by Andrew J. Pekarik

The ways that museums measure the success of their exhibitions reveal their attitudes and values. Are they striving to control visitors so that people will experience what the museum wants? Or are they working to support visitors, who seek to find their own path? The type of approach known as ‘‘outcome-based evaluation’’ weighs in on the side of control. These outcomes are sometimes codified and limited to some half-dozen or so ‘‘learning objectives’’ or ‘‘impact categories.’’ In essence, those who follow this approach are committed to creating exhibitions that will tell visitors what they must experience. Yet people come to museums to construct something new and personally meaningful (and perhaps unexpected or unpredictable) for themselves. They come for their own reasons, see the world through their own frameworks, and may resist (and even resent) attempts to shape their experience. How can museums design and evaluate exhibitions that seek to support visitors rather than control them? How can museum professionals cultivate ‘‘not knowing’’ as a motivation for improving what they do?

by Ken Yellis

There are an estimated 17,500 museums in the United States. If people think these institutions are pretty much the same once you get inside or that the differences between them are unimportant, it might be hard to persuade them that all 17,500 are needed. Exhibitions can have great transformational power; why don’t they exercise that power more often? Have museums not fully understood exhibitions as a medium? Have we not devoted enough attention to the full repertoire of visitor feelings? Have visitors been telling us this and we have failed to listen? For many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for most others few or none. How can this be? ‘‘Museum-adept’’ visitors seem to prize museums as theaters in which their own emotional and spiritual journeys can be staged, but what about the non-museum-adept? Can the museum-adept teach us how to realize our medium’s full potential?

by Elaine Heumann Gurian

In this paper, I suggest that museums have not explored their potential opportunities enough when dealing with their communities under stressful conditions. Each reader, however, should decide when what I am talking about is no longer appropriate for museums in general or your museum in particular. While some museums have moved more in the direction of serving their communities, I am struck by how little philosophical change has actually taken place in most museums after a year into this universal economic downturn. I argue that incorporating a broader palette of social services may make institutions more useful, but at some point these institutions might cease to be traditional museums. My question would be: ‘‘Should you care?’’ I do not suggest that all museums become full-service community centers, though somemight explore that option. Perhaps the question might become: How do we expand our services so that we make museums’ important physical assets of safe civic space and objects useful for tangible three-dimensional learning into more relevant programs that reach all levels of community, and are rated by many more as essential to their needs and their aspirations for their children?

by David Carr

Fresh encounters with Maori treasures first seen by the author at the Metropolitan Museum in 1984 revealed the concentrated power of these objects and the importance of their presence among the beliefs and continuities of their makers’ culture. A masterwork viewed in a museum may evoke a strong and sometimes inarticulate response. We might say the inability to articulate reflects a larger dimension—an aspect of the infinite—residing in the object. Museum objects return us to the human culture and knowledge we carry with us; they stimulate reflective impulses essential to the shared threads of democracy. They allow us to locate ourselves and each other, and our shared horizons.

by PINO MONACO AND THEANO MOUSSOURI

Recently, the Smithsonian Institution addressed the challenge of coordinating the articulation of intended learning outcomes for educational programs. Pino Monaco, and Theano Moussouri, got together to discuss the Generic Learning Outcomes (GLOs), and a similar framework proposed by the National Science Foundation in the U.S., as concrete guidelines to provide tangible and assessable shapes to learning outcomes.

Issues discussed and still open for elaboration rotated around the concept of intentionality – why is the informal education community still discussing whether we should or should not have intended outcomes in mind when we facilitate a learning experience?

Furthermore, after presenting examples of how outcome-based evaluations could be integrated within our current practices, the authors recognized the need for further pondering, especially concerning the issue of “measuring learning outcomes.”

• Isn’t a measurement in contrast with a free-choice learning experience?
• How do we measure fun and enjoyment?
• Instead of measuring, could we gather and describe?

Feel free to join the conversation in the Forum by adding your comments below.

by AMANDA KRANTZ, RANDI KORN, AND MARGARET MENNINGER

Understanding visitors is a necessary and complex undertaking. In this article, we present K-means cluster analysis as one strategy that is particularly useful in unpacking the complex nature of museum visitors.

Three questions organize the article and are as follows:

1. What is K-means cluster analysis?
2. How is K-means cluster analysis conducted?
3. Most importantly: What are the applications of K-means cluster analysis for museum practitioners?

To answer these questions, we present five steps that are vital to conducting a K-means cluster analysis.

We also present three cases studies to demonstrate differences among the results of three K-means cluster analyses and provide practical applications of the findings.

by JOHN FRASER

This study asked why parents value zoo experiences for themselves and their children. It proposes a new theory regarding the psychological value of such experiences for the development of identity. The study used a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore parenting perspectives on the value of zoo visits undertaken by eight families from three adjacent inner-city neighborhoods in a major American city. The results suggest that parents use zoo visits as tools for promoting family values. These parents felt that experiences with live animals were necessary to encourage holistic empathy, to extend children’s sense of justice to include natural systems, and to model the importance of family relationships. The author concludes that parents find zoos useful as a tool for helping their children to develop skills with altruism, to transfer environmental values, to elevate children’s self-esteem, and to inculcate social norms that they believe will aid in their children’s social success in the future.

Photograph by Julie Larsen Maher, staff photographer of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NY, courtesy of the WCS.

by KEN YELLIS

Our relationships with our audiences have proved parlous. But if history is destined to be contested, where should museums be in that contest and how do we get there?

Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum has turned out to be a path not taken; Enola Gay was a cautionary tale. But we should have these fights in museums, where the national narrative is blocked out and staged, because of how museums teach us, opening hidden windows on cloaked realities.

Museums can start by becoming clearer about what they think they are doing when they make an exhibition. Exhibitions can have a profound effect on visitors at many levels but it doesn’t happen very often. Is that because visitors seek another kind of experience from what we typically offer?