Rewind: Building Capacity to Have Capacity

MUSEUM NOTES

Jeanne Vergeront

Vergeront Museum Planning

In the dynamic, fast-changing social, cultural, economic, and technological environment in which museums serve and navigate, the need for greater, new, and additional capacity is enormous and relentless. Audience interests change; attendance surges and softens; the surrounding neighborhood changes; long-time staff leave and new expertise is needed; projects get larger; partnerships become more complex; and new media replaces the last new media. The list is long, changing, and distinct for each museum.  

While having internal capacity is essential for a museum’s resilience, building that capacity deliberately is too often an afterthought. We launch strategic planning, initiate extensive community engagement projects, plan a major expansion, or amp up customer service. Before hand, do we explore whether staff, trustees, and volunteers have the capacity to do this well?

Based on conversations I have with museum staff as they prepare for major efforts, probably not. In fact, a significant aspect of my museum work involves capacity building for the planning being done through observing, coaching, building awareness, strengthening skills, giving feedback, introducing practices and protocols, and sharing resources. This is regardless of a museum’s size or maturity.

Capacity building is the deliberate and ongoing process through which individuals, groups, and organizations increase their ability, knowledge, skills, and other capabilities to identify and meet planned and unplanned challenges: what you need to be really good at what you do now and tomorrow. The role of capacity building is to facilitate organizational learning, strengthen operations, bring a level of consistency to offerings, and increase the museum’s ability to stretch, be nimble, gain traction, and rebound.

Assuring the capacity necessary to implement a major plan may be embedded somewhere in the plan itself. In many plans I have seen and developed myself, increasing capacity to, for instance, be accessible and inclusive, co-create with the community, or use a space as a laboratory for experimental approaches to collections is considered belatedly and sometimes not at all.

A seat of the pants approach often becomes the default method for dealing with reality. In these scenarios, the education director now writes grants; the building maintenance manager also does exhibit upgrades; the marketing assistant is writing exhibit text; and the science program coordinator steps forward to work with neighborhood artists. I know this from first-hand experience; I took on innumerable projects, initiatives, and plans with scant preparation. Such willingness and flexibility is valuable. But is something being added or is other work overlooked? And is quality the result? There are, obviously, other ways to access these skill sets.

In museums we tend to build capacity as we hire staff with particular expertise, skills, and experience. We also upgrade existing systems and invest in new ones; we provide professional development opportunities through coaching and training, workshops, and conferences. Capacity, however, is emphatically more than skills, equipment, and systems. It is taking risks and making new mistakes; working collaboratively and valuing others' perspectives; focusing on the long view not the short sprint. Museums need individual capacity to think, question, experiment, learn, and challenge in order to grow the organizational capacity to respond to changes and opportunities. Cultivating these mindsets and dispositions need time and support.

From work in and with many museums, the pattern I see is a general satisfaction with existing capacity until a weakness emerges and disrupts plans. We assume we have the skills, expertise, and outlooks we need in the right areas or will access them soon enough. We are, however, constantly contending with unexpected shifts in growth, emerging expertise, and an improbable combination of skills. Required capacity must reflect changes, adjusting excess capacity in one area and inadequate capacity in another.  

Often, when museums get stuck and don’t know why, it’s because they haven’t been attentive to cultivating skills, talents, and experience. Investing in the learning and skill development of staff and trustees declines and the mix of skills and expertise looks much like it did 7 or 15 years ago.

We carefully select staff and trustees because of their set of skills, attitudes, expertise, and experience. We need to be as deliberate in recognizing their contributions and investing in their continuing growth. Providing well-considered opportunities to increase individual and group capacity signals confidence, motivates, and enriches the experience bank. If cultivating life-long learning is a priority for our visitors, it has to be for staff and trustees as well.

Here are 3 questions I keep returning to as I think about building the kind of organizational capacity a museum wants to–and should–have to navigate the exciting and uncertain future and to do well in the process. While not simple to address, they are essential for a robust internal dialogue about  the nature of the changes the museum is looking for and progress being made. 

Do we have enough capacity and in the right places? Growing capacity often focuses on adding skills in a new area: evaluation, social media, bilingual staff, event planning. That approach, however, doesn’t consider the context of current challenges, long-term plans, and the collective and present skill and talent pool. A museum can assess the capacity it currently has and will need, determine in what individuals or groups it is needed, and identify steps to grow it over the coming year as part of its annual planning.

How do we build the capacity we need on an on-going basis? The need for capacity building never goes away. Every year, staff and trustees join the museum and some move on. Every year a museum has new goals and priorities. So, every year should be an opportunity to invest the time and opportunity to grow and strengthen the skills, talents, and experience bank of staff, trustees, and volunteers.  

How do we know whether our professional development efforts are succeeding as we need them to? As I think about decades of professional development, I wonder whether my work with museum staff or board–or with teachers years ago as a staff development coordinator for a school district–were effective. The recent report, The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development, by TNTP presses on assumptions about teacher improvement and raises similar questions about the effectiveness of the professional development museums provide. How do conferences stack up for building capacity? Do coaching, mentoring, staff exchanges, seminars, webinars, and institutes make a difference?

I don’t intend to endorse one type of capacity building over another, nor do I want to object to seat-of-the pants methods of capacity building. I am, however, advocating for the same kind of deliberate approach to building staff, trustee, and volunteer capacity to implement an organizational plan that goes into developing it.

How does your museum prepare for and stay on top of these changes so it is not playing catch up?

Below are some resources about capacity-building.   
• The American Alliance of Museum’s Museum Assessment Program  with support from IMLS provide opportunities to improve a museum’s knowledge, alignment, and ability in selected organizational areas 
• The Getty Leadership Institute, an executive education program for museum leaders to develop their knowledge and skills in order to manage change and forge bright futures
• Future Proof Museums, a year-long program for museum fellows
• Noyce Foundation’s Leadership Institute at one time supported increasing the capacity of museum leaders to manage change, focus outward, engage peers and form key partnerships 
• Non-profit Lifecycles:Stage-Based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity looks at capacity from an organizational and developmental perspective by Susan Kenny Stevens

Four Years Later: Reflections on 2013 Museums Study Tour to Reggio

Ray of Light Studios continue to inspire

In November 2013, 50 participants from 11 museums with partners from higher ed, libraries, community organizations, early childhood, and preschools traveled to Reggio Emilia in northern Italy for a study tour of the city’s schools. Over the course of a week, the group was immersed in the pedagogy of the municipal schools with presentations by early childhood specialists, educators, and studio teachers; visits to infant-toddler centers and preschools; and tours of documentation and recycle centers.

Returning from the November 2013 Museums Study Tour Reggio participants shared their experiences with colleagues and area teachers. One group of participants organized a full day pre-conference for InterActivity 2014 in Phoenix. Attended by more than 30 the conference was followed by a set of articles, Adopting/Adapting: Reggio in Children’s Museums, in the spring 2014 issue of Hand To Hand.

Since then participants have been active in exploring these ideas more deeply, engaging in and adapting Reggio-inspired practice to museum and school settings. Work ranges from events with visibility like Tacoma Children’s Museum’s annual co-sponsorship of Symposium on Our Youngest Citizens to personal acts of rereading notebooks and journals from the weeklong visit. In some of the groups such as South Dakota Children’s Museum and Opal School, Reggio practices are foundational, embedded into the work, and supported by the shared experience of several study tour participants. In other cases individuals intently and patiently have looked for opportunities to weave these ideas into existing “duties as assigned.”  

Our group: November 2013

Recently I proposed to the study tour participants that we look back at this remarkable opportunity and share our reflections with one another. A dozen study tour participants, approximately one-quarter of the group, wrote and talked about their experience in Reggio and its presence in their work now. A continuing energy and appreciation for the roomy ideas we were able to explore comes through all of the reflections. The opportunity to visit schools, observe children, and listen to seasoned Reggio educators over the week added depth and dimension to understanding this complex pedagogy and increased awareness of the rigor that guides it. Moments stand out, shifting perspectives on existing practice were noted, and new questions have emerged. Yet, these reflections also indicate the challenging, on-going, and some times lonely nature of this work, work variously described as a life-long journey and a struggle to weave learning from Reggio into daily work.

As I reflected on connections between the study tour and what these participants have been doing, thinking, and wondering about, several threads emerged. They are, hopefully, invitations to further reflections, questions, and explorations.

•                Moments from the 2013 study tour still stand out vividly 4 years later. Illuminated moments around the relationship between aesthetics and ethics; children as citizens now; and the child’s agency have become touchstones and provocations for continued thinking and further exploration.  

•          Consistent with Reggio philosophy, relationship and collaboration characterize on-going work among study tour participants. Participants were encouraged to apply with museum, school, or community colleagues and many pairs and groups did so. Hence, it’s not surprising that relationships among participants have grown and are active. Less predictable, however, is that the study tour group has become a kind of Reggio-inspired network for its participants, building on pre-existing relationships, strengthening connections, and offering new associations. 

Adapting Reggio to the museum: from the final reflection

•                The complexity of Reggio ideas combined with the challenge of translating them into new contexts invites collaboration around projects. Appreciation of the challenge of translating practices into another culture and contexts in meaningful ways is very apparent. This challenge points to the importance, or perhaps necessity, of thinking together about these rich, complex ideas. Projects have been instrumental in adapting Reggio ideas and practices to other settings.

•                Four years after the study tour, the hopes and possibilities of Reggio-inspired connections, conversations, small experiments, and projects are coming to fruition in some of our museums and schools. This is encouraging in several ways. In museums such a time frame is typical, even short, for major projects, re-imagining a museum, or changing course. Learning, adapting, and meaningful change take time. Undoubtedly, promising connections and new projects that will emerge in perhaps 4-5 years are incubating now.

Looking Back

Four years after the museums study tour, 16 years after my first study tour, and 24+ years after first being introduced to Reggio, I am as drawn to the question of how one transforms thinking and practice as I am to the hardworking principles of Reggio pedagogy itself. The principles of the child as a born thinker, doer, and planner; the 100 Languages of children (or learning); the environment as the third teacher; and the role of pedagogical documentation continue to be compelling. They bring an aesthetic to thinking and learning that is powerful. I am keen to explore these ideas with others more knowledgeable than I am and I want to share them with others who indicate the slightest interest in related ideas such as exploring materials, asking new questions, or children as citizens.

Because I don’t work in a museum, school, or a firm with others, I have “borrowed” the participants on the 2013 study tour and their museums, schools, and firms to serve as a kind of community of learners for me. I check in on-line, meet-up at conferences, and stay in touch via email with these colleagues. I follow activities like the Children’s Museum of Tacoma’s annual Symposium on Our Youngest Citizens and read the Opal School blog. Opal’s thoughtful posts help shape an image for me of a culture of following ideas and connections and creating movement in thinking for children and teachers.

Diving into these ideas in various ways–through reading, writing, and talking; trying out small experiments; and folding them into my museum planning practice–keeps them present, active, and evolving. Members of the local MN Reggio-inspired network are a great source of Reggio-inspired, related, and connected blogs that are local, national, and international. Exploring Reggio-inspired ideas on my Museum Notes blog pushes me to dig into, unpack, and rethink documentation, the image of the child, the environment as teacher, learning together, etc.

New Starting Points

Strong, capable agents in
thinking, doing, and connecting

My planning work with museums most readily lends itself to advancing an image of the child as strong, capable, and an active agent in their thinking and learning. While not an easy shift from how we as a culture view children, I have found this to be an accessible entry point for a team or museum. It does not require a deep understanding or commitment to the Reggio pedagogy yet it goes to the core of a transformative view of children. It also resonates personally with a desire in each of us to be viewed as capable and appreciated for our strengths. This can lower resistance to a new idea.

With an image of the “rich” child as an organizational value, at the center of learning frameworks, or in experience planning, a museum is poised to make a fundamental shift. Here is an opening for other practices, perhaps developing a shared vocabulary around the strong child, the possibility of a child-driven experience planning process, or the use of documentation to make thinking visible. It may prompt new questions about children’s–and adults’–capabilities and how parents, caregivers, and staff can support, extend, and deepen explorations.

Along with this work, a few museum planning projects have offered opportunities to explore Reggio ideas in the context of museums with like-minded colleagues. Time together with Maeryta Medrano and Julia Bland on the study tour further inspired and grounded approaches to exhibit design, caregiver engagement, graphics and text for the “new” Louisiana Children’s Museum. In a collaborative project between Minnesota Children’s Museum and the Reggio-inspired Network of MN, teachers, parents, and caregivers documented children’s questions and thinking about places that make up communities as part of the redesign of MCM’s Our World gallery.   

Reflections from Reggio

I am fortunate that the Twin Cities has an active, robust Reggio-inspired network I can draw on in this work. Since its founding in 2000, the Network has grown and now offers varied entry points and activities, encouraging self-forming groups: monthly materials explorations, a book study group, and documentation lab. A group around big body play is active. 

Most weeks I am able to join 2 Reggio-inspired educators who encourage and challenge me with their reading, questions, and ideas. For the last 15 months we have been reading from the Contesting Early Childhood series by Routledge. We think together about the conditions that encourage the dispositions in educators and policy makers to be open, creative, and reflective. Often in these moments I am able to glimpse how the rich, hardworking ideas I have found in Reggio interact and take hold with the power to transform. 

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