Tag Archives: learning process

On ambiguity and conflict

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Further to my last post on a story in the February 06 issue of the Museums Australia mag… The same issue also contains a review of a book on visitor learning at museums, and there is some nice resonance between the two stories, as well as some dissonance.

According to Dr Janette Griffin’s review of Listening in on Museum Conversations by Gaea Leinhardt and Karen Knutson (2004), their research suggests that:

visitors want to know the stance of the museum, but at the same time they engage with conflict in ideas. [In addition,] visitors were “upset by ambiguity in signage but nonetheless engaged by it.” (p.160) However, if information was incomplete or hard to read, visitors became uncomfortable and disengaged.

An exhibition designed to be unsettlingAn exhibition designed to be unsettling.
Photo by Nikolaus.

The spaces a museum leaves for visitors to make their own meaning seem to be both welcome and unsettling. No doubt, as visitors, we are accustomed to museums giving us unequivocal answers, so equivocation can take people out of their comfort zone.

(Discontent would also occur when visitors perceive that a museum is blocking their engagement by withholding information, or by putting it in too small a font size, or on a label that is poorly placed or poorly lit. I can relate to that.)

But isn’t some element of discomfort intrinsic to the process of learning?

How would you respond to a glass-cased peach stone that is, according to the sign, ‘delicately carved with a minute neoclassical scene’ if, when you looked at it, even through a magnifying glass, all you could see was a small broken peach stone?

Personally, I would enjoy such a gentle bewilderment, especially in the context of a Museum of Jurassic Technology. But I cannot imagine this display in the National Museum of Australia. Well – not without an uproar ensuing.

But surely there is a place for ambiguity, indeed for uncertainty, in museum displays, even (or especially?) in national cultural institutions. And do we still need to even ask whether there is a place for contestation?* The research suggests that many visitors think so. Do you agree?

Note

*On the issue of contestation, Fiona Cameron’s research into exhibitions as contested sites is exemplary. See her paper Transcending fear – engaging emotions and opinions – a case for museums in the 21st century published in the Open Museum Journal in September 2003.

The space in between

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I’ve just read a paper from the first mostly-online Museums Australia mag. (See the members section of Museums Australia.)

Things in glass orbs

Orbs at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Photo by Huro Kitty.

I have never been to the Museum Of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, but I’ve loved the idea of it since reading Lawrence Weschler’s book Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (1995). It seems to be the kind of place that you could visit again and again without ever exhausting the experience. So it was a great pleasure to read Mark Thomson and Stephen Bowers’ article Strange riches: The Museum of Jurassic Technology (PDF 132kb).

For Thomson and Bowers, the MJT occupies ‘a sort of netherworld between scientific fact and classical fiction, between ambiguity and amazement, speculation and assurance’. That in-between-ness is perhaps central to its appeal, and surely to its success as a space for learning. It is authoritative but at the same time it is playful, so you must decide for yourself how to take it. How refreshing! And how foreign that concept is to most education programs in museums.

Most satisfyingly, when you get to the end of the article, you learn that the authors are Director and Field Researcher respectively of the Australasian Institute of Backyard Studies. Love it.

Prehistoric pine and platypus

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In the Australian National Botanic Gardens the other day, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of the cage that protects the young Wollemi Pine tree:

cage

I remember when the news broke of its discovery in the depths of a rainforest gorge in the huge Wollemi National Park, just northwest of Sydney. A rare story of species discovery, rather than extinction! And a species that is old, old, old – prehistoric. That was about the extent of my knowledge recall.

This was my first encounter with a real live Wollemi Pine. The cage is odd. But it also adds to its appeal. And you can peer through and see the tree, gloriously alive and flourishing:

This is what the Gardens tells you on the spot:

I was inspired to find out more. Did you know…

  • each tree is bisexual, having both male and female seed cones – I guess this is a male one:
  • it sheds whole branches, rather than individual leaves, and
  • it is being exhibited alongside a platypus at World Expo 2005 in Japan.

See the Wollemi Pine website for information, inspiration and… a demo of clever marketing.

Techno but not dialogic

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The South Australian Museum is implementing a kind of mother-CMS, so that collection items, once arranged and described, can be output to any screen device in the museum, be it hand-held, part of an exhibition display, on the web, whatever.

When this tech was being demonstrated at the MA conference, the presenters mentioned a facility to track changes made by users. I got all excited, thinking how great it would be for visitors to be able to interpret the collection too… but then I realised they didn’t mean visitor users; only staff users. The output is all centrally controlled.

Then an education officer from the museum said that the technology is convenient but that the template structure is fixed, so it can be a straitjacket.

That subdued me quite a lot.

Would anyone from the SA Museum care to comment?

How do you know?

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A slow, head-shaking moment from the MA conference…

Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton‘s study of Australians and ‘the past’ confirms that community and family learning are critical to historical knowledge and understanding. Governments are not the gatekeepers of history. Whew!

Most Australians consider museums the most trustworthy source of narratives on the past. But for Indigenous people, the opposite is true — museum practices are highly questionable.

And yet, even for non-Indigenous Australians, museums are not necessarily places where they feel connected to the past.

So even people who believe museums know best about the past don’t expect to learn much from them…?!

Power to the people

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My ‘Hurrah!’ moment from the MA conference: when David Anderson (Director of Learning & Interpretation at the Victoria & Albert Museum) said:

  • people have a right to be involved as producers of culture – not only as its consumers

and

  • scholarship and participation need not be in conflict.

So why do so many museums still hog the authorial seat?

You can download his conference paper (PDF). In fact, you can read more of David Anderson’s good ideas about museums and learning.