Brown Bag Seminar – November 9th 2011
Britta Z. Geschwind
PhD student of the School of Cultural History, Stockholm University
Museums as Spaces for Learning: Shops and Entrances
On Wednesday the 9th of November, the Brown
Bag Seminar Series welcomed Britta Geschwind, a PhD researcher of ethnology of
Stockholm University in Sweden. This is the land of the museum pioneer Arthur Hazelius, who in the last part of the 19th
century gave birth to important museological projects with ethnographic collections
that later on became the Nordiska Museet and
the Skansen (one of the first open-air
museums).
But this time, Britta presented an inspiring session
about another museum: the Museum of NationalAntiquities (MNA) of Stockholm, opened as a modern museum in 1864 with an
archaeological collection of prehistoric Swedish artefacts as well as
ecclesiastical art. In the early 1920s a new project for the museum developed
with many political and social actors involved, especially in the design of the
new building, which turned out to be a mixture of a functionalist and a
monumental style. This fact reflected the intense political negotiations that grew
up during its origin, and continues until the present day. The construction
began in 1934, and was finished five years later, though the museum itself was
not inaugurated until 1943. The museum was created according to a nationalist
ideology in which the building was required to preserve the “cultural heritage”
of the Swedish people.
Nowadays, the museum divides itself between different
functions such as collecting and preserving but mainly, since 1990s and the
educational turn of the New Museology, the
learning processes of its audiences. Britta’s general analysis specifically focuses
upon the educational role of the MNA between 1943 and the present time, but
considering the peripheral places in
which museum learning takes place. By peripheral we mean those other aspects
that are normally excluded in our traditional conceptions of museum education.
As we will now address, Geschwind’s proposal was mind-opening in terms of
providing more ground to reflect upon the other places outside the exhibit
space, such as the store and the entrance halls, for example, in which visitors’
learning can occur.
In Britta’s research the notion of place is
fundamental because it functions as a complex network of meanings in which
different actors and ideologies converge: the educational premises, the governmental
policies, the pressing economical guidelines, the visitor’s expectations, the
staff development programmes and the spatiality of the museum, among others. To do so, she is undertaking her research
using diverse methodologies such as Actor – NetworkTheory (ANT, initially developed by the French philosopher Bruno Latour)
and walking ethnography, which allow her to
interpret the physicality of the museum in terms of the social, political and
economical implications.
By studying two particular places, the entrance hall
and the shop, Geschwind is emphasizing the way cultural policy objectives,
including the pressure on museums to increase their incomes, are negotiated in
respect of the learning practices they should address. The different changes in
the design and physical arrangement of the entrance hall are scars, remains of
the diverse ideas that the museum has embodied about, for example, audiences,
accessibility, wellbeing, utility or education. In this same way, the museum shop is an exemplary place to analyse
the contemporary museum’s paradoxes because, citing Geschwind, “it lies at the
heart of the museum experience”: on the one hand it is part of the economic
pressure put on museums to guarantee their survival but on the other, it is
part of the visitors’ museum general experience. Britta’s research has sharply
identified this tension and analysed it in terms of a collision between
marketing targets and educational objectives: for example, should the museum
shop continue offering books and other products that do not sell as much as other
products that are not related, or even worse, that contradict the educational
message of the museum?
I found this problem very evident in my last visit to
the Imperial War Museum in London. When looking
at its aims, it stated that they looked for “developing skills of historical
inquiry and boosting visitors understanding of cause, consequence and
historical significance”. However, this clashes completely when one enters the
shop and sees that the merchandise being sold, especially for children, presents
war as a play; children can buy their military uniforms and pretend to be soldiers.
They can also buy helicopters, planes, tanks and many other war-related games.
The question is, then, what idea of war are children getting from the
shop-experience? Could it be that the ideas and learning that children get from
the shop are stronger and more memorable than the ones supposedly encouraged by
the exhibition?
Perhaps we, museum professionals, tend to neglect the
importance of the store or common areas (for example the entrance, the
restrooms, the gardens or the particular architecture or design of a part of
the museum) in the meaning-making process of the visitors because we focus on
the experience generated –only or mainly- by the exhibition space and the activities
programming. But visitors are constantly active, interpreting and perceiving
all the museum elements to built their own messages because, as Geschwind
argues, learning takes place in the whole museum and in the periphery of museum
education but this is not always visible.
To sum up, the museum is a network of meanings that
embody in their physicality different ideologies, some times conflicting. In
that same sense, museums can “teach” many things to visitors outside their
exhibitions and even against their own educational aims. Museum research should
try to nourish methodologies and theories that encourage analysing how less
evident or not obvious aspects of the museum generate visitor responses,
interpretations and learning. This can be also a ground to think about the
concepts we have about learning: it is not only about knowledge; it is also
about skills, behaviour, attitudes and values, as the GenericLearning Outcomes (GLO) proposal suggests. Hopefully, we will have in
the coming years more inspiring studies, such as Britta’s, that shine more
light on that wonderful organism called museum and its hidden mysteries.
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