Museum Practitioners Research Articles

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere

There She Goes Again: A Project on Gender Representation in Norwegian Museums’ Collections and Exhibition Practices

Recent research has shown that Norwegian museums reproduce outdated ideas, power structures and inequities in their exhibitions and educational programmes, as well as in the management of their collections. In 2018, the Arts Council Norway granted the Norwegian Museum Network for Women’s History (led by the Women’s Museum in Norway) NOK 2.8 million (EUR 260,000) for a project aiming to change such anti-democratic practices. This article discusses the background for and development of this project. The project’s title, ‘There She Goes Again’, refers to an expression museum professionals are often confronted with when addressing the lack of women’s perspectives in their own institutions. The expression shows a patriarchal attitude that still persists in Norwegian museums. This project develops a methodology designed to help museum practitioners improve gender balance in their collections, as well as when curating new exhibitions. The focus is on museums’ everyday practices. One of the project’s challenges, but also one of its ambitions, is to devise a toolkit that can be easily implemented by museums to improve how gender is represented in museums. The Norwegian Museum Network for Women’s History will form pilot groups to test and evaluate the new methodology. This is an ongoing project that was initiated in January 2019 and will end in March 2021. This article presents the initial phases of the project and reflects upon the challenges we have thus far observed. It includes a critical discussion of the project, its methodology and the workgroup’s own practices.

Fashion archives, museums and collections in the age of the digital

Currently there is a trend for the digital in archives, collections and museums of fashion. Not only are museums digitalizing and giving free online access to their collections, but new types of digital fashion archives and collections are emerging thanks to the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of social media. This article explores this shift, functioning as both an introduction to this thematic issue and as a mapping of the different transformations lived by archives, museums and collections in the age of the digital. How has the digital effected a different understanding of fashion in museums, archives and collections? What types of challenges is the digital bringing to museum practitioners and scholars? In the following sections, my aim is to emphasize some areas of transformation, highlighting four contested fields: (1) the dichotomies between archives/museums and the digital in relation to issues of access and fashion heritage; (2) the shift from material to digital archives and the effects of practices of digitalization of fashion archives; (3) the emergence of new ephemeralities and the utopic practices of conserving online fashion; and (4) the expansion of the understanding of fashion archives and the consequent effects on users’ agency and research practices. Drawing on digital studies, archive theory, museum studies, heritage studies and fashion studies, I reflect on these shifts, contextualizing the articles published in this thematic issue and revisiting the scope of some of the projects I developed in collaboration with the EU-funded project Europeana Fashion.

Visitor Satisfaction of the Palace Museum Website in China: An Empirical and Integrated Model

In 2001, the website of the Palace Museum was opened to the public, marking that museum’s first step into the digital era in China. Numerous studies and much research has concentrated on how to employ this new technology in order to digitize the museum and its collection. However, little attention has been paid to research regarding visitor satisfaction’s regarding museum websites in China. This research aims to fill the gap. Consequently, this conceptual model has been proposed, and the Palace Museum website was as the research objective. Empirical methodology has been applied and the online survey was created to gather data, which results in a total of 557 questionnaires being analyzed though the SPSS 20.0. The findings demonstrate that system quality, perceived usefulness, perceived usability, and the museum’s image have a positive impact on visitor satisfaction regarding their continuance intention. Furthermore, managerial implications are proposed for museum practitioners.

Storytelling, Science, and Religion: Promoting Reflection and Conversation about Societal Issues

AbstractThe Science & Religion project explored the relationship of science and religion through creative nonfiction stories and public programs. The overarching goal of this work was to investigate whether and how museums can encourage reflection and conversation around big, important, and difficult questions. In this paper, we contextualize the project in the movement to address societal issues in museums, describe some of the design and delivery strategies we used to create public programs that were inclusive of diverse points of view, report the programs’ impact on participants, and offer lessons learned for museum practitioners interested in similar programmatic approaches or topics. We also reflect on our own attitudes and preconceptions as museum educators, considering why we felt this was a controversial topic and why we were surprised to discover that audiences were so receptive to it.

How Domestic Visitors Relate to Te Papa Museum: The Other Roles of Modern Museums

The roles of modern museums have been scrutinized theoretically in museum studies, critical theory, cultural studies, and other academic disciplines, but there is a lack of empirical insights into their actual functioning from the visitor's perspective. The functions of modern museums are not so simple and straightforward as merely interactive learning experience and leisure. By drawing on the results of qualitative research that examined domestic visitors' motives and overall experiences at Te Papa museum in New Zealand, this study found that the nexuses between the physical and personal contexts and the physical and social contexts reveal different roles of the modern museum. The role of the modern museum is much broader than merely providing infotainment and leisure for families on a Sunday afternoon. The museum is an important site for social learning experiences; remembering historical and personal events; connecting visitors with the familiar and reinforcing their preexisting knowledge; and aesthetic, recreational, and restful experiences. These findings thereby offer interesting clues to museum practitioners to help them better understand their visitors and the wider roles modern museums may play in visitors' experiences as well as rethink the mission and goals of these types of institutions.

Introduction

Introduction

Recognising and valuing student engagement in science museums

ABSTRACTStudent engagement with museum content is an integral part of the mission of many institutions, including science museums. Our research utilises a sociological lens to bring a new perspective on engagement in such spaces. Specifically, we draw on qualitative data from student visits to a science museum to explore what engagement might be possible, by whom, and under what circumstances. The students in focus are of underrepresented ethnic and cultural backgrounds in the museum, and do not have high levels of science capital. Our findings reveal that moments of engagement occur when there is alignment between personal habitus and capital – the students’ dispositions and practices – and the field, the museum's conventions and rules, as well as its objects and exhibits. However, this engagement was often with the historical or social aspects of exhibits, rather than the science behind them. We propose this approach to engagement as a useful tool for museum practitioners.

Challenging Exclusion and Museum Doctrine

Challenging Exclusion and Museum Doctrine

Creating a Female‐Responsive Design Framework for STEM exhibits

AbstractThis paper describes the development of a Female‐Responsive Design Framework for Informal Science Education (ISE). The FRD Framework translates ideas from Culturally Responsive Pedagogy to discover and recommend pedagogical strategies that apply to females and design. This paper describes our synthesis of prior research about females’ social, historical, and cultural practices in STEM learning from a variety of fields. The paper further details our process of developing the FRD Framework with the help of museum practitioners, female youth, researchers, and experts from the fields of design, gender, and museums. We discuss four female‐responsive strategies, and suggest multiple STEM exhibit design attributes that support each of these strategies. This framework contributes to a growing movement to more thoughtfully consider females when designing STEM exhibits. We hope that the museum field will expand, evolve, and deeply explore the FRD Framework.

Drivers of museum visitors' willingness to practice green activities

Our objectives were to propose and test a single framework for the relationships among environmental awareness and positive and negative anticipated feelings in building museum visitors' green behavioral intentions, and also to identify the role of environmental awareness as an independent variable or a moderator in these relationships. The proposed model and hypotheses were in general supported by data collected from a field survey completed by 270 visitors to museums in Seoul, South Korea. Results of structural equation modeling analysis indicated that anticipated feelings had a significant direct impact on visitors' behavioral intentions and mediated the influence of environmental awareness on intentions. Moreover, through a test for metric invariance, we established that it was more suitable to use environmental awareness as an independent variable rather than as a moderator variable. As museum visitors' ecofriendly behavior had rarely been explored previously in research, our findings provide meaningful insights for museum researchers and practitioners.

STEAM-y Partnerships: A Case of Interdisciplinary Professional Development and Collaboration

ABSTRACTMuseum partnerships can involve significant tensions, especially when these collaborations reach across institutions to blend disciplines such as art and mathematics. Rather than simply being obstacles to overcome, we suggest that tensions arising in multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary collaborations can be highly generative for collaborators, sparking new approaches to practice and catalyzing professional growth. To support this idea, we describe an interdisciplinary professional development program for museum practitioners focused on developing innovative programs and exhibits integrating Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM). We discuss the design of this STEAM Professional Learning Laboratory in terms of a shared-facilitation model and relate that model to specific tensions that arose in this collaboration. Based on evaluation data, we summarize key characteristics of the Lab that supported successful collaboration and interdisciplinary learning. We share learning outcomes we documented for art and science museum professionals who participated in the Lab. We conclude with considerations for others in the field engaging in similar efforts.

Visit motivations: development of a short scale for comparison across sites

ABSTRACTMotivations for visiting educational leisure settings (ELS) are a lasting research focus for academics and museum practitioners alike. Insights into visit motivations have proven valuable in drawing audiences, creating satisfying experiences and for better understanding visitors’ learning processes. However, the lack of an instrument offering a reasonable degree of measurement invariance to use across sites has challenged attempts to make valid comparisons across different types of ELS. We therefore developed a short scale to enable quick and valid comparisons of visit motivations across ELS and investigated its dimensionality, reliability and measurement invariance across three sites (science museum, art museum, zoo; N = 605). Our 17-item short scale captures six theoretically important visit motivation categories with sufficient reliability (ρ. 65 < .85). Analysis indicates an approximate scalar invariance of factor loadings and item intercepts, allowing for a comparison of latent factor means across sites. Subsequently, we found plausible mean differences in visit motivation dimensions across ELS, providing preliminary evidence that the scale enables meaningful comparisons across sites.

An Evaluation-Driven Design Process for Exhibitions

Museums and science centres are informal education environments that intend to engage visitors with their exhibits.We present an efficient design process that allows an improved working relationship between museum practitioners, exhibition designers, and visitors. Its principles and a graphical representation are based on the Engagement Profile from previous work. Curators and designers evaluate the qualities of exhibits using the engagement profile while visitors inform the design process by answering a standardised questionnaire. Elements of the design process were evaluated using an educational game at the science centre Engineerium. This study was based on the responses from over five hundred visitors to the science centre. As an outcome, the science centre received valuable information of how to improve the exhibit. Further, one iteration of the design process was implemented in practice. First experiences show that our method will practically support the work of museum practitioners and exhibition designers. We present the principles and a graphical representation based on the Engagement Profile from previous work. Elements of the design process are evaluated using an educational game at the science centre Engineerium. The evaluation is based on a study with over five hundred visitors to the science centre.

Evaluating museum visitor experiences based on user-generated travel photos

ABSTRACTThis research introduces online travel photos published on social media platforms as a complementary data resource to examine the behavior and experience of museum visitors. The practical value of online travel photos is demonstrated through a case study of popular Hong Kong museums, particularly by using the photo content and metadata available from the Flickr platform. The proposed approach is a generic method for understanding museum visitor behavior and preferences, and supports museum practitioners in developing improved products for visitors. The case study findings are particularly beneficial for tourism managers, especially those in Hong Kong, in promoting and attracting tourists to visit local museums.

‘I think I know a little bit about that anyway, so it’s okay’: Museum visitor strategies for disengaging with confronting mental health material

Visitor engagement at museums is an area that has received significant attention from museum practitioners and academics over the last decade. However, very few studies have sought to understand how and why visitors may actively employ strategies to shut down attempts to elicit deep emotional engagement with museum material and messages. This paper looks at an exhibition in a major museum in Australia that discusses mental health and illness. It discusses the high rates of emotional disengagement that were found amongst 172 visitors who were faced with emotionally confronting material and argues that emotions enabled, as well as hindered, constructive, critical reflection amongst visitors.Key words: Mental-health, Museums, Engagement, Disengagement, Empathy

Research and Practice: One Way, Two Way, No Way, or New Way?

AbstractAs learning institutions, museums have long been buffeted by currents, coming mostly out of formal education, defining what counts as learning. The field has struggled to find its way in these waters. In this article I propose a strategy for gaining a firmer footing and indeed (shifting metaphors) for beginning to shape the very landscape, in educational and cultural policy, that currently constrains how our work is perceived and understood as contributing to learning within broader educational ecosystems. Research‐practice partnerships represent a new, more equitable and perhaps more ethical, strategy for producing evidence‐based knowledge and practice. Leveraging perspectives and expertise of both researchers and museum practitioners, RPPs can help the field begin to redefine what learning looks like and how museums both support and expand it. This paper discusses the need to participate in this new approach to research and provides some strategies for getting started.

Understanding Controversies over Memorial Museums: The Case of the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum, Potsdam

Focusing on the case of the Leistikowstrase Memorial Museum in Potsdam, which commemorates victims of Soviet occupation after 1945, this article seeks to understand how conflicts can arise over such institutions, paying attention to the politicization of memory, the professional discourse of historians and museum practitioners, the demands of victims, and institutional factors. It examines the context of the development of this memorial museum in order to understand the decisions that determined the particular ways in which the past is presented at this site.

Editorial Focus

Editorial Focus

Coming Together to Address Systemic Racism in Museums

AbstractA group of 25 multi‐generational, multi‐racial museum professionals met in January 2016 for a 3‐day dialogue about museums and race. They concurred that forming alliances among museum practitioners of all races and ethnic backgrounds is a critical step in dismantling the persistent and pervasive presence of structural racism in museums. This article asserts that there are both demographic and ethical imperatives for close examination of all aspects of museums’ programs, their staffs and boards, the publics they serve, and the organizations that exist because of them. It provides an introduction to the vocabulary and attendant systems of white privilege, oppression, and intersectionality, offers concrete suggestions for people of all backgrounds to join forces, and ends with a call to action to bring racial awareness and action to the forefront in our institutions, our communities, and our nation.