The Value of Museums for Inquiry and Information Literacy

 Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the Shofuso House in Philadelphia. The house was a gift to the United States from Japan in the 1950s. As I listened to the docent speak, I was very conscious about the wide range of information I was receiving and questions that I had about it. I thought about the context of the gift, the considerations the architect made during the design process, the current status of the facility, and numerous other factors about the institution. A museum experience, such as this one, provides a perfect opportunity for us to consider our thinking process, to reflect on how we build knowledge, and to challenge our inquiry skills.

As I explore and teach information literacy, I find myself wondering how others take in information. One can choose to look at the pretty Japanese garden and just enjoy the beauty, for example, but that only scratches the surface -- How big do Koi get? How do they survive the winter? How do they keep that tree pruned? Is a big pruned tree like that called a "Bonsai" tree or is that just little trees? From where did all these visitors here today come? How many gardens in the United States were gifted to us by Japan? How about other nations? Do the United States ever gift gardens to other countries? How do these gardens help us cross cultural boundaries? What does a natural paradise such as this one mean to the citizens of this area?

Objects are underutilized in the classroom to encourage inquiry and I would like that to change. I have written before about the value of objects for education. I have encouraged my museum colleagues to partner with others to introduce their objects to teachers and students, but some of the burden needs to be placed with educators too. Cultural heritage institutions exist, in part, to help you with your mission to educate. Think about the following:

• What kinds of objects will make your students more curious? 
• What kinds of questions do you want your kids to ask? 
• What connections between curriculum and "real world" should your kids be making? 
• What information links should they be forming to better understand contexts and develop information literacy skills?  
• What museums are in your area that can help?

School librarians, consider how you can use objects and museums to enhance your information literacy curriculum. How can you use object as a launching point into larger contexts? How can you relate objects to the written word? How can objects enhance the critical thinking skills you teach as an information specialist?

Information literacy involves layers of knowing and inquiry. It is our challenge as educators and keepers of objects to consider these layers, and to get our students/patrons to consider them too.

School Library and Museum Collaboration

Museums and schools should be natural partners. So, when I began working at a high school library three-and-a-half years ago, one of the first things I did was seek out an institution willing to try something a little different. My goals were mainly twofold:

• Promote hands-on learning and STEAM / Makerspace education in my town, while showing students the value of collaboration 
• Promote museum educational programs and outreach

Students check out the 3D printer that will
be used to build drone parts. It was acquired thanks
to a museum education grant that included our school.

I was willing to work with any type of museum, with the hope that this project will expand and perhaps involve multiple museums in the future. In July 2014, I met with a like-minded science museum director in my area to discuss ideas about a potential collaboration. This winter, our partnership and year-and-a-half of planning is resulting in a project launch with my high school teens. I have described our project on Donor's Choose as follows:


Our first collaborative project is to design and build a drone. The project will help students gather and evaluate information. It will support innovation, creativity and critical thinking. With the help of the librarian, administration, teachers, and museum staff, it will allow students to become comfortable with collaboration and communicating with experts. Students will work within a budget, create an engineering project plan, build a drone kit and modify the drone with CAD and a 3D printer, create a documentary about the experience, design a web site, write articles for the school paper and other media outlets outside of our walls and deliver presentations about our work.

This project is open to all students and will cater to varied interests and abilities.

Students will engage in authentic learning, picking up skills that will serve them in a 21st century world. Furthermore, the project will boost our sense of community due to its large-scale collaborative nature. We hope that this will serve as a model for other non-formal learning opportunities. [Donor's Choose, 2016]

In my original planning document I state the following: 

Students are invited to learn in an environment that distinguishes itself from the traditional classroom experience - to explore, to be creative and to discover new ways of thinking. We aim to make our school a model for community learning that brings informational and cultural tools from around the world into our educational space.

We see collaboration as an important part of our learning experience. Collaboration gives us more ways to access information. It enables us to rely on group diversity to accomplish tasks. It gives us multiple perspectives for more efficiently solving problems. Collaboration can help us grow ideas, stretch our minds, and garner new tools for information seeking behaviors.

• We aim to make learning fun and to connect it to the real world.
• We aim to help students adapt to different ways of communication, exploration, inquiry, and evaluation of information using diverse low and high tech tools.
• We aim to help students understand that you learn for a lifetime.
• We aim to show students that success relates to caring about something, getting involved, and following through with an idea from inception to completion. [GHS/McAuliffe Shepard Partnership, 2015]

 ...In fact, these points are what libraries are all about in the 21st century:

We most effectively reach our audience to convey these concepts and provide these opportunities through collaboration. I believe that such school and museum partnerships should be the model for the 21st century to the benefit of both institutions.

The Compassion Economy

The New Year is always a good time for reflection on yourself and the world around you. I have been thinking a lot over the past few years about my work, its meaning to me, to those around me, and to the world. Today I address the role of, and try to assign new meaning to, being a librarian, archivist, or museum professional in 2016.

Information and cultural heritage professionals have been grappling for about a decade now over what it means to be part of the following:

• the knowledge economy
• the information economy
• the creative economy (See bottom of page for definitions of each)

I propose that there is another economic role for professionals in our line of work. We are part of the "compassion economy." My idea of this economy is one in which we aim to help others with the effect of helping ourselves. (I was struck by a recent TED radio hour talk that dovetails nicely with this idea.)

As a fourth year teacher-librarian in a public high school, who is also working to attain a post-grad degree in education, I have recently learned a lot about the process of learning. There are few jobs that I know of that require the kind of compassion that one must muster to be surrounded by 1200 teenage students day in and out. We deal with hormones, insecurities, family problems, socio-economic issues, and feelings of confinement with a burgeoning desire for adult freedom. ("I can do whatever I want! I'm 18 now you know!!) As a librarian, I do not usually assign grades. I (mostly) do not have a set curriculum to teach. My job centers around compassion and I would like to suggest that if you are a librarian of any sort, an archivist, or if you work in a museum, your job centers around this too.

Not the school where I teach, but a nice one nonetheless

We live in a time when information is exploding. As information professionals, we help others gather the data they need in this information economy. We have knowledge about how to get more knowledge, and we have collections at our disposal to help us impart that knowledge to others. These same collections help young entrepreneurs change our world in creative ways, taking old ideas and giving them new life. Furthermore, our newly developed understanding of the need to supply makerspaces for patrons and museum-goers, and our resolve to design exhibits and programs that encourage questioning, relate to the role we play in the creative economy. Whereas in the past we cared for collections, steered users to catalogs, and left them taking away what they would, today we encourage discussion right in our institutions. We look for feedback on social media. We want our patrons to be part of our institutional family and not merely visitors to our professional worlds.

Despite all this, I have begun thinking that we librarians, archivists, and curators can see ourselves as a hub for compassion above and beyond all else.

• We give people the learning tools that they need to make the world a better place (economically and socially) - the knowledge and know-how.
• We can also give people the emotional tools they need to make the world a better place - the can-do attitude and sense of place and belonging necessary for personal and professional betterment.
• We are part of an individual's support team, helping them grow, assisting them in numerous ways to help them reach their full potential.

Students work in our library Makerspace

But we do this job not for  purely altruistic reasons as the moniker "compassion economy" might suggest. Our work is also self-seeking. Museums, libraries, and archives make this world a better place because of our collections, know-how, and ability to reflect the success and failures of our past. Society needs to have access to these things so that humanity may pick itself up by its boot straps, as it were, and propel itself to greater things. We understand that the intellectually designed artifacts created by human beings are improved from diversity and our sensitivity to it. Understanding of individual achievement leads members of civilization to build on the work of others. As professionals, by supporting creation and by showing "compassion" for all people who have potential to build upon old ideas, librarians, archivists, and museum professionals are helping to build the future.

***

For the knowledge economy See:  (http://web.stanford.edu/group/song/papers/powell_snellman.pdf)

For the information economy see (http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Dec-94/branscom.html)

For the creative economy see the always very interesting Richard Florida http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-florida/creativity-is-the-new-eco_b_1608363.html

See also:

Debjani Kanjilal, Azam M. Bejou & David Bejou. (2012). “Compassion: The Missing Link in Economics and Management.” Journal of Relationship Marketing.

TED Radio Hour.  Just a Little Nicer. NPR.  (podcast) December 4, 2015.

Wuthnow, Robert. (1991) Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves. NJ: Princeton University Press.

A Sturbridge Village Learning Experience

The girls enjoy some candy and fudge in front of a gift shop at Old Sturbridge Village

This week, I took my daughter and her friend to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. The Village is the largest living history museum in New England on over 200 acres of land. It recreates an 1830s New England community with over 40 structures that include a general store, mills, homes, barns,  workshops, a school,  and more. The girls accompanying me were twelve-years of age and are about to dive into American History this fall as seventh graders. Our little trip gave them a taste of some of what they will learn, but the main lesson for my daughter surprised me.

The girls were disappointed with the beds of straw, but were enamored with the cozy wallpapered bedrooms. The cramped quarters in the stagecoach made us appreciate my car even more. They liked some of the outfits, but were glad that they did not have to wear them on a hot date. They enjoyed the games, but were not happy that they would be spending so much time at the age of twelve doing chores instead of playing.

Early in the visit, my daughter asked if she could have been artist during this time. I explained that art was a profession for very, very few and those few would not be from a village like this. If you lived in a city you may be exposed to art as she knows it, but not really on a rural farm. You would not be able to afford art supplies. You would not have had the time to practice drawing. And so, my daughter's thoughts turned to, "What profession could I have had in the 1830s?"

I have talked to my daughter about how much life changed for women in the 20th century. I told her about how when I was a kid, I was told that I could not run a steeplechase race that I really wanted to compete in because I was not a boy. I told her how much it annoyed me that our physics teacher often made points about physics by throwing baseballs to the boys in the class and not the girls. I told her about how grandma was turned away from her school entrance because she wore pants on a snowy day, even though she had a skirt in her bag for changing in the bathroom. But these are stories. These were my stories. Sturbridge Village helped us turn these stories into part of my daughter's own narrative when she was better able to apply what I've told her to herself.

The female interpreters in Sturbridge were sewing, caring for animals, baking and caring for the gardens. My daughter, who is an avid writer, wanted to visit the print shop. The girls hung back and I asked a lot of questions (trying to be a good role model.) "How did they make paper?... What was the ink made out of?" As we left, my daughter asked me if women could do that work. "I don't know" (Yes, I did.) "Let's go back and ask."
Her face grew grim at the negative response we received from the interpreter. Women may have done a little typesetting to supplement the family income, but that would have been rare and it would not have truly been a job. Women worked in the home.

My daughter walked through the houses with new eyes. Early in our trip, she mentioned how she liked the parlors and that she would spend most of her time there drawing. Now, she looked at the kitchens. She had no interest in the rooms for sitting and sewing. "I could spend my time in the kitchen. This room is open. I think I could do my chores here [and be comfortable and happy.]

When the girls saw the school house, they decided to be teachers.  "We could have done this!" they yelled as they ran toward the door. "You can pretend your the teacher now. I'll be the student." "I'll teach you spanish!"

The schoolhouse was actually moved from a town near us in New Hampshire, so I mentioned that fact hoping it would help the girls even better place themselves in the past. They ran into the building and were greeted by an interpreter who was standing at the teacher's podium. We took seats on the benches. Asking questions, we learned that the kids of Sturbridge attended school in summer and winter. They learned on their own at their own pace, from their own books. The teacher tested them on their lessons, but did not "teach" as we know it today. Teachers were young people who probably had just finished their own schooling. Adults did not teach. Young ladies would have taught in the summertime, if they had the opportunity to do so. They may have taught one summer session and that would be it. Teaching was not a "career."

The thought that my daughter would not have had choices in the early nineteenth century was eye opening for her. At various times during the day she talked about running away to the city. She learned she would likely then work in a mill. (Not appealing.) She imagined hiding in the fields so she could have some alone time for a day. I told her that she would not have even considered this. She would have been raised differently from the start and this would just be the only way of life she knew. She similarly said that she would have been terrible at sewing. I told her that if I started her off sewing at the age of four that she would have been just fine at it.

Our visit to Sturbridge made the experience of nineteenth century American life come to life for the girls. My daughter in particular will never see her place in the world quite the same way again. Furthermore, this fall the kids will be able to look back on our trip to give them better context and understanding for all of their American History lessons. I think now they will be able to imagine themselves in the full narrative of our country's roots and with an understanding that as girls, their opportunities would have been greatly limited from the full scope of what they learn.

More Finds at the Local Antique Shop: Reading Photographs

Photographs without descriptions require us to more carefully examine what is in front of us than we ordinarily might. While text and narrative can help us better understand an image, lack of text can help us figure it out for ourselves.

When you go to a museum, do you run up and read the label copy or do you first examine the object and see what you can figure out on your own? I am aware that the procedure of viewing that I choose may change my whole experience. Do I want the expert to tell me what to see? Or, do I want to take my time to decipher an item and then verify it with what the label copy tells me?  If I have a limited time at a museum, I'll read the label copy first. If I can afford the time, I prefer the puzzle. Both ways help me learn. Both allow me to connect information I am given to what I already know, but one way is much more passive than the other.

Why does this matter?

As an educator, it matters very much for my teaching,

Look at this image I found last week at an antique shop. What can YOU tell ME about it?

My students tend to tell me things such as: That woman lived a long time ago or that woman is wealthy. Fine. But we can do better. Let's reevaluate. Let's teach them to read an image. 

"Wait a minute! How do you know that?" They will look again and I will say, "Tell me something simpler about this image, such as it's black and white. Is that one clue that this woman lived a long time ago? How do you know she's wealthy?"

A young person might say, "She is wearing fancy clothes and jewelry. That tells us she has some money. And we don't wear clothes like that now. That is another way we know this picture is old."

"Okay, what else? Do you think a photographer took this? Why or why not? Do you think that everyone could have afforded a photographer back then? Let's look more closely."

The image is mounted in a cardboard folio. The photograph is covered with a thin tissue and there is a ghost image on the other side. Most young people would not think about this at all if I didn't point it out. The ink from the photograph is acidic and creating the shadow on the other side. When I point things like this out to students, they tend to start thinking about their family's own photo collections. The "life" of the photograph becomes as important as the subject. How can we take better care of our things? What does preservation mean?

When students learn to "read" a photograph, it opens new worlds of exploration. Notice the glasses on this lady below. Notice the oval frame. Notice her dress and tie. Notice that this image is not just black and white, but it's also browning. Notice this woman isn't smiling. "Ms. Mannon, they never smile in old pictures! They always look so angry!" Why?

I often hear that kids are not curious about the past and they are not interested in their family's heirlooms. Is this because we hand kids information that they cannot relate to their own lives and their own knowledge? Is this also because we don't encourage them to ask questions? Do we not teach them how to be curious and how to "read" a photograph or an item? I find that kids do not even know what questions a photograph can pose; what mysteries does it hold? Who cares about this black and white image?

Museums and archives can do the same thing that we do in a classroom by re-writing label copy to engage a younger generation. (Local historical societies, this is a good way for you especially to re-think your displays.)

Teach kids to ask:

What do you see? Is this something you would see today?

Teach kids to wonder:

Why does it look this way? Why are these people not smiling? Why is this image black and white? Why are these people dressed this way? Where are these people? Who are these people?

Teach kids to be curious:

Where and how can I find out more? Is it possible to figure out who these people are?

When we read a photograph, we may begin to see bits of ourselves in the faces that peer at us. We may see families like our own and people with hopes and dreams similar to ours. "Reading" images not only makes us smarter and more curious, it also makes us more empathetic. Images have the capacity for helping us to dig deeper into ourselves, to define who we are and how those who built history helped form who we are and what society is today. And I find that once we start encouraging them to "read", the curiosity won't stop. Keep providing more materials so those questions keep coming.