With all credit going to Chart House Learning's Fish! and Fish Tales! I've worked up a set of values for the Peace project team. Week by week, I am working through ways to make it true to how we actually get our work done and work together. Here it is:
WE PLAY: Work made fun gets done. We choose to approach serious topics and tasks in a lighthearted, spontaneous way. It’s not an activity; it’s a way of working that brings energy to the project and sparks creative solutions.
When we enjoy our visits and feel positive emotions, we are more likely to remember our experience positively. We want our visitors to enjoy Peace.
WE MAKE THEIR DAY: We choose to treat everyone we collaborate with as special members of this project, with something unique and valuable to contribute. We respect the beliefs, actions and opinions of our collaborators and subjects. We will help each other to success.
When someone goes the extra mile for us, it makes us feel valued and respected. We want our visitors to feel special and respected.
WE ARE THERE: We commit wholeheartedly to this project. The exhibition and the people who work on it deserve nothing less than our total engagement.
When we truly listen and are listened to, we form connections. We want our visitors to feel connected to Peace.
WE CHOOSE OUR ATTITUDE: When we look for barriers, obstacles and problems, that is all we see. We choose to look for the best and find opportunities. We choose the sunny side of life.
When we choose to look for the good, we can make good things happen. We want our visitors to have the best possible experience.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Friday, June 4, 2010
Voice on labels
My big question to resolve now is about the voice or tone we use in our Peace exhibition. We want the text to be accessible, friendly, inclusive, and respectful. We've used words like conversational, open, and up-front to describe what we want. Basically, we'd like to step away from the authoritative, single-voice MUSEUM voice. We'd like to acknowledge that we've made choices in what we present and don't present. That we don't have all the answers - or necessarily even all the questions. And most of all, we want to avoid making judgements.
This is new for my museum. We use a generic detached museum voice and first person quotes, and we have adapted other institution's "voices", but we've never been this bold. We will have to make a really strong case for changing. To prepare, I've been reading around, and playing with draft text.
It's not that easy! A lot has been written about how to write proper labels (Serrell, of course), but not much touches on the advantages or disadvantages of different voices or tones in labels. And writing a label that is all those things we want AND within a reasonable word count is tricky! I think the next step is to draft some guidelines or qualities of the voice we want so we can at least define it. Then we will defend it. Then we write!
I've read:
Dumbing down for museum audiences —
necessity or myth?
http://www.emendediting.com/html/ezine/issue3/PDFs/BLUNDEN.pdf
Writing for a Family Audience by USS Constitution Museum Team
http://www.familylearningforum.org/engaging-text/writing-for-families/writing-for-families.htm
Using Questions as Titles on Museum Exhibit Labels to Direct Visitor Attention and Increase Learning
The Everday Activist
Waiting to get my grubby hands on : Connecting kids to history with museum exhibitions
This is new for my museum. We use a generic detached museum voice and first person quotes, and we have adapted other institution's "voices", but we've never been this bold. We will have to make a really strong case for changing. To prepare, I've been reading around, and playing with draft text.
It's not that easy! A lot has been written about how to write proper labels (Serrell, of course), but not much touches on the advantages or disadvantages of different voices or tones in labels. And writing a label that is all those things we want AND within a reasonable word count is tricky! I think the next step is to draft some guidelines or qualities of the voice we want so we can at least define it. Then we will defend it. Then we write!
I've read:
Dumbing down for museum audiences —
necessity or myth?
http://www.emendediting.com/html/ezine/issue3/PDFs/BLUNDEN.pdf
Writing for a Family Audience by USS Constitution Museum Team
http://www.familylearningforum.org/engaging-text/writing-for-families/writing-for-families.htm
The Evolution of Exhibit Labels
Using Questions as Titles on Museum Exhibit Labels to Direct Visitor Attention and Increase Learning
The Everday Activist
Waiting to get my grubby hands on : Connecting kids to history with museum exhibitions
Thursday, May 6, 2010
"Today" in the exhibition
A key component of an exhibition that I am working on is an area that we want to use to focus on "today". This is a challenge in a conventional history exhibition because there aren't really many artifacts and there are stories, but not necessarily History. We mean to create a space that helps visitors come to understand (that word again!) the messages and objectives of the show. A place for dialogue, exchange, debate, interaction - all of which is comes from individuals and is very much today.
Not sure yet how to do all that successfully...The word cloud is courtesy of wordle.net
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
What some students "know" about Peace
More on the theme of knowledge. Every year, we have a award program for senior high school students. It's usually related to an exhibition. This year's in on the theme of peace. Since that is one of the exhibitions I am working on, I get to be on the review panel.
I've done this for six years now and it's always interesting. Students have a lot of flexibility in how they can respond to the theme: they can write, paint, make a Web site or compose music. Some are absolutely brilliant: grasping the theme, and demonstrating great creativity and a clear talent for their chosen medium. Others, well, not so much. It can be tedious to read the same plodding, awkward prose for page after page. But it can also be pretty darn funny: exuberant reparations? memorizing gaze?
What was most interesting this time was to see the patterns in the students' responses and compare that to what visitors said they know about peace. It was pretty similar: Canada's connection to peace keeping, Lester B. Pearson, doves, past military sacrifices and a little bit of social justice.
So again, I am wondering if this is what people know about Peace, how do we reconcile the content (knowledge) of the exhibition with the messages (understanding) that we want to communicate?
I've done this for six years now and it's always interesting. Students have a lot of flexibility in how they can respond to the theme: they can write, paint, make a Web site or compose music. Some are absolutely brilliant: grasping the theme, and demonstrating great creativity and a clear talent for their chosen medium. Others, well, not so much. It can be tedious to read the same plodding, awkward prose for page after page. But it can also be pretty darn funny: exuberant reparations? memorizing gaze?
What was most interesting this time was to see the patterns in the students' responses and compare that to what visitors said they know about peace. It was pretty similar: Canada's connection to peace keeping, Lester B. Pearson, doves, past military sacrifices and a little bit of social justice.
So again, I am wondering if this is what people know about Peace, how do we reconcile the content (knowledge) of the exhibition with the messages (understanding) that we want to communicate?
Friday, April 30, 2010
Knowledge and Understanding
The Museum I work in is a knowledge-based place: the facts, the verfiable claims, basically what has come to be regarded as a true by a critical mass of legitimized people. Knowledge reigns in the development of our projects. But there is a disconnect between this knowledge orientation and our visitors, the messages we aim to communicate to them and the exerpiences we try to create for them.
Our messages and experiences are understanding oriented. In other words, our messages never require that a visitor leave knowing the dates of an event, or what material an object was made from. Instead, we aim to have the visitor understand the relevance of the event or object within a context, like the evolution of a country or their own life.
There are a few points of tension with this difference. First off, have we made assumptions about what our visitors know about our subjects? When asked our current visitors often demonstrate very little knowledge (the way we define knowledge - as facts and truth about events or objects) We rarely ask non-visitors. We don't usually assess or evaluate knowledge acquired after a visit. Can understanding come without knowledge? Is knowledge temporary but understanding more lasting? How best can a knowledge based institution and exhibition communicate understanding based messages and experiences?
A few things I read today:
Reinventing the Museum
What is the Object of this Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums, Elainne Heumann Gurian
Museum Management and Curatorship
Beyond the field trip: museum literacy and higher education
Carin Jacobs; Janine Andrews; M. Christine Castle; Nicolette Meister; William Green; Kristen Olson; Andrew Simpson; Rhianedd Smith
Excerpts from
Understanding by Design
Grant P. Wiggins, Jay McTighe
Our messages and experiences are understanding oriented. In other words, our messages never require that a visitor leave knowing the dates of an event, or what material an object was made from. Instead, we aim to have the visitor understand the relevance of the event or object within a context, like the evolution of a country or their own life.
There are a few points of tension with this difference. First off, have we made assumptions about what our visitors know about our subjects? When asked our current visitors often demonstrate very little knowledge (the way we define knowledge - as facts and truth about events or objects) We rarely ask non-visitors. We don't usually assess or evaluate knowledge acquired after a visit. Can understanding come without knowledge? Is knowledge temporary but understanding more lasting? How best can a knowledge based institution and exhibition communicate understanding based messages and experiences?
A few things I read today:
Reinventing the Museum
What is the Object of this Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums, Elainne Heumann Gurian
Museum Management and Curatorship
Beyond the field trip: museum literacy and higher education
Carin Jacobs; Janine Andrews; M. Christine Castle; Nicolette Meister; William Green; Kristen Olson; Andrew Simpson; Rhianedd Smith
Excerpts from
Understanding by Design
Grant P. Wiggins, Jay McTighe
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