Scared of the F-Words?

Fear.  Failure.  They're scary words.  We hate to admit them,  we don't often want to own up to them, and they affect our work more than we like.   Over the last two weeks, I've been in two great conversations where we used them; owned them;  we embraced them; to move the process of change forward.

I've been working with the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center on the re-interpretation of the Stowe House for a little over a year.  As you can imagine, that is many, many conversations among many, many people about how to create a historic house experience that really embodies the Stowe Center's social justice mission, in addition to caring for the house and collections.   This week, we brought a team of 20 (yes 20!) together to do some serious thinking as we're now at the decision-making stage.  Designer, evaluator, development people, architect, curator, director, educator, front-end staff, community members, scholars, playwright.  We were all around the table.

In planning the day, Shannon Burke, Director of Education and Visitor Services and I realized that everyone (including us) had fears about the project.  We decided to surface them first thing.  Using just a flip chart, I wrote down the fears that the group shared.  None of them would really surprise anyone who's been through a big project:  not enough money;  losing the audience we have; not gaining new audiences;  not doing enough training;  not having the new experience be "magical;"   not getting everyone on board; have the experience be not diverse enough;  too much technology;  not enough technology;  can we find a clear theme and make it real?   

It was a pretty big list.  But I flipped over the page and we didn't talk any more about them until the very end of the day. After a great, inspiring day, full of new ideas, connections, and more, we flipped the page back and went through the fears.  Some fears had gone away--but there were definitely still some fears left.  The good news though, is that I think most people in the room felt the fears were now manageable.  We'd made progress on the day, but knew that there was much work to do.  By surfacing and sharing fears, we turned them from the big monster under the bed to something we can work on together.

But what about failure?  Many of the Stowe Center team's fears were about failure.  At the New England Museum Association's Young and Emerging Professionals meet-up last week, Rainey Tisdale and I shared some creativity information (Rainey's awesome speed networking creativity dance-off will have to wait for another post).  I took on running the Failure Olympics.   Divided into Failure Nations, each group had to create a Failure flag (my favorites:  the crumpled paper and the lonely stick with no flag);  share their own stories of fails and lessons learned; and then nominate someone to compete in the Failure Olympics by sharing their stories in front of the whole group.  The winner:  a complex tale of ants, ant farms, exhibit openings and a shy young professional who learned that asking for help is better than having a pile of dead ants.  

What do both these conversations have in common?  Exactly that.  They were conversations.  In each setting, we tried to create an atmosphere of trust--and fun--so that fears and failures were easily shared, rather than hidden under our desk.   It takes zero dollars to do this--it just takes a willingness to listen and to talk.

Dear readers,  what's your best/worst failure story?

Top:  the Failure Olympics, center:  Stowe House meeting,  bottom:  failure flag creation.

Lost Neighbourhoods: Can Oral History be the Center of an Exhibit?

Catherine Charlebois, from the Centre d'histoire de Montreal (Montreal's History Center) is one of my mentees for 2014. Her first blog post shares the background of an exhibit project that ended up transforming both the work of the museum and of her own professional practice. It's a great example of how uncertainty is an integral part of any creative process. This is part one of two, so stay tuned for the follow-up.

In June 2011, the Centre d’histoire de Montréal (Montreal’s History Center) launched its new temporary exhibition: Lost Neighbourhoods. The idea: bring back to life three working-class neighbourhoods and explain their disappearance. The objective: have the individuals who went through the events tell the story. The result: A new museum approach where oral histories are the primary sources and videotaped interviews, the main artifacts. For the first time, former residents who were uprooted had a public voice and told their stories, while planners active during the events and present-day experts explained the issues of the period and evaluated their legacy.

The Centre d’histoire de Montréal
 
I think it is important that I share the institution’s history to understand why it became so important for the CHM to create a major oral history-based exhibition.

The Centre d’histoire de Montréal, created in 1983, is a city-operated museum located in a former fire station, a unique heritage site. It drew inspiration from the ideas behind US National Park Service orientation centers. It was simply a place where visitors could get a brief overview of the history of the city through one permanent exhibition. Over the years, the Centre accumulated the other activities traditional to museums: temporary exhibitions, programs and collections.
 

By the early years of 2000, the Center got more and more interested in finding ways to include the many « voices » of its citizens in its interpretation activities, especially those under-represented in the more official storyline, such as the underprivileged and ethnic communities. We became interested in documenting groups that are also usually totally absent or under-represented in more traditional museums' collections and interpretation. The staff discovered and rapidly adopted the collection of memories and personal commentaries of historical significance. Montrealers sharing their memories through recorded interviews helped to create exhibitions and educational programming that would really feature their presence in the city’s history. In brief, oral history had officially made its entrance at the Centre d’histoire de Montreal and would become, over the years, an important part of its organizational identity.

The seeds of change...
 
After experimenting, developing and creating different oral history projects and programs for almost 10 years, the CHM decided, in 2009, that it was time to think seriously about doing a major exhibition in which the voices and memories of Montrealers would play a central part.
 
The Lost Neighbourhoods exhibition project was born with the discovery of a collection in the City Archives of more than 6400 photographs of buildings slated for demolition in older working-class neighbourhoods surrounding downtown Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s. Like other North American cities during the 1950s up to the 1970s, Montreal was transformed by major urban renewal projects. A modern city emerged, but only through the expropriation and displacement of more than 25,000 people from older inner-city neighbourhoods. The demolition of the three neighbourhoods presented in the exhibition, the Red Light district, the Fauboug à m’lasse (Molasse Borough) and Goose Village, resulted in the displacement of more than 12,000 people.
 
The City undertook the daunting task of systematically numbering and photographing the exterior facades (and sometimes interior rooms) of the thousands of residences condemned for demolition. It is believed that these photographic archives were created to facilitate the appraisal of building value in order to compensate owners. With basic information on the building and images in hand, the city’s real estate appraisers could simply do their job at their desk without having to pace up and down streets and back alleys.

In the presence of this extraordinary visual account of vanished neighbourhoods and with all the experience we had acquired with oral history it became clear to us that it was the perfect project to combine both: An history museum exhibition based on a corpus of historical photographs mixed with personal testimonies of people who had lived in these neighbourhoods and gone through the displacement process.

Aiming toward another type of exhibition...

We were pumped, excited and deeply motivated by this idea. We knew somehow that it would work, that it would propel us toward something different. But, to be completely honest, we had no idea about how to do it exactly or what would be the end result. But we knew somehow, that to fully embrace this new way of doing an history exhibition in an history museum we had to let go some of our old habits and beliefs and embrace new methods--get even more creative.

On the other hand, the CHM’s agenda for this project was very clear from the start :

• showcase, in innovative manner, of a vast photography collection from the municipal archives. a collection mostly unknown to the public .
• re-position the institution by prioritizing the memories of Montrealers making the CHM a leading curator and promoter of our own citizens history and memory.
• and above all, place oral history at the heart of the interpretation and exhibition design. By placing oral history at the center, we had three subgoals:
• present, in a non-confrontational manner, the different viewpoints of the residents/citizens and those of urban planners and historians.
• make oral history the principal resource in interpretation and interaction with museum visitors, limiting images and, especially, texts to a discreet supporting role when appropriate.
• better understand this watershed moment in Montreal’s history by revealing the human face of urban renewal.

These were the initial goals and moreover they acted as guidelines to develop the project since we did not have models to rely on or similar previous exhibition experience of that kind and of that scale. They were not written down but came over and over in our conversations, meetings and official presentations of the project. Despite the lack of written "plans" these goals did not undergo revision throughout the process. They were clearly stated and understood, they were the official institutional positions and oriented the project from day one.

Using Oral History to Tell the Human Side of the Story 

With these goals in mind plus the objective to bring back to life these three working-class neighbourhoods we knew we could not do things only in a traditional way. We had to venture ourselves toward other fields and techniques. On one hand, we of course had to include field research, finding and collecting testimonies. On the other, we had to think on how to include this type of information and media in an exhibition that would be really engaging and entertaining to the audience.

We put in parallel motion traditional documentary research done in preparation to any exhibition project and an oral history collecting campaign. For nine months, the field team interviewed former residents and also City of Montreal officials and other actors involved in the demolitions. We also interviewed professionals and researchers who could give us an appreciation and a better comprehension of what happened at the time.

Ten binders of research materials, 43 filmed interviews involving 55 participants and more than 75 hours of interview footage later we had to make sense of all of this. We still had the challenge to materialize this wild idea of creating an orally-based history museum exhibition. The ultimate objective being that the interviews, the oral history aspect of the project, would be the basis for the historical interpretation of the events and not the artifacts or the archival documents. From day one, people’s voices would be the center of this story.

But the question was still how? How could we establish a clear, efficient and engaging dialogue between the design of exhibition spaces, the more traditional historical documents, including the vast collection of photographs, and the taped interviews which we wanted at the center?

Of course we knew that the use of oral history in exhibitions was not a new idea. But in general, these personal accounts usually constitute one among several illustrative techniques to facilitate visitors’ understanding of the theme. They also usually are not the principal source of documentation and interpretation within a history museum exhibition and nor are they fully integrated into the design. We wanted to change that. We wanted to go further, go beyond the small television in the corner or the cinema-type room where you happened to go only if you have time... In Lost Neighbourhoods we wanted to place personal testimonies at the centre of the exhibition. But still, how do you do that? Stay tuned for Part 2 to find out how the exhibit was created.

Imagine: Can Your Visitor Do It? Not Unless You Try

As I work with the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center on the re-interpretation of Stowe House, I continue to be compelled and surprised by what we're finding (you can read earlier observations here and here).  On my last visit, I was struck by how willing people are to take imaginative leaps in the service of telling a moving story.   And of course, it reminded me how rarely we do this.

In earlier audience conversations, we found that an enormous percentage of visitors, when queried what question they would ask Stowe herself,  wanted to know how and where she found the courage to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.  So that framework served as the framework for our next iteration of the planning process.  The staff invited diverse groups of participants to community conversations.  These were people who knew the Stowe Center in some way but in general were far more familiar with the Center's innovative programs than the house itself.  An interpreter provided a half-hour tour of the house, and then we sat down to chat.  And as always, my thanks go to the great interpretive planning team of Shannon Burke, Beth Burgess and Brian Co-Francesco for their willingness and passion for experimentation!

In these conversations, we tried yet another experiment.  After some talk about what surprised them and what was memorable, I divided them into groups of two or three,  gave each group a room, and asked them, in ten minutes or so, to design an experience in that room that would carry the idea of courage forward for visitors to the house.   In our forthcoming book about creativity, Rainey Tisdale and I talk about the idea of constraints helping to drive creativity--and this proved absolutely true.  Our constraints here were the room and the idea of courage;  but all the rest of the framework was wide open.

The result:  some of the responses were stunning, poetic and surprising.  There were approaches we had never thought of.  The small groups buzzed with conversation and several weeks after the get-together, a staff member happened to speak with one of the participants, who was still pumped up about the process.   A few examples:

In thinking about Harriet Beecher Stowe's bedroom, which has plenty of natural light and plants, per her and her sister's advice in The American Women's Home, one group played off those ideas in terms of both her writing and activism to create metaphors. The sunlight represented how she shed light on injustice, and the plants, the ways in which she nurtured her own creativity. 

In that same conversation, our notes show a deep interest in the kinds of topics rarely addressed in historic house:

What were her “visions” around Uncle Tom's Cabin – visions while in prayer? While walking? Thoughts she referred to as visions? – What was the depth of her thinking in relation to the topic she “courageously” brought forward? The values through which we perceive reality and make decisions – as people move through the house, give them context of the general consciousness of the period, world view, Christianity, compassion, empathy – what is this all about, and what brought her to speak out? Interested in one person’s consciousness changing the consciousness of many.

In a the next day's conversation, one participant noted about the bedroom,

[It was a] sanctuary, her escape…if she had doubts, misgivings, or was in any situations in her public life that made her uncomfortable, that this would be the space where she could release all of that without being judged or could share that with her husband and get reassurance.

When was the last time you got to delve that deeply into a historic figure's thoughts?  But the ideas weren't limited to a single room.  Another group took the dining room experience somewhere surprising to us.  Their advice was to not have it be the dining room of this house, but rather, to present the dining room as the dining room in the Litchfield house where Harriet grew up in a lively, passionate, engaged big family, and that visitors would, as Harriet did as a child every evening, have the chance to sit down and talk about the big issues of the day, ask questions and learn how to take action to make a better world.  This group's work reminded me that  often we're afraid to think outside the box, to think that visitors will not get rooms of a different period, or be interested in big ideas.

But we're finding pretty clear evidence at Stowe that experimentation is what visitors want. That many long for an experience that requires imagination.  One participant noted that the room-by-room interpretation felt particularly frustrating in talking about ideas, in getting inside Stowe's head.  So when we think about courage at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, we're trying to be courageous ourselves in the new interpretive efforts,  courage we gain by listening to current and potential audiences.

A few other quick notes on historic house tours based on what we're learning:

• Play down what brings the obvious questions.  Harriet was also a hobbyist painter, like many educated women of her time.  People are surprised at that, and ask about it, but it's a bit of a distraction from the ideas we're working on. We experimented with how the paintings are approached.  When the first painting is encountered,  the interpreter mentions that she painted, as did many women of her time, and then the paintings are not highlighted in every room. This gives space for other topics and other ways to engage visitors, rather than just talking about pretty paintings.  Visitors have more, better questions when we provide more and better ways to ask those questions.

• Interpersonal relationships matter.   The current tour talks a fair amount about Harriet's marriage and about her large family, but just mentions that she had servants.  Many of our conversation participants wanted to know more about those servants and the relationship she had with them, about the way that her work as a writer was made possible by other women who did the household work.  Research has already begun to further expand our understanding of everyone in the household.

• And of course, no surprise that individual meaning-making is always important.  Many women are particularly interested in Stowe's perspective on feminism;  those from Hartford want to know more about her relationship with the city;  reflective readers want to sit on the front porch and peruse a book.   We'll continue to puzzle out the challenge of different ways to engage all of the site's visitors.

But imagine.  Ask your visitors to do the same.  When I began writing this post, I googled and watched John Lennon's Imagine,  so I'll end with that video.  Imagine what your historic house could be and invite your visitors to do the same.  Imagine.

Upcoming This Week

Just a quick post to say that I'll be busy as a bee this upcoming week, with lots on my plate at the American Association for State and Local History annual conference in Salt Lake City.   My last round (for now, perhaps) of working with a great group of field service providers and others on the StEPs curricula will be on Wednesday.  Over the last three years,  I've really enjoyed getting to know colleagues from states big (Alaska) and small (Connecticut) and hope all those connections continue.

On Thursday,  I hope you'll come find Rainey Tisdale and I from 12:00-1:30 in the South Foyer of the convention center.  At the meet-up--open to all--we'll be sharing what we've learned so far in our work on museums and creativity and then together, we'll work on a brainstorming an activity designed to help all of us find new ways to approach one of the core functions of history museums and historic sites.   Also on Thursday, I'm looking forward to learning about Conner Prairie's transformation and the many ways that history museums can use Historypin (I'm a huge fan already!).

Wake up early on Friday morning to make my session called Banish the Boring at 8:30.  It's pretty nervy to title a session that,  but I'm planning that, all of us working together,  can come up with some pretty great ways to make conference sessions--or any other kind of presentations--not boring,  but rather,  turn them into what my colleague Stuart Chase  calls the Three Bs:  brisk, bodacious and bold!   Need an inspiration?  Try Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.    Later that day, Rainey's chairing a session with Trevor Jones of the Kentucky Historical Society and me where we hope to engage all of you in a lively conversation about whether museums need objects?  What does the 21st century hold for those things in our collections storage?  Or for those things in our community and not yet in our museums?

And finally,  another morning session on Friday,  an expansion from last year's webinar for StEPS--in an informal workshop format, we'll work on telling a good stories--and how those good stories can transform our institutions and our visitors.

As always,  I love to meet colleagues and bounce ideas around.  If you'll be at AASLH and want to meet for coffee or a quick meal,  just let me know!

What I Learned in Newfoundland #1: Stories Matter

I spent almost two full weeks in July traveling around Newfoundland,  facilitating workshops on the ways in which heritage organizations can engage older community residents in their work.  I had a tremendous time, traveling all over the province from Cape Spear to Gros Morne;  from St. Alban's to Cape Anguille and Twillingate (check out a map--I went all over!).  I met great people everywhere, saw incredible scenery,  ate some of  Newfoundland's distinctive cuisine and most of all, learned some terrific stories.   I know stories matter and I care deeply about how we use them in museums--but these workshops reminded me again of their importance.

I was looking for a way to open up a workshop that was different from the usual introductions and came up with the idea of asking participants to bring an object or image that represented an older generation.  And in each of my five workshops,  I learned bits of Newfoundland history from those objects--my very own version of the British Museum's history of the world in 100 objects.   From a bone pair of snow glasses to a miniature wheelbarrow carved by a grandfather;  from a set of sail mending needles to a coin from the company store in Corner Brook;  from a tea cozy to a photo of Nan in the garden;  from a milk pan to a hooked rug;  each object had a story--and each object would have been far, far less meaningful without the story.

I didn't ask each person to share their own object's stories, rather I asked pairs to take a minute each and learn as much as they could about the object, not telling them about any next step.  After those brief two minutes, I asked each one to share with the full group about what they had learned about the other person's object.  It was amazing how much you can learn in a minute;  and how important good listening is.  Imagine, local history museums, if you always took just one minute to learn about the meaning of each object a donor brought in.

Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of the, to me, most memorable object and story.  In St. Alban's, the workshop was at the Canadian Legion hall,  where there was a small museum dedicated to local residents who had served in the armed forces.  One of the participants had forgotten to bring an object, and she went in the museum and came back with a framed photograph of a veteran, probably in his '80s at the time of the photo.  It was her uncle, Alistair, I think, and she remembered the day he and all the other men came back from World War II.  "Oh, I can still see them sailing up to the dock,"  she said, "what a party there was that night...I was young, but it went on all night."    In that one minute,  I gained a little  understanding of the isolation and independence of Newfoundlanders,  the importance of family and community, and the ways in which a single memory can generate many more for others.   Thanks, Newfoundlanders, for sharing your stories with me.