Museum Studies Blog at Tufts University

Today we bring you an article by Christina Errico, currently a Tufts student in the Museum Education Master’s program. For the Tufts course Museums and Digital Media, students investigate and critique the real ways that museums are implementing a variety of digital media.

Recently, I visited the MFA for the first time and, realizing that I would most likely be overwhelmed by the vast amount of art in the museum, I decided to make use of their mobile guides while I was there. I didn’t mind paying the $6 because I had gotten into the museum for free with my Tufts ID, and I liked that the guide was free for those who really needed it. But if I had to pay the full $25 admission fee, it might have been a little harder for me to justify paying an extra $6 for the audio guide.

The actual device was simply an iPod touch fitted into a sturdy case that had a durable lanyard attached to it. The headphones were standard plastic headphones, nothing fancy, but what I liked about them was that the cord ran up the lanyard and came out where your collarbone would be so that the cord wouldn’t get tangled or caught on anything. As someone who owns an iPhone, I found the device’s interface very familiar and easy to use. The only issue I had with the device itself was that the case didn’t allow you to lock the iPod which meant that it was using its battery the entire time I had it. For someone like me who wanted to use the guide for multiple exhibitions, it became an issue because I eventually ran out of battery. Overall though, I really enjoyed the device itself because it was easy to use, comfortable, and well-designed.

I decided to start with the “Class Distinctions” tour and I have to say that it really enhanced my experience in that gallery. As someone who has an interest in Dutch painting but not a lot of knowledge about it, I really appreciated how they included the curator in almost every tour stop. The curator was very down to earth, engaging, and never condescending. She pointed out interesting things about the context of each painting rather than simply describing what was going on or the techniques used to paint it. Almost each stop had a “Going Deeper” section and what I loved about these were that they often focused on a different painting that was right next to the original one. These were then compared to show what the differences and similarities were and what themes were present in Dutch painting as a whole, making the entire guide seamless with the exhibit. I also liked that it usually gave directional cues on where to go next or where to look. Many of the stops had videos which were very interesting, and I appreciated how the guide would tell me exactly when to look at the screen for a video and when to look back at the art so that I never had to worry if I was missing something.

While the audio guide as a genre is not the newest idea in the museum world, I think the way the MFA handled it still made it fresh and new. By including a “Going Deeper” option, they allowed the visitor to have some choice on how much they wanted to explore rather than locking them into a specific time frame. I also liked that they brought in different voices like the curator and a poet, for instance. I additionally appreciated that, by including secondary artworks in the “Going Deeper” tracks, the audio guide actually covered most of the paintings in the gallery. For me, I felt that the “Class Distinctions” audio guide really met its learning goals of helping the visitor to slow down and learn a lot about the paintings in the greater context of Dutch art, culture, and history.

Overall, the benefits of the MFA’s mobile guide greatly outweighed the few drawbacks. I thought that it was absolutely an appropriate and almost essential use of digital media given the size of the museum and huge amounts of art. The small, personal size of the device did not take away from the art or the museum experience and the headphones didn’t bleed sound into the galleries. The MFA’s mobile guide was well-designed and well-executed and I would definitely go back and use it again.

Today we bring you an article by Christina Errico, currently a Tufts student in the Museum Education Master’s program. Here, Christina analyzes a tour at the MFA for the Tufts course Teaching and Learning in the Museum.

In November, I took a docent-led tour of the Art of Europe wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The tour was aimed at providing the participants with a broad range of examples of European art, from medieval to early 20^th century. While the experience was not wholly unsuccessful, there were two major issues with the tour. There was a clear lack of engagement between the tour guide and the visitors and, because of that, the tour did not necessarily live up to the MFA’s “ultimate aim” of their mission statement: to “encourage inquiry and to heighten public understanding and appreciation of the visual world.”

The first thing I noticed about my tour was that, because we were never asked about ourselves, we were (presumably unintentionally) being told that although we were not important, what was important was our guide asserting her authority by telling us how long she had worked there and how much she knew about the art. By the way our guide described the works of art and the fact that she never welcomed questions, the tour felt as if it was made for people who already knew about European art or at least had a very strong interest in it. This may have felt exclusionary for some people, and in fact one visitor dropped off the tour a few stops in. Our tour guide also walked quickly between works of art that sometimes spanned long and confusing stretches of the museum without once looking back to make sure that her tour was keeping up with her or even that we were all with her when she began speaking about the next piece. Because our guide did not take into consideration all the different aspects of our experiences and because we as learners were not finding new ideas or constructing knowledge on our own, I would argue that making any meaning at all out of this experience would have been very difficult. And while the MFA’s mission statement states that “the Museum’s ultimate aim is to encourage inquiry and to heighten public understanding and appreciation of the visual world,” I believe that because she never checked in with us to see how her efforts were paying off, it would be hard to tell whether she was successful.

While reflecting on my tour experience at the MFA, I thought of the Visitor’s Bill of Rights written by Judy Rand, director of Rand and Associates. There appeared to me to be a few rights that could have been addressed more clearly to yield an improved experience. The first was the right to feel welcomed. Our tour guide could have made us feel more welcome asking us at the very least who we were, but more importantly by engaging in dialogue with us along the way and also making sure that we were keeping up with her physically and intellectually as well. The second right was the right to communication. Communication is a key part of learning and meaning making in museums, so our guide could have made us more comfortable by making sure that we understood what she was saying and why it was relevant, as well as welcoming questions from the start of the tour. The third right the right to choice and control. A certain amount of control could have been ceded to us by our tour guide engaging us with more open-ended questions to facilitate an organic discussion between us.

Although I do not think I learned as much as I could have through the didactic model of teaching, it does work for some learners and I did not walk away having learned nothing from the Art of Europe tour at the MFA. If I was to summarize all of my thoughts, I would do so by quoting Rika Burnham, who at one time was in a very similar situation as our tour guide while conducting one of her run-of-the-mill tours at the Met. Burnham realized that, because visitors were not able to engage with the art through the didactic style of teaching she had employed, she needed to “stop lecturing and begin listening” to her visitors while at the same creating a safe space for them to “question, search, challenge, be moved by, and ultimately bring the work into the context of their own lives without being intimidated or made to feel inadequate.”