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Welcome to our first e-newsletter. The purpose of the newsletter is to keep our web site visitors informed of the MLC's activities and future plans. It is also designed to stimulate visitors to write in with suggestions, questions, and even criticisms. Over the past year our web site has been visited by people from all of the world's continents except Antarctica and by over 100 countries. The main purpose of our web site is to make our electronic, annotated literature database available, but we also want to be a location where researchers and educators can share their courses and their intellectual tools observational instruments, methods of analysis, and definitions of key constructs such as learning. So, we do invite you to send us your work if you would like to share it. In this newsletter we want to point out that the web site now includes the abstract and full plan for Phase 2 of this work. As you will notice if you visit the page on Phase 2, we are focusing on "conversational elaboration" as one process and outcome of learning in a museum. Why conversation? To answer that question we need to back up a little bit and discuss what our assumptions and goals are and were. As we stated in our original proposal and reiterated in our Phase 2 proposal we view museums as among our preeminent institutions for learning because they are places in which our society gathers and preserves visible records of social, scientific, and artistic accomplishments. Museums are places where all people can turn to extend their understanding of history and society, to expand their cultural horizons, and to explore scientific phenomena. Because we emphasize the social and cultural aspects of museums we want to focus on social, as contrasted to purely individualistic consequences of engaging in museum exhibits. We also want to acknowledge that museums are pleasurable and cultural, not just hallowed and informative. We searched, then, for a naturally occurring social activity that might logically be expected to be sensitive to museum experiences. A great deal of human conversation is solidly goal-directed. Conversation among family and friends is often focused on planning and arranging, agreeing and mediating, reviewing and recounting. Other conversation, however, is about valued and often shared social experiences. In its most primitive form it may be a simple identification/evaluation exchange, such as, "Went to the Gare St. Lazare Monet Manet show; it was neat." A more sustained conversational experience might include description, emotional responsiveness, acknowledged realization or insight, connection to beliefs or prior experiences, and even disciplinary elaboration (aesthetic evaluation or scientific explanation). It is our view that conversations held amongst visitors while in the museum and also after a visit might well be stimulated by deep curatorial, design, and educational decisions the museum has made. For example, many museums are beginning to literally and figuratively place windows between the galleries and the spaces behind the scenes (as does the Carnegie Museum of Natural History); in some cases they share with the visitor the curatorial and philosophical debates (as does the National Museum of the American Indian). In other cases curators, educators, and designers decide to work against the natural visitor assumptions of organization (as does the Carnegie Museum of Art). All of these moves might well be expected to prompt visitor thought, conversation, and extension of ideas because they represent ways of challenging and informing the visitor. We believe that when we are challenged and experience the unexpected we discuss it with our friends; we also believe that, by discussing our encounters and emotional and intellectual reactions, we are demonstrating an important form of learning. We are looking forward to exploring these issues as Phase 2 gets underway. As always, we value your input and hearing from you. You can e-mail your comments to Mary Abu-Shumays. |
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