Custom-made reflective practice: can museums realise their capabilities in helping others realise theirs?

Abstract

For many museums, the reality of their public engagement work frequently fails to match the rhetoric, even when the work is inspired by a genuinely democratic impulse. Museum professionals express the feeling of being ‘stuck’, while their community partners convey frustration and dissatisfaction. Based on the author's 2010 Paul Hamlyn Foundation-sponsored study of public engagement in 12 museums across the UK, the results demonstrate that the only way engagement can both be embedded and effective in museums is through a constant cycle of reflective practice. With the museum as ‘participatory sphere institution’ at the heart of civil society, community partners are no longer seen as passive ‘beneficiaries’ and the museum becomes a vibrant public sphere of contestation. Thus, in line with Amartya Sen's call to address ‘capability failure’, museums, while realising their institutional capabilities, may actively support others realising theirs.

Keywords:

• museum management
• museum ethics
• public engagement
• social responsibility
• civil society
• citizenship
• reflective practice
• museum governance

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the Paul Hamlyn Foundation for the initiation and support of the study ‘Engagement at the heart of museums and galleries’ and especially the courageous staff and community partners of the 12 museums and galleries involved, who provided a model of fearless, open discussion of their public engagement practice to the sector as a whole. These 12 are now embarking on organisational development, with the support of the Foundation and the continued involvement of their community partners as ‘critical friends’, towards improving and embedding their engagement practice.

Notes

1. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation works across three UK programmes: Social Justice, Education and Learning and the Arts. The mission of the Foundation is to maximise opportunities for individuals and communities to realise their potential and to experience and enjoy a better quality of life, now and in the future. In particular, the Foundation is concerned with children and young people and with disadvantaged people. In the study, ‘Engagement at the heart of museums and galleries’, the Foundation wished to consider whether, within the Arts Programme, there may be scope to‘ help promote the health and development of the museums and galleries sector in the UK. For information about the Arts Programme or any other aspect of Paul Hamlyn Foundation's work, see www.phf.org.uk

2. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation has now published the final report on the study. Entitled, Whose Cake is it Anyway?: A collaborative investigation into engagement and participation in 12 museums and galleries in the UK, it is available from May 2011 on the Foundation's website: phf.org.uk. There is a search function on the site, and the report is located in the ‘publications’ section, as well as the ‘arts’ section.

3. Rock is a type of hard stick-shaped boiled sugar confectionary that usually has a pattern or word embedded throughout its length (Lynch 2011c, 9).

4. The identity of the museums and galleries from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales that participated will not be revealed here, as a condition of the study. They include the following: a large national museum service; a range of local authority museum services with multiple sites; a university museum; some local authority art galleries and museums; and some independent museums and galleries.

5. Cultural hegemony was discussed by Antonio Gramsci as the political, economic, ideological or cultural power exerted by a dominant group over other groups, regardless of the explicit consent of the latter. For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a ‘crisis of authority’, the ‘masks of consent slip away, revealing the fist of force’ (Antonio Gramsci 1971, Lxxxix).

6. According to Peter Senge, in situations of rapid change “only those [organisations] that are flexible, adaptive and productive will excel. For this to happen… organizations need to ‘discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels… A learning organization exhibits five main characteristics: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, a shared vision, and team learning”. (Senge 1990, 4).

7. The study was underpinned by the principles of Participatory Action Research (PAR). The PAR approach ensures that the views of communities and the museum/gallery sector are integral to the process.

8. Theory of change defines all the building blocks required to bring about a given long-term goal. http://www.theoryofchange.org/background/basics.html

9. Some of this is explored further in a paper co-authored with Sam Alberti, where we break this process down through the example of an attempt at co-creating an exhibition, Myths About Race, at the Manchester Museum (Lynch and Alberti 2010).

10. Zahid Hussain, Manchester Museum Community Advisory Panel member, writer and Manchester-based social enterprise developer speaking at the ‘Are museums racist?’ debate at the Manchester Museum, August 2007.

11. Brazilian Augusto Boal developed the idea of Image Theatre as part of ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’. http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.com/

12. I further explore the effects and ethical implications of ‘false consensus’ in Lynch (2011a).

13. These issues are explored in Lynch and Alberti (2010) where we break this process down through the example of an attempt at co-creating an exhibition, Myths About Race, at the Manchester Museum in 2007.

14. McGonagle, D., in talk given 18 June 2008 as part of a debate on museums of the future at City University London.

15. I explore the difficulties of working within utopian images of the museum in a volume of the ARKEN Bulletin, a research journal published in English and distributed internationally by ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (Lynch 2011b). http://www.arken.dk/content/us/press/news/a_new_arken_bulletin_looks_at_the_changing_museum