Musings

Gaea Leinhardt

In the second installment of Musings, we discuss the MLC's construct of Identity. Conversational elaboration is a learning process and outcome that represents the interaction among three phenomena that form the core dimensions of our model of learning in museums: Identity, Explanatory Engagement, and Learning Environment. Identity is the aspect of this complex interaction that visitors bring to the museum. Clearly, the knowledge, attitudes, dispositions, expectations, and values that a person or group brings to the museum setting deeply affect the kind of experience they have. People do not have just one identity, however; rather, they have many identities-some that are visible externally (e.g., gender, age, and to some extent ethnicity) and others that are not externally obvious (e.g., educational level, religious affiliation, parental and marital status). Whether observable or not, these identity elements have a social meaning when individuals participate as part of a museum-visiting group, in terms of both the interactions among group members and the interactions with the museum's message. The extreme reactions to the proposed "Enola Gay" exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum, for example, was an instance in which some people's sense of what it meant to be patriots who risked their lives for their society collided with the curators' and historians' sense of truth-telling and reliance on evidence from historical records (Wallace, 1995, 1996). That controversy led to major changes in the exhibit. Some exhibitions deliberately ask the visitors to consider controversial issues of identity that are connected to the exhibition. One example of that approach appears in the Museum of the American Indian, where the contrast between the anthropological and Native American interpretations of American Indian history is dramatically portrayed in large text panels on opposite walls of the exhibition.

In the Museum Learning Collaborative, we treat identity as multifaceted and as part of the social system being brought to the exhibition by the conversational group. We focus closely on visitors' sense of themselves as museum participants and consumers on the one hand and connoisseurs of the particular content on the other. Visitors' connection to the content is seen as being of two quite different types, one in which the visitors have personal productive knowledge--they were glass blowers, they are artists, they are scientists working with electromagnetism--and the other in which they are appreciators--they collect glass, they own art, they are avid watchers of NOVA. These aspects of identity (museum participation, and connection to the content as either producers or appreciators), we believe, impact the visitors' experiences in a particular museum at a particular time in particular ways. This influence is reflected in the nature of the conversations that people have among themselves, both during their visit and after they have left the museum setting. We have begun to develop methodologies for capturing those conversations and for tapping the identity strands that we believe matter. Readers can get a sense of where we are going in this project by viewing the Research Plan for Phase 2 on our web site and can find out how we are exploring the identity construct by reading in this Newsletter the brief research updates that describe current validation studies under way.

 

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