfare; 5) Health Issues in Our Communities; and 6) Our Immigrant Histories: Telling Our Stories.
In each of the workshops, students visit a recreated apartment of an immigrant family from the past and then compare and contrast that family’s experience with their own. For instance, in the Making a Living workshop, students “visit” the Levine family of 1897 and learn how they made a living by turning their apartment into a small garment shop, sewing clothes by the piece for a local garment manufacturer. After visiting the Levine apartment, students have shared stories about not being able to find decent employment, working long hours for low pay and being afraid to complain about labor law violations. The educator facilitates a discussion about the significance of the connections between immigrant experiences past and present.
The goals of these Shared Journeys workshops include: 1) To provide immigrants with a forum for sharing their own immigration experiences and a historical context in which to understand those experiences; 2) To empower immigrants to confront challenges they face by teaching them about the accomplishments of immigrants who have come before them; and 3) To encourage immigrants to use their shared histories as a foundation for collective social action.
English language learning is built into all of the Shared Journeys workshops. Before taking the tour of the recreated apartment, students review a list of new vocabulary words they will hear. In the Making a Living workshop, this list includes “garment,” “sweatshop,” “union” and “manufacturer.” Students are encouraged to use these new words in the post-tour facilitated discussion. After the workshop, teachers receive copies of relevant chapters from the museum’s ESOL workbook, The Immigrant Connection, to use in their classes as a post-visit activity.
How the Program Was Developed
Previously, the museum offered its own ESOL class for immigrants in its local community. In 2002, though, staff decided to adopt a different model: developing a free workshop series that existing ESOL classes throughout New York City could integrate into their curricula.
There were three main reasons for this change. First, it enabled the Tenement Museum to reach a larger number of people. By offering its own class, the museum served approximately 30 ESOL students per year; through Shared Journeys, it currently serves approximately 600 to 700 per year. Second, this approach facilitates outreach. It is easier to target immigrant-serving organizations than individual immigrants, and the organizations that participate in the program play an instrumental role in increasing awareness about the museum’s resources. And third, offering free programs to local organizations helps build collaborative relationships, making them stakeholders in the success of the program and the institution.
While designing Shared Journeys in 2002, the museum held a series of focus groups with ESOL teachers from local immigrant-serving organizations to learn how best to serve as a resource for them. These teachers played a big role in determining the Shared Journeys workshop topics. They also made recommendations about program logistics: that the workshops should be offered in the evenings, that teachers should have the option to participate in fewer than six workshops, and that the program should be free of charge. The teachers also reviewed drafts of ESOL tour scripts and discussion questions.
Before the program was officially launched, there was a pilot phase during which the teachers who had participated in the focus groups were invited to bring their classes and offer feedback—and invite their students to offer feedback—on how the program might better meet their needs. The materials were then revised before the museum introduced the program as one of the museum’s official programs.
Involving immigrants and immigrant organizations in developing Shared Journeys has been critical to the success of the program because it ensures that the program responds to their needs and interests. In fact, after seeing how beneficial immigrants’ contributions were, the Tenement Museum instituted this approach for all of its programs. In 2004, the museum convened an Immigrant Programs Advisory Committee that meets regularly. Involving new immigrants as advisors has often required museum staff to be willing to do things in dramatically different ways than they had in the past. This has not always been easy, as it has necessitated extensive consensus building within the institution, but it has ultimately strengthened the museum.
Program Outcomes
Since the inception of Shared Journeys, the Tenement Museum has served more than 1,500 ESOL students in more than 150 workshops. Participating students come from all over the world, including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Hungary, Ivory Coast, Korea, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia and Taiwan.
Student responses indicate that Shared Journeys has had a significant impact on participants. One ESOL student wrote in his post-workshop evaluation that the program helped him make connections with other immigrants from different backgrounds: “I learned a lot of history about people who immigrated from different parts of the world, and [it] is interesting because sometimes I see myself reflected.” Another student discussed how the program gave her confidence to confront the challenges she faces as a new immigrant:
“It is a comfort to know that people lived here facing similar difficulties as I do. Also, to know they overcame the difficulties . . . encourages me.” When asked whether the
program had taught them anything new about their fellow classmates, one student responded, “I learned that we are a good team!” A young woman from Ecuador said of her experience visiting the Tenement Museum, “It makes me feel I’m part of the American history but in a new way (I’m part of the new history!)”
The impact of Shared Journeys on the Tenement Museum has been perhaps even more profound. The most quantifiable outcome is that it enabled the museum to serve a broader audience and connect with the diverse people who live in its community. Perhaps more importantly, though, Shared Journeys provides a forum for recent immigrants to share their personal experiences with and perspectives on the immigration-related issues addressed in the museum’s exhibits, thereby deepening, expanding and complicating the museum’s understanding—and, by extension, its interpretation—of those issues.
Because the ideas generated in the program were so thought provoking, the Tenement Museum recently developed a new component of Shared Journeys, in which a select group of participants work with an established artist to create a public art installation. Installations are on display for six months in the museum’s storefront windows, and information about the exhibits and the ESOL students who created them is incorporated into every public tour. This component makes the Shared Journeys participants even more invested in the museum and gives them ownership over how contemporary immigrant experiences are represented and interpreted. It also provides a forum for the new knowledge generated in the workshops to be shared with a broader audience.
Shared Journeys has also proved to be attractive to funders. The Tenement Museum has received several sizeable grants, including one from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to develop a similar program for high school students as well as an ESOL teacher-training workshop. The IMLS review stated that the program “represents an excellent model for the use of a historic museum setting to further relevant learning and understanding about contemporary issues, and to provide critical life-skills learning in English language and civics.”
Conclusion
The point of describing the Shared Journeys program in such detail is not to suggest that other museums should attempt to replicate it at their own institutions; rather, it is to provide inspiration to museum professionals who are considering developing programs for new immigrants. Museums can find creative ways to eliminate the barriers that prevent immigrants from accessing their resources.
The “best practices” that made Shared Journeys successful essentially boil down to listening to and learning from new immigrants. The lesson is that if museums truly want to eliminate the barriers that prevent immigrants from visiting their institutions, they must involve them fully in every aspect of their work, from program planning to interpretation, outreach and evaluation.
This is hard work. It cannot be completed in a day, a month or even a year; it requires a constant and sustained effort. But it is exciting, challenging and gratifying, and the rewards are enormous. If museums commit themselves to serving immigrant audiences, they will be that much closer to meeting John Cotton Dana’s challenge to be more inclusive, and they will be stronger, more vibrant and more dynamic institutions as a result.
Maggie Russell-Ciardi is education director, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York.
Endnotes
1. John Cotton Dana, “The Gloom of the Museum,” Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift, edited by Gail Anderson. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2004.
2. New York Immigration Coalition. Immigrants in the Workplace. From www.thenyic.org/issue.asp?cid=89 (accessed Jan. 5, 2006).
3. Lower East Side Tenement Museum Immigrant Programs Advisory Committee Meeting, April 2004.
