Museum Learning Talk at Powerhouse Museum

Gave a talk at the Powerhouse Museum (PHM) today as part of their talks after noon seminar series. Was great to get back to the doctorate and remember why I got interested in this topic in the first place. My slides have been uploaded to Slideshare and chapters of the thesis are online here.

I co-presented with Helen Whitty from the PHM who gave a talk a titled Public programs: Snake oil merchants or Museum professional? Helen is always a great speaker and some points I took from her talk were:

• Experience of the museum not just the exhibitions
  
• 'Public programs are the links between the museum and its audience' (MacLulich, 1994)
  
• Look at not what the public program is but what it does – for example is it a destination event; a signature program; a fixed/ongoing program linked to permanent exhibition; or special programs linked to temporary exhibitions?
  
• Penfold, an early PHM Director, in 1939 was scathing about museums as 'dead places' and suggested museums should move to retail practices – he suggested that visitors should leave a museum having 'bought' something
  
• What do the public actually want from a museum? Helen spoke about findings from a PHM study which found that half of those surveyed wanted 'learning' and half wanted 'pleasure' in their leisure time
  
• Perceived dichotomy between education and entertainment is now an old framework, it's now about how we approach our learners and about putting our visitors at the centre (hear-hear Helen!! That's what I found in my research too)
  

All in all a good session and thanks for organising it Rita and Jana.

Learning vs education vs entertainment??

This question popped up from Ken at lunch yesterday: What are visitors seeking from cultural attractions in terms of education and/or entertaining experiences? Can these co-exist?

Well Ken, since you don't want to read my thesis online, or even Chapter 7 which answers these questions I will summarise it for you here. Watch out for a future edition of Curator where these findings will be published in more detail.

When comparing the concepts of learning, education and entertainment four differences emerged:

• the general language used to explain each concept differed, with more active words used to talk about learning, such as discovering, exploring, applying and experiencing and participants describing education in more concrete ways
  
• previous research established that people had generally negative views of education as a passive process over which they had no control, yet in my study negative views of education expressed emanated from a perceived lack of choice
  
• although there were differences in the language used to describe these concepts, there was still an appreciation of the role that education played in both acquiring facts and information, and in delivering learning, and unlike some of the studies reviewed in the literature, education was not seen as necessarily negative, just different
  
• in contrast to learning and education, descriptions of entertainment included words and phrases that were based on feelings and emotions.
  

I suggested that the museum environment allows the concepts of learning, education and entertainment to closely overlap in positive ways as shown in the diagram below. Overall I concluded that learning, entertainment and education are not competing concepts or opposites — they are complementary. Museums should not be concerned about their entertainment value and role, as results indicated that adult visitors felt that entertainment added to learning, not detracted from it, and overall, museums should promote themselves as places for enjoyable and entertaining learning experiences.

The relationship between learning, education and entertainment

Lifelong Learning Symposium

What a full day of fascinating papers delivered by passionate people! I took a wad of notes, so will report here on the main points as I saw them.
David's paper was (as always) a broad sweep of the intellectual and the practical. He suggested that we need to tackle barriers of poverty, education disadvantage, disabilities and other issues facing older peole. He reminded us that museums can still be seen as elitist places and that we need to cater for all audiences and not spend too much time always segmenting.
The thing I enjoyed abut Marie's talk was the emphasis on learning as pleasure, fun and enjoyment - words we often forget to relate to musuems! The NGI is running some amazing programs, not just for older audiences - one I think is really innovative is the young mothers tours.
Des's talk ranged widely, reminding us that often with ageing we focus on the negative rather than the positive. The ageing population shouldn't be seen as a problem to be solved but as a "demographic bounty" to be used. He cited many, many examples of creativity in older life - apart from artists and classical composers we also saw images of Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney! The three aspects regarding ageing he mentioned were:

• the positives - the creativity, wisdom and life experience of older people
  
• inter-individual variability and the need to have a wide palette - all older people are not the same and there is more variation between two 80 year olds as between two 40 year olds
• reduced reserve - therefore providing spaces to relax, recharge and contemplate are required
  

He reminded us that the majority of older people are fit, heatlty and contributing, however those that are sick do tend to have more complex health issues. He also gave us a nice quote (didn't get the author but worth reproducing): "If you design for the old you include the young, if you design for the young you exclude the old". The overall message I got was to have a complex palette on offer and design for all.
Catherine's talk on vounteering was full of information. The remarks she made about the 21st century volunteer were very salient - that they are looking for an experience and added-value and that there are so many more opportunities to volunteer now (I have seen the increase of volunteer tourism for example). She challenged us to remember that volunteers are changing so are we trying to fit them into a 20th century volunteer model or are we trying to change?
There were other papers and a great discussion at the end - too much to digest now, but overall a great success I feel.
Just a reminder that my paper is here