Risk and Reward, Conference Edition

I didn't make it to Nina Simon and Kathy McLean's Risk and Reward session at AAM this year, but heard lots of talk, in person and across my twitter feed about it, so I've shaped my conference learning from this spring in the same vein.

Risks

• Take some, history museums!  Several history museum colleagues and I talked about how there seemed to be a dearth of sessions framed around history museums at the AAM conference.  Is that because we're, as a part of the field, risk averse, still doing the same old same old?
• Picking the right session seems increasingly risky--and I think the risk hasn't changed, but perusing my Twitter feed during a session makes me feel like I'm missing (a couple times due to crowding) the great one next door.  The answer, of course, is a simple one for me. Don't look at the feed during the session.
• Take more risks in developing your sessions.  The real, not-real, who cares, kinesthetic, audience-driven session about objects really relied on the audience's willingness to play along, and of course, everyone welcomed the chance.
• AAM program committee, I appreciated the risk you took last year in crowd-sourcing sessions, but you only went half way.  You never told us how you used the crowd's wisdom in your still opaque decision-making process.  You can--and should-- do better.
• Take a risk and if you're submitting a session that talks about just one, or a few similar projects, invite someone entirely out of the box, unfamiliar with the project, to be a panel member critiquing and asking questions.  Take the risk of admitting those mistakes (and thanks to those who did the Mistakes were Made session!)
• How can a conference retain some spontaneous feel within all the planning that goes into making it a success?  Drawing on an idea shared by a colleague, Rainey Tisdale and I decided to set up a little guerrilla table to encourage creative ways of thinking about name tags and  share some of our thoughts about museums and creative practice.  It was great to see those name tags spurring questions, conversations and a few bemused looks throughout the rest of the week.

Rewards

• It's the second year in a row I've been an Ambassador at AAM.  This year it was great to spend some time with the staff from the incredible Casa Azul in Mexico City and with three young Ph.D students from Shanghai. 
• Museums from around the world have a growing presence at AAM but I'd like to see their presentations more integrated into the program and some mentoring done prior to the conference to help in more innovative session development.  I think then the rewards will be much greater for all of us.
• I did a quick fill-in in an international session--I was preceded by Silvia Alderoqui of Argentina.  Her description of her school museum's challenges and educational efforts had some moving connections with Ukrainian museums, and it's always an amazing reward to share my experiences in Ukraine with colleagues from around the world.
  
• It was great to spend time with old friends (you all know who you are)  and get to know others who have been, until now, just a tiny Twitter photo.  Thanks,  Jamie Glavic, for gathering a group of museum bloggers for lunch;  and to newly met Suzanne Fischer for another great conversation over lunch--I hope all our conversations will continue in person and online.
• Those conversations were great, but I'm wondering whether it's time to seek out a different conference to push me outside my comfort zone.  Suggestions?
• We had almost 40 people at 7:30 AM for our Strategize Me career planning session.  Participants were at every stage in their careers and it's always thoughtful and inspiring to watch all of you consider what your next steps are. Risks and rewards abound.
• Most memorable conversation?  The six brain scientists brought together by Reach Advisors to talk science and museums with us.  Passionate, committed, thoughtful--and in fact, one told us that it was pure folly to head down the entertainment road, to be, as he put it, "art crack," and that we should have the power of our convictions, understanding that we are, or can be, in the transcendence business.

And how about you?  Risks and rewards from your conference going?

Do You Age-Stereotype? A Small Rant

I've been in several conversations lately that really have me thinking about age stereotypes. Is it true that all those baby boomers still hanging on in those director's jobs are just doing nothing--just coasting towards retirement?  Are those Millenials just slackers who don't know how to work and are constantly just tweeting?  And what about those who fall in between those two generations--how do we characterize them?

I understand why these categories exist--it gives us a quick shorthand to understand our audiences or our colleagues.  But I've come to think they're not particularly useful--and in fact, may be particularly destructive in our efforts to work together.  Nina Simon's recent post about her museum's work in social bridging--bringing groups and people together--is something that we can all learn from.  And we might want to start that social bridging--that creative collaboration-- inside our own organizations.

Perhaps it's because I've spent my career either in small museums (where, as a young professional,  an ability to work with different generations wasn't ever optional) or as an independent professional, where coasting certainly isn't an option.

Do I know old fogeys of my own generation that are coasting towards retirement?  Absolutely.  Do I know young fogeys who are hiding in the basement coasting towards a fifty years from now retirement?  Yes, sad to say.  But at the same time, I know colleagues older than I am who are pushing towards new ideas and understandings and young colleagues who are elbowing their way into the field with new ideas in hand.  My own career has been enriched at every end of the spectrum--from senior citizen board members in my first director's job to my young colleagues in Ukraine who push museums forward despite some pretty serious hurdles.

So stop complaining about generations and get looking around.  Find the creative people in your organization or in your community and begin working with them--no matter what age.  Get going!

Changing the Perspective: The View from Underground

In my last post, I wrote about setting students in Donetsk to the weekend task of finding and interviewing miners.  Early Monday morning, we arrived at school to hear the results,  which were amazing!  Each group had found a miner to interview--and in addition, one group had asked if they could research one student's great-grandfather, as a way of memorializing him.  Each group had prepared a Power Point presentation, in English and one group even re-enacted the interview with one student reading his grandfather's answers while other students asked the questions.

What did I learn about miners in Donetsk?

Victor (above), who's been working for about 30 years in a mine and is an uncle of one of the students,  , said, 

Well, it’s a very hard work. The preparations and the transportation take a lot of time, so that we spend ten hours per hour in the mine. And besides physical burdens, our job is very risky.

You know, every time you're going down to the mine, you understand that you may not come back this evening. Of course, it is much better when you don't think about it, but it is really hard not to think of it in real life. You say "hello" to people and in an hour you understand that by this words you've already said "good bye". If you try to think detailed about this job you'll become more than scared.

In such conditions, which we have underground the friendship is highly valued, so our best friends are our workmates. 

P.F. Seregin was the great-grandfather of one of the students.  This group shared historic photos and archival material, including his workbook (below).  We were so pleased that they understood that these simple historic materials can enhance a historical story.

 The group that interviewed a grandfather learned about his different jobs at the mine:

At first I worked as a horse-driver. Until the 20th century, when there were no electric tubs, the coal could be delivered from beneath the earth to the surface only with help of horses. Then I became a lining-master. There is an arc lining inside the tunnels. Over the time such a lining is loosening under the rock’s pressure, so that even a tub can’t pass through the tunnel. So my work was to fix those linings. After that I worked as a tunneller for 16 years and as a miner in mine drifts, extracting coal for 6 years.

And what did your family think of your work?

They worried. But I had a high income, so it was totally worth it.

Accidents were--and are--common in the mines. 

You know, accidents happened frequently… I had been working for 20 years when I got under the rock collapse… I got a thorax injury. Sometimes, it would crumble on somebody… Such a mishap…

We learned a great deal about the miners of Donetsk--but we wanted to know what students had learned.  None of them had ever had any conversation with their family members about working in the mines, despite the fact that virtually every student had at least one family member who worked in one.  But these students, with their smartphones and bound for college are now far away from that world.  One said that he now realized that miners were like everyone else, that they worked for money, not for the glory of country (as was very much promoted in the Soviet Union).  Several students also said that they gained a measure of respect for workers they had tended to dismiss--and learned that all knowledge is not gained through books.

For me, the big takeaway is that there are many potential tremendous projects to be done in Donetsk related to the industrial history, but that the first step of many was this one, the simple act of a grandson sitting with a grandfather to learn about his life and sharing that story with others.  Thank you, members of the Polyglot Club, for reminding us all about the importance of stories.

 

Does It Change You if You Never see the Sun and other Philosophical Questions

As part of my cultural residency here in Donetsk, Ukraine, I'm spending some time with high school students at the local lyceum, talking about industrial history.  We had our first meeting yesterday and the students, all with incredibly fluent English,  and I talked about industrial workers.  These are high-achieving kids, headed towards college and university.  Despite the fact that Donetsk is a highly industrialized city, with coal mines and metallurgy plants in the city centre,  only one or two of them had ever visited a factory.  I asked them to make a list of questions they would like to ask industrial workers about their lives and their work.  And the first question was something like, "does it change you if you never see the sun?"   It was followed by a broad swath of questions that got at both the work and its impact on individuals and families including:

• What did your family think of your work?
• Did you ever organize for better salaries for conditions?
• Why did you stay in the job?
• Were you ever afraid?

We've now asked the students to work in small groups to find workers to interview--and that again evoked great conversations in the groups about who to ask.  Should it be the next door neighbor woman who worked in the mines during World War II?  What about a grandfather who worked at the metallurgy plant?  And one student said, "you know, many people think miners are not smart, but I think they must be smart to do the jobs they do, to survive under there."   In this small conversation, these students took steps to understanding lives far different than their own--and an understanding that museums here (and in many other places) do not convey.

And how would we share what we learned?  For now, just in presentations, but the students' suggestions included posters on trams for older people (only pensioners take the trams because they are slow) and pop-up exhibits outside McDonald's to reach people their own age.

Again and again, no matter where I work, I'm reminded of the immense value of plain old conversation.  Stay tuned for their reports!

Donetsk Dispatch

I'm in Donetsk, Ukraine for the next week or so, as part of a Cultural Manager Residency with Eko-Arts, supported by the Center for Cultural Management in L'viv, and joined by my dear friend and industrial historian Gyorgi Nemeth from Hungary.   Over the week we will learn about the work of cultural organizations working with industrial history including the Metallurgical Museum, the Regional Museum, and Isolyatsia, whose amazing work combining an industrial site and contemporary art we learned about on today's visit.

But most importantly, we will be working with high school students to explore innovative ways in which they might share the city’s history.  We’ll share other projects—where student have written poems about photographs,  conducted oral history interviews,  created websites and even developed pop-up exhibits.  It’s an chance to learn more about a city and share our own interests in the creative presentations of history, involving a city’s own citizens in shaping the story that’s told—a new way of thinking for many history museums here.

Check back for updates on our progress!

Is the Pen Mightier? Can Words Reshape a Historic House?

I've just begun working with the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, CT and spent two days there last week talking with staff about the re-interpretation of Stowe House.  I've known of the organization for a long time and had been impressed with their powerful mission and the wide array of programs they do around a range of social justice issues--expanding out from Stowe's fame as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.   So I'm thrilled to be undertaking this project.  On the first day,  we tried to put some of Rainey Tisdale and my brainstorming research into play as about 15 or so of us spent a day puzzling out the connections between audiences and Stowe.  We did audience profiles, thought about multiple intelligences and John Falk's classification of identities in museum visitors.    One element we tried was putting some inspirational quotes by Stowe up on the walls to encourage our own creative thinking.

"The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today."

"There is more done with pens than swords” 

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you until it seems that you cannot hold on for a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time when the tide will turn."

But what's interesting is that, despite Stowe's fame as a writer,  an initial impulse was to continue focusing more the objects in the house and a domestic story that, in fact, could be told anywhere.  But we kept working--and on the second day, a smaller group took the multitude of ideas generated on the first day and went into each room of the house.  We sat on the floor and talked, we wondered about making spaces more accessible and doing away with some period rooms.  We imagined visitors seeing challenging objects and making themselves at home in the parlor.  We talked about different kinds of tours and different kinds of learners.  But we kept coming back to one idea--that this is a site with a story that is about the power of words--that in fact,  Harriet Beecher Stowe's words changed the world and yours could too.

It brought back to mind the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine, where a thoughtful and interpretive effort combines his life story and his novel, The White Guard, into a single tour.   It remains one of the most surprising historic house experiences I've ever had.  And all too few houses create a

How can we create a historic house experience where words are the thing--where we do more with pens than with swords?  And we don't mean a tour that's just talking--but somehow a place where ideas, expressed in words, emerge, swirl, confront,  confuse, clarify, and most importantly, empower visitors to leave the house and do something to make a difference.  Ways to do this are busily emerging and I'll be spending some time this summer in Hartford testing out some of those ideas with both visitors and community members who don't yet connect with the Stowe Center.   In our increasing visual culture--can we make words matter?   Suggestions welcomed!

What I Learned on My Trip--and What Community Museums Might Learn Too

It's hard to believe, but since February 25 I've visited 13 European cities, with one more to go this week. I've drunk cappuccino,  espresso, herbal tea, raki,  prosecco,  spritzers, French wine, Italian wine, Spanish wine, Turkish wine, German beer, Czech beer;  I've traveled by plane, train, boat, car, tram, metro, horse and buggy, foot and funicular;  but most of all I've had an amazing time working with Context Travel staff and docents around Europe (and even touched in Asia yesterday afternoon along the Bosphorus).

I definitely didn't write as many blog posts along the way as I had hoped, but I did visit some museums, so some posts to come, but overall the experience has been a way for me to think about what community-based museums do and how we might do it better.   Here's some things I think community museums--from big cities to villages--could do more of.

Get Walking  Context Travel is all about scholar-led walks in great cities.  But their commitment to sustainability and deep knowledge in the service of getting people out into the community is something every museum could embrace.   Why can't museums in small cities and towns offer tours that people sign up for on a regular basis?  Why do we always expect that people are going to come to our museum, rather than getting out in to the community to understand it in a physical way, rather than just visiting our museum? 

Facilitate More Conversations  On this trip I've had the chance to sit with people who grew up in West Berlin and East Berlin to talk about their childhood experiences;  to talk with ex-pats about what made them fall in love with a city and make the leap to live there;  to hear from a young woman running a spice store in Istanbul's spice market about her work (and her graduate training in upstate New York);  to get a tour of the Forum from a Roman whose family arrived there more than 500 years ago;  and to chat with lively Saudi women during a ferry crossing.  All too often in our lives, we stick to the people we know, and museums could--and should--take a leading role in bringing communities together in conversation.  Could you install conversation starters on public transportation or hung from signposts?  Like the Big Read projects, could you design a local history project designed to encourage sharing and conversation?

Go Outside Your Comfort Zone--and Help Others to Do the Same In the same way we tend to stick to the people we know,  we tend to stick the places we know.  If a place we're familiar with changes, we tend to stay away; and say, "oh,  it's just not the same when I was young."  We're nervous, even when there's no need to be.  This was particularly brought home to me this past week when Context's city manager, Ceylan Zere, walked four of us through a conservative Istanbul neighborhood.  It's definitely not on the beaten tourist path but was absolutely worth doing--a brief look at a much different world.  As community museum people, we too often live in the past, rather in the ever-changing present.   Take a walk to a neighborhood you don't normally go to;  visit a mosque or temple;  shop in a neighborhood store--and then see what ideas that brings you for your museum's exhibits or programs.

Be Nice  I learned this over and over again this trip.  Context puts a high priority on customer service and so I watched staff members bend over backwards to create amazing experiences for me and their clients. Honestly, I've never worked with a museum that cared as much about their visitors.  But that niceness extends the other way.  I had a number of dinners in Rome with Context staffer Liz Roller, who grew up in the restaurant business in Philadelphia and loves food.  Her passionate enthusiasm (way beyond just nice!) led to charming explanations from waiters and a chef or two appearing at our table to explain the dish.   Liz's passion led those waiters and chefs to be friendly and passionate as well.   Those waiters' listened to her passionate interest and responded in kind--does your museum do the same?  Do you even listen for it?

Keep Learning  I came to work with Context because they were committed to lifelong learning for not just their clients, but also for their staff and docents (for Context, docents are the scholars who lead tours).  In 40 or so workshops,  I was continually reminded of the importance of our own lifelong learning.  I gained new perspectives,  worked to sharpen my own approach as a trainer,  and all along the way, tried to keep learning.  Museums need to invest in ways for all their staff to learn more--and staff need to be more focused on their own learning.  This was top-of-mind for me as Rainey Tisdale and I have just finished a draft of our book on museums and creative practice--and that desire for learning is one key component of great creative people, creative teams, and creative museums.

Where will I go next?   Who knows--but I plan to continue learning no matter where it is.