Visitor to Visitor Learning: Setting up Open-Ended Inquiry in an Unstaffed Space

ABSTRACT

Using the case study of an unstaffed, interactive making space at the Portland Museum of Art, this article explores the potential for museums to facilitate visitor to visitor learning without the in-person assistance of a gallery educator. It offers concrete steps to design activities, environments, and supporting resources which prompt close looking and deep engagement. It also highlights challenges and opportunities in defining and evaluating this type of open-ended and visitor-directed learning, which may look very different from other types of gallery teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum education
• visitor to visitor learning
• participatory exhibits
• interactive exhibits
• play
• PISEC
• exhibition design
• evaluation

At the heart of education is learning, not teaching, and so our focus has started to shift from what the teacher does to what happens to the learners.¹

Almost 50 years later, the learner-centered approach described by Malcolm Knowles, a pioneer in defining informal adult learning, is a foundational tenant of education practice. Moreover, we now understand that active learners who play with, manipulate, or respond to new stimuli exhibit increased engagement with and retention of new concepts.² Thus, today’s emphasis rests on the learner’s ability to activate, not the educator’s ability to disseminate. The case study explored below applies these conceptual underpinnings to an interactive gallery in which the evidence of visitor’s exploration is centralized and the educator is both physically absent and made invisible to the greatest extent possible. The article first explores the design of the project, emphasizing how museum educators set up these opportunities for visitor to visitor learning. It then discusses what learning looks like in this context.

Philosophically, this approach is indebted to early educational theorists, including Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky who articulated learning as a co-constructed process of social interaction and emphasized the value of proximal peers as coaches and collaborators.³ It also resonates with the contemporary thinkers who made the words participatory, interactive, responsive, and social uniquely prevalent in contemporary museum education literature. Pedagogically, parallels can be seen in a more general sense with a variety of open-ended, inquiry-driven gallery teaching approaches, including Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). In VTS the educator is a conspicuously neutral facilitator. The educator’s role is to reflect, link, and encourage the non-expert group in observing and synthesizing. He or she neither disseminates information nor plans the conversation’s inevitable twists and turns. That responsibility falls to the visitor.⁴

An introduction to the Workshop

Opened in February 2016 at the Portland Museum of Art, the Workshop is an unstaffed education space populated by rotating installations derived from hands-on activities.

Although these activities could be broadly described as art-making, they are more akin to a collaborative experiment. Unlike a tinker lab or open studio space, each Workshop explores a single, clearly articulated question. Activities have included:

• A coloring book wall (Figure 1), which invited visitors to test how color provides information to a landscape scene, offering clues as to the place, time, season, weather, and mood. Each visitor colored the same seascape scene, adding a data point to the collective experiment.

• A flock of bird sculptures (Figure 2), created using only crumpled newsprint and paper tape in a variety of patterns. Inspired by the bright coloring of birds, we encouraged participants to think about the interplay between 3D and 2D.

• A web of ideas (Figure 3), where we invited visitors to pick up a coffee-stained card and share with others what they see. Drawing upon the same human impulse that allows us to find shapes in the clouds, we encouraged visitors to approach pure abstraction in a playful manner.

Figure 1. Installation photograph, Coloring the Landscape.

Figure 2. Visitor creations, A Bird in the Hand.

Figure 3. Visitor creations, Inspired by the Everyday.

All Workshop prompts conspicuously lack a right answer. There is no correct way to interpret a coffee stain or color a landscape. Paired with often unconventional materials and challenges, this primes visitors to explore their intellectual abilities to reason, wonder, and imagine over their technical abilities to produce. Moreover, each answer proffered by a visitor is more interesting as a one idea in the context of the whole than it would be in a vacuum.

Thus, the second key component of each Workshop is the display of visitor creations. Intentionally egalitarian, each display overtly compiles all responses and allows ideas to pool over months. As new visitors enter, past participants’ creations prompt them to consider the question at hand from new perspectives and consider new directions. The display also ensures that visitor creations visually and conceptually dominate the space. Although museum staff design each prompt, material set, and installation, the emphasis unmistakably rests on visitors’ creations.

Setting up visitor to visitor learning

To paraphrase exhibition designer Kathleen McLean, developing interactive exhibits requires the integration of what you want visitors to learn, with what you want them to do, and how you want them to feel.⁵ Pedagogy functions in concert with lighting, seating, fonts, materials, and design, working together to achieve a cohesive goal. In the Workshop, we sought to create a space which encouraged two types of visitor to visitor learning: (1) between those present in the space at the same time and (2) between current visitors and past participants.

Physically and conceptually, the Workshop is more akin to a talk-back wall than an activity table. Both pair personal reflection with the exploration of others’ insights. From the educator’s perspective, they also require similar types of questions or prompts. A successful activity station might engage visitors in solving a puzzle or creating a paper crane from instructions, but the near-identical results would be of little interest to future visitors. For a Workshop or response wall question to be successful, visitors must be interested in each other’s experiences. However, interest alone is a weak or unreliable facilitator, especially without an educator to prompt inquiry or prior didactic content to establish engagement. Thus, other elements of the Workshop design must support and encourage visitor to visitor learning.

To engender exchange between visitors present in the space at the same time, we leveraged insights from the Philadelphia/Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative (PISEC). In 1998, PISEC published seven criteria for designing family-friendly, interactive exhibits (Table 1). Although developed with children and families in mind, the list defines physical and pedagogical components necessary to produce a social space in which visitors of all ages will play, learn, and work together.⁶

Table 1. Seven characteristics of family-friendly exhibits.

Multi-sided	the family can cluster around the exhibit
Multi-user	interaction allows for several sets of hands and bodies
Accessible	the exhibit can be comfortably used by children and adults
Multi-outcome	observation and interaction are sufficiently complex to foster group discussion
Multi-modal	the activity appeals to different learning styles and levels of knowledge
Readable	the text is arranged in easily-understood segments
Relevant	the exhibit provides cognitive links to visitors’ existing knowledge and experience

The intersection between “multi-outcome” and “multi-sided” became particularly evident in A Bird in the Hand, the installation of bird sculptures. Because the supplies were anchored to the square activity tables, visitors had to sit together to participate, often next to or across from strangers for half an hour or more. The multi-outcome nature of the activity prompted conversation-starting questions – “How did you make those legs like that?” or “What kind of bird is that?” – but the spatial design made these interactions possible. Sharing resources at intimate square tables set visitors up to casually see what others were working on and required introductory “could you pass me the … ” conversations. Thus, visitors easily found themselves transitioning into sharing discoveries, coaching other participants, and receiving encouragement or suggestions.

Readability was also critical to constructing a visitor to visitor facilitated space. Rather than organize text in lengthy prose, we broke it down into easily scannable bullet points and bolded key concepts. Simple, clear instructions presented a script for parents to quickly jump in as facilitators for their children. Peer groups also used them, answering questions for each other. For ease of access, we repeated the same prompt, keywords, and big ideas across the space, on text panels, table-top signs, and activity cards.

Facilitating connections between present visitors and past participants required a different approach. Interestingly, participants were happy to share their creations with others by leaving them in the museum – even when it was clear that the individual had devoted an hour or more to the project. Whether it stems from a desire to contribute to a collective or an aversion to bringing clutter home, thousands of visitors shared their creations with the museum.⁷

To encourage exchange between current visitors and past participants, we again leveraged a combination of physical and instructional design. Past creations visually dominated the space, housed in vast webs of twine, on rows of Lucite shelves, or even suspended from the ceiling. The narrow, rectangular shape of the gallery allowed us to make the making space contiguous with display space. This encouraged visitors to engage in an ongoing back-and-forth with the display instead of getting inspired before they began or comparing their work to others’ after completion.

We also sought ways to create aesthetically cohesive and visually appealing projects which drew both participants and passers-by into close looking. In A Bird in the Hand, this was simple. Any bird – no matter how misshapen – appeared charming when in a flock flying overhead. In other instances, we chose an intriguing or alluring support for their creations or limited the visitor’s palette to create a cohesive aesthetic (this also assisted visitors in reducing their cognitive load, detailed below).

In designing each Workshop, we looked for every opportunity to make the display central to the activity. Instead of providing overly proscriptive instructions or educator-created models, we overtly prompted visitors to look to other visitors for clarification and inspiration.

Making visitor-modeled behavior useable

Unfortunately, not all visitor-created examples are inherently useable. As education researcher John Hattie notes, a good model does not only reproduce the desired skill, it also contains avenues by which users can analyze, interpret, and decode. In fact, without these, a model can dissuade, disorient, and produce other negative effects.⁸ However, that does not preclude visitor examples from serving as models or require educators to hand-select appropriate examples. It simply necessitates additional consideration in considering what visitor models of each project can do and what they can’t. Instructional signage can then be designed to complement the models’ strengths and weaknesses.

Consider A Bird in the Hand. Completed birds demonstrated an incredible variety of ways to create form, apply pattern, simulate movement, and capture the essence of a bird. Museum-generated instruction in these areas would be proscriptive and redundant. However, the completed birds obscured the initial steps of their creation. Thus, we supplemented the models with basic instructions: Shape, Tape, Decorate. These three words, repeated and expanded upon in a time-lapse video, table-top card, and text panel signage, gave visitors a basic schema and sequence for creating a bird: crumple newspaper to create a form; tape wings, bodies, and beaks together; then apply surface patterns. They also steered visitors away from likely pitfalls, such as elaborately designing individual wings or tails before attaching them to the body. Modeling of creative ideas or approaches was intentionally left to the visitors.

Cognitive load and keeping it simple

When possible, we chose supplies and activity types which required no instructional support. For example, the average American user can easily navigate a coloring book and pencils. Such simplification allowed us to minimize the museum educator’s voice, as detailed above, and also reduced participants’ cognitive load.

In any discussion of what learning in museum galleries looks like, we must remember that visitors are navigating an unfamiliar space, wondering how much time remains on their parking meter, and chaperoning their children. These all require visitors to process an additional cognitive load while they read a label, interact with an educator, or look closely at an object. Cumulatively, these small details can have a big impact. As Hattie quips, “you cannot comprehend a ‘big picture’ if your mind’s energies are hijacked by low-level processing.”⁹

To help our visitors devote as much cognitive power to that “big picture” comprehension, we proactively simplified all non-critical elements.¹⁰ Although this manifested differently in each installation, three principles recurred:

Fewer choices: When we asked visitors to explore the impact of color in landscape, we offered 75 shades of colored pencils. When our focus was abstraction, illustration, or association, we pared down visitors’ options to a small palette of sepia tones or a limited selection of two blues, two greens, and two browns instead.

Familiar materials: From LEGO bricks to blank greeting cards, we chose materials which were known quantities. Visitors could dive right into the prompt, knowing the affordances and limitations of the material. We also applied this to environmental elements, using clothespins to hang visitor creations or a prize wheel to deliver prompts.

Clear creative constraints: Visitors did not choose a passage from any book to illustrate, they picked up the next sequential page of Moby-Dick. We did not ask for any sculpture, we requested birds. We intentionally limited materials and response types. Although visitors could, and did, disregard the constraints, we presented a defined project scope for visitors who were overwhelmed by infinite possibility.

Defining and evaluating visitor to visitor learning

At its heart, learning in the Workshop is play: doodling on coffee stains, crumpling paper, building with LEGO bricks. Research shows that a playful mindset allows an individual to explore and develop new skills in a more catholic and memorable way.¹¹ In the Workshop, play allows visitors to discover solutions and offer answers that staff never anticipated. Yet, it also makes it difficult to define where and how learning is happening.

Assessing whether individuals have acquired the specific, predetermined pieces of information that the educator intended to transmit would be antithetical to the premise of the Workshop. Evaluation of this project requires a model which accommodates an unpredictable fractal pattern of exchange over months as new visitors initiate branches and sub-branches, forks and sub-forks. For this reason, we employed Generic Learning Outcomes (GLO), co-developed by the Arts Council and the University of Leicester. GLO measures impacts in five categories: (1) Knowledge and Understanding; (2) Skills; (4) Attitudes and Values; (4) Enjoyment, Inspiration, Creativity; (5) Activity, Behavior, Progression. Using them, one might document a range of behaviors from learning facts and information” to “innovative thoughts,” or “being inspired.”¹² These specific yet open-ended terms allowed us to discuss, define, and assess outcomes without limiting the definition of success to only those ideas which we could predict.

Although our specific metrics varied by installation and modality, across the board we observed the following indicators of learning:

High time on task: One of the simplest ways to measure engagement, we clocked the time visitors spent in the space and on their individual projects. Highly successful Workshop prompts had the capacity to engage visitors for averages of 25–35 minutes, with some participants lavishing an hour or more on a single creation or pursuing multiple solutions to the same prompt.

Relating to lived experiences: Adult learners in particular enjoy learning by playing with the integration of new into their existing knowledge.¹³ However, the diversity of visitors’ lived experiences makes this hard to see. For example, a Black Lives Matters drawing in response to Moby-Dick initially appears off-topic and as evidence of disengagement. Yet, its meaning changes when the visitor places it next to a description of Queequeg, the dark-skinned, tattooed South Pacific Islander whose presence allows author Herman Melville to explore themes of racial diversity in whaling communities. There may be many examples in this category that we were unable to recognize or may have misunderstood.

Exchange within visitor groups: Although we saw many collaborative projects, especially with young visitors directing their adult helpers, we also saw exchange between related individuals working on independent projects. Companions asked each other to explain what they were doing, why, and how. They asked each other for ideas, support, and aid. This process of verbalizing intentions and coaching are significant steps in consolidating learning.

Exchange between unaffiliated visitors: Copying and remixing was the clearest and most frequent indicator of this kind of dialogue. One turtle coffee stain drawing might provoke another 20. Visitors would examine and scrutinize bird sculptures in the space to try to copy a particular effect or even the bird as a whole. Visitors pinned their responses next to ideas they agreed or disagreed with, even using arrows to create a trans-temporal conversation. Participant tracking studies also confirmed this as we observed visitors looking at, handling, and discussing creations on the display wall.

In short, we saw concrete evidence of visitors investing time in exploring the given prompt, aggregating, and synthesizing new information, and finding inspiration in other visitors’ contributions and perspectives. Learning, in this context, might be copying another visitor’s drawing or sculpture. It might be explaining an idea to a companion or stranger. It might be an unorthodox synthesis of any and all of the above.

The educational role of the museum

What we did not observe in the Workshop was the acquisition of new facts, historical context, or transferrable concrete skills. Indeed, other than a few books included for deeper inquiry or to amuse disengaged companions, facts and figures are conspicuously absent from the space. This juxtaposition gets to the heart of what the educational role of the museum should be. Is a museum a space to introduce and teach new ideas in all their complexity? Or should the institution’s role be to awaken the mind to the complexities which exist.¹⁴ The Workshop supports the latter objective.

The kind of visitor-driven synthesis which occurs in the Workshop is particularly valuable in this respect. As Hattie noted, “We need explicit teaching to not only learn the ideas but also to relate these ideas and see connections, relationships, or ‘coat hangers’ between ideas.”¹⁵ In Hattie’s statement – largely intended to apply to the classroom context – we see echoes of Falk’s writing a decade before. He argued that “most of what occurs in museums has more to do with consolidation and reinforcement of previously understood ideas than with the creation of totally new knowledge structures.”¹⁶

The museum can, and should, serve this function because it is not a stand-alone educational experience. It is contiguous with all of the past knowledge that visitors bring into the museum and all of the new resources and experiences that visitors can seek out when they leave, from books to television shows to repeat visits. Spaces like the Workshop help visitors consolidate, reinforce, and expand upon existing knowledge. They utilize the same underlying principles of open-ended, inquiry-driven, learner-centric education which define most contemporary museum practice. The additional shift to a visitor to visitor learning model only makes the Workshop’s potential more expansive. Thousands of visitors, each coming from a unique personal experience and empowered by a playful mindset, can identify, demonstrate, and explore infinitely more connections, relationships, and coat-hangers than we as professional educators could. As museums seek to welcome more visitors from increasingly diverse backgrounds, this can only be an asset of increasing value.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Phillippa Pitts is the Interim Director of Learning and Interpretation at the Portland Museum of Art, leading the team responsible for developing and implementing educational opportunities for all museum audiences. With a decade of experience in the field, Phillippa specializes in innovative approaches to interpretation and adult learning. She launched the Workshop in 2016. Phillippa has presented at national and regional conferences and co-authored several articles and book chapters. Phillippa earned her B.A. from Brown University and her M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from Tufts University.

Notes

1 Knowles, “Innovations in Teaching Styles and Approaches,” 32.

2 Examples exist across the museum literature, particularly in children’s museums and science centers, but John Hattie gives an excellent explanation of the cognitive basis for this phenomenon. See Hattie and Yates, Visible Learning and the Science, 115.

3 See Diane Hogan and Jonathan Tudge’s “Implications of Vygotsky’s Theory for Peer Learning” for both a discussion of this aspect of Vygtosky’s research and an analysis of subsequent research on this topic.

4 Housen, “Art Viewing and Aesthetic Development.”

5 McLean, Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions, 93–5.

6 Borun, “Why Family Learning in Museums,” 9.

7 Interestingly, responses dropped into the tens when we asked visitors to take and email photographs of their creations to be printed and posted in the space. Visitors were observed taking photographs in these installations, and posting snaps to social media on their own accounts, but were disinclined to co-create a space in a digital and non-immediate manner. This disinclination remained constant across two installations, despite the fact that the prompts explored different themes and the activity leveraged different modalities.

8 Hattie and Yates, Visible Learning and the Science, 73.

9 Ibid., 53.

10 This was particularly significant because the Workshop is an unstaffed space. Self-facilitating requires determining next steps, locating supplies, and self-soothing through pain points, which all add to the cumulative cognitive load.

11 Diamond, “Playing and Learning,” 1–7.

12 Hooper-Greenhill, “Measuring Learning Outcomes.”

13 Donald, “Measurement of Learning in the Museum,” 391. In Donald’s words,

Adult learners speak of the pleasure of playing with the known and creating something new from it, the pleasure of considering the unknown and coming to understand it, and the pleasure of mastering the unknown and integrating it with what one already knows.

14 For a broader discussion, see Burnham, “Information in Gallery Teaching”; Donald, “Measurement of Learning in the Museum”; Falk, “Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience”; and Hein, “Educational Theory,” among others.

15 Hattie and Yates, Visible Learning and the Science, xvi.

16 Falk, “Museums as Institutions,” 260.