“A Different Kind of Visitor Study”
By Susan M. Glasser
Director of Exhibitions and Collections.
Boyden Gallery of Art, St. Mary’s College, St. Mary’s City, Md.

From the judges: “The larger message is that life-long learning is for the museum professional, too. Visit a museum and discover yourself. But the essay read a little like a paper for a museum studies course, which distracted from the larger message.”

What makes for a meaningful museum visit? Here is an inexpensive and effective way to find out. Conduct an informal visitor study. Visit a museum outside of your subject area and examine your own visitor experience. It’s a shame more of us don’t take advantage of this simple field research. It is as close as we can get to experiencing a typical museum visit first-hand without being unencumbered by our “insider” status. Taking a personal approach can provide insights into a museum experience in a way that even the best visitor studies evaluations cannot.

For example, I recently visited a military aviation museum although my own passion, preference, and profession is in art museums. As the joke goes, so small is my personal interest in either military history or aviation that it is unlikely to be located even with the high-powered aid of the Hubble telescope. (But in a way, that was the whole point; many members of the Boyden Gallery’s community have limited interest in our collections.) Despite its systematic displays and a plethora of didactic labels, I departed the museum 45 minutes later having learned nothing about military aviation. But I did discover a course worth of insights into the “why,” “what,” and “how” of museum education.

The “Why” of Museum Education

“Did the world need the Fifth Symphony before it was written? Did Beethoven need it? He designed it, he wrote it, and the world needed it. Desire is the creation of a new need.” —Louis Kahn, architect

Thanks to the leadership of AAM’s Education Committee and the growing field of visitor studies, the past two decades have generated shelves filled with research on teaching and learning in museums. Yet many museums still are painfully clumsy at providing meaningful learning experiences to visitors other than school groups. My learning-free experience at the military aviation museum left me wondering why that institution wanted me, a non-student visitor, to learn about this topic in the first place.

 An admirable answer might be that this (or any) museum wants to share its collection so visitors can experience the joys of life-long learning, meaningful recreation, self-revelation, or the contemplation of life’s meatier questions. While noble, that answer is also disingenuous. If it were true, museums would be fundamentally different places. Educators serving on the senior management team would be the rule rather than the exception. Educators’ salaries would be on par with curators’ and conservators’. And trustees would fight to sit on the program committee rather than the acquisition committee. In truth, education has always been—in practice if not in theory—a penultimate goal, subordinate to collecting and preserving. Which brings me back to my question, Why do museums strive to educate non-student visitors?

What if rather than denying the real answer, we embraced it? The art historian Kenneth Clarke said that his position as Slate professor at Oxford was intended not to teach art history but “to make people care somewhat for art.” This, I think, is the real reason underlying museum education. If people care—even a little—they might attend a paid program, become members, give to the annual campaign, urge their employer to underwrite a program, start insisting that political candidates have a platform on cultural programming, write their legislators urging support for museum funding. Caring creates desire, and desire creates need. When people perceive that they need a museum they are more likely to support its ultimate goals of collecting and preserving. Our institutions will have a secure place in our society and an acknowledged role in shaping our national values. They might become part of the canon of our general culture, a part of our daily lives.

The “What” of Museum Education

“Where is the wisdom we have
lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have
lost in information?”
T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

The “why” of museum education necessarily affects the “what” of museum education. What should we be educating visitors about if our goal is to get them to care? I fear museums will remain socially, financially, and politically marginal institutions as long as we continue to disseminate facts (whether about science or history or art) to any visitors other than school groups.

This pervasive approach ignores the typical visitor’s skills and knowledge or his motivation(s) for coming to our museums. (Visitor surveys aside, when was the last time you sought to educate yourself about something by going to a museum? Can you imagine anyone you know saying, “I want to learn a little bit about Virginia history, I think I’ll drive over to the local history museum for a visit.” Or, “With all this talk about the Middle East, I want to visit the art museum to see cultural art and artifacts that might put all this news into some perspective for me.”) The dissemination of content knowledge should be a secondary purpose of museum education at best.

Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker, has complained that the heavily annotated exhibitions currently in vogue have turned museums into “twittering machines” and “all visitors into students.” He has suggested that museums are not the place to acquire knowledge; rather they are the places we go to apply the knowledge we already possess. This is borne out by the education theories of Piaget, Dewey, and the constructivist education theorists who have shown that learning is most influenced by what the learner already knows. And what do we know more about than ourselves?

To get people to care, perhaps we should think about educating autobiographically. This is not an emotionally trivial idea. We all care more about ourselves and those with whom we have things in common than about museum collections. When I worked at a large art museum, we had a major grant to reinstall a non-Western portion of the collection. To help us identify a signature image for the reinstallation, we convened numerous community focus groups composed of representatives from the targeted ethnic group. Though we showed the groups beautiful photographs of historically and aesthetically outstanding pieces, they wanted an image of a person rather than of an object from the collection. People relate to people.

This is not to say that exhibitions shouldn’t introduce factual information or that the museum experience should not be primarily object based. It does mean that information about any object should be immediately useable by the visitor or it won’t “stick.” It won’t be retained because it has no relevance to the visitor.

As child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once said, “Factual knowledge profits [people] only when it is turned into personal knowledge.” I can think of several ways that a museum might make an exhibition autobiographical—by making it chronologically personal, individually personal, and culturally personal. Let’s go back to that military aviation museum and see how this might look in practice.

My limited prior knowledge and lack of a personal connection to military aviation does not mean that the museum has to resign itself to presenting sophomoric information—the perpetual fear of curators everywhere. “We should resist lowering our standards, not only for the sake of preserving our professional integrity,” Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, the director of the Bibliotheca Hertiziana in Rome, has rightly observed, “but because to trivialize our cultural heritage undermines the goal of conserving it.” 1 It does mean that other types of information (and not necessarily text-based information) could help me find connections to things I already know.

Example 1
Instead of hoping that a disinterested visitor might read a nearby label, put the object into a meaningful chronological context: That antiquated row of pilot ejector seats were actually state-of-the-art in the 1960s. A large period photograph that shouts “1960s” would allow me to locate those peculiar, unfamiliar objects within a timeframe instantaneously.

Example 2
Make it personal. How much did I pay for that fighter jet? To hear that the national deficit is $7 trillion means little to me but hearing that my family’s share is $80,000 makes it more real.

Example 3
Make it culturally familiar. That unmanned surveillance plane looks like something out of a James Bond movie, a video clip of which could speak volumes about public perceptions of military capabilities. Likewise, the unexpected juxtaposition of a contemporary video game with its original ancestor, a flight simulator, could suggest the impact of military innovations on my daily life.

Now military aviation will resonate with me: that’s what high tech looked like back in the days when I was dancing the Swim in my white go-go boots; that’s what my tax dollars support; this is how military needs filter down into popular wants. Such an approach pushes me beyond the biases and misconceptions that I (and all visitors) carry through the doors. Instead of thinking of this museum as an institution for hawks and technology geeks, I can begin to see its exhibitions reflecting part of my history, my money, my culture. Maybe I’ll start to care a little.

Supporters of outcome-based project planning and evaluation (OBPP&E), including the Institute of Museum and Library Services and others, urge our profession to ask how visitors are going to be different at the end of a museum visit. OBPP&E is about measuring change in skills, knowledge, attitude, and/or behavior. Based on my own “visitor study,” I am beginning to consider these changes as sequential. A change in attitude makes way for the acquisition of new knowledge, which requires new skills, which may change my behavior.

By making military aviation more personally relevant, my attitude towards it may change in a small, meaningful way. I begin to care a little about it. And where will that lead? It might prime me to want to learn more (change in knowledge). To learn more, I may need to obtain a new vocabulary or acquire the ability to differentiate the silhouettes of different jets (change in skill). Finally my new knowledge and skills, made possible by my new attitude, may inspire me to return to the museum or participate in a ticketed program (change in behavior). Caring a little motivates a lot.

The “How” of Museum Education

At the beginning of this article I referred to my visit to the military aviation museum as a “learning-free experience.” As time passes, I have come to realize that this is exactly not true. While I didn’t learn about military aviation, I learned much about museum education. Indeed, my “visitor study” has become a demonstration of how meaningful learning happens. The museum’s staff did create the circumstances to produce learning just not the learning they were probably hoping or aiming for.

The visit presented “living questions”2 about something that mattered to me, namely the nature and role of museum education for the casual visitor. I have a need and interest in knowing why exhibitions do or do not work. In this particular museum I had to figure out for myself what wasn’t working, but that process made the experience productive and meaningful. The most effective learning comes from participation, from discovering on one’s own.

As a museum educator, I thought I knew what museum education was about. But experiencing a museum as a first-time visitor raised questions about my assumptions. The experience was more substantive than the exhibit content. I became engaged only after I assigned a task for myself—to discover what would make me interested in the museum. Finding personal, often unexpected, connections increased my motivation to move on to the next exhibit. What remains for me now is apply these lessons to my own collections.

Informal. Unscientific. Unsystematic. Unprofessional. My one-person visitor study was all of those things. But it was also constructive and informative; it generated ideas and focused my mind. The next time you need, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, “conversation to formulate your own ideas” take a Saturday afternoon to conduct your own solitary visitor study.

References

1.Sybille Ebert-Schifferer. “Art History and Its Audience: A Matter of Gaps and Bridges” in The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, Charles W. Haxthausen, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

2. Donald Finkel. Teaching With Your Mouth Shut. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Look Publishers, Inc., 2000. Copyright 2005, the American Association of Museums. All rights reserved.