by columnist Cira Brown,

This past Sunday, I visited the Museum of Science to see the new exhibit entitled “Dead Sea Scrolls: Life in Ancient Times”. Admittedly, it’s a topic I don’t know much about, which makes it difficult to evaluate how the exhibition presented the material. However, the experience made for a good opportunity to assess learning in a museum from my own standpoint – and I realized something interesting. While the artifacts were stunning and the exhibition beautifully crafted, I emerged from my time in the exhibit without a clear idea of what the objective of the exhibition was. What I mean by this is that despite all of the information in each panel, I was unable to construct a larger understanding of the topic at hand – in short, the big idea, save for a vague larger appreciation for the historical significance of the discovery and preservation efforts.

When I visit an exhibit, it’s usually apparent to me what the “take-away” learning objectives are – the label text, artifacts and interactives all acting as scaffolds to support a predetermined goal. I was unable to discern objectives from this exhibit, as the labels were informative, but did not focus too heavily on any particular aspect. I was expecting to find conflicting theories about the origin and meaning the scrolls, each with their respective academic arguments for and against each theory. Similarly, I expected to be presented with detailed explanations of preservation and restoration efforts. Instead, the exhibition mainly focused on providing context about the era in which the scrolls were written, which in and of itself was a tremendous task. Due to the scrolls unknown provenance and inconclusive assertions about the authors’ motivations, I understand the need to be ambiguous, especially given the “official” status that is bestowed upon the museum exhibit.

Nonetheless, I certainly wouldn’t say this say this exhibit failed, and I should note that I did not participate in the audio tour, which may have remedied some of this confusion. Jumping into an exhibit about a topic I knew little about was challenging and left me with a lot of questions – when I went home I downloaded a book and watched a documentary on the topic as well. The exhibit, then, was successful in that it sparked further research and interest. But in the museum, in the whirlwind of information, I felt fairly lost. I’m curious to know if this alienated visitors instead of empowering them.As I reflect on my time on Sunday, I’ve decided that this “lost” feeling isn’t as negative at it appears. I certainly wasn’t frustrated in the exhibit. If something is challenging, the consequential challenge for the curator and exhibit developer is to translate the topic without making it intimidating or isolating, and I wouldn’t characterize the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit as either. I think it’s okay to not understand everything, perhaps even major things, or have an expectation that visitors will meet those educational objectives in bullet form. It brings to mind the work of art museum educators and the valuable discussions that can be created from visual observation – even if the participants do not know the “hidden” or “true” meanings of the artwork, context or symbols contained within. After this initial engagement with an object or concept, will visitors be more receptive to internalizing other meanings? I believe so – and this starting point is inquiry.

Science museums espouse “exploration”, and fostering exploration within a conceptual topic is a difficult experience to design. The science exhibit developer can emulate an experiment to allow visitors to explore particular phenomena, which are a tried-and-true for science exhibitions. The aforementioned impetus for inquiry is usually explicitly stated in label text. However, are there other, non-interactive, non-explicit ways to mentally explore a topic? What about the progression and formation of an idea, particularly a scientific theory? Like the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls or any historical topic, scientific narratives cannot always be summed up in a succinct manner.

My first foray into exhibit development took the form of an exploratory digital exhibition on one of those tricky narratives: the scientific development of early 20th-century physics and the subsequent development of atomic weaponry. The context needed to present the topic is immense, both on a scientific and historic scale: quantum mechanics plus the global affairs that resulted in two world wars. This project addressed many of the difficulties in fostering exploration that I’ve described here, and, in my next blog post, I will discuss various educational methods to confront these “tricky” topics.

Also, I’d be curious to know what others who saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit thought of it!

by columnist Kacie Rice

We’ve all seen our fair share of movies that happen at museums (museum professionals around the country are surely tired of being asked if their jobs are like Night at the Museum or The DaVinci Code) – but what about bringing the movies to life in museum exhibits themselves?

Beginning May 23, Thinktank, a hands-on science museum in Birmingham, England, will be hosting The Pirates!: In an Adventure with Scientists: The Exhibition, based on the 2012 animated movie of the same title. The movie, released last year in the U.S. as The Pirates: Band of Misfits (some speculated at the time that this change was due to Americans’ perceived inability to think of “scientists” as a fun crowd – though I’d ask anyone who believes this to join my pub trivia team just to prove them wrong), is a stop-motion comedy from the Aardman Animation team (Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run) that follows a group of pirates as they accidentally get tangled up with Charles Darwin’s search for the extinct dodo (I’d highly recommend checking it out if, like me, you’re into evolution humor). The movie manages to be at once funny and surprisingly smart – when was the last time you saw the H.M.S. Beagle namedropped in a kids’ movie?

The exhibition, funded by Sony Pictures Animation, will do double duty, both advertising for the movie and educating kids about piracy, filmmaking, and evolution. It features many of the clay puppets and sets from the movie and uses them as a jumping off point to teach kids about steering a galleon and using blue-screen technology. The museum will also be displaying a recreation of a dodo specimen from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to link the exhibition to natural history and evolution themes.

I’ve noticed exhibits like Pirates cropping up sporadically for the last several years. The Perot Museum of Science, Dallas’ brand new flagship science museum, boasts a Tyrannosaurus rex scale model used in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park. The American Museum of Natural History in New York has hosted a series of events and exhibitions coinciding with the release dates of the popular Spider Man franchise of movies. These have included exhibitions on live spiders in 2007 and 2012, the latter of which was highly publicized and attended by Spider Man himself, Andrew Garfield.

These pop-culturally relevant exhibits hold huge potential to attract audiences to museums – but do they do this at the cost of weakening a museums’ mission? I have to admit, when I first read about the Pirates exhibition in Birmingham, my first thought was that it seemed too commercial. The museum is using the props from the film to sell the exhibition and get bodies in the door – the question is: will they center the exhibition around these props to the detriment of real learning, or will they use children’s initial interest in the movie to really get them involved in history and science? Even more concerning: will the funding from Sony Pictures Animation force the museum’s hand in making an exhibition that promotes Sony’s profit-based interests over the museum’s educational interests?

I wondered if casual visitors might have the same reaction that I did – will they see an exhibition like this as a sign that the museum is “selling out” and weakening its educational mission? Will audiences place less trust in a respected cultural institution if it commercially associates itself with popular media? These questions echo fears raised in the 1990’s, when Chicago’s Field Museum partnered with McDonald’s and Disney to raise money to buy Sue, the famous T. rex fossil. Many in the museum field felt that this association would imbue the fossil and exhibition with dangerous corporate messaging that could derail the museum’s educational content. Fortunately, McDonald’s and Disney anticipated these fears and presented their gift as purely philanthropic – while a cast of Sue did travel to Disney World, the travelling exhibit was entirely educational and served to promote the museum’s mission across the country. In this case, the museum’s partnership with popular media corporations paid off: though the corporations did hold naming rights for the exhibitions (see: the McDonald’s Fossil Prep Lab), The Field Museum retained all intellectual rights and had the freedom to teach about Sue in a way that would not have been possible without the funding partnership (for more on this story, including the dramatic legal battle over Sue, I’d recommend Steve Fiffer’s fantastic 2001 book Tyrannosaurus Sue).

Does it benefit museums to use media corporations to capitalize on pop cultural trends and events? Many people decry popular media as devoid of substance, but in the examples above, movies have opened the doors to a variety of academic topics: piracy, technology, paleontology, and entomology. As funding grows increasingly scarce, do you think we’ll start to see museums like Harvard’s Peabody partnering with Paramount Pictures to create an Indiana Jones Hall of Archaeology? Do you think a trend like this would help museums or hurt them in the long run? I’m on the fence about this – while I believe that these kinds of exhibits would bring people in (I’d be the first in line for the Indiana Jones hall!) and provide much-needed funding, I also think they could make the public assume that the museum’s exhibits aren’t academically rigorous, weakening their trust in traditionally esteemed institutions.

As the Pirates exhibit won’t open until May 25th, we won’t know how Thinktank’s relationship with Sony will play out until the reviews start coming in. Until then, my hopes are high that kids will go in hoping to see their favorite pirate characters and come out wanting to read about Blackbeard, Mary Read, and, of course, the dodo.