From “Scary” to Hide-and-Seek: Youth and Historic House Museums, Part 1

So after our intense work with the students this summer, what were our big takeaways for museums, especially historic house museums? 

Overall, five main themes emerged through our observations, the direct comments of the students, and in what they produced as part of their summer program.  These themes were both methodological, focusing on how museums, including historic house museums, present themselves, and content-based, focusing on what a museum shares.

Methodological  Themes

Control.  The students, time and time again, made it abundantly clear that they wanted to retain control over the experiences they had in museums.  We particularly noted this during our museum field trips, as they were much more engaged in the content when they controlled whether they participated or not, how they participated, and when they exited the experience.  So long as the students were in control of the environment they were much more likely to look around, engage, and even participate . . . or seek opportunities to do so. 

During the times when museum staff addressed them they very clearly shut down, brains turned off, and they became downright fidgety.  They wanted OUT.  They told us rather explicitly how much they disliked certain interpretation methods, such as guided tours (which they tended to call “lectures”),  as you will hear for yourself in this video from eleven-year-old India:

Immersive and Multi-Sensory Environments.  In our museum visits, and in the Open House the students hosted, they sought out or created environments that were highly immersive and multi-sensory.  This includes immersive environments, such as dioramas, the recreated Pequot Village at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, theatre-style movies, and hands-on experiences.  But hands-on experiences themselves are actually rather tricky.  In our CT Cultural Panel (qualitative research with 59 adult museum-goers, which I will be posting about later this fall), it was a pretty universal perspective that hands-on activities are just for kids.  One student, sixteen-year-old Kimmy agreed, underscoring a need for more substantive hands-on experiences that engage more than just “little kids,” as seen in this video: 

It was fascinating to hear from Kimmy throughout the summer, as this was a common refrain of hers.  But in addition to commenting on it, she did something about it at the Open House, by making cornbread for visitors to taste (adding to the multi-sensory experience) as well as engaging visitors in buttermaking so that visitors could butter their cornbread . . . and learn something about food and buttermaking.  Given that the buttermaking made a direct link to the content Kimmy wanted to share at the Open House, it qualified for her, and for visitors, as a substantive hands-on experience.

But making methodological changes isn’t enough.  Far from it.  Indeed, based on this research, as well as broader research of Reach Advisors, I would go further to say that  original objects and an immersive, multi-sensory experience doesn’t get you very far at all without a good story.  The gut-wrenching, emotional, relevant, meaningful story that provide fodder for that post-visit car ride conversation and that sticks with you for days, weeks, months, sometimes years afterwards.  And that brings us to the next set of themes:  content.  We’ll pick up on the content themes in our next post.

We’d love to hear what you think!  To comment, click below where it says how many individuals have commented on this post (e.g., “no comments,” “1 comment,” etc.).

Susie Wilkening is a Senior Consultant and Curator of Museum Audiences at Reach Advisors.  She is leading several phases of audience research for this project.

The Art Museum: A Visit to RISD

For the last museum field trip for the students, we chose the RISD Museum – our only visit to an art museum.  24 kids and 4 adults arrived for a day of looking at art.

The students arrived at the Museum after a week of summer rain – and they were pumped up.  We were self guided, so no staff came out to give us an introduction to the Museum. That was fine with me as, after all, the students had rated the brief introductions at other museum experiences extremely low. In hindsight, this was an error on our part.

The RISD Museum is a very different environment that the previous museums we had gone to. There are 2000-year-old fragile objects open to the air within. Guards roam the galleries kindly asking visitors to keep a reasonable distance from the artifact, don’t run, and be quite. OK this last one has always bothered me. The theory here is that you will disturb other visitors, but since so many labels in art museums often lack even basic context, how exactly are visitors supposed to learn within these walls without talking? If art is directly connected to emotion, why are we asked to be so dispassionate?  I must admit that some of the kids broke all of these rules. All of the students shot through the galleries in just short of a run – the guards’ radios crackled for our entire visit.

Finally we got to a show of current artwork – “Locally Made.” Here was artwork that was visually compelling, but not easily understood.  Many of the students stopped to try and figure out what these might be about. “It’s like ‘Where The Wild Things Are,’ but there’s a dead guy next to him,” one of the students remarked while looking at a canvas. The description was apt. The friendly and relaxed guard engaged the students while explaining why they should not touch the art in a very respectful way. 

The group came back together for lunch, and we decided to re-group. What could we do with the kids that would interest them? The program for the day included this:

Micah Salkind curates The Re-sounding City from 7/23-7/28.

In “The Re-sounding City” six Providence DJs spin one-hour sets that speak to their experiences of life in The Creative Capital. Curators and DJs Micah Jackson will be on-site to talk and dance about the Assembly with audiences, asking them to contribute drawings and text indexing their impressions in archival leger, a document that will compliment audio recordings of the one-hour performances. — Micah Salkind

Perfect and very cool! We thought that the kids would find this both appealing and familiar. After lunch we marched over the Contemporary Art Gallery just as the program began. The music was not too loud, the space did not have fragile items in it, and the staff was friendly and excited. The students spent the next 30 minutes horsing around and chatting with each other. I asked the Writers Block staff what was up – did the kids have any connection to this music? The answer is no – they are too young. As teenagers their musical experience is often limited to today’s pop tunes. While friendly, the staff did not engage the students despite the program description.

So now what? How could we get these kids involved in this museum? How will we fill the 2 hours left before the bus comes back? I decided to try my own role as tour guide. “Did everyone see the mummy? How old do you think this is?” (Guesses ranged from 200 to 20,000 years.)  My guided tour could not compete with the kids next to them. These students had now spent over 5 weeks with each other and were much more interested in just hanging out with their friends than listening to me –or anyone else for that matter.

Toward the end of the visit some of the students slowed down and engaged with the art. There was a piece of Herman Miller upholstery fabric designed by Alexander Girard and a video art installation that made the kids stop and question what was going on. The fabric pattern appeared to be cursive writing – but was not quite readable, and the video appeared to have a narrative which was just as allusive. They thought the fabric was cool, the video art – just confusing. I had to agree with them there. Who is video art for anyway?

At the end of the visit I wondered:

• Should we have read them the riot act when we got there?
• Could we have better prepared them for a successful visit?
• Would the kids that had never been to an art museum before be able to have a better experience next time at an art museum, now that they understand a little more what is expected of them as visitors?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that for most students this museum clearly communicated to most of these kids – ‘we are not the place for you’ despite institutional efforts to address a wider audience. If the Hempstead house is to be successful reaching much larger audiences, we must identify when, where and how our historic house inadvertently sends the same message.

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.

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.

Teen Visitors, Objects, and Stories

It is about stories. 

Having now spent time with the students (ages 11 to 16) this summer, and taken them on three museum field trips, that is my big conclusion.

Not too surprising, is it?

Except that it really isn’t that straightforward, and stories that are compelling to the students seem to be in short supply.

Over the past two weeks we have taken the students on two additional museum field trips:  the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park (both New Bedford, MA); and Mystic Seaport (Mystic, CT).  (Our first trip was to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, which Robert blogged about.) 

Here are some of my initial observations:

•  Original objects are a fundamental base for museum experiences (except when they are not).  That is, the students do look at the objects on display as they walk through exhibition galleries.  The problem is that they walk through those galleries really quickly, and they largely rely on the objects themselves to tell the story.  An object has to be extremely eye-catching to warrant a second look and perhaps a reading of the label or accompanying text panel.  Since the story the objects are there to tell isn’t always self-evident, this means that most, if not all, of the intended content is lost on the students.  But there are also two twists I have noticed:

o   We provided digital cameras to the students, and encouraged them to take pictures of their visits so that they could include printouts in the journals they are keeping.  The majority of the photos taken are of each other or of the objects on display; many include both.  

Mystic Seaport; photo taken by participating student

o   Objects that provide what I am calling the “Ew Factor” do grab their attention and provoke strong reactions.  This includes things like a diorama of a deer being butchered in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and preserved whale eyes and brains at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. 

• The right staff can engage tweens and teens, and pull them into stories and provoke emotional reactions (and help them look at objects with new eyes).  We saw this in two different ways:

o   In New Bedford, the students interacted with a couple of first-person interpreters.  These interpreters did a good job handling a crowd of tweens and teens, and engaging them in the stories they had to share.  The students remembered these interactions, and some are planning to provide similar experiences to their guests at our upcoming open house.

"Strawberry Lady" at New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park; photo taken by participating student

o   At Mystic Seaport, a staff member, not in costume or in character, took a moment to tell the students about a small boat on display that, otherwise, they would have walked right by.  Turns out, this rather beaten-up boat was used by a number of Cubans to escape Cuba, and their tale was rather harrowing.  He pulled them into this story, engaged their emotions, evoked a sense of drama, and they looked at him, and the boat, enrapt and with widened, new eyes.  As Naomi wrote in her journal afterwards, “This story was so interesting I couldn’t stop listening.  I usually do when people give us lectures, but shh it’s a secret.”  For Naomi, and the others, this story was no lecture.

Cuban fishing boat at Mystic Seaport; photo taken by participating student

• Use of technology was hit or miss . . . and largely miss.  A movie in a theatre can hold their interest, engage them in a story, and engender their empathy, as we saw at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum.  But while computer monitors and other video screens may catch their attention, they rarely hold their interest for more than a few seconds.

o   Unless you are talking about the technology they brought with them.  Many of the students used their phones extensively to do more than text, but to take pictures of their visits.  LOTS of pictures, which indicates an interest in the museum on a personal level (otherwise, why bother taking pictures and posting them?). 

• The students did engage with interactive activities, but I did hear comments that some were too simple for them or clearly intended for younger children.  They wanted hands-on activities that were more age appropriate and substantive. 

•  Finally, if creature comforts are not addressed, engagement and learning plummet.  I most clearly saw this in two ways:

o   Seating.  Whenever I saw a bench, there was a student sitting on it.  They take every opportunity to sit down, reminding us that being young doesn’t mean one is indefatigable.  Museum fatigue happens to all of us.  What kinds of content can we, therefore, provide at these benches?  And are there ever enough benches?

Very hot and tired students at Mystic Seaport; photo taken by author

o   Ambient temperature.  It was well into the 90s for our visit to Mystic Seaport, and many of the exhibits and activities take place outdoors there.  Despite that those exhibits and activities would likely have engaged them (costumed interpretation, hands-on activities, performances, and programs on music), most of them were ignored by the students, who actively sought out air conditioned spaces, regardless of content. 

Fundamentally, museums, especially history museums, are in the storytelling business.  Yet based on what we have observed the students doing, and not doing, on all three museum field trips thus far, the stories are getting lost because the mechanisms of telling the stories are not engaging them.  In terms of engaging these students, we have to rethink what we rely on, and what we need to pay attention to. 

We rely too much on:

• objects to tell a story without really realizing that the story they tell may not be evident to visitors
• text panels that are often ignored
• what the students would deem “lectures” from adults that go on and on and on and on (e.g., guided tours)

From what I have seen thus far, perhaps we need to pay more attention to:

•  how objects can more explicitly tell a story and spark deeper interest . . . without text
•  skillful use of trained storytellers
•  substantive hands-on activities that help make visitors (including our students) feel they are experiencing something much like what people of the past experienced
• ensuring that the physical environment is so comfortable that it becomes an aid to engagement, not a barrier

This doesn’t mean that we are suggesting museum exhibitions should no longer have text panels, or that historic house museums should never have guided tours.  Instead, it is a deeper understanding that while those methods of interpretation work for some, they don’t work for many, and we have to be more flexible and nimble if we want to broaden our audiences and create more sustainable futures for our museums.

Next stop:  RISD Museum of Art!

We’d love to know what you think.  Share a comment with us!

Susie Wilkening is a Senior Consultant and Curator of Museum Audiences at Reach Advisors.  She is leading several phases of audience research for this project.