Count Something

We are accustomed to counting things. We count down to midnight on New Year’s Eve. We count calories and footsteps and the days until vacation. We count museum members, new members, members at each level; and we count visitors in many different ways. Counting helps us know what’s going on and how we are doing. 

In his book, Better, surgeon, scientist, and writer, Atul Gawande delivers an intriguing message that is as applicable to the world of museums, libraries, and schools as well as to the world of medicine. He says people in the medical profession should “count something.” Regardless of what someone actually does in medicine, she should be a scientist in this world. 

This leads me to think we all should be counting something in museums as well. We should count to see whether an intuition is close to the mark, to check how an assumption matches reality, or to understand if a good intention is being confused with actual achievement.

Museum’s knowledge about themselves–the experiences they offer, the learning they promote, the relationships they cultivate, and what their audiences expect–is incomplete. Nevertheless they want to make decisions informed by evidence in order to do better.

Of course, museums do gather and monitor information about attendance and donors. They conduct audience research, evaluate programs, and prototype. These are important, organization-wide practices. But museums are complex and dynamic organizations, active, operating, and engaging on multiple fronts, with thousands of visitors, across many timeframes, at any one moment. They rely on innumerable efforts and diligent practice to do well. Captured information can tell a museum how it’s doing and how it could do better for its community, visitors, staff, and itself.

Everyone can count. Whether you are an educator, designer, developer, evaluator, researcher, data manager, fundraiser, marketer, curator conservator, greeter, guide, explainer, and cashier, volunteer, event planner, or CEO, you can count. In fact, only you can make sure that what you care about is considered and made visible by counting.

An exhortation to count something doesn’t mean launching a massive study. You don’t need to know a K-means cluster analysis from a chi-square. You can tally, time, or track; average daily totals, plot information over time, or compare groups. You can count with ticks and clickers, scratch paper; you can use existing data.  Count successes and failures and keep track of the unexpected and unanticipated. They can reveal situations and opportunities that might be significant. You can add notes and take photos. Analyze and reflect and discuss with others. You can frame another question, begin to count again, and set change in motion.

What to Count

Just start counting. Think about something that piques your interest, informs your work, guides you in making decisions,  and matters to you. Count something you have wondered about, something that challenges you. Bring your professional knowledge and experience to do better and advance the museum’s interests.

The first rounds of counting may be disappointing and somewhat messy. Carry on and count. Inevitably, one counting question will lead to another and better question. Successive rounds are likely to yield information and more insights. They will also let you be progressively more precise and systematic in what and how you count.

Counting helps in focusing and observing. When you look more closely at what you value and are trying to do, you get a realistic sense of what is happening.

Do you wonder what the museum experience is actually like? You might explore:

-        Which questions do visitors ask most at the front desk? In the museum shop?

-        How many places are visitors standing in line? At the elevator, rest rooms, an iconic exhibit? How many people are in line? Can you shorten the wait time?

-        What’s happening in the front lobby? How many people go into the museum shop? The café? Wait at the door to be picked up?

-        If you are hearing complaints from visitors about strollers, count strollers. How many strollers are parked in designated stroller parking lots? In circulation routes?

Do you want to be more confident that you are offering a safe environment?

-        How many injuries occur each month at the museum? In what exhibits or at which components do injuries occur more? Less? How many injuries occur for different age groups? What are the nature of the injuries?

Are you interested in knowing more about what happens in exhibits?

-        How long does someone watch others at a component before jumping in?

-        Which parts of the exhibit do visitors approach and then turn away from?

-        How long did an exchange between a gallery guide and visitor last? What’s the average for 20 visitors?

-        How long did a visitor stop at a component? How many ways did the visitor engage with it? Now you can ask, “What does engagement look like?”

-        How many people are in a gallery alone? With one other person? In a group? How many are talking to one another?

-        How many benches in each exhibit area are occupied? Are people sharing a bench or sitting alone? Now you can explore whether galleries need more, or fewer, benches and places to sit and where they should be.  

Counting tells you about how your museum is doing in some hard-to-get-at areas. It can help the museum hit the mark where change has occurred, priorities are shifting, or where getting it right matters.

Are you curious about whether your museum is engaging a particular audience group, for Tweens, Millenials, Experts?

-        Where are Tweens spending their time? Count how many children 6-8 and 8-11 years are in each exhibit area. Where are the most and fewest children in these age groups present? What time of the day are they most/least present? Asking them what they like best about the areas they are spending time could give clues for better engaging them.

Are you interested in knowing what actually happens in a school or senior tour that you developed or that you promoted for the museum?

-        Count how many questions the docent asked. How many were open-ended? How many questions did the students ask?

-        What might you count to get a sense that the participants are engaged?

Do you wonder how the museum can better understand the intangible qualities that help describe its value? What cultivating relationships with visitors looks like?

-        How many visitors do you know by sight and name when they come into the museum, enroll in a program, join a tour, or sit in on demonstration?

-        If you ask a visitor whether this is her first visit to the museum, what could you learn? Ask what she remembered from her last visit. Why?

-        What could you learn about the impact of a visit by asking a visitor whether she went on-line, checked out a resource, or looked something up after that visit?

-        Learn more about what’s important to visitors. What is fascinating to them about a topic? An exhibit? An object? Why?

-        Interested in encouraging compassion and empathy? Walk around and listen for, observe, and record examples of empathetic and compassionate behavior among visitors.

Counting helps solve problems. Counting can help you deconstruct a situation or check assumptions to know what’s really going on. Then you can start trying to solve that problem and do better.

Are you concerned about problems with crowding or underutilized spaces? Are you planning an expansion or a new building and want to understand your current capacity better?

-        Study one space, like the atrium or lobby, during a variety of times. How many people can listen to a story or watch a performance in that space? How many are sitting or standing? How many people are too few in the space so it feels empty?

-        Where do visitors seem to congregate and what areas do they avoid? Identify high-use and low-use areas; count the number of people in each part of a gallery. Can you influence the “clumping” by locating a high-use component in a low-use area?

-        Maybe visitors are crowded in certain areas because there is more (or less) to do. Count the amount-to-do per visitor in an exhibit or area by counting the number of people who can comfortably use each activity or component at one time. Tally it to arrive at a user load. What would the user load of the gallery be?

Do staff complain about adults on their cell phones? About loose parts strewn all over the place? Look around; count to see to what extent and where this is happening before making rules or removing objects.

-        How many parents and caregivers are on their cell phone? Count this across different time periods; are there time or space-related patterns?

-        More than just tallies help decide how abundant loose parts should be at a museum. But for starters, count where loose parts wind up and compare that with where they started out.

Are some staff and visitors suggesting that exhibit repairs are taking too long?

-        Start counting. Count the number of exhibits pulled off the floor for repairs weekly and monthly; count the number of days it takes to repair an exhibit. (Perhaps, gather this information from a comparable museum, or a few.) Identify strategies for lowering the numbers; continue to count and track.

 

Counting Matters

Admittedly, lives are on the line in medicine while in museums they are not. Nevertheless, in museums, reputations, relationships, trust, and responsible use of resources are at risk.  

Clearly, counting is not just about numbers and is not the only source of information for solving problems and making improvements. Numbers with thoughtful reflection and discussion can help you act with purpose. If you keep track of what you are interested in knowing, something will be visible that wasn’t before. You can formulate questions for a survey or interview; make changes in staffing and scheduling; reduce injuries and frustrations; and smooth transitions and circulation.

Counting, tracking, and sharing information set them in motion, build connections to the interests and work of others at your museum, and help improve performance. What you count, track, and share can become part of the collective knowledge of your museum.

There may not be sudden or dramatic changes as a result of everything you and your colleagues count. It does begin to reveal, however, that change can happen by diligent attention. Counting can nourish a culture of focus and observation, solve problems, animate the museum’s values, and generate new knowledge about the museum’s visitors and services.  

Related Museum Notes Posts

• DIY Research Agenda

• Curiosity is at the Top of My List

• Following the Thread of Practice

Executive Function: Completing the Connection

Executive function is getting a lot of attention these days particularly in schools, museums, and libraries. Located in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, an area that keeps track of goals, engages in abstract problem-solving, and moderates appropriate behavior, executive functions weave, mediate, and integrate both cognitive and social capacities.

While developing early in life and rapidly during the preschool years, executive brain functions are not important just for children. Throughout life, we need to regulate emotions, delay gratification, and make plans. During adolescence some executive functions improve, becoming more efficient and effective with increased mastery over thinking, emotions, and behavior. During the 20’s, executive function skills are at their peak and begin to decline in later adulthood.

Models for executive function break down and describe them with some variation. The executive functions explored in Ellen Galinsky’s book Mind In the Making: The Seven Essential Skills Every Children Needs are: focus and self-control, perspective taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and self-directed and engaged learning.

Evidence of executive function is apparent in the focus and inhibitory control displayed in persistence in following an activity to its natural conclusion or sticking with something after a setback. Taking another perspective and putting oneself in another’s shoes involves cognitive flexibility. Making connections is critical to making sense of a situation and relies on recognizing similarities and differences, using rules and applying and recombining elements in various and inventive ways.

Involved in language, play, learning, and social interactions, executive functions have a definite place in museums. Recently, IMLS released Brain-Building Powerhouses: How Museums and Libraries Can Strengthen Executive Function Life Skills with Mind in the Making and Families and Work Institute. A study on executive function skills in museums and libraries, it explores what they are, why they are important, how children develop them, and how museums and libraries promote them.

The report identifies 6 assets museums and libraries can leverage to support executive function skills from Family Engagement to Community Partnerships. Museums are incorporating information on executive function skills into programs for parents, programming where children practice science skills, and kits. Portland Children’s Museum has developed a handbook summarizing 7 skills.

These and other efforts to deliberately incorporate executive function skills cluster into two general areas. First, handbooks, webinars, text, and handouts focus on and summarize the content of executive function skills. Print materials in text panels and handouts provide explanation, tips, and prompts for parents and caregivers. Materials cover recent research, developmental information, and examples about how activities and experiences can support development of specific life skills.

The second cluster of museum efforts to incorporate executive function skills is around programmatic tools and strategies. Kits, programs, research-based exhibits weave executive function skills into museum experiences. Some museums offer informal play-and-learn groups and formal parent training to develop parent and caregiver awareness and skills.

Both areas of activities are good and necessary for encouraging executive function skills in museums. They serve as groundwork in bringing the content into the museum, building awareness of how and why these skills are important, and supporting parents and caregivers in valuing and encouraging these skills in children as they explore and play. Both help in building a case for support around a museum's intention and potential to make a difference in the lives of visitors and the community.

Most museum efforts to encourage development of executive function skills, however, overlook the enormous and indispensible asset of prepared and engaged staff. In fact, in Brain-building Powerhouses, staff are not identified as one of the 6 assets that museums and libraries can use to promote executive function life skills.

Gallery guides, museum educators, on-floor educators, docents, and volunteers who interact with children and adults–daily and hourly, from arrival to departure–have the potential to make connections to these life skills that even the best signs, tools, and media cannot. Informed, practiced, and on the spot, staff are able to customize a response, gesture, or comment to a child or adult and the situation. Moreover they can model and scaffold for parents and caregivers, augmenting and making visible what is in the text and what it looks like in reality.

Because experiences are often planned to be self-guided, museums may not recognize the steady stream of  opportunities for knowledgeable and well-trained staff to support and advance development of executive function life skills. Virtually every visitor encounter is an opening to model or respond in helpful, focused ways. Children wait in line at admissions, use a new tool in the maker space, scale the climber, or monopolize the green screen. Getting separated from a parent or jumping the line at the crane may be a self-guided experience; it can also use informed guidance.   

Clearly parents and caregivers play a critical role in fostering a child’s focus, self control, persistence, and keeping information in mind during a task or activity. Is it realistic, however, to expect adults to read text, absorb relatively complex content, and respond accordingly as their child abandons an activity? Grabs a tool from someone else? Faces a meltdown? What about when their hands are full with 2 or 3 children?

Well-prepared staff who are familiar with the research on executive function and the related life skills serve a function nothing else is able to. Not supervising a child, they can observe and notice related behaviors, identify opportune moments for engagement, and scaffold these skills. They can reflect on the interactions and discuss later with other staff. Modeling and scaffolding for parents and caregivers is a powerful way for them to understand what self-regulation or working memory looks like and what they might do in situations when prompts aren’t present. Even brief follow-up conversations with parents and caregivers can help make these connections.

Admittedly, the investment in preparing staff well is considerable. Furthermore, not all staff may have the capacity to engage with visitors around brain development and executive function skills. In fact, only half the museum respondents to the IMLS study felt staff has the capacity to converse with families and children about brain development. 

If this is where museums hope to have a positive impact on their visitors and, ultimately, on their communities, they need to take action on multiple fronts. Text, handouts, posting information, and weaving experiences into exhibits to support these important skills are only part of an approach that can be considered comprehensive and potentially effective. Without staff prepared to engage, respond to, and support executive function life skills, the approach remains a well-intentioned museum interest. Fortunately, some training in this area beyond introductory is occurring in museums. Mind in the Making and Boston Children’s Museum are developing training for museum staff. Museums can also conduct small-scale experiments with trained on-floor educators in a particular exhibit to interpret messages and model interactions. These results would provide informed guidance in expanded staff engagement.

A wholehearted approach is what I think is intended by one of the action steps in Brain-building Powerhouses: Embed a priority to develop executive function life skills into all aspects of the operations: planning, facilities, staff training, communications, guest services, etc.

In my mind, that's the top action step if museums are serious about delivering results for executive brain skills and–in fact for any area museums consider important such as creativity, the importance of play, science learning, early development, literacy, etc. 

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Executive Function in Museums

• What Do Museums Want of Parents?

• Building Capacity to Have Capacity

Now Playing … At the Store

“Look! This is a hiding place,” a 6 year old says pointing to a narrow opening. Two small barefoot boys climb on top of a scale model of a tent and slide down. Four girls join hands, move in a circle, sing and kick their feet. Two girls flop down on the wavy chair and pretend to swim along its curves. A boy drags benches into an alcove and starts telling jokes.

Where is this? The Backyard? The playroom or playground? The museum? No, these children are playing in stores: a fabric store, an outdoor recreation gear store, a clothing store, and a bookstore.

Perhaps as a child, you remember standing inside the hinged mirrors and closing them around you to create your very own infinity box. Did you cruise the shoe department looking for high-heels? Then sling a purse over your shoulder and clomp around? In bookstores did you gallop up and down the long aisles between towering bookshelves? Did you bounce on mattresses? Were the nuts and bolts coins and treasure?

Adults typically view stores as places to do errands and attend daily tasks. They buy groceries, pick-up gardening supplies, take screens for repair, purchase books, and look at furniture. For store owners, managers, and cashiers the store is a commercial setting, designed to display and sell merchandise, answer customer questions, and move them through check-out.

For children, however, stores are natural places to play. Yes, there are some stores like LEGO, Kapla blocks, and American Girl dolls designed for children to play with and hopefully buy toys. On the other hand, as multi-sensory environments full of props and intriguing spaces, stores offer attractive possibilities for play. The spatial cues, fixtures, lighting, and objects that entice adult shoppers are often interpreted differently by children. Furthermore, children are taken along on innumerable shopping trips that involve lots of waiting. Children sit in grocery carts while pushed up and down aisles; they hang around as a parent compares products; and they wait some more while items are scanned and bagged. It’s not surprising that children find play opportunities in stores.

What does this tell us about children’s play?

While found play experiences in stores are, admittedly, short play episodes, they nevertheless possess key qualities of rich, authentic play. We see children claim the space, fixtures, and props and direct their play in stores. With shelves and racks of clothing, these settings surpass the box for costumes and dress-up. Networks of pathways meander and intersect hinting of maps, roadways, rivers, or escape routes. Aisles lead to racks loaded with multi-colored clothing, bins are chock full of giant sponges, and low platforms are stacked with rugs. Enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces are perfect for ducking into and hiding in a quick game of hide-and-seek. Relatively movable fixtures like benches can be dragged and arranged to serve as a stage or an obstacle course. Mirrors punctuating the walls add special effects. Distinctive lighting spotlights the action.

Children play where they find themselves. While stores afford many opportunities to play, they have few, if any, rules about play. Adults are otherwise engaged or have simply not given thought to children playing in the store. Left on their own and inspired by displays, clothing racks, aisles, enclosures, and accumulations of merchandise, children enter new worlds, invent games, escape from imagined bandits, and fashion adventures. Imaginative possibilities open as coiled hoses become snakes, bolts of cloth become mummies, pillows are icebergs, and tents are slides.

The play flows and shifts. A fine game of monster may pick up a story thread suggested by shopping routines, a piece of merchandise, or a chance phrase heard from a shopper. Is this pretend play? Building play? Exploratory play? A musical game? Like much of the best play, it is a mix, quickly shifting from pretending, to making up rules, to large motor exploration that involves crawling under sales tables.

In store play, children come together with other children similarly expected to wait. Playmates are siblings, friends, and, often, new acquaintances. Even in short play episodes, issues about who can play, roles, and rules arise, are hashed out, and resolved. Play is reconfigured with the departure of a child called by a caregiver.

While perhaps not obvious, learning as well as fun is part of these found play experiences in stores. In negotiating play rules and spaces, children use social skills, solve physical problems, interpret spatial cues, and test memory. They incorporate categories of things displayed together into their play. They use vocabulary to name and describe objects; they listen and speak in discussing rules, and are they likely to read an occasional label and price tag.

What does children’s play in stores suggest about places for play in museums?

Unwittingly hospitable to play, store settings offer clues about appealing spaces for play and exploration in museums. It’s not that museums should create more store-like environments or more store exhibits. Rather, museums may do well to look at stores (and other settings) where children play spontaneously to identify qualities that are often missing in spaces planned for play. Features and qualities that are present–and absent–in store settings are needed to support children in directing play, using their imaginations, engaging in open-ended activities, and problem solving. 

Children take charge. A largely unscripted environment is a powerful companion for fashioning worlds and concocting adventures. As children shape experiences by and for themselves, their ideas, motivation, and competence are apparent. They are masterful at taking advantage of features such as height, movability, form, texture, and color to advance and extend their play.

Too much adult-driven design interferes with children discovering ways to rearrange, recombine, and repurpose elements for their exploration and amusement. The flexibility and movability of shelves, rolling racks, carts, and benches that facilitate changing displays also allow children to experiment with forms and modify spaces in meaningful ways–sometimes working together to manage bigger and bulkier items.

Imaginations at play. When a rack of clothes becomes a spaceship and the narrow space between two hanging jackets becomes an arrow slit in a castle, we know children’s imaginations are alive and lively. Simple, suggestive forms invite multiple interpretations and reflect many opportunities in contrast to the overly-defined forms typical of many designed play environments. Literal forms like trees, castles, and houses dictate the meaning of a form, substituting a dominant idea for yet-to-be-discovered possibilities.

Novelty unleashes imaginations as does juxtaposition and complexity. Children’s imaginations are inspired by unfamiliar objects and materials, enormous quantities, and unusual combinations of objects typical of stores. Hundreds of light fixtures, towering racks of jewelry, yards of chain, and an ocean of mattresses spark fresh ideas compared to several of one thing or almost anything at home.

Engaging in open-ended activities. In play, children are unlikely to give themselves a defined outcome, seek rules from adults, or give themselves a test. Right answers are virtually irrelevant in most types of play. Children have ideas that they are interested in exploring and play suits their purposes. Play confers a kind of freedom to experiment. In a setting like a store that is unconcerned with (and unintended for) children’s play, children follow and negotiate their interests and ideas.

The “what if” possibilities of store shelves bursting with books, pegboards loaded with whisks, a wall of paint samples, and tables with bolts of fabric are unlimited. And so are any spaces that are rich with information about the world, open to changing and modifying through play, and limited by few rules.

Perhaps this reflection suggests an opportunity beyond observing play and play environments. Less than obvious settings and everyday places are sources of useful information, lessons, and insights on delivering services, experiences, environments, and interactions to museum visitors and communities. What places are truly welcoming? Where do people feel in control? Where is customer service excellent? Where does inclusion and access feel authentic? Where are barriers to participation low? In what settings are processes efficient, warm, and personal? How can we extend our curiosity and awareness about what we care about that is done well and differently by others?

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Exploration and Play…Play and Exploration

• Now Playing…On the Sidewalk

• Now Playing…Nature In the City

• More Varied Places for Children

• Hardware Stores and Museums

Filling Museums With Words and Language

The Heart's Map at Minnesota Children's Museum

Everyday words and language pour, spill, fly, flow, fill, infuse, inhabit, and animate museums. They are spoken, written, thought, imagined, gestured, recorded, remembered, and signed in interactions and on-line in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic and the countless other languages of our communities.

Text Rain (Utterback)

Words name and describe objects, paintings, and phenomena. They help express how artwork makes us feel and forge connections with past experiences we remember. Narratives are often embedded in exhibits, sometimes explicitly as a part of framing the experience and sometimes loosely connecting experiences and ideas. Visitors read and hear the voices of inventors, settlers, writers, farmers, soldiers, immigrants, artists, and neighbors in famous speeches, newspaper headlines, founding documents, and letters. Museum professionals write texts and labels, catalogs, and scripts for films. Text Rain falls and memorable quotes punctuate museum walls. Using words and images, museums tell their stories to supporters, friends, funders, and their communities.

Words and language are ubiquitous. They welcome, guide, invite, instruct, and inspire children, youth, and adults in museum exhibits, programs, performances, tours, demonstrations, events, catalogs, services, and initiatives. Often, however, they do so incidentally rather than intentionally. But well beyond just getting visitors to read more text (or better written text) or listen to stories, museums can deliberately and actively engage visitors in acts of reading and writing, in thinking and making connections, and in deepening enjoyment.

Is encouraging museums to explore and develop opportunities that emphasize words and language inviting them to go off mission? Adding more to their plates? Becoming more like schools? I think not. In fact, words and language provide an impressive and promising set of opportunities, activities, and experiences capable of assisting museums in accomplishing their missions and goals.

The world of words and language is vast and largely underexplored in museums. This world encompasses basic tools for communication and expression; it is the driver of meaning and understanding; and it provides pleasure. Words and language can also be understood in broader, more flexible concepts and as metaphor. In Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, elements (“Light on two sides”) can be combined to shape spaces to support routines, provide comfort, and bring people together. The 100 Languages of Children grounded in the Reggio pedagogy represents symbolic systems for expression, exploring relations, inventing, and learning.

Words and language help illuminate ideas, deepen a visitor’s understanding, broaden a view of the world, and increase a museum’s impact in many ways and scales.

Placing words and language at the heart of the museum. Some museums like historic homes of authors or The Newseum have words and language at their core as do museums of language.

• Treehouse Museum, Ogden UT focuses on family literacy, children’s literature and the arts and humanities. The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is dedicated to inspiring a love of art and reading through picture books. At Bookworm Gardens stories remembered and imagined are found on 8 acres of woods, fields, and sunny glades. 

Growing 21^st century learners. Three of the 7 IMLS Learning and Innovation Skills, Communication, Visual Literacy, and Basic Literacy, deal directly with words and language. Many museum incorporate these skills in their exhibits and programs. 

• Pre-literacy and early literacy skills are the focus of Minnesota Children’s Museum’s Storyland, Mississippi Children’s Museum’s Literacy Garden, and Louisiana Children’s Museum’s Talk & Play Center. In these settings, parents and caregivers are encouraged to talk with and think about the language they use with their children and its role in cultivating literacy. 
• Stepping Stones Museum for Children’s ELLI Lab School is a comprehensive, high quality language and literacy development preschool program for all children and their families. 
• Creative writing is part of Mia’s Creativity Academy.

Theodore Roosevelt 2 by Carrie Roy

Layering and thickening experiences with the power of words and language to intrigue, engage, and provoke thinking. Pairing words and images in unusual and beautiful ways can tap into visitor’s curiosity and interests as well as make complex information accessible.  

• Data artist Carrie Roy’s work distills literary works, letters, and other groupings of texts down to key concepts or vocabulary and explores them through art. Her Theodore Roosevelt 2 layers words and images based on a textual analysis of Roosevelt’s book to reveal regionally-related word choices.

• In her blog, Marianna Adams describes how the concept of collaborative writing inspired by Japanese renga poetry served as both an activity and embedded performance assessment. Exploring the Gardner Museum galleries, a group substituted verses for objects, spaces, or views using a set of words–rising, distant, enclosed, fold, release. The experience produced beautiful versions that evoked the spirit of Mrs. Gardner and data sources helpful in understanding the connections visitors make with the museum.

Deepening understanding of art, artifacts, current issues. Language used in unexpected ways and places can capture and concentrate visitor’s attention.

• The Getty invited visitors to write a Haiku poem about a selected drawing that used negative space. With multiple examples from the curator who had used Haiku, an un-rhymed three-line poem, for label copy, visitors composed Haiku of 17 syllables in lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each.

• The Language of Conservation introduced poetry into the Audubon Zoo landscape in New Orleans (as well as in zoos in Milwaukee, Chicago, Little Rock, and Jacksonville) through a partnership of Poets House and the New Orleans Public Library. Lines like, “There is pleasure in these pathless woods” help deepen public awareness and appreciation of environmental issues through poetry.

• Prompts like “listen to an object speak" can generate attention, focus, and surprise while “Describe the place in which this diorama is set” can focus observation. Both are an opportunity to write.

Finding the museum’s voice. Language in its many forms is the voice of the museum about its mission, its audience, and with its community.

• Years ago a poet and a paper artist worked with children at Minnesota Children’s Museum to create The Heart’s Map. “I Am from Love” greets visitors as they enter the museum’s lobby and speaks powerfully to and about the children the museum serves and celebrates.This line has stayed with me for years: “I am from leaving someone. I am from coming to America and knowing nothing, everything. I am from Hmong and German and Senegalese.

• NEMA’s 2015 conference theme, The Language of Museums also points to the importance of recognizing the power of words and language in all aspects of a museum’s work.

Related Museum Notes Posts 
• Learning + Literacy

• Literacy At Play
• Playing with...Words

• Bookworm Gardens