MUSEUMS ARE BORING
NO THEY AREN’T
AT LEAST THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE
By Dr. Dorothy Stulberg, Tenn TLC Community Fellow
I have taken a personal journey to discover that I was pretty empty-headed in my resistance to museums. In preparing for our faculty evening at the museum, I spent considerable time discovering ways in which existing museums engage faculty and students. I start with the beginning of my journey.
Episode One
My boss told me that faculty are drawn to museums! I doubted it, because I was a faculty member for seven years, and I always thought museums were boring. They seemed like funeral homes, except in the case of museums, with reverence for objects. Heaven forbid if you spoke to someone you didn’t know or raised your voice or giggled. I could never understand sitting for half an hour with an out-of the world look on my face, staring at a painting. I didn’t even connect with the famous Italian art museums. When I was forced to go to a museum, I’d whip through and wait outside for my friends. Usually one or two disliked museums as much as I and waited with me.
Foucault considered prisons and museums as institutions of confinement. I always felt confined in a museum. I was watched, I was to be orderly, I was not to be myself.
Episode Two
Engaging in reflective practice encourages you to reflect on why you hold strong opinions. What is the true role of museums? I started reading and thinking.
I thought about the speed of change. A video by X-Plane on You-Tube provides an alarming picture about the speed of change. It took 38 years for the radio to reach 50 million users. It took TV 13 years to do the same. Face book had 100 million users in 9 months! There are now 100 million blogs. Television is watched on phones. E-mail has become passé to the new generation as ninety six percent have joined a social network.
How is the speed of change going to be recorded unless someone is paying attention? And what other institution better equipped than the museum? Andisn’t it best to collaborate with the university faculty?
You and I are making history and what will be remembered 100 years from now. Do we challenge what is collected? Does the faculty have a role in creatively using the museum in teaching so that as education content and delivery changes, museums also change?
Episode Three
The more I read, the more I realize that museums are making the difficult changes necessary to acknowledge different ways of learning and ways of using technology to allow all kinds of interaction. Museum goers can explore the past to the present.
In 2003, the British Museum opened the Living and Dying gallery which explored the ways in which cultures deal with death. Centrally located in the gallery is a display called Cradle to the Grave. Down the center of the great room is a long low glass case with a life supply of prescribed drugs containing 14,000 pills, tablets, lozenges and capsules—the estimated average number prescribed to the average man and woman during their lifetime in Britain. Around the room are devices used for testing us from birth to death with comments and pictures by real people. Think of how professors could use this—psychology, science, pharmacology, history and cultural studies!
Final Episode
I’m not completely convinced that all faculty members will like museums or that all museums are worth spending time in. But I am convinced that museums are extremely important in that they establish cultures in what they choose to display. The time is here for faculty and museums to involve the students in learning from the past in order to understand how we got where we are.
I learned of multiple issues facing museums and universities, as well as endless possibilities, all of which are possible for our students at UT with our wonderful museums at the McClung and the Baker Center.
Learning trails. Although I don’t quite understand learning trails, they sound so interesting and so capable of inducing personal involvement in the use of museums, and very easy technically because of the prevalence of mobile phones. To develop a learning trail, the individual walks through the museum and records his or her reaction. The audio experience forms a linear digital trail that can be shared with others after editing and uploading. Think what a class could do in comparing their personal experience in viewing a display with others!
Web Pages. How do museums and universities recognize and use the difference between representation and experienced reality? How can museums and universities use appearance of objects as realizations of an underlying culture rather than the appearance of objects and their substantial qualities? We can ask our students to take direct experience and put their experiences into words, images, and video. They know how to do this better than I!
Creative Products.What about the use of museums as the center of a novel or short story or a poem? It is possible for authors of novels to say more about how we collect, how we decide what to collect, and how we interpret the meaning of culture, history, biology, architecture, exploration, and other areas of knowledge.
I’m convinced that the museums and universities are undergoing growing pains trying to catch up to the speed of change. But consider these passages, which I saved from somewhere because they struck a note for me: