Break the Rules: Hands-On Tours that Really Do

In our book, Creativity in Museum Practice, Rainey and I highlight an AAM session from several years ago that asked participants to make a list of all the museum rules and then to think about how they could creatively be broken.   What's the biggest museum rule?  The one we tell school children and probably every adult would mention if asked?  Don't touch.

Last week at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, I got a chance to break that big rule, not just with grudging permission, but with enthusiastic encouragement from staff.  The Rosenbach is best known for its incredible manuscript and rare book collection--everything from the manuscript of Joyce's Ulysses to a list of enslaved people written by Thomas Jefferson;  to the entire collection of Maurice Sendak's work to poet Marianne Moore's living room. So you imagine a hushed, white-glove kind of place, where archivists and curators jealously guard access to their precious materials.  Wrong!

The Rosenbach's hands-on tours are not tours with reproductions.  They are small group (less than five people) hands-on tours of the real thing--and the real thing is everything from some of the earliest printings of Shakespeare to Marianne Moore's letters.   The cost is $5 in addition to museum admission and you can sign up in advance or join the tour on the spur of the moment if there's room.
Last Friday, along with other tour participants, I carefully washed my hands, and then Farrar Fitzgerald, The Sunstein Family Assistant Director of Education, led us upstairs, into the Rosenbach brothers' library on the top floor.  It felt secret in a way, and as Farrar unlocked a library cabinet to take out a box, it felt even more special.   Our tour was about the sea, and so we embarked on a journey, both practical and metaphorical.

Over the course of the next hour, we looked--and yes, touched!--a handwritten manuscript by Joseph Conrad, a first edition of Moby Dick;  a fine art edition of Joyce's Ulysses with illustrations by Matisse;  and a lovingly hand-printed edition of the Wreck of the Hesperus.   We held the books and manuscripts in our hands, feeling the weight of the paper, the press of the hand-set type, even smelling that old-book smell.  We each read a bit aloud,  and I remember closing my eyes and listening to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, imagining the scene.  Farrar introduced each item, linking it to the sea, and drawing our attention to details.  She carefully handled each object, but didn't hesitate to say, "go ahead, you can pick it up!"

Upon reflection, I was struck not only by the power of objects and the power of words,  but the power of the experience itself, of bonding with a small group of strangers as we embarked upon our own voyage of discovery. 

The best thing for you, museum readers?  It's that every single history museum or historical society, no matter what your size, could do exactly this same program on the same budget--pretty much zero dollars.  I've used literally hundreds of history archives, large and small, well organized and not, and although Joseph Conrad's manuscripts don't exist in every one,  incredible stories do.  So, next Monday morning, go first thing to your archives and consider what stories you can tell, what voyages you can take your community on. 

What's a Family Anyway?

I'm beginning work with the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia re-visioning their family programming.  The Rosenbach's collections are incredible, including Maurice Sendak's archives and they undertake a wide variety of programming.  New opportunities abound with a merger with the Philadelphia Free Library Foundation so it's an exciting time to be pondering what makes a great family program with the staff.

But we began with some conversations with staff and docents about what a family is.  To museum educators, family programs has quite a specific meaning.  Generally, it's programming designed for parents and elementary age children.  But is that how we should be defining a family?  Here's some of the responses:

• They choose to be together and consider themselves to be a family
• Wide range of ages
• Group or unit that's somehow connected together but not necessarily living together
• Some relationship:  love, blood, dependency
• Self-defined as related to one another
• 2 or more people long-term invested in each others well-being
• Caregivers too?
• Extended family who choose to associate together
• A hierarchy of relationships, within an established group
• and, as one docent definitively remarked, "It's not the 1950s any more!"

That's a giant pile of definitions that go far beyond the parent and young child relationship so often assumed in museum family programming.  I've found the USS Constitution's Family Learning Forum website incredibly useful in so many ways, so I went back to check out what they said about family definitions.  On their site, Lynn Dierking came to much the same conclusion we did.  Here's her definition:

Two or more people in a multi-generational group that has an on-going relationship; they may be biologically related but not necessarily. In fact, the general rule is that if a group defines itself as a family they are one!

We asked the volunteer docents at the Rosenbach to share their most memorable family experience in a museum.  Lots of intergenerational work at play:  grandmothers sharing recent visits with grandchildren;  a look behind the scenes at Williamsburg with family members;  learning a story about a family at a historic site.  One docent shared the experience of going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for an open evening event with friends, people she considered family.

Does this mean that we'll rename family programming at the Rosenbach?  Not necessarily, but I think we'll be asking this question as we go forward in conversations with all sorts of audiences and potential audiences and be particularly aware of barriers to participation that the lack of thoughtful language might bring.  How do you define families at your museum?