Student Exhibit Prototypes

If you could make any kind of exhibit for the Hempsted house what would it be?

Got an idea?  Great!

You need to make it in the next three hours. Here is some foam core, markers, string, paper, and other stuff let’s see what you can do.

That was the charge we gave the Writers Block students at an exhibit prototype session we developed for them earlier this summer. At that point, they had spent time in different kinds of museums and they were very familiar with the content of the Hempsted House. What would they come up with?  

I have done this workshop with museum professionals as a way to get them to quickly think through some of the implications for creating more visitor focused exhibits, using family learning criteria such as PISEC and prototyping ideas. After making a foam core exhibit, groups typically present to each other, find out what works and what doesn’t, and make changes to their exhibit.

My goals for the students were very different. I want to see what kinds of materials they would want to interact with and to hear what content interested them the most.

Here are some clips of the students describing their exhibits:

The students created a variety of prototype exhibits:

• Two board games
• Two model houses
• A comic book
• A newspaper about ghost sightings
• A display of some of the pages of the Hempsted diary
• A poster/display that asked visitors to help determine if the house was a stop on the Underground Railway

The content that some of the students focused on were the questions or mysteries. The students did tie Adam Jackson and Joshua Hempsted together-even as spirits from the afterworld. The two house models were seen as guides to the house for the students that created them.

What was most interesting to me is how the student work differed from how adults have taken on this challenge in past workshops. When I ask adults to do this activity, they invariable want to add a computer screen. I did let the students know that this was an option, but none of the students’ exhibits included technology.  

Additionally, the students’ content was not linear while adults often try and tell a story or control the user experience – first you do this then that. Even the newspaper exhibit about ghosts was designed to be accessed randomly.

The students were also interested in unresolved questions and creepy places. Neat and clean both physically and intellectually is just boring for them, and, maybe, lacks authenticity. I think they have a point.

Robert Kiihne of RK Exhibits will be participating in the teen audience research this summer and will draft the exhibitions component of the interpretive plan in the fall.

25 Students Visit the Mashantucket Pequot Museum

The MashantucketPequot Museum, in Mashantucket, CT, was the first of four field trips with the students this summer.  Our field trip goals include:

• Observing which exhibits the students use, for how long and what their experience looks like.
• Asking the students to write in journals about their experiences while in the museum and addressing specific questions.
•  Providing the students with examples of exhibits for them to adopt, push off of, or think about when they are asked to consider what we might do at the Hempsted House.
•  Seeing how the students interact socially within the exhibits – for example when left without direction, do they go through as a group? A few at a time? Individually?
• Ideally, identifying what characteristics of exhibits the students are drawn to

The students arrived after a long school bus ride. Entering the Museum, the students received a brief introduction from a Pequot Museum staff member. Many of the students had been to the Museum on school field trips. The introduction was short, well done, and included information directly relevant to the students’ project.  The staff member addressed the plight and behavior of enslaved Pequots after the Pequot War. Many Pequots enslaved on colonial manors walked away and joined other local Native American groups.

Four days later, when asked what their least favorite part of the Pequot Museum visit was, the students cited the staff introduction. I admit that the staff person had done this introduction at my request. I had hoped the students would see a connection and think about the differences between Adam Jackson’s enslavement and the Pequot enslavement at the same time period.  Instead, they perceived it as a lecture.

After the introduction, students could explore the Museum freely. At first we stayed together, but this quickly broke down as different groups of students found different exhibits more or less engaging.  Students got together in groups of two to five, in basically two age categories; 11 to 14 and 15 to 17. The students understood we were there for the day, and everyone took their time. 

Much of the Museum is taken up with exceptional life-sized dioramas of the ice age, a 6,000 year old hunt, nature of the region and a series of vignettes taking place in a Pequot village.  Off of these spaces there are a number of small theaters with rotating shows and smaller gallery. The Museum contains an introductory space with stories from today, a wonderful object theater that documents the tribe’s history from 1930 or so onward and a temporary show, “Ramp It Up! Skateboard Culture in Native America,” a show aimed squarely at our demographic.

Here is how the students interacted, and what they wrote about at the end of the day:

Ramp It Up!:

Only about half the students viewed this exhibit, but of those that did, a good number enjoyed the show, and even read the labels. The skateboard decks were behind glass, and one student reached behind and touched a few of them before the other students told him to stop. All agreed that there should be some you could touch. There was a long loop of video running – but without added information or a way to control the video the students quickly lost interest.

The Ice Age:

A 2 foot tall model of a glacier with a 4” bronze model of the Museum at the bottom quickly conveyed the thickness of ice that covered the area 11,000 years ago in the last ice age. They got it and liked it. Next to this was a computer interactive that some of the students tried and promptly gave up on. Its design made little sense to them – and they were not sure what the interactive was attempting to convey.

Two life sized models of mega fauna looked great and many of the students were drawn to the numerous animals throughout. They did not read labels, but did understand – these animals lived here a long time ago.

The Hunt:

This life sized diorama of a caribou hunt with multiple vignettes fascinated the students. The computer terminals here and the rail labels provided added information – but not the information the students were looking for in a way that they could access.

The Pequot Village:

The Village takes up a large part of the Museum. It incorporates about 30 life sized vignettes of Pequot village life. Few institutions could afford or would be willing to commit the needed space to an impressive installation like this. Interpretation for the Village relies on user operated audio guides. Visitors type in numbers, imbedded in the floor, into their audio guide and hear a piece about the scene in front of them. The students were having fun exploring the museum in small social groups up to this point. Listening to audio pieces often gets in the way of social interaction, so I thought that the students might not use this technology very much, maybe a few times here and there.  I was wrong. Almost all of the younger students listened to a large number of the audio pieces, though the older ones did not listen to as many.

The pieces themselves are very short and focused. After each one there is often a reference to added related topics that the user can access. One student decided that he had to hear every single one. This took a long time, but he was determined.

Off of the Village there are few galleries and shorter video presentations. Most of this was of little interest to the students, save one element. A Pequot language interactive gave students the ability to hear their name in the Pequot language as well as other words. This interactive came up a lot in post visit conversations.

The Witness – a 30 minute film:

This dramatization of events surrounding the Pequot War engaged all of the students, and many commented on how sad the film was.

What can we learn from the Writer Block students’ first museum visit? Here are my preliminary takeaways –

• Choice - The students responded to choice and the ability to choose their own experience. Every time that the students could not exercise choice they lost interest and moved on. A few of students commented that they had a much better time exploring the Museum than their last visit; when they had received a guided tour with their school group.
• Relevance – Just like the rest of us the students needed a way to prioritize what they should look at. In competing stories of tool making and family life, family life wins hands down because it is easily relatable.
• Accessibility - Like choice, the ability to find information that they wanted to know determined the success of exhibits.

We will see if these observations hold for the other museum visits. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum has a lot of wonderful exhibits, but it does not have a lot of hands on interactives competing for attention. How would more hands on interactives have altered the students’ experience? 

Robert Kiihne of RK Exhibits will be participating in the teen audience research this summer and will draft the exhibitions component of the interpretive plan in the fall.

John Jackson never lived here

“Not until the first hours of May 29, 1711, could they finally act. On that day, Jackson stood watchful and uneasy on his master’s boat, as he and John Rogers maneuvered it across the dark waters of the Sound." - Allegra Di Bonaventure, For Adam’s Sake, p.153 

In was the middle of the night when John Jackson, father of Hempsted slave Adam Jackson, sailed from New London, CT to Long Island, NY with his former owner, John Rogers, at the helm. Once on Long Island, John would sneak into the home of his wife’s owner and, without waking the other occupants, find his wife, Joan Jackson, and their two children inside. The group would leave the house, return to the boat and sail back to New London undetected. The next day Joan and the two children would be spirited away to Rhode Island while John Jackson and John Rogers faced an angry New London court– where no one doubted who had done the daring deed.

At the time of this dramatic event Adam Jackson was 11 years old. It will be nearly 16 years before Adam will be enslaved at Hempsted House.

So here is the question – Is this amazing tale an appropriate story to tell at the Hempsted House?  By the definition of many historic home interpretations the answer is clearly no. The story did not take place within the Hempsted property and had little impact on the occupants at the time. Yet if you were visiting the Hempsted House in New London and wanted to learn about Colonial slavery wouldn’t you want to hear this story?  

Certainly the story and its aftermath must have helped to form Adam Jackson’s view of his world. Adam would have heard of the later capture of Joan, his mother, and two of his siblings within months of the dramatic rescue and their immediate sale to yet another family. He may have gotten regular updates of his father’s extraordinary efforts to gain Joan’s freedom over the next 6 years and even longer to regain the freedom of Jack, his little brother, and Rachel, his little sister, in the Massachusetts courts system. He would also see his parents and siblings struggle with the limits of freedom for free men and women of color in Colonial America.  For Adam the idea and reality of freedom must have been complex.

Joshua Hempsted himself chronicled the murder of a 9 year old slave named Zeno. Whipped to death by her master, Zeno’s death and the heavily attended trial of her well-heeled master grabbed the attention of all of New London. While clearly the community disapproved, in the end her owner, the upper crust Nicholas Lechmere, would escape punishment. Joshua and Adam would have known all of the players in this drama personally, and it is hard to image that this life experience did not shape both their views as a slave owner and a slave – yet none of this took place within the Hempsted House nor involved its occupants.

Which leads to our question:  is this an appropriate story to share at the Hempsted House?  What do you think?

Robert Kiihne of RK Exhibits will be participating in the teen audience research this summer and will draft the exhibitions component of the interpretive plan in the fall.

The Writers’ Block students first impressions of the Hempsted House

[Note:  As part of our interpretive planning process, the planning team is working with a group of young students from The Writers’ Block, to learn more about their impressions about museums and how they would prefer to experience them.  On July 30 they will be presenting the stories of the house with the public during an open house, the details of which will follow in an additional blog post.] 

The students gathered at the house for the first time on June 25th. Many knew very little about the House, so this was our opportunity to hear their preconceptions. From the beginning they understood that the House is very old, but they had no idea how old. Anywhere from 1640 to 1850 would have made sense to them. Some had heard that the House was haunted and some knew that a slave had lived there.

We asked the students about their past museum experiences. In retrospect this was a trick question since many did not think of a historic house as a museum. In fact the students’ answers suggest that they do see historic houses in a different category. While the kids had gone to science museums and art museums, they also gave examples of monuments – the Statue of Liberty and Lincoln Memorial.

The kids are right.

Many historic houses are presented as monuments and not museums.  How often have you been to a historic house interpreted through:

• Discussions of the architecture
• Lists of who lived here when
• What they might have done in each room
• How the house’s occupants would have used this antique candle holder that the curator bought last year

Often what is lacking is a broader context: community, moment in history, theme – the basic building blocks of a museum exhibition.

As the students explored the Hempsted House, they enjoyed playing- “what is that?” and, “Can you uncover the story of this house?” Then it was time to give  them some historical context. It was 11:30 in the morning, 92 degrees and humid outside. We told them the basic history of the house, who lived here and when.  We tried to add a little variety into the program with a timeline activity. I brought a bright red 8’ by 1’ board on a stand with a lot of stickers and asked the kids for help. They could put what every dates they wanted between 1630 and 2013. We helped identify dates of major events the kids brought up. My hope had been that the kids might see this as theirs. They might put their own birthday or 9/11 or some anything that had meaning in their lives. It was not to be. While they participated, the students, from 11 to 17, did not include any dates with personal meaning. I then realized that, for them, so far, this was school without air-conditioning.

Many of the kids did start to participate in a discussion, or at least ask some questions when it came time to talk about Colonial slavery. The story is complex and different from place to place. Many students and Writers Block staff had made assumptions like – there must have been a number of slaves at this house, they would have lived outside of the main house, the slaves would have eaten different food. While none of these are true at the Hempsted property, they might have been true right down the road in 1730.

So what is the difference between the life of the Hempsted family and the life of Adam Jackson? To me (a father of two in his mid 40’s) it is family. Joshua Hempsted does everything he can to provide for his children, while denying Adam Jackson even the hope of family. Even if Adam could have children, his offspring would be born into bondage. We know that in the coming weeks the students and Writers Block staff will pull apart slavery, and there are many directions they can choose to explore. My hope is that at some point this will no longer feel like school.   

Robert Kiihne of RK Exhibits will be participating in the teen audience research this summer and will draft the exhibitions component of the interpretive plan in the fall.