Request for Response to Academic Advising Survey

Over the past decade, I developed a keen interest in advising/mentoring students and emerging professionals on issues related to career development.  I have written on the specific themes of co-creative mentoring and job placement on numerous occasions.

Events that support this interest include:

• In the fall of 2017, I devoted one three-hour session of my Museum Practices graduate seminar to career development.  The session readings included A Life in Museums: Managing Your Museum Career edited by Greg Stevens and Wendy Luke, the American Alliance of Museum’s 2012 National Comparative Museum Salary Study, and several others.  Fifteen percent of the course grade required preparing a resume, cover letter, and justification for same for a real-time job the student might apply for upon graduation.  The enthusiastic student response to the session and project surprised me.  Prior to the seminar, not one of the students had their resume or cover letter critiqued by a professional in their field!
• Five years ago, I participated in a focus group of employers who hired graduates from the university where I was teaching at the time.  The first question asked of the focus group employers by the university representative was “What is the greatest skill deficiency of our graduates you have interviewed or hired?”  All fifteen of the employer participants agreed on the response – oral and written communication skills.
• Over the past decade I have been both pleased and disappointed at the preparation students receive for entering the job market.  Some students flow seamlessly from academia into careers and others struggle with even the task of creating a resume.  The difference between the two sets of students seems unrelated to their academic successes or failures.  At the same time, higher education seems awash in job fairs, career counseling centers, advising and so forth.  Yet, something is not clicking.

Today, I created a brief survey to explore how former students perceive the advising they received during their academic career that prepared them to enter the job market.  The purpose of the survey is to determine how and where student expectations and needs for career counseling are met.  Is higher education meeting these needs?  If so, where and how?  What resources outside of higher education do students use to prepare for their careers?  Now in the workforce, what advice do emerging professionals wish to provide current students in their field?

The survey will take 5 minutes or less to complete and is completely anonymous.  No information that provides the identity of any individual survey respondent will be shared with any individual or organization.  I will distribute the survey results as follows:

• Minimally, a full summary report will be published on this blog.
• Survey respondents may request to receive a summary of the survey results.
• I fully anticipate the survey will form the basis for an open-source (and ideally peer-reviewed) article that will be made available through this blog.

I will appreciate your distributing this blog post and/or the survey link (http://lsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ekw8fdQMf7Lgz3L) to former students, emerging professionals, educators, and other relevant individuals via your social media, email contacts, or other networks.

Thanks in advance for your help in this project!

Co-Creation in Mentoring

Adapted from The Courage to Teach (1998:102) by Parker Palmer

In the past couple of years co-creation has become a buzzword for a rather imprecise range of activities from simple collaboration to truly reciprocal processes.  In the Introduction to Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset  Elizabeth Bollwerk and I argue that co-creation

“. . . does not mean working for the community based on what a museum perceives are a community’s needs. Instead co-creation means working with the community to address the needs as expressed by the community itself.”

To apply the concept of co-creation to mentoring, simply substitute “mentee” for “community” in the above quote.  A co-creative perspective best describes my approach to mentoring.

The other day I began reading On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old by Parker Palmer.  The title sums up the volume’s focus.  Palmer includes a substantive mentorship discussion in the book.  As well, he articulates an approach to mentorship to which I completely align.  He writes (2018:33):

Every spring, commencement speakers take the stage across the country to tell the graduates, “Our hopes for the future are in your hands.” . . . It’s unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. . .  it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next.  We – young and old together – hold the future in our hands.  If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort . . . let’s change the metaphor and invite young adults to join the orchestra.  As we sit together, we can help them learn to play their instruments – while they help us learn the music of the merging world, which they hear more clearly than we do.

Flowing from the above, here are two relevant points in how I approach mentorship:

• The mentor and the mentee are in a reciprocal learning relationship beyond the mechanics of the mentoring process.  I find that the mutual expenditure of time and effort by the mentor and the mentee is a miniscule part of the reciprocity.  Instead, as with Palmer’s orchestra metaphor, both the mentor and mentee learn from their mutually shared wisdom and skills.  This point is the very essence of the diagram pictured above, adapted from Palmer’s The Courage to Teach.  In a teacher/student or mentor/mentee relationship, everyone can access the Great Thing.
• A true co-creative approach mandates that the expressed needs of the mentee be at the heart of the relationship.  The mentor responsibility is not to create a clone of themselves or what aligns with the interests of their academic department.

Below, I offer several mentorship examples I experienced that illustrate these points.

Emily Neal and Scott Hadley were interns at the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa in 2010.  They created a hands-on activity using educational collections of stone tool artifacts.  In the first couple of minutes of this video, Emily and Scott talk about what they learned in creating the activity.  What I remember most from the eight-year old experience was, to use Palmer’s metaphor, “learning the music of the emerging world” that they represented.  In the activity created by Emily and Scott, they explained how stone tool styles changed over the thousands of years of prehistory.  Typically, when I explain stylistic changes, I rely either on battleship curves (popularized by James Ford in archaeology over 50 years ago) or talk about automotive stylistic changes through time.  Emily and Scott used the stylistic changes of video gaming devices over a several year period, something that the 10-15 year old target audience could readily appreciate.  The activity they created contained many similar examples.  Emily and Scott clearly reflected the mindset of the target audience better than my PhD in Anthropology.  I learned a great deal about education in museum settings from Emily and Scott during their internships.  As an aside, I am pleased to see in a recent Facebook post that the stone tool program is still part of the Museum offerings and Emily, now a full-time employee at Chucalissa, leads the activity that she created eight years ago as an intern!

Gabriel Short graduated this year with an Masters in Liberal Studies (MALS), and certificates in Museum Studies and Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership from the University of Memphis.  I met Gabriel in about 2015 when he sought advice on a career in museums.  Gabriel was one of those folks with a million ideas about what he wanted to do in life without a solid plan on anything.  As a result, although he was someone with clear intellectual ability, his lack of focus and mediocre GPA caused his rejection by academic departments to which he applied for graduate studies. He was becoming frustrated.  I met with Gabriel and suggested a different approach.  I suggested that he consider the MALS program – often considered by academic departments as a “less than” degree.  However, for Gabriel, it would allow him the opportunity for considerably greater latitude in constructing his curriculum, explore his research interests, and study abroad for course credit.  Upon his graduation this past spring, Gabriel sent me a note expressing how the MALS program proved ideal for preparing his next career steps.  He is now employed as a data analyst with the University of Memphis Research Foundation.  In working with students such as Gabriel, along with examining my own academic and professional career, I emphasize the need to think long and hard about the necessary steps to prepare for a career.  Too many students end up with graduate degrees that either poorly qualify or over qualify them for their career interests.  I learned that mentoring students on their academic trajectory must be divorced from my own interests in what I think they should pursue, or the recruitment interests of the department to which I am affiliated.

Elizabeth Cruzado Carranza and I first met in 2013 at the bus station in Caraz, in her native Peru where she had come to pick me up to then head up to the small village of Hualcayán. A colleague, Rebecca Bria had invited me to participate in a cultural heritage project in the small 400-person Andean community.  The next year, Eli applied to and was accepted as a graduate student at the University of Memphis.  I hired her as a graduate assistant at the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa which provided her with a stipend and tuition waiver.    Upon receiving her M.A. from the University of Memphis, Eli was accepted and funded to a PhD program at the Louisiana State University.  Over the past five years, we worked together on several projects in both Hualcayán and the Casma region on Peru’s north coast.  Eli and I published articles and gave presentations based on our mutual work.  For example, here is the Annual Report from the first year’s activities for the Culture and Community in Casma nonprofit we launched.  Since our first meeting based in a student/faculty relationship, today we have moved to function as colleagues.  Since 2013, in my half-dozen trips to Peru, I have learned much about the rich cultural heritage of Eli’s country.

Eli and her family have always expressed tremendous gratitude to my wife and I for providing for her in terms of material and moral comfort during her time as a student in the U.S.  When she received her Masters Degree, members of her family from New York to Lima, Peru came to Memphis for the event.  At a dinner in Eli’s honor, I noted how her family always thanked me for helping Eli, but I wanted to use the occasion to thank them.  I noted that career goals for me included giving back for the benefits I received as a student and also to conduct meaningful work.  Besides the hospitality her family always provides when I am in Peru, I thanked them for entrusting their daughter to our household for two years – pretty much sight unseen.  I thanked them too as in coming to know an work with Eli, I ended the “institutional” part of my professional career in a several year project that met my expressed needs to be engaged in the preservation and presentation of the cultural heritage of underserved peoples.  I more fully learned through working with Eli how it is the student/mentee who provides the opportunity for the professor/mentor to live into their needs as a professional.  I have also come to see in students such as Eli the true collegial component of such relationships.

 

Now, back to co-creation – in all three of the above examples, the expressed needs of the mentees formed the basis of the engagement – whether in gaining experience through internships, advising on an academic trajectory, or obtaining a graduate degree and launching a local program to preserve and present a vanishing cultural heritage.  At the same time, the expressed needs of the mentor are addressed equally by the very same processes.  Obviously, the mentee and mentor cannot exist independently. I am convinced that in ideal relationships, the mentor and mentee co-create with each other opportunities of equal value to grow more fully into their true selves.

Museums as Participatory Institutions

For the past few years, half of the final exam in my Museum Practices graduate seminar in the Museum Studies Program at the University of Memphis consists of responding to the following:

Put yourself in the position of John or Josephine Q. Public. In the current economic chaos, the bank is foreclosing on their home, they have lost their jobs, and the city just reduced their public services. In referring to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the House Budget Committee recently argued that “The activities and content funded by these agencies…are generally enjoyed by people of higher income levels, making them a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.” Isn’t your research or the position you aspire to a museum professional just another example of this wealth transfer? What do John and Josephine Q. Public get for their tax dollars that fund your research/position?

This year, Paige Brevick, a graduate student in Egyptology and the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program wrote a compelling response that incorporates some of the ongoing discussions of museologists today, specifically based on her experiences on the staff of the Museum of Biblical History in Collierville, Tennesse, U.S.  Here is her essay:

The stereotype of museums as hoarders of wealth, both economically and intellectually, is an outdated myth in desperate need of revision.  While museums may have historically catered to the elite or academic, they have undergone significant reform in recent years to increase the transparency of their collections and develop their resources.  Today, even the most research driven institutions must find innovative ways to entice the public and interact with them through increasingly creative means.[1]  This level of social engagement encourages a dialogue between the public and academic that is rarely seen in other settings.  It is in this way that the museum leaves behind the stereotype of “elitism,” rather, it strives towards the ideal of the “participatory,” where a community may take an active role in all aspects of museum administration.[2]  Tax dollars then do not only fund high-brow research or support unethical wealth transfer.  Instead, the Public’s tax dollars go to fund museums who are increasingly aware of the needs of their communities, and who cultivate environments for learning.

As curator at the Museum of Biblical History, a small museum with limited staff in Collierville, Tennessee, my duties are highly varied.  Not only do I conduct research and work in the gallery, but I am constantly seeking out new ways to engage the public with our exhibitions.  The Museum of Biblical History has served the community for over two decades and has had to adapt to the needs of the changing community over time.  At its onset, the museum hosted lectures on archaeology that were free to the public.  Attending a museum lecture like this would provide John and Josephine Q. Public the opportunity to briefly leave behind the troubles they face in a hopefully inspiring way.  Though not necessarily problem-solving in itself, attending free lectures is a way for the public to better understand what museums in their town have to offer.  Attendance at a lecture like this may be the first step to getting involved in action-oriented projects within the community, as museum programming brings people from different social groups  together.

In an effort to better serve the community of Collierville, the Museum of Biblical History now offers Bible Story Time programming to children once a week.  Local members of the community, including the mayor and firefighters, volunteer to read Bible stories to  children in the museum.  The museum provides two crafts per program, which student participants make in the museum and take home.  Museum staff and volunteers supervise the event, with the support of visiting parents.  This program is provided free of charge.  Though the Publics are going through difficult times with reduced public services, turning to the resources provided by their local museums may alleviate small concerns and provide a degree of routine to their schedule.  Many museums offer similar free programming at least once a month.

Though the Museum of Biblical History is small, it adjusts to meet the needs of the community.  This winter the museum stored its entire Near Eastern artifact collection away, in order to showcase a highly requested display of nativities from around the world.  Even the crèche collection itself is on loan from a community resident.  As an archaeologist, part of me was hesitant to make such a dramatic change in our gallery.  The public, however, had spoken so the show was underway.  I curated the nativity exhibition and watched on opening night as over a hundred people packed into the small museum, doting upon handmade nativities.  The show brought people together to discuss culture, tradition, heritage, art, and the history of Christmas as it is understood from international perspectives.  The Publics tax dollars support experiences like this one.  Their funding encourages not only an appreciation of art and history, but of empathy across cultures, even in the small town of Collierville.

Museums should strive to become beacons of knowledge, and act as windows into other worlds, whether those worlds are a glimpse into an ancient culture or an exhibit featuring local artists.  A museum is not only a safe-haven for research or objects of the past.  If  museums are to remain successful in an economically turbulent environment, they need to continue to focus on making the information they possess accessible to the communities they serve.  The Publics, then, are not transferring their money into a disconnected or wealthy museum entity.  Instead, their tax dollars go back into their own community, creating educated generations for years to come.

[1] AMA, Word of Mouth Marketing, pg. 38-40.

[2] Simon, Nina.  “Chapter 7: Collaborating with Visitors,” In The Participatory Museum.

2017 Field Opportunity, North Coast of Peru

I have posted before about the research project Elizabeth Cruzado Carranza and I have launched near the village of Casma, Peru.  We are pleased to announce that a 2017 field school opportunity from late May through July.  The project involves archaeological field excavations and survey, mapping, artifact analysis, museum practices and engagement with the local community.  The project sites are located around the small town of Nivín and date from 500 BC – AD 1400. 

There will be two sessions for the 2017 Season:

Session 1 – May 26 – June 24

Session 2 – June 26 – July 24

For more information, see:

• Report on work with the community in 2016 (Spanish and English)
• More details on field research site, costs, and logistics
• Questions?  contact Elizabeth Cruzado Carranza at ecruza1@lsu.edu

We anticipate offering only four student slots for each of the two sessions.  The small size of the field crew will assure plenty of individual instruction and experience, but also that the spots will fill quickly!

Final Thoughts on Museums & Relevance in 2017

For the past few years, half of the final exam in my Museum Practices graduate seminar in the Museum Studies Program at the University of Memphis consists of responding to the following:

Put yourself in the position of John or Josephine Q. Public. In the current economic chaos, the bank is foreclosing on their home, they have lost their jobs, and the city just reduced their public services. In referring to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the House Budget Committee recently argued that “The activities and content funded by these agencies…are generally enjoyed by people of higher income levels, making them a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.” Isn’t your research or the position you aspire to a museum professional just another example of this wealth transfer? What do John and Josephine Q. Public get for their tax dollars that fund your research/position?

This year, Emily Coate, a graduate student in Egyptology and the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program wrote a compelling response that incorporates some of the ongoing discussions of museologists today.  Here is her essay:

From the view of Ms. Public, I would need to see evidence that the museum serves a tangible function within the community in order to appease my frustration on this front. Is my local museum a place where my neighbors and I feel we are actively engaged? I hope that with this view in mind, I will be able to work towards fulfilling these goals in a museum setting. The importance of not taking a museum’s position for granted, just because it is something I enjoy, is not a lesson that will be forgotten. I would hope to show the Publics that the museum is a space where everyone’s history, art, science, etc is included. It is an inclusive space that strives to incorporate all members of society. The work done to bring in members of the community in a meaningful manner at Chucalissa is a prime example. Even with a small staff and a small budget, volunteers, students, and the community form an integral part of the running of the museum. Along the lines of Simon’s folksonomy, museums must ask for community input, and then follow-up with a visible materialization of the suggestions or utilization of the participatory action offered. This gives visitors a personal stake in the result, and thus, the museum. A model that continuously provides a better visitor experience through these feedback loops would certainly go a long way toward placing the museum in a better light in the public’s eye. The Critical Assessment Framework developed by Worts is a resource that museums should consult if they are finding difficulty “measuring the cultural needs, as well as the impacts of their programs, at individual, community, and institutional levels.”[1] Once these questions are at the forefront of a museum’s mind, then the execution of the planning of programs with expressed goals toward community involvement can take form. It will depend on the type and size of the museum to what extent and to what shape community engagement will take. So much the better if they are able to offer a multitude of volunteer opportunities which satisfies visitors wishing for a simply level of involvement all the way through fostering co-creative exhibits. The museum must ask their public, “what are the community’s needs, and in what way can we help you achieve their resolution?”

This idea of a wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy, to an institution which holds no use of value to people of lower income or social status is exactly the type of rhetoric which museums must consciously work to overcome. What can each individual connected with the museum do to best alleviate these barriers? How can we advocate for the necessity of museums to the government as well as the public? What do the budget cuts take away that Mr. and Mrs. Public feel are more necessary than the museum?

One statistic that has stood out to me was that among those individuals who make museums an integral part of their lifestyle, “Nearly all have a distinct memory of a specific, seminal museum experience, usually between the ages of 5 and 9.”[2] This highlights the importance of effective educational programming aimed at children. As Beverly Sheppard suggests, museums should work with local schools, even if they are doing the lion’s share of the work, in order to create viable regular programming that connects the two.[3] The economic state that has thrown the Public family into distress has most likely affected their children’s education as well.  If after school activities have been reduced, perhaps the museum could look into starting a regular afternoon activity session for school-aged children. Action should be taken on the part of the museum to ensure that its full capabilities are able to be taken advantage of by the young members of the surrounding society. The Smithsonian Latino Center provides scholarships and internships for its widespread constituency. If funds are to be given museums, the public needs to see that they are redistributed by as many means possible.

I hope that the museum I represent can provide the level of local relevance of the Pearl Button Museum. A place that incites memory from residents and provides a useful physical space to support the community. No one should feel excluded from a museum, or feel that its holdings are so far from one’s own interests as to have little possible effect on their life. As Lord demonstrated with his interaction with prison inmates at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a present and meaningful relevance can be found for anyone, so long as it is sought. Museums must devote creative energy to finding these connections within their collections.

Museums will hopefully continue on the trajectory of becoming a recognized place for everyone’s benefit, regardless of economic wealth or social standing. I would hope through (continual) positive interactions, we could prove the worth of art, history, and science to everyone. This will be accomplished when everyone has had the opportunity to experience the full potential that each of these mediums has to enrich the quality of human existence and life. Rather than offering this up as a platitude,[4] I hope it can one day become a reality felt by all.

[1] Worts, D. “Measuring Museum Meaning: A Critical Assessment Framework.” Journal of Museum Education 31(1). 2006: 47.

[2] Merritt, Elizabeth. Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures. American Association of Museums.  2008. http://www.aam-us.org/docs/center-for-the-future-ofmuseums/museumssociety2034.pdf.

[3] Sheppard, Beverly. “Insistent Questions in Our Learning Age.  Journal of Museum Education, (35): 3, 218.

[4] Connolly, Robert. “Labor Day and the Cultural Heritage Professional.”  Archaeology, Museums, and Outreach Blog. 2012. https://rcnnolly.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/labor-day-and-the-cultural-heritage-professional/.

 

Contact Emily at emcoate(at)memphis.edu

More on Museum Relevance in 2017

For the past few years, half of the final exam in my Museum Practices graduate seminar in the Museum Studies Program at the University of Memphis consists of responding to the following:

Put yourself in the position of John or Josephine Q. Public. In the current economic chaos, the bank is foreclosing on their home, they have lost their jobs, and the city just reduced their public services. In referring to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the House Budget Committee recently argued that “The activities and content funded by these agencies…are generally enjoyed by people of higher income levels, making them a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.” Isn’t your research or the position you aspire to a museum professional just another example of this wealth transfer? What do John and Josephine Q. Public get for their tax dollars that fund your research/position?

This year, Jessica Johnson, a December graduate of the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program wrote a compelling response that is particularly apt for the current socio-political climate in the U.S.  Here is his essay:

I was once told that art is the product of what a society thinks of itself and wants others to see, but historical artifacts were the reality of a society. The two outputs of any society are intricately intertwined to create an entire picture. Traditionally, museums were more appealing to the wealthier class as a leisurely activity, but as museums constantly strive to validate their own existence, this statement is becoming more outdated and naïve. This is not to say there is no validity to it because many institutions still struggle with their purpose and mission, and translating those goals into actual, beneficial, tangible ways of providing for their community.

As an emerging, young museum professional I ask myself the same variety of questions as Mr. and Mrs. John and Josephine Q. Public. Why does what I do matter? It matters to me, but I have the personality and innate love of museums that makes me completely bias. However, what I do does not matter in the least bit if it does not matter to the people of whom we are researching and maintaining their history. Despite the arguments, however valid, that museums must balance budget with best practices, and outreach and advocacy with factual knowledge, the bottom line still remains: Why are we important enough to keep? I personally feel that museums are far too quick to congratulate themselves when they have done something that falls into the category of “outreach” or “community engagement.” The complications that must be balanced in museum life are hard and time consuming. However, I doubt any museum professional is required to spend 4+ years in school, only to not be able to handle the hard, time consuming tasks, while still constantly striving to fortify the reason for a museum’s existence. We as professionals know why, we feel why, we work every day towards why, but we have to remember that we still have much farther to go when it comes to convincing other people why museums actually matter.

Perhaps my specialization within my field, or the time I spent researching something only to have the accomplishment of adding to the general, scholarly pool of knowledge, can be deemed this transfer of wealth. However, once that is through, once myself and other young professionals and continuing museum professionals are interacting with their communities, this statement is far less true. Our training is applied to handling objects, but it is also applied to teaching people, caring for our surroundings, becoming relevant and interacting with the public on a local and global scale.

The tax dollars teach professionals how to care for the history, culture, and ability to learn about things that would have otherwise disappeared long ago, and do so for the people that pay their tax dollars. The research/position we do is justifying the tax dollars spent by helping citizens gain the ability to reconnect with history, to learn from history and, like suggested, empower people (Connolly 2012) and give them a sense of pride about their history and their community. But more so than that, research/position brings to light a sense of purpose about how far our society has come, and how far we still have to go.  Our research grounds citizens in the common thread that is all of our human existences. Our society often divides people, puts them into categories and groups based on a multitude of factors and occasionally, so do museum classifications. But the bigger picture, the Big Idea as it were, is that what is highlighted in museums, whether it be expression, creativity, perseverance, culture, history, applies to every person on a fundamental level; reminding us that we are all the same. This is something that is often forgotten, but can be the cornerstone for so much growth and cooperation.

Museums are constantly striving to interact with their community on all economic levels. To fight against the stigma that museums are only for the wealthy who have the free time to leisurely stroll through priceless works of art. There are so many more museums that chronicle racial inequality, the struggle of the misfortune, the history of our country. Through heavy subjects such as these, to art made simply for pleasure and viewing, museums cannot only help these individuals on an emotional level by allowing them a safe haven to get away from their troubles for a short amount of time, but are striving to tangibly help people. For example, the San Francisco Public Library helped their community by hiring the homeless people that often took refuge within their walls, and even provided contact with a mental health specialist (Goldberg 2016). This example is just one of many where museums are fulfilling their ability to cast a “ripple effect” (Simon: 2012) through their surroundings, whether it be creating a thriving downtown area, or being a draw for businesses and home owners. I know that as professionals entrusted with providing our relevance and caring for collections, we still have much to prove. However, we are on a constant path toward giving back as much as our societies have given it us.

Jess can be reached at jjhnsn78(at)memphis.edu

Museums and Relevance in 2017

H. Doug McQuirter

For the past few years, half of the final exam in my Museum Practices graduate seminar in the Museum Studies Program at the University of Memphis consists of responding to the following:

Put yourself in the position of John or Josephine Q. Public. In the current economic chaos, the bank is foreclosing on their home, they have lost their jobs, and the city just reduced their public services. In referring to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the House Budget Committee recently argued that “The activities and content funded by these agencies…are generally enjoyed by people of higher income levels, making them a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.” Isn’t your research or the position you aspire to a museum professional just another example of this wealth transfer? What do John and Josephine Q. Public get for their tax dollars that fund your research/position?

This year, Doug McQuirter, a graduate student in the History Department wrote a compelling response that is particularly apt for the current socio-political climate in the U.S.  Here is his essay:

The specter of hyper-capitalism Robert Janes (2009), the malignant fast capitalism warned of by Randall H. McGuire’s Archaeology as Political Action (2008), or any of the political positions espoused by the Paul Ryan House of Representatives espouse a knee-jerk reaction against any form of wealth transfer from the wealthy to the poor. However, this statement turns the argument on its head; a reverse Robin Hood, transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. It is a brilliantly framed obfuscation of anti-intellectualist thought. How better to sell fund-cutting than to present it as protecting the poor from egghead intellectuals and their myriad ways of burning money with pointless research.

Social scientists are in the same tough position that history and humanities researchers are in, namely, they are not curing diseases or building rocket ships, so who cares if Richard III is found in a parking lot or if Nat Turner suffered from mental illness. Non-STEM research, and for the terms of this question, museum/anthropological research is crucial for studying social cohesion and resolving the problems of the past. Museums provide learning but also leisure for all. If Josephine Q. Public is not a museumgoer, then this is going to be a tough sell. Museums, after all, do not cure diseases. However, the intellectual stimulation that museums provide, no matter how abstract it may seem at first glance, is crucial to the health and well-being of the community and greater society. Seeing the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum can be a simple stop-and-glance, but it can also be a target of a field trip for fifth graders learning about war and its cruelty. Viewing the ceremonial clothes at Chucalissa could be something to give cursory attention, but it might also trigger vivid memories of a family member for a burgeoning fiction writer. These are the hard-to-grasp reasons why people must go to museums, and this is why tax dollars must continue to fund them.

Museums for the most part provide an optional, supplementary role in education. They are an option. They provide extra context. Nothing about museums requires one to go. The Ferrell and Medvedeva reading (2010) point to reasons why minority populations do not visit museums. The population is changing, and those who are becoming more prominent do not visit. This must change and ideas need to flow on how to include underrepresented groups. Nevertheless, assimilation of immigrant communities does not occur without bringing their stories and histories into the grand narrative. Museums provide the structure to present these histories. The Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration exemplifies a successful insertion of telling the immigrants’ stories.

Why should museums use tax dollars then? Robert Janes put it best by stating that museums are public sector but they are increasingly reliant on private sector means (2009: 16). If museums received more money from state and federal outlays, then one could easily bet that they would give up the private-sector development game. That would be true with anyone, but museums do not produce widgets, nor do they involve a great amount of personal interactions with many other people. Tours can successfully cope with one or two docents. Therefore, there is not much overhead to speak of in the average one-room county historical society museum. Unless they are the Met or the Getty, they are not going to generate income on name alone. They are not public companies, beholden to shareholders. They are about as public as one can get without being a government agency. They conserve and present national treasures, products of human ingenuity, and bravely examine social problems. If the hyper-capitalist’s run their ideas to their logical conclusions, then there would only be a few museums that presented historical documents and objects more in the style of the National Archive, only fee-based. It would be pay-as-you-go. Objects would be in storage to save money, only to come out if someone wanted to view it and pay a fee. Ferrell and Medvedeva’s research on future trends would be rendered useless, as very few people, other than those with time and money would want to go through the bother of this. Museums, therefore, establish and maintain the sanctity of citizenship, by creating and maintaining a healthy dissent and critique of the grand narratives that drove this country for so long. A worry for the future is that people are not going to care about these critiques, and live in their pseudo-historical fantasies and conspiracies. Museums that practice critical thinking and are socially activist are a way to counter these dangerous practices and habits. They are also pressure release valves for dissenters and skeptics of the official grand narrative. While Josephine Q. Public, for example, may be politically opposed to the mission of the National Civil Rights Museum, its existence and its attempts to demarginalize the history of civil rights and bring it to the foreground of the narrative is healthy and necessary for social cohesion. She would be hard pressed to argue with that.

References

Farrell, Betty and Maria Medvedeva. 2010. Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museum. American Association of Museums.

Janes, Robert R. 2009. “Museums and Irrelevance.” In Museums in a Troubled World. Routledge.

McGuire, Randall H. 2008. Archaeology as Political Action. University of California Press.

 

Contact Doug at hdmcqrtr(at)memphis.edu

Public Accountability in Cultural Heritage Studies – Now More Than Ever.

Public or Applied Archaeology will play an increasingly important role in presenting and preserving cultural heritage of the United States in the coming period.  As readers of this blog are aware, I advocate for demonstrating the public relevance of archaeology and museums.  With a future certainty that discretionary spending will be increasingly cut, cultural heritage programs that best demonstrate their utility to the public, will stand the best chance of surviving.

Below are several links that show how this might work, first around the issue of metal detecting:

• Maureen Malloy, Manager of Public Education at the Society for American Archaeology is the lead author on a paper that evaluates the SAA role in advising on the National Geographic Channels Diggers program.  The reality cable tv show featured avocational metal detectorists, often considered by professional archaeologists as a significant bane to their existence.  Maureen presented the paper, Diggers Evaluating Diggers: A Collaboration between SAA and the National Geographic Channel, at last year’s SAA Annual meeting in Orlando.  In the paper, Maureen and her co-authors trace the evolution of Diggers, demonstrating the positive impact that professional archaeologists were able to bring to the show’s content.  The paper effectively argues for an engaged presence as a means to increase attention and action on the archaeological concerns in such programming.
• Matthew Reeves presented the SAA Webinar Working With Metal Detectorists: Citizen Science at Historic Montpelier and Engaging a New Constituency.  Matt discusses the training program for the Montpelier detectorists and their work at the Montpelier site.  The webinar is available for free to SAA members here.  If you are not an SAA member but would like access to the webinar, drop me a note to see about making arrangements.  Matt also recently published an article on the subject that provides considerable detail on the Montpelier project.
• The SAA For the Public webpages has a resource link dedicated to metal detecting and includes articles such as Reality Television and Metal Detecting: Let’s Be Part of the Solution and Not Add to the Problem by Giovanna Peebles.  The page contains nearly two dozen other links on metal detecting, public engagement, and related legal issues.
• I would be remiss if I did not note the BBC comedy The Detectorists that is available on Netflix.

A couple of other recent links relevant to public archaeology include:

• Elizabeth Reetz, chair of the SAA’s Public Education Committee, recently posted a PowerPoint file Effectively Communicating Archaeology to the Public In Three Minutes or Less that contains information about advocacy work in archaeology.  Of particular value, Elizabeth’s presentation addresses a point raised in Maureen’s SAA paper – how archaeologists and the public often talk on two different levels with two different sets of vocabularies and expectations.  Elizabeth’s presentation is a great way to kick off a discussion on launching an advocacy campaign.  And speaking of advocacy, check the Resource Guide for the just published volume I edited with Beth Bollwerk, Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset.  The Guide contains over 30 Advocacy links to better guide public engagement in cultural heritage work.
• Finally Doug’s Archaeology recently posted a set of videos of papers on Community Archaeology from a recent conference of The Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, the leading professional body representing archaeologists working in the UK.  The papers address and evaluate a diversity of community-based cultural heritage projects.

What other resources will you use to demonstrate the relevance of your cultural heritage projects funded by the public we are meant to serve? 

 

 

 

 

Museums Working with Communities: The Book

I am pleased to announce that my colleague Beth Bollwerk and I have a new book that will be available in the coming weeks –  Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset: A Practical Guide, published by Rowman and Littlefield Press.  You can pre-order a copy at a 30% discount by using the promotional code RLFANDF30.  The extensive Resource Guide of the book is available now online (and at no cost).

So why is this book different from other titles on how museums strive to be engaged with the communities they serve? Our new book is explicitly a “how to guide” for museums to integrate themselves into their communities.  Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset: A Practical Guide, is not meant to convince the reader of the need for that integration. We consider that need a settled matter.  We envision this book within the framework of museums co-creating with their communities. We do not envision this co-creation as museums simply being more attuned to community needs. Co-creation means making a commitment to working with a community to address those needs.

We consider this volume as the instruction manual for our previously edited volumes that discussed the concept of co-creation for cultural heritage professionals and museums. In 2012 we published Open(ing) Authority Through Community Engagement, that provided a theoretical overview and ten case studies on co-creation with museums and their communities. In 2015, we published Co-creation in the Archaeological Record that brought the discussion squarely to fieldwork, curation, and interpretation in the discipline of archaeology along with another set of case studies.

In our application of co-creation we prioritize acting on the public’s expressed needs and interests.  To simplify that process we rely on Dana’s mandate in The New Museum written one century ago – “Learn what aid the community needs: fit the museum to those needs”   Our new volume fills the methodological and logistical gap in acting on Dana’s mandate. For example, our experience over the past several years demonstrates that for many museums, particularly smaller ones, the ability to carry out a community oral history project that can be curated online with universal access, or creating a new low-cost exhibit based on important community curated collections are often not considered possible because of finances, staffing, or other constraints. At the same time, over that same time period, we have encountered dozens of projects that overcame these obstacles and implemented such community-driven engagement work.

Drawing on that experience, this volume does not discuss the relevance or need for museums to engage with their communities. Instead, our contributors introduce specific themes of engagement, supported by applied case studies. The volume themes and case studies are particularly relevant to small and medium-sized cultural heritage venues with a limited or even no full-time staff. Our contributors to this book were also certain their “how to” projects could be completed for $1500.00 or less to assure that cost was not a prohibitive factor.

Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset: A Practical Guide is organized into six sections. Each section begins with a thematic discussion relevant to a museum’s engagement with the community they serve. Each thematic discussion is followed by four or five case study applications.   The Table of Contents listed below shows the diversity of case studies presented that range from rural Peru to the urban Upper Midwest of the United States.  The final section of the book links to an extensive online Resource Guide that will be regularly updated.  We were selective about the links included in the Resource Guide.  We chose not to include so many entries such that the reader could not tell the forest for the trees.  Instead we carefully selected those resources of particular relevance to small and medium-sized cultural heritage venues aligned with the focus of our volume’s contributors.

Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset: A Practical Guide is a book that demonstrates any museum, regardless of size, staffing, or financial resources, can engage with their communities in a vibrant and co-creative way. We truly believe that when museums and communities co-create together those cultural heritage venues will serve as valuable community partners that must be preserved and maintained.

Order your copy today at the 30% off with the discount code RLFANDF30.

 

 

Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset: A Practical Guide

Table of Contents

Introduction- Robert P. Connolly and Elizabeth A. Bollwerk

Part 1 – Communities Making Meaning in Museum Education – Jody Stokes Casey

Case Studies

1. Developing High School Curriculum: The C.H. Nash Museum and Freedom Prep Charter School Project – Nur Abdalla and Lyndsey Pender
2. Creating a Museum in a School: Cultural Heritage in Nivín, Perú– Gustavo Valencia Tello and Elizabeth Cruzado
3. Meeting Teacher Needs: Digital Collections in the Classroom – Shana Crosson
4. Using Postcard Collections as a Primary Resource in the Classroom – Brian Failing
5. Words, Stone, Earth, and Paint: Using Creative Writing to Engage a Community with Its Museum – Mary Anna Evans

Part 2 – The Value of Open(ing) Authority and Participatory Frameworks for Museums – Elizabeth A. Bollwerk

Case Studies

1. Oral History For, About, and By a Local Community: Co-Creation in the Peruvian Highlands – Elizabeth Cruzado and Leodan Alejo Valerio
2. Working with a Private Collector to Strengthen Women’s History: Sewall-Belmont House & Museum – Rebecca Price.
3. Reconnecting a University Museum Collection with Hopi Farmers through an Undergraduate Class– Lisa Young and Susan Sekaquaptewa
4. Our Stories, Our Places: Centering the Community as Narrative Voice in the Reinterpretation of an African American Historic Site – Porchia Moore

Part 3 – Advocacy for Heritage Professionals During the Crisis and the Calm – Sarah E. Miller

Case Studies

1. Making Advocacy Everyone’s Priority – Ember Farber
2. Impact Statements – Demonstrating a Museum’s Public Value – Robert P. Connolly
3. Small Fish, Big Pond: How to Effectively Advocate in Your Community – Melissa Prycer

Part 4 – Museums Engaging With People As A Community Resource – Robert P. Connolly

Case Studies

1. Taking Steps to Make a Museum Special Needs Friendly – Colleen McCartney
2. Incorporating Descendent Community Voices: The Whitney Plantation – Ashley Rogers
3. How Community Input Can Shape a Mission: The Proposed Eggleston Museum – Allison Hennie
4. Building a Community History at the University of the West Indies Museum – Suzanne Francis-Brown
5. Telling Our Town’s History: The Muscatine History and Industry Center – Mary Wildermuth
6. Working to Address Community Needs: The Missouri History Museum – Melanie Adams

Part 5 – Engaging User Audiences in the Digital Landscape – Brigitte Billeaudeaux and Jennifer Schnabel

Case Studies

1. Creating a Digital Library for Community Access: A. Schwab on Beale Street – Brigitte Billeaudeaux
2. Separating the Glitz from the Practical in Social Media at the National Underground Railroad Museum – Jamie Glavic and Assia Johnson
3. How a Simple, Inexpensive Podcast Engaged an Entire Community: Chick History, Inc – Rebecca Price
4. Recording the Neglected Sports Stories From the Backside – Holly Solis
5. Small Museum Website Creation with a Limited Staff and Budget: The Arden Craft Shop Museum – Kelsey Ransick

Part 6 – Resource Guide

The Space of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion – Lima, Peru

For this post, I start by noting that I am not Peruvian and I have no desire to mess in that sovereign nation’s affairs.  I write from the perspective of a cultural heritage professional. This is my review of El Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (The Space of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion), located in Lima, Peru.

The role of jailed former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori plays prominently in The Space interpretation of events.

The Space serves as a museum, cultural center, place of reconciliation and reflection on the Shining Path’s reign of terror in Peru from the 1980s through 2000.  Here are some of my takeaways:

• The presentation is impressive throughout the three floors of The Space.  The story is told principally through panel text and image displays along with a substantive but not overwhelming distribution of video stations.  My three-hour visit allowed a sufficient amount of time to view and absorb most of the exhibits.  My Spanish is good enough to understand all that I was reading.  I assumed, as always, that a museum has its own point of view that excludes other perspectives.  However, when I asked my Peruvian hosts about the potential bias, they believed the presentation was representative of multiple perspectives.  In fact, the very creation of the museum was eclipsed by several years of controversy to maximize inclusion.
• The Space contains many of the hallmarks of other “museum of conscious” type of venues such as the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.  For example, visitors pick up small booklets that contain information about the lives of those assassinated or disappeared over the twenty-year period.  A memory board allows visitors to comment directly about specific individuals or the relatives of the disappeared.  Large flat screen displays feature the oral histories of individuals impacted by the Shining Path activities.  The second floor leads to a spacious reflection area.  The third floor includes a gallery of contemporary artwork on the period along with walls of mementos brought by families of the disappeared.

• 

  Mementos from the Disappeared.

  A departure from similar museums I have visited is a free admission to The Space, making the venue accessible to anyone who is able to get to Lima.  I was struck as well that although the museum very effectively tells the story of Shining Path, contextualized within the poverty and oppression of rural Peru, quite clearly, the focus of the venue is as a place of reflection and reconciliation for Peruvians.

Memory Board

I found the experience of visiting the museum quite humbling.  I learned another part of the story of the rural Quechua village where I spend a portion of my summers of late.  I had always known that the community was founded in part based on attempts to escape the Shining Path war, but The Space helped me to better understand and appreciate the lives of my Peruvian friends in both the Andes and Lima.

If in Lima, The Space of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion is definitely worth the visit for both the story and method of the telling.