Outside Museum Walls: The Impact of Community Facilitators in an Outdoor Social Science Exhibition

Abstract

The museum field has begun exploring the effects of facilitation on visitors’ learning, focusing on facilitation by museum staff inside museum buildings. However, some museum professionals contend that museums have a responsibility to serve their communities in the spaces where community members spend time, rather than expecting the public to come to them. Less is known about the effects of facilitation on visitors in urban outdoor spaces where interactions with facilitators are unexpected. The present study contributes to this line of literature by describing a quasi-experimental study that assessed the effects of exhibition facilitation led by community stewards using a trauma-informed approach in an outdoor, freely accessible civic plaza. Video observation and visitor interview data were collected. The present study found that facilitation increased visitors’ exhibit usage, overall satisfaction, and some but not all assessed areas of affective and metacognitive learning. The study highlights the value of research conducted in partnership and the power of content-humanizing facilitation.