Making Sense – Two Ways

When you start planning a museum experience for children—an exhibit, environment, event, program or even a museum for children—how do you go about understanding the children you intend to serve?

While professionals and researchers across the museum field have various methods for learning about museum visitors, they are generally not used widely with children. Even when they are, they often have a narrow focus. This is somewhat understandable. Gathering input is time consuming and requires expertise to be helpful. Familiar methods are generally less suited to engaging children. Outside of behavioral observations, methods like focus groups, surveys, and interviews rely on skills children may not have developed fully. When we do consult children, the focus is often limited. We assess their understanding of a concept or a preference for one activity over another.

Wonder of Learning Exhibit: Reggio Children

And yet, we are undergoing a change in our conceptualization of children. Advances in
neuroscience and brain development and educational projects like the Reggio Emilia schools have expanded our view of children as capable social actors, thinkers, and doers, active agents in their play, learning, and development. This provides ample reason to go beyond occasional questions about a specific activity or a focus on a skill rather than on the child to more fully understand and engage them in museums. 

To be more than a good intention, however, we must create meaningful opportunities to actively involve children and learn with and from them. There is no lack of interesting and important questions to explore. In fact, the questions we might ask for planning museum experiences can also tell us something we didn't know about children's thinking, learning, and understanding which is critical to creating experiences with greater impact. These are questions as much about children as about museums; as much about what delights them as what they are learning; and as much about our broader understanding of children as testing a prototype.

Familiar Steps in an Open-ended, Iterative Process. We can explore these questions using familiar steps and methods in evaluation and research and draw on approaches like the pedagogical documentation used in the Reggio schools. This blend creates an open-ended, qualitative, descriptive, emergent, and exploratory approach which offers a broader, richer, more comprehensive view of children's engagement with their world while helping us glimpse what we couldn't otherwise see.

Reggio Children

Like a series of small studies unfolding over time, one study builds on another, fueled by new questions. We don't know just where such studies will lead. We do, however, know that this iterative process of framing questions and thinking and discovering together, will build our understanding of children and contribute to authentic experiences that engage their potential. 

Framing Questions, like developing research questions, brings focus to our interest in better understanding how children make sense of themselves and their world. Questions about children's interests and understanding need to be generous, not reduced to one activity or behavior while ignoring the richness of the context. A question about how children explore a natural setting, for example, can look at how they navigate undefined spaces, are curious about mud, and develop a connection to the natural world. We might even notice something germane to siting the museum building itself or an outdoor nature play area.

Designing for Engagement, like designing a study, considers a promising focus and how to investigate it: the children, their ages and groupings; the setting, the nature of the engagement, and appropriate methods. Here, engagement is understood as children's activity—behavior, movement, conversation—as well as their attention, interest, and its intensity. The study itself is an opportunity for children to interact with materials, the setting, other children, an artist, animals, and ideas in ways that maintain the complexity of the real world. This approach is necessarily open to the unexpected happening.

Watching and Listening, may appear to be less orderly than data collection typically does, but it is no less intentional. An approach that centers on children, their capabilities, agency, and potential follows their interest, attention, actions, questions, hunches, and conversations. Methods like video, photos, recording, drones, drawings, and mapping capture dialogue, movement, play, and transformations of space. Data collection literally follows them, bringing in multiple points of view and ways of capturing their encounters. A debrief immediately following gathers what has escaped the eye and ear to produce multiple snapshots and sequences of the children's explorations.

Reviewing and Reflection, much like analysis, is concerned with thinking about what we are

Photo credit: Vergeront

seeing in the information and impressions we have gathered. Multiple passes of videos, photos, recordings, or drawings by different people capture what we think might be happening. With careful consideration, we arrive at possible interpretations. We work to locate the meaning making in the child and then in ourselves. And we do it again. Why? Because in suspending our certainty about what we are noticing, what the child might be feeling, paying attention to, or doing, we are also learning about how we see. We are making sense in a way that is provisional both for the child and for us in understanding the child.

Relaunching, much like results, considers where exploration might lead. While a study might be a starting point for understanding a child's interests, questions, and ideas on a potential exhibit topic or activity, it should also help us make sense of how children work with others, set their own goals in play, or view their capabilities and accomplishments. The genesis of an exhibit can come from observing and listening to children rather than from exhibit planners, marketing, school curriculum, or funder interest. A Relaunch invites exploring alternative meanings, pursuing another line of inquiry, and shaping questions around a museum's long-term interest in children. 

Making Sense of Children Making Sense. The involved and evolving nature of a process concerned with making sense of children making sense of the world is challenging both in practice and in making the benefits concrete and concise. Brief descriptions and photos from 3 museum projects follow, each highlighting various aspects of this approach.

•    Planning for the recently opened Louisiana Children's Museum (LCM) in New Orleans involved groups of children and parents in a set of activities and conversations that informed the design direction, exhibit development, architectural design, and graphics. Development of LCM's 2011 museum strategic master plan began with a visitor panel of a dozen children, 5 - 10 years, their parents and caregivers that met 3 times. Sessions focused on what was fascinating to children in LCM's Julia Street exhibits, how parents and caregivers saw their child's thinking and learning, and what was important and interesting to the children about water in their everyday lives. Children's drawings, discussions, photographs, and words not only expressed their ideas and interests, but also inspired planning. 

Photo credit: © Gyroscope Inc.

One boy's drawing of his ideal exhibit showed a giant chessboard overlaid with a map of New
Orleans and sounds collected from across the city. Moving a chess piece would activate a city sound on that square. His drawing inspired the Jackson Square entry experience in the Make Your Mark gallery.

Recognizing how this first round of conversations and drawings brimmed with children's ideas and parent observations, dialogue sessions were held throughout the 8 years of planning. They were incorporated into camps, one-time sessions, and school projects. Sessions focused on topics about growing food, where ideas come from, water, animals and their habitats. Some focused on the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren. The insights and interests that emerged from children and families inspired experiences (a crawfish boil), became gallery graphics, were incorporated into way-finding, and even appear in LCM's logo. Highlighting the role of children's contributions, use of a child's art work includes the child's name and age.

Photo Credit: Louisiana Children's
Museum

Through the team's observations and listening, members learned that these children have a sense of place, understand something about local food culture, and how water plays a role in moving food from New Orleans to the world. Relationships are important to them; they take care of things, help each other, and are careful observers. These observations and new questions are being folded into LCM's ongoing work.

•    Interest in exploring children's ideas about communities and the places that make up communities prompted a 2014 collaboration between Minnesota Children's Museum and the Reggio-inspired Network of Minnesota. As part of MCM's 2014-2017 expansion and renovation, Seeing Everyday Places was a project within a project within a project. MCM shared with educators and families in local early years programs the community settings the Our World gallery would include: a fire station, park, farmers' market, hardware store, post office, and food truck. 

Over several months, children visited one of the settings with their class, in small groups, or with their families. They met and talked with people at the hardware store; went behind the scenes at the bank; and visited the fire station. New lines of inquiry emerged: curiosity about types of mailboxes and each child's family mailbox, and how more money is made. 

Fire Station Kitchen
Courtesy Minnesota Children's Museum

Documentation panels from each of the groups highlighted connections children found between everyday places in their neighborhoods and communities. "A Story of Materials and Money" captured a family's trips to the hardware store. That parent noted that, over the course of the family's exploring hardware stores, her 4-year old's building constructions changed from spaceships and fantasy vehicles to gas stations and neighborhood scenes. Children who explored parks created Nature Park Blue Prints for the Our World park. Four-year old Oliver's blue print specified the number (6), size (s, m, l), and type (deciduous and evergreen) or trees; a button for making rain sounds; a fountain and a bench; and magnifying glasses. Responding to children's curiosity about firefighters living at the 

Fire station living
Photo credit: Vergeront

station when they work, MCM devoted more space and activities to a fire station kitchen where children could explore firefighters' daily routines through dramatic play.

 •    Planning currently underway for Region 5 Children's  Museum (R5CM) in north central Minnesota is conducting a set of small studies and community engagement based in the Museum's strategic master plan. Referred to as encounters, they are intended to engage children, families, and communities around understanding more about how children find their place in the world. They are also part of early exhibit development. The first of several encounters for small groups of children 2 - 10 years is underway in a park that is likely to be the home of the Museum.

Photo credit: R5CM

With an interest in understanding more about how children engage in open-ended exploration and child-directed play in an outdoor setting, the Museum's team set up 2 conditions, a park playground area and a natural area, both with loose parts the children could carry, build with, pretend with, and investigate. In one session, an extended play experience laster nearly 25 minutes. Captured on video, a group of children ages 5 - 9 from a summer day camp program worked collaboratively at the climb-on play equipment. Using 50-feet of rope and moving back-and-forth between two structures tying the rope between them, from 3 - 6 children worked to make a zip line. 

They tied knots and tested their strength. When knots loosened and the rope—and the child—dropped, they tied new knots. They lowered the height of the rope at one end and raised the other end by shimmying up poles and boosting each other up to reach higher bars. Working with an apparent hunch about reducing friction on the zip line, they found a length of PVC pipe and slid it over the rope. Like good problem solvers, they tested, revised, rethought aspects of the problem, and improved their design.

From review and discussion of this and other videos, photos, and notes, the team has been thinking about what the children are doing and what their engagement might mean to them. The team noticed the children's extensive and innovative investigation of materials; how they were collaborative and managed their interactions; had hunches and persisted in exploring them; and that they socialized easily. The child-directed curriculum of everyday STEM the children developed was rich.

The first set of encounters has laid a groundwork for the next which will focus on the natural phenomena at the park the children notice and how they use their senses and imaginations to explore and represent them. The team has yet to see where that will lead.

More Like a Milkweed Pod Than a Pocketful of Rye. Where we place our attention is where we begin to see what is happening. When we follow compelling questions and when we wonder, think, and discover together, we deepen our understanding of the thinkers, doers, and learners in our museums including ourselves. We push on safe ideas, shift perspectives, fold new insights into everyday choices, and create new touchstones within a group working together. Each person takes something of that shared understanding into a new setting, fresh possibilities, and a new set of questions.

My thanks to Lani Shapiro, Tom Bedard, Cheryl Kessler, Mary Weiland, Jim Roe, Peter Olson, Maeryta Medrano, and Julia Bland

Related Museum Notes

• Observation: Seeing, Un-seeing, Re-seeing:

• Listening to Children's Thinking:

 

   

Observation: Seeing, Un-seeing, Re-seeing

These shifts of seeing again are precisely what the word ‘respect’ means. To look again is to ‘respect.’ Each time we look again at the same thing, we gain respect for it and add respect to it.

James Hillman, City and Soul

                                       

Over the past few months, I have been thinking about observation and its value as a tool for learning, stretching our thinking, seeing new possibilities, and being better museums.

Daily, we walk through our museums and what do we notice? We watch a family move through the lobby and pause before the door to a gallery. What is this moment about for them? We see someone step in front of a painting and lean in, peer closely at the lower right hand corner, and step back again. What new insight has that closer look added?  We watch someone slowly brush away gravel to reveal the form of an enormous bone. What happens next? What does it mean for them? What might we do differently knowing this?

These, among so many questions, reveal our on-going search for a deeper understanding of visitors and a greater familiarity with the conditions that encourage and support exploration and meaning making in museums. So much is going on in a single exhibit, program, gallery, or classroom in any one moment. Without thoughtful observation, what can we know and understand about what is happening around us in our museums, in the experiences we create, and the connections we hope to foster?

Yet, as powerful and valuable as observation is in advancing our understanding, thinking, and imaginations, we rarely engage in it extensively in museums–at least, from my experience and in my own work.

Of course, we do observe in museums. We engage in both formal and informal observation in research and evaluation, during prototyping, and sharing visitor comments. We follow visitors’ movements through an exhibit and sometimes sit in observation booths and videotape. This kind of observation, however, is typically short term and narrowly focused. It is intended to answer a single question, assess and fix a problem, or confirm what we already believe. Often it is to check whether exhibits are being used as intended.

Brief observation episodes that are ends in themselves or serve other agendas have a limited capacity to build new knowledge with long-term value that changes perspectives and reveals new possibilities about how people interact with objects and learn in museums.

With this view of observation, we are unlikely to take time to study how families explore together in our museums; how visitors negotiate turn-taking with one another; how children of different ages approach open-ended materials; what traces of use and engagement visitors leave to offer glimpses into their thinking; what having an idea looks like; and what building on someone’s idea looks like.

What We Don’t Already See

How do we go beyond the obvious behaviors we are able to identify and code and the minutes we can count to glimpse the extraordinary moments in museums and other settings?

There is no quick, easy, or particular way to engage in deeper observation. More and longer observation episodes are likely involved. Time to give our careful and steady attention to what is around us without deciding too soon what is before us is critical. In opening ourselves to being present to what is happening we can create room to notice what we don’t already see.

Observation is a process of attending, noticing, capturing, and revisiting. Keeping notes, taking photos and videos, and charting and mapping give value but not certainty to what we notice. What we have captured even temporarily allows us to return to the traces of those moments and ask, what am I noticing? How can I account for it? What does it mean to me? To others? What might others bring to the process to probe what matters here?

As good observers, we must also be observers of ourselves, studying our attention, checking our assumptions, and registering our focus. Questioning ourselves as we observe reminds us that we arrive at subjective interpretations, partial findings, and, hopefully, new questions.

Seeing Differently

As I was working through these thoughts, the subject of observation surfaced in my Thursday study group with Lani and Tom, two recently retired educators in the Twin Cities. As these weekly conversations so often do, this one pushed my imagination not just further, but into a different realm: from seeing more to seeing differently.

Lani had marked a passage to read from Art and Creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the Role and Potential of Ateliers in Early Childhood Education by Reggio atelierista, Vea Vecchi. This brief, but extraordinary account of when Vea started in the Reggio schools in the 1960’s describes her year of observation.

At the direction of Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, Vea was asked to observe children in the school. She invited 4 children at a time into a studio space to work with paints in a nonfigurative way. Her observations of 90 children of different ages in the school continued over the year with Vea taking notes on her observations of children and their paintings. She also referred to books by more knowledgeable guides like Jean Piaget, Herbert Read, and Viktor Lowenfeld that Malaguzzi had given her. Malaguzzi then poured over her notes and the children’s paintings. He commented on her observations and shared his interpretations with her. At the end of the year, using his notes and comments, Vea wrote a report for the school on the children’s work; it later became a book.

Vea has described Malaguzzi’s strategy that changed her mental framework and identity from a secondary art educator to a professional in a new role as an atelierista. Malaguzzi helped create the conditions for change with a process of observation, formative reading, notes, discussion and shared interpretation, and documentation through which Vea unlearned her certainties and opened her eyes to the potentials of the children.

See, Un-see, Re-see

Tom called this process: see, un-see, and re-see. In observation, as in many activities we engage in, we think we are being neutral and seeing the truth. Actually we are often affirming what we already think, reinforcing beliefs we have arrived at by other means. This happens for a number of reasons. Learning, memory, expectation, and attention shape what we perceive, see, and believe. Pressures of accountability in schools and other institutions subtly insist we see what we are asked to see around standards and benchmarks. In museums we are susceptible to a dominant view of learning imported from schools that is content focused and teacher directed. We are also eager to demonstrate our value to supporters with evidence. These factors influence what we see when we observe in galleries, study exhibits, and describe museum visitors.     

Even when we do see something new, we are likely to name it something else, something we have seen before. Twentieth century philosopher and public intellectual, Marshall McLuhan, expressed this as, “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”

Realistically, un-seeing is difficult, if not literally impossible. But we can work to undo old learning, find ways to displace certainty, and see fresh versions of what we are viewing. The conditions of Vea’s extraordinary journey are not easily replicated, but her effort and goal can encourage us to observe from a new stance. We can shift our observation from looking for what we expect, to looking for what we haven’t seen before. We can be open to what surprises us.

Tom, Lani, and I thought together about what might create movement from seeing to re-seeing to create a crack in our thinking through observation by:

• Being curious, open, and eager to be surprised

• Wholeheartedly pursuing the opportunity of the moment

• Revisiting the experience and its possible meanings  

When we are open, curious, and eager to be surprised, we are:

-        Awake to our surroundings and the people, spaces, and materials

-        Accepting uncertainty and the complexity of what we are noticing

-        Comfortable with not knowing what we are seeing

-        Exposing ourselves to other thinkers and knowledgeable guides

When we wholeheartedly pursue the opportunity of the moment, we:

-        Are prepared to capture traces of the experience in multiple ways: notes, video, photos, images

-        Are open to what we may be seeing that is contrary to the apparent direction and we follow it

-        Observe until we are surprised

When we revisit the experience and its possible meanings, we:

-        Return to all of the collected traces of observation: notes, photos, images, and videos

-        Pursue questions to reflect on what we have noticed: how do visitors influence each other in exploring an exhibit? How do ideas about how something works change over the course of an experience?

-        Attend to strategies, not outcomes: ways that individuals engage with the group; patterns of choices; leaps in thinking; the roles conversation plays

-        Share, and invite others to contribute what they see

-        Stretch to consider what something might mean that is beyond our imagination

-        Think together: what might we do to make this or that unusual gesture or activity more likely to happen again?

This is a bigger, more complex, process than can possibly be captured here. In fact, the above list, or any list, is fundamentally at odds with deep, open-ended observation. We must keep in mind that seeing what we already see is a poor strategy for the positive change and transformation we seek for our visitors, our communities, and ourselves. Fortunately, the benefits of what Lani calls a radical openness to what’s out there and what it means are ample and worthwhile: a livelier, richer experience of our work and its potential value. Are you ready to be surprised?

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Making Learning Visible. What Does It Mean? 

• In Between Research, Theory and Practice

• Documentation: From Reggio Schools to US Museums

Thank you, Lani and Tom

Stand aside awhile and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different.

­Loris Malaguzzi

Making Learning Visible. What Does it Mean?

Image: Reggio Children

Have you heard yourself or a colleague say, “I wish our visitors could tell us what they are thinking and learning”? That musing might continue with, “Are they trying strategies we never imagined? How are they figuring out why something happened? We’d have an idea of how they reason, how we might extend their exploration, and if they got a glimpse into their thinking.

Museum visitors and learners can give us an idea of what they are thinking and learning. They do, all the time, if we are interested, paying attention, and prepared to help make learning visible. Small gestures and facial expressions; conversations in which someone explains what she did and why and what he thought would happen; structures and gizmos built; choices made and materials used and “misused” share clues about learning.

Making Sense of Experience

“Making learning visible” emerged from decades of work among educators in the Municipal Schools in Reggio (IT) and was chosen as the title of a book written collaboratively by Project Zero at Harvard University and Reggio Children. A powerful and intriguing idea, this phrase has, not surprisingly, attracted great interest. Migrating from the schools of Reggio Emilia to schools and museums in the U.S. and other countries, it has generated multiple meanings and inspired various applications.

In the Reggio schools context, making learning visible reflects a strong interest in understanding and communicating children’s learning, thinking, and discoveries. An important focus of this work is understanding children as individual and group learners in school settings. In extended projects and explorations, children use multiple languages–drawing, movement, materials, and words–to represent, communicate, and express their ideas in varied media and symbol systems. Documentation, a cycle of inquiry and a shared process among educators, parents and children, has evolved as a robust tool for capturing, sharing, and studying children’s thinking and learning. As a research tool, documentation gives value to and makes apparent and accessible the nature of children’s and adults’ learning processes.

The collaborative work of Project Zero and Reggio Children has served as a bridge to U.S. schools and museums. With time, this idea has been adapted to various museum contexts such as school-based programs, exhibits, and maker spaces, and to approaches like thinking routines.  The Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio uses “visible thinking” routines from Harvard’s Project Zero to emphasize certain aspects of the tinkering and thinking processes. Inspired by Reggio pedagogy and guided by research agendas and learning frameworks, interest in making learning visible and audible is present in museums including Providence Children’s Museum, Columbus Art Museum, and Portland Children’s Museum (OR).

Museums know that understanding learning and thinking in museum contexts is important for delivering and growing learning value. Consequently they look for ways to adapt processes that make learning (and thinking and experience) visible for all learners, not only children. While an attractive phrase, making learning visible, is a complex concept, one that requires time and effort to understand and practice. Not cartoon thought bubbles filling with text that explain a visitor’s thinking, it does, however, offer great potential for capturing meaningful clues about learning processes and how museum learners make sense of their experiences.  

Different museums naturally have different definitions of what this phrase means as well as different ideas about its application. Museums, for instance, can and do solicit visitor feedback; they post signs that effectively say, “Learning is happening here.” These and similar abbreviated approaches overlook the nature of learning, its complexity, and the conditions that support learners in developing ideas, expressing hunches, understanding materials, and working around obstacles. These methods stop far short of shaping experiences and environments that make room for thinking and learning, extend exploration, encourage engagement and conversation among learners, and offer different media and methods for exposing thinking and learning.

In Museums

Given the nature of learning and museum environments, both opportunities and challenges to make learning visible are at play and sometimes at odds. In the visitor-centered, social settings that characterize museums, learners follow their interests, pursue questions, and engage in conversation with others. They use their senses and multiple symbol systems to gather and organize information. As active agents in their own learning, they make connections among objects, materials, stories, phenomena, and art that museums present. They pause, muse, and make sense of these experiences in ways that are significant to them.

Museum teams of designers, educators, developers, and evaluators are charged with creating engaging learning experiences and environments in galleries, programs, labs, and studios. Following their interest in sharing subject matter, developing skills, and delivering messages, they select learning strategies, choose materials and objects, invite exploration, and plan discovery to support these intentions. Throughout an extensive experience planning process and beyond, museums conduct evaluations, assess, and carry out research; these are processes and practices with interests in common with documentation.

Conversely, museums encounter challenges in creating the conditions that help make learning visible. Exhibits are often planned to be self-guided, determined by a visitor’s agenda, personal pace, or time constraints. The difference between one visit and another is striking because of a visitor’s age, interest, and reason for visiting. The nature of learning itself–a personal process requiring time and occurring over time–also poses obstacles for museums. Visits are relatively brief, especially considering the other activities also taking place during a museum visit. Dwell times at an exhibit or artwork are relatively short. Single visits are more common than multiple visits. Visitors leave the museum at the end of the visit, perhaps returning and perhaps not.

A Language of Thinking and Learning

While every museum is challenged to find ways to demonstrate its learning value, it also has a remarkable advantage in making learning visible. At the very heart of what it does, a museum makes substantial investments in talent, time, resources, and expertise to create engaging learning experiences and environments for learners of all ages. A great asset, this in fact contains two other opportunities for making learning visible.  

The experience development process itself, from concept to remediation, supports thinking, learning, exploration, reflection, and documentation. In experience planning, developers, designers, curators, educators, interpreters, and evaluators are learners themselves working together to develop learning experiences for other learners–visitors. Furthermore, opportunities for learning in museums are not limited to self-guided exhibits and one-time programs. Museums also offer camps with multiple sessions, guided tours, professional development institutes, community engagement projects, and maker spaces. Ripe for learning about learning they invite, support, and extend participants’ engagement with materials and media facilitated by prepared staff.

In any experience planning, a team draws on its understanding of learning and the conditions that support it. In bringing greater visibility to learning, a team views itself in a learning role, recognizing that its learning is inextricably tied to visitors’ learning. Teams consider concepts learners could explore, learning processes they might use, and where exploration might lead. They anticipate thinking skills learners might use, revisit these hunches later, and compare them with what they think actually happened. In existing environments and during prototyping, they observe learners, looking for evidence of what they do and think in their conversation and use of materials.

Team members are explorers themselves, as individuals and as a group. Together they visualize the learning process and frame questions to tell them something about learners they didn’t know as well as about their own thinking and learning. They engage collectively around where they see evidence of learning in an exhibit, program, or studio, and reflect on thought processes to explore what they learn from visitors and how they know. Photos, sketches, a wonder wall, and videos assist in visualizing learning. Throughout the process a team keeps track of what it thought and did, constructs what it thinks is happening in the team, and continually updates its understanding of relevant concepts and processes.

This work suggests where to go next and new tools. Over time, a focus on cognitive processes–their own and visitors’–sharpens their understanding of thinking and learning. A language of thinking and learning develops as does a fluency with these processes.  

Practice, Context, Visibility

Inevitably, as a team examines and deconstructs existing practices to make learning visible, it challenges familiar practices. By pushing its own thinking and searching for ways to capture and express its learning insights, it shapes new practices.

An important set of practices for making learning visible involves making time and space for thinking and learning in an exhibit, studio, workshop, or camp. Designing for encounters that extend exploration, increase dwell time, support making connections, or add steps expands opportunities for learners to engage, focus, and notice their thinking. Encouraging higher levels of engagement among visitors through conversation and cooperation invites and registers thinking. Incorporating learning provocations such as objects, text, or photos into an activity helps slow learners, gives them time to focus, and alerts them to their learning.

Thinking and visibility take many forms. Materials and media must be similarly varied and responsive to elicit thinking, capture actions, record thoughts, and facilitate learners sharing with others. Materials that are receptive to learners’ intentions and manipulations show imprints of use and traces of thinking and learning in words, diagrams, sounds, constructions, mind maps, and messages. Diverse materials and media: writing and drawing materials, tools for recording conversations, taking photos and making videos, and digital technologies extend the range of possibilities for representing emergent thoughts.

Integrating materials and media into experiences themselves is critical for capturing thinking during an activity or experience. Thinking and learning arrive not solely at the end of a process or project, but throughout, from concept to remediation for a team, and from entry to exit and beyond for visitors. How did she think her way to the end of that problem? What mental path is he taking? What do their comments suggest about the challenges of that construction? Visitors learn from and are stimulated by other’s thinking explorations. Staff interactions with visitors also generate insights, gestures like pointing, smiles or hesitations observed; narratives overheard; and activities filmed.

Valuable but Difficult to See 

Insights emerging from these explorations are unlikely to be precisely measured learning outcomes or specific results in subject areas. Very much like thinking and learning, giving visibility to these processes is complex. Work takes place at many levels and over time. A trade-off between certainty about specific learning outcomes and complexity about learning is inevitable.

Teams, individually and collectively, arrive at new questions, subsequent observations, or recognition of new learning strategies. What surprised us about the experience of the learners? What furthered our thinking? What connections can we make to broader issues of learning and thinking in a museum setting? What is the significance we attribute to the questions, problems and ideas within a certain event? Even a small event, short thinking sequence, or learning moment is treated seriously and valued.    

For learners in exhibits, studios, workshops, and programs the process and product of learning is something that is valuable but difficult to see–yet. It is emergent, newly present for looking at more closely and reflecting. The value is in expressing the meaning making rather than arriving at a precise lesson learned. Exhibit exploration, tinkering, and conversation offer new perspectives on building knowledge and learning skills.

True, there are no auto-fill thought bubbles, no prescribed steps, and no amazing materials that magically reveal the thinking that is occurring. In fact, making thinking and learning visible is hard, incremental, continuous work. Every museum is challenged to find ways of demonstrating its learning value. By making explicit, visible, and shareable our thinking and learning, we make it much easier to think and learn. 

Engaging with Matisse

Purple Robe and Anemones (1937)

There was no missing that a major Matisse exhibition was in the Twin Cities recently. For more than 3 months, every walk, bus ride, or freeway trip was in some way in view of a poster of Purple Robe and Anemones. Matisse, Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from February 23 to May 18, 2014.

Organized and circulated by the Baltimore Museum of Art, the exhibition spans 6 decades of Matisse’s career. It features 50 works of painting and sculpture, 30 prints, and the artist’s book, Jazz.  Most of the artworks came from the Cone Collection. Two Baltimore sisters–Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone–acquired an exceptional collection of 3,000 modern works (displayed in their apartments) including 500 works by Matisse.

With the exhibition’s announcement in April 2013 and its review on February 22, 2014 in the Star Tribune, visiting Matisse was on everyone’s A-list, especially this cold bleak Twin Cities winter stretching into April. The exhibition was high on my list as well. I have long loved Matisse’s vibrant patterns, broad blocks of color in unusual combinations, and emphatically flat compositions.

Drawing with scissors activity

Due to a busy couple of months for most of the exhibition’s run, I only made it to Matisse on a rainy Sunday afternoon in late April. When I did finally visit and with only 3 weeks before closing, I kept finding successive ways of engaging with Matisse and his work. Altogether, I toured the exhibition twice, listened in on a docent’s tour, eavesdropped on my husband’s audio guide, heard friends’ impressions, took photos, talked with a guard, observed families drawing with scissors, browsed in the museum shop, and visited a companion exhibit, Chasing Matisse, one floor up. This group of multiple experiences differs significantly from my typical pattern of a single visit to an exhibition as it does for most people, I think. While some of my encounters were serendipitous, I nevertheless enjoyed them and valued the intense and extensive engagement they all provided and they added up to.

Now, three weeks later, impressions of the exhibition are strong and surface pleasantly in both substantive and fleeting ways. I continue to make connections and solidify understandings grounded in Matisse. I'm following connections between comments and text, find a question, and recall a fragment from a painting. I am aware of feeling greater interest in the artist's smaller paintings than in his larger paintings, prints or sculptures and to some paintings like Interior, Flowers and Parakeets (1924) especially. At certain moments, I can conjure up the feeling of being back in the exhibition space and enjoying the sensation of a portrait dissolving into pure pattern.

Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899)

An image of the awkward hands folded gracelessly in the lap of The Yellow Dress (1929-1931) persists as well. This detail of the painting troubles me, insisting I explore the reason: its unfinished quality? its clumsiness? something else? I also hear a voice expressing how Matisse feels upon completing a composition, “Each picture, as I finish it, seems like the best thing I have ever done…and yet, after a while, I am not so sure.” It captures perfectly the highs and lows of finishing an exhibition, a master plan, a garden bed, or blog post.

In a daily way, patterns and colors of fabrics surrounding me vibrate more. I want to buy oranges because I remember their rich color in Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899). 

Durable Experiences

Through multiple exposures to an exhibition and its elements, we gather more pieces of information, draw on others’ perspectives, and anchor ideas in other knowledge we hold. The deeper, richer, possibly transformative experiences we hope exhibitions offer visitors rely on aligning a multitude of factors that are intended and serendipitous and that we can and can’t control.  But when exhibitions do manage this choreography of various entry points, complementary opportunities, and extended engagement, they create durable experiences that carry high personal value and lasting impact for visitors and resonate over time.

The character of durable experiences is sufficiently complex that it can't be collapsed into a quick list of criteria and folded into exhibition planning. However, identifying factors that might support durable experiences for visitors could help us understand how to increase the impact and value of experiences museums create. The four qualities below came through in my extended encounters with Matisse. Broadly speaking, they seem to support durability in ways that reflect the complexity of exhibition experiences and our growing understanding of learning in museums. 

• The Necessity of Time. Learning, making connections, or incubating ideas needs time. Even though I had an interest in and some familiarity with Matisse, I found I had little background for the focus of this exhibition. A second visit afforded me another opportunity to build up background knowledge. For instance, I needed to read some panels multiple times and on both visits to build the vocabulary for following the panels and consolidating ideas the exhibition covered. Also, it wasn’t until the end of my second visit that the interconnectedness of the artist’s work came into focus. His investigations of issues in sculpture informed his paintings; he drew models and then did paintings of them; in his prints Matisse explored formal concerns related to his sculpture.

• Conversation as Intensifier. Whether occurring within or outside an exhibit, conversation and dialogue serve as intensifiers, the way really is an intensifier that adds emotional context to a statement. Conversations introduce new perspectives, create openings, and activate possibilities for making connections and meaning in an exhibition. My friend told me Matisse’s creative process interested her most which I hadn’t thought about on my first visit. On my second visit, I looked for evidence of his creative process and glimpsed it in the 22 highlighted changes that Matisse made to Large Reclining Nude (1935). Nina’s interest alerted me to this propensity to return to and rework compositions, making his thinking about form, color, and line visible. Moreover, I saw this as documentation and how creative thinking might be made visible in an exhibition.

• Accumulated Experiences. Multiple, related, and complementary experiences sampled over the course of several weeks extended my engagement with Matisse to open up his remarkable body of work. When accessible, accumulated experiences can be sticky. It is as if each collected experience sets down another adhesive layer with the possibility of more, deeper, and lasting connections. An audio guide, a reading area, the MIA website’s Exhibition Preview, interactions with other visitors, text panels, and the artworks themselves are not unusual experiences for a museum to offer with an exhibition. Most visitors, however, typically accumulate only one or two of the many experiences available. A guard at the MIA told me about Chasing Matisse, the MIA’s companion exhibit one floor up. The reading area prominently located in a corner in the last gallery was well used on both visits. 

• Sustained Attention. Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science uses the term, sustained attention, in his recent interview with Museum2.0 blogger Nina Simon. Sustained attention, the several hours of attention we give a book or a movie, is one of the goals behind NYSCI’s experiment with a new medium for museums, an ebook. An ebook on the challenging subject of forensic science and the problem of false convictions and my extended engagement with Matisse are vastly different experiences. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, they help illustrate the importance of sustaining interest and attention in a topic, question, or issue to increase durability. Both point to the need for exhibitions–in fact for a substantial portion of museum work–to be compelling, have impact; and for the experience to leave the museum with the visitor, move into everyday lives, inform daily choices, and influence the future. 

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Experience Goals for Exhibitions

• Framing Experiences