National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, timely example of the educational and civic value of museums

Those of us who work in and advocate for museums already know that visitors access museum exhibits and websites for valuable and reliable information on diverse topics. Here is a great example of a museum serving as a relevant educational institution, providing opportunities for informal exploration of a timely subject and offering a deeper understanding of complicated issues. In the wake of the devastating earthquake in Japan and the ongoing threat of a nuclear meltdown at several Japanese nuclear power plants, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico saw a three-fold increase in attendance over the weekend.

With the Republican-led Congress currently considering drastic cuts to federal funding for the arts, humanities, museums, libraries, and other stewards of our shared history and cultural heritage, perhaps we need more news stories highlighting the important role museums play in educating Americans about the world around them. Last week, members of Congress might have seen the Nuclear Museum as a small organization on a relatively narrow and seemingly esoteric subject, but this week we can show that it is a valuable resource to both its local community and the nation at-large.

This video from KRQE in Albuquerque describes the museum's surge in attendance, highlights a popular exhibit on types of nuclear power plants, and features reactions from first-time visitors.

History, politics, and the role museums play: Starlee Kine examines this interplay in her piece for "This American Life"

MuseoBlogger seen here eagerly awaiting a
call from Vail's Colorado Ski & Snowboard
Museum in reply to her offer to work for lift tickets.

As I am on vacation this week, living my dream, schussing through the Sierra Nevada mountains at Heavenly in Lake Tahoe, I am posting an audio segment I heard last month on This American Life. Listen, enjoy, discuss amongst yourselves, and I will catch you all next week, when I'm back at my laptop in Cleveland.

On January 14, 2011, in Episode 424, This American Life brought us "Kid Politics." Following Ira Glass's brief prologue centered around a documentary film by Weijun Chen, entitled Please Vote For Me, we hear Act I, "Trickle Down History." This brilliant piece by Starlee Kine about a middle school class' trip to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum includes reminiscences of her own class trip to the Nixon Library as a child. Ms. Kine's take on the museum education programs, interactive exhibits, and educator/facilitators in the galleries is both hilarious and insightful. Ask yourself, what are we teaching school groups in our galleries? Is there politics at play in the education curriculum at your museum?

USS Midway Museum's family audio guide sticks with visitors

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of spending two days aboard the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. As part of my preparation for an exhibit evaluation project, I spent almost four hours taking the audio guided tour of the entire ship in order to gain the valuable perspective of an uninitiated first-time visitor. Upon receiving my headset I was told about the brand new family audio tour, which debuted at the Museum just a few weeks prior to my visit. I expressed a particular interest in this tour, which was developed specifically to engage kids and adults simultaneously, and the docent explained that I was welcome to sample the new guide along my journey whenever I encountered a green numbered audio stop.

I began my tour as many adult visitors would, typing in the appropriate yellow numbers and receiving the carefully crafted and duly informative messages aimed at a mature museum audience. However, after listening to only three of the stops on the family tour, I found myself typing in the green numbers first at combined stops, postponing the adult tour, and listening to it as I made way along the passageway to the next stop. What was the significant difference, and why were the family stops so much more compelling to me?

In essence the strength of the new family audio tour lies in several key principles I believe are critical for any successful museum narrative:

1. Keep it short: most of the family tour recordings seemed to last less than a minute and a half.
2. Make it personal: a friendly sailor character personified the experience, developing a familiar rapport between the visitor and the guide, while also allowing an insider's look at life onboard the Midway.
3. Make it authentic: appropriate sound effects, attention to subtleties, and little details described in intimate spaces piqued the visitor's interest and instilled a desire for more.
4. Don't get too technical: the emphasis was on how men lived and worked aboard the Midway, and the importance of that work, not on the specifics of how the work was accomplished.
5. Less is usually more: with markedly fewer stops along the tour, the visitor did not grow as overwhelmed by infinite details, instead the pace was steady, but manageable.

The USS Midway's new family tour works because visitors are treated to a first-hand accounting of the history of the ship, but are not expected to disembark as experts. The pressure to retain great amounts of information is replaced by a casual initiation into the ranks of those who served. Looking back on my experience, I find that I can easily recall numerous memorable stops on the family tour and convey the significant take-away message from each, but I have only a few such take-aways remaining from the adult tour. It was too much information, delivered in rapid-fire succession and unfortunately not as much of it stuck.

In relating my experience with the tour audio guides onboard the Midway, I am reminded of the keynote address delivered this past May by Susie Wilkening of Reach Advisors at the Ohio Museums Association's annual conference. Susie reported initial findings from Reach Advisors' survey of over 40,000 museum-going households across the country. In talking about the most memorable and profound museum experiences described by survey respondents, Susie used the term "sticky." The longest-lasting museum encounters were sticky moments when memories were being formed in the minds of young visitors.

Naturally, most museums want to create opportunities for children and their families to have these sticky experiences together within the context of their own particular content. In my opinion, the USS Midway's new family audio tour creates exactly this kind of sticky opportunity. There is a remarkable space to explore, a personable character guide, and a wealth of history and objects to share. I certainly fall well outside of the seven year-old average age for sticky memory creation, but the Midway Museum's family tour will stick with me for years to come. It will be interesting to see if evaluation of this new educational program identifies the same kind of information retention in other visitors, both kids and adults, but that's a study for another day. Stay tuned.

Indianapolis Children's Museum to offer preschool, more museum schools to come?

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has launched an exciting new preschool venture beginning this fall. As the mother of a not quite four year-old, I can say for certain that my daughter would love the idea of attending preschool inside the Children's Museum galleries. Currently my daughter attends a preschool in University Circle, an area of Cleveland rich in museums and cultural organizations. As part of her school's curriculum program she and her classmates take regular outings to the surrounding museums, the Botanical Garden, and even the world famous Cleveland Orchestra. However, the Indianapolis Children's Museum, staffed by experts in early childhood education, is taking this idea from an every-now-and-again experience to a new height of immersive learning, moving the preschool onsite and integrating the museum into every class day.

About ten years ago the idea of the "museum school" was showing potential as an exciting way for museums to take a greater role in educating students about the world around them, but although some very fine museum schools exist today, the trend never caught on as an initiative embraced by most museums across the country. I think preschool is a wonderful thing to teach in a museum setting. Typically, the preschool day is short, children only attend a few days each week, and very little of the instruction requires textbooks, white boards, or number 2 pencils. The children lucky enough to enroll in this new preschool will have a wealth of engaging learning environments all around them. I must admit to being a little jealous that the Montessori preschool I attended as a child, although wonderfully enriching in its own right, didn't have an indoor carousel or a Chihuly on the ceiling.

Here in Cleveland we have a new Montessori High School, also located in University Circle, which makes partnerships with the surrounding institutions an integral part of their specialized college preparatory program. Could we see the museum school reemerge as a viable alternative to traditional private schools, or even charter schools, in the future? With so many quality programs on diverse subjects already in place at museums, the next step towards some form of "museum school" might not be as a great a leap as once imagined. Perhaps tuition from onsite schools, or revenue sharing from cooperative programs could help pay the expensive educational bills? Consider the exciting possibilities of having students support public outreach efforts and the response from families whose children participate in building their communities from the museum out.

Certainly, opening a school within your museum is not an endeavor one enters into lightly, or with the expressed goal of making money, but as budgets grow increasingly tighter, education departments are forced to find new and sustainable revenue streams and just maybe the museum school comes off the shelf again. Best wishes to The Children's Museum of Indianapolis and this first class of students beginning their lifetime of learning in the new preschool this fall. I am looking forward to hearing about how this program comes into its own and supports the mission of the museum at-large.

Indianapolis Children's Museum to offer preschool - chicagotribune.com

Photo: My daughter Nora, age 1 1/2, in the dinosaur dig exhibit at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

MOCA Cleveland produces excellent documentary video on iona rozeal brown exhibition

Last month I reviewed MOCA Cleveland's exhibition, iona rozeal brown : all falls down after touring the show with the curator Megan Lykins Reich. MOCA recently released a documentary video about the unique project with area high school students that complemented the installation of iona rozeal brown's mature works.

Even if you missed the exhibition at MOCA, this video is definitely worth fifteen minutes of your time. It is a great example of how a thoughtfully designed collaborative partnership can inspire hopeful youth and established practitioners, creating an educational experience for both.

iona rozeal brown @ MOCA Cleveland (documentary) from Moca Cleveland on Vimeo.

Informal science education worked for her!

In case you had any doubts about the impact and importance of informal science education (I never did), I offer this recent photo of my 2 1/2 year-old daughter, Nora. She was playing dress-up one afternoon and came over to ask for some help packing her backpack. I obliged, took little notice of her unique get-up, and went back to what I was doing. She promptly ran off and disappeared for another five minutes.

When she returned, she was completely outfitted as you see her here.

"Goodbye, Mommy!" she announced triumphantly.
"Goodbye? Where are you going? Are you leaving?" I asked.
"I'm going to the rainforest," she said importantly. "I'm going to search for frogs, to dig them up and save them. I'm doing research."

Yes, that's right, my 31month-old child said all of that to me one afternoon while sporting a tiara (upside-down on the back of her head, it's hard to see in the picture), a candy necklace, mardi gras beads, a Toys-R-Us backpack filled with "supplies", a sand pail, and an over-sized beach shovel. As it turns out, Nora had been greatly impacted by some excellent informal science education at her tender age of two, and was very concerned about the global plight of frogs. I'm totally serious.

Between visiting the Amphibians exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Year of the Frog displays at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, and watching the Sid the Science Kid series and Nature, both on PBS, Nora was very well-informed about declining frog populations (although she didn't put it that way) and the way science asks and answers questions. She wanted to go to the rainforest as a scientist to help save the frogs.

Talk about an "Aha!" moment. Here is proof positive that if you put good, quality, educational programming out there, our children, with a little help from us, will become consumers of that information and will get it! It works and it makes a difference.

So, to all of you fellow exhibit developers, education directors, outreach coordinators, instructors, tour guides, and volunteers out there, kudos! Keep up the good work. To all the parents, take your kids to the museum and the zoo, look for peepers around the pond in the park, turn off Oprah, and turn on PBS. Apparently, our kids are paying more attention than we think.

-- Post From My iPhone