From the Editor-in-Chief

A growing body of literature urges museums to engage in co-creation and sharing authority. An important contribution to this came from scholar Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello in the July 2013 guest-edited section of the Journal of Museum Education. In her introduction, she defined shared authority, and argued that museums that care about contributing to the function of civil society need to find ways to give voices to the communities they serve. Shared authority, she wrote, means that “ … in collaborative work that aims to be responsive to social needs, all parties involved must be understood to be authorities on topics of value to the collaboration, and must be understood to have the power and position to fully co-create.”¹

Sharing authority is not easy to do, for it requires breaking habits and shedding assumptions.

Museum professionals often have a hard time giving up expertise when it comes to content, believing that visitors need and want the information that museums hold. But interpretive planner Swarupa Anila believes that instead of defining shared authority “as corrective measures, raising up stories,” museums can learn to see that incorporating multiple perspectives and voices creates collective cultural wealth.²

Most of the examples of successfully shared authority documented in the literature focus on exhibition development, and most tout techniques for engaging visitors in meaning-making through activities such as adding their voices through written comments, recording their stories, or other prompts that foster conversation for making connections between their lives and the exhibitions’ content. Other museums are inviting community members or professionals from outside the museum to serve on exhibition development teams. For instance, when planning the reinstallation of its Asian collection, the Detroit Institute of Art created paid consulting positions for community members on its exhibition development team to “fracture the traditional, univocal Western authority of museums,” according to Anila.³ This approach is new. However, the Wing Luke Museum’s community exhibition program, which has shared authority with groups of people who come together to create exhibitions for the past two decades,⁴ shows that sharing authority in exhibition work has deep roots.

Exhibition development projects that choose to offer different points of view built into the exhibition itself are harder to find. Notable examples include a traveling exhibition co-created by four different Indigenous communities along with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry that explored two ways of understanding the world: traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge and environmental scientific knowledge. The exhibition planners believed that the perspectives were complementary rather than incompatible, and that they enriched each other.⁵ In another example, the Detroit Historical Museum’s Detroit 67: Perspectives examines the city’s riots of July 1967 from multiple perspectives, both to show visitors how different groups of residents had completely different perspectives and sources of information, and to bring disparate community factions together to examine the way those events continue to shape the city.⁶

There are fewer examples of shared authority when it comes to face-to-face interactions between museum facilitators and visitors in guided tours, although dialogic interpretation, whether through a protocol like Visual Thinking Strategies,⁷ the Artful Thinking Palette,⁸ or through the conversational interpretive techniques now being used at places like Conner Prairie,⁹ is well known and increasingly utilized as a communicative technique.

The articles in this issue of JME, guest-edited by Lauren Zalut, offer another strategy for sharing authority in face-to-face interactions. To diversify perspectives, the museums featured in two of the case studies employ tour guides whose lived experiences inform interpretations. The tour-giver’s own perspective becomes part of the museum’s interaction with the public; supplying information and viewpoints that might otherwise be missing and by connecting past and present. That some of these tour guides experienced trauma relating to their tour sites adds layers of complexity. Their lived experiences as intertwined with the sites add an irreplaceable point of view—and richness—to the visitor’s experience. But there are risks that telling one’s traumatic story to strangers may harm the teller, or could teeter on the edge of spectacle and exploitation.

Telling history from a lived experience perspective is not new. In her introduction, guest editor Zalut recognizes the contributions of culturally specific museums that have utilized the personal and specific voices of those who have experienced the histories told at museums as narrators, content contributors, and tour guides.¹⁰ The museums represented in her guest-edited section extend this strategy and amplify it by adding new perspectives, navigating the politics of interpreting the contemporary world, and by revealing the delicacy of touch—the sensitivity to visitors’ reactions—that tour-givers must develop.

In the end, the museums that can most easily incorporate multiple voices in both the structured interpretation of the exhibition or site, and the layered-on interpretation through tours, may be ones like the Museum of Tolerance, also featured in this issue, which aims to avoid telling visitors what to think through a specific narrative, but instead, focuses on helping visitors use the past to understand their lives. Author Mark Katrikh writes, “In conceptualizing the space, the founders based content decisions on the idea that the purpose of the museum was to allow visitors to learn from history, not to teach about historic events.”¹¹ This approach means that the museum can change over time, enabling new voices to add theirs to a collective and varied narrative. It takes the emphasis away from a content-driven storyline, and instead scaffolds visitors’ meaning-making and their ability to forge connections between their own experiences and the larger world, past, present, and future.

About the author

Cynthia Robinson is the director of museum studies and senior lecturer at Tufts University, where she specializes in museum education. She spent 25 years working in and with museums and has extensive experience in developing programs, curricula, and exhibitions, as well as in museum management and administration. Cynthia recently received the 2017 John Cotton Dana Award for Leadership, presented by the Education Committee of the American Alliance of Museums. The award recognizes individuals outside the field of museum education who exhibit outstanding leadership and promote the educational responsibility and capacity of museums. It has only been awarded 9 times in the past 32 years.

Notes

1. Duclos-Orecello, “Shared Authority,” 122. Duclos-Orcello credits Michael Frisch with the concept of shared authority in A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (1990).

2. Anila, “Inclusion Requires Fracturing,” 113.

3. Anila, “Polyvocality and Representation” and Anila, “Inclusion Requires Fracturing,” 115.

4. Wing Luke Museum, “Community Process.”

5. Coats, Maryboy, and Begay, “Roots of Wisdom,” 51.

6. Jackman, “Why the Detroit Historical Museum’s New 1967 Exhibit.”

7. “VTS: Visual Thinking Strategies.”

8. “Artful Thinking.”

9. Bergeron and Tuttle, Art and Science of Engagement, 77.

10. Zalut, “Interpreting Trauma, Memory, and Lived Experience.”

11. Katrikh, “Creating Safe(r) Spaces for Visitors.”