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ABSTRACT
This article briefly sketches the evolution of live animal displays in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. museums of science and natural history, in order to show how these exhibits function as a sampling device for changing postwar pedagogies of science learning. Live animal displays have been, more often than not, interpreted by both their creators and their visitors in surprising ways. Such contingent developments, I argue, suggest how museum educators working in informal settings might use the affordances that their spaces provide to connect STEM learning theory to display practice and also to engage productively the needs and identities of diverse museum audiences and learners.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
About the author
Karen A. Rader is Professor of History and Director of STS@VCU, the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the co-author (with Victoria E.M. Cain) of Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museum of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Notes
1 Curran, “Discovering the History of Museum Education,” 2.
2 Rader, “Interacting with ‘The Watchful Grasshopper’,”177–80.
3 Rader and Cain, Life on Display, Chapters 4 and 5.
4 Chicago Museum of Science and Industry curator Lucy Nielsen, for instance, issued sober warnings about static exhibits and their educational consequences: “Too many people believe that museums are numbingly dull,” she wrote, and “as long as educators and the public at large persists in regarding all museums in this light [they] … will find their seeds falling on stony ground.” Boston’s Museum of Science’s Bradford Washburn argued to his Board and museum members that: “Our Museum of Science is primarily a teaching institution,” he argued, noting that education staff was double that of exhibits, and “were selected for the ability to create and sustain an enthusiasm for learning. Our exhibits, too, are primarily designed for teaching and the majority of them demand the active participation of the visitor in the learning process … .” Boston Museum of Science Annual Report 1955–56, 3, Boston Museum of Science Archives (hereafter: BMoSA).
5 Borgmann, Holding on to Reality; see also Alberti, The Afterlives of Animal.
6 On the overlapping history of live animal displays at children’s zoos and museums in the 1950s, see “Animal Lending Library” (1952), “Want to Borrow a Porcupine?” (1953) and Schneider, Children’s Zoos.
7 Bradford Washburn Oral History conducted by the author and Sylvie Gassaway, 2005 (transcript in author’s personal possession); see also Boston Museum of Science Annual Report 1950, at BMoSA; Rock, 101, 104.
8 This “exposure model” of museum science education was hardly precise in content, nor was it hegemonic: notably, it was challenged by some policy-makers at the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF program officers denied Washburn funds to do a Summer Teachers Institute based on live animals in his museum; “We are,” the NSF officers told him in 1962, “fundamentally interested in instruction rather than exposure [emphasis in original] to science … We are interested in the real stuff, not the kind of thing that you appear to be doing now.” National Science Foundation (NSF): Bradford Washburn to George Rothwell (NSF Program Officer), 7 December 1961, Box “1961,” Folder “Correspondence” (BW), “Memorandum – Visit by BW to NSF, 14 November 1962,” Box “1962,” Folder “NSF;” cf. Norm Harris to BW, 6 January 1959 memo re: “Summer Teachers Courses,” Box “4-1959,” Folder “Education Dept.” – all from Washburn papers, BMoSA.
9 “Progress Report: Museum of Science,” no. 6 (May 1950), p. 1; cf. Washburn’s report on his trip to European museums during the summer of 1957, as quoted in “Minutes of Museum of Science Trustee Annual Meeting, 9 October 1957,” p. 5 in Box “1957–58” of the Washburn Papers, all in BMoSA.
10 For some feature articles and pictures of Spooky, see run of Museum of Science Newsletters of 1954 and 1959, BMoSA
11 Rock, Museum of Science, 100; “Junior Assistants in the Animal Room,” cover of Museum of Science Newsletter March 1956; “Science in Action” quote from Museum of Science Newsletter, March 1957, BMoSA.
12 For a contemporary analysis of this approach to museum education, see Thwaits et al., Inquiry, Play, and Problem Solving.
13 Hipschman, Exploratorium Cookbook II, recipe #99.
14 For more on The Watchful Grasshopper exhibit design, see Rader “Interacting with The Watchful Grasshopper, or Why Live Animals Matter in Twentieth-Century Science Museums,” in Thorsen et al., eds, Chapter 8.
15 Carlson et al., “Two Simple Electrophysiological Preparations.”
16 M. [illegible name] Clausen (who identified herself as a teacher) to “Director of the Exploratorium,” October 1981, BANC MSS. 87/148c, 4:4, BL-UCB.
17 Leelane E. Hines to Frank Oppenheimer, BANC MSS. 87/148c, 4:13, BL-UCB.
18 Hein, The Exploratorium, 103, 109.
19 Muhaima Startt to “Executive Director, Exploratorium,” 28 July 1984, BANC MSS. 87/148c, 4:23, BL-UCB.
20 Carlson et al., Report to Grass Foundation (1977), BANC MSS. 87/148c, 35:38; cf. earlier in-house study which is extant in archives: “Documentation of Exhibits, The Exploratorium, December 1974 to June 1975,” BANC 87/148c, 39:8, BL-UCB.
21 “Visitors From Around the Globe: Easter crowds watch chickens hatch on Harvester Farm,” Progress 4, no. 3 (May/June 1953): 8, Chicago Museum of Science and Industry Archives, hereafter, CMoSI).
22 “Swift Moves In,” Progress 4, no. 5 (1953): 2–3. CMoSI.
23 “What’s Behind the Hatchery … ?”
24 “GOING OUT” Guide, New York Times, 1975.
25 When COSI closed its original location in deteriorating Memorial Hall in 1999, and moved to its current location on West Broad Street in downtown Columbus, the museum opened a history blog through which visitors shared videos sent to the museum to capture what they called “the Old COSI.” See http://oldcosi.com (accessed on 5 May 2019).
26 Specifically, a 1988 video, labeled by its creator (unknown) as “Palmer Family Visit to COSI,” shows a child visitor interacting with the chick hatchery. From this brief, scene, we can observe more than we might know simply from a diagram of the exhibit design. With the larger chick hatchery show in the background, the video focuses in on a very young boy, invited to pick up and pet a chick from a numbered bin which appears to have minimal signage or direction. He does so, then pets the animal, and places the chick back into differently numbered bin “1988 Palmer Family Visit to COSI,” mounted at: http://oldcosi.com/1988.mp4 (accessed 5 May 2019); starting around 2:17 for the Chick Hatchery scene described.
27 “Carnegie Science Center Shuts Down … ”; see also Karen Davis (UPC President), Letter to the Editor, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, 14 March 2000.
28 Davis also suggested an alternative form of display: “I respectfully urge you.to use video and computer technology that, I can assure you, will entice people much more eagerly and significantly than a plastic incubator with broken shells, eggs and motherless birds flopped down on a grid, stumbling about inside sterile machinery.” Letter from Karen Davis to David Ellis, 2 November 2000, at https://www.upc-online.org/001103boston_chick_hatchery.html (accessed 5 May 2019).
29 Mintz, “That’s Edutainment!”
30 See http://oldcosi.com/stories.htm (Todd Dobbs’ letter, 19 September 2010) (Accessed 5 May 2019).
31 “Rat Basketball in Wofford Class.”
32 On the history of COSI, see “COSI’s history” at https://cosi.org/about-cosi/history-of-cosi (accessed 21 August 2019); Thomas, Jr.
33 Cari Miller wrote in 2010:
Did you ever want to see rats play basketball? You can, at COSI in Columbus … .Why they taught rats to play basketball, I don’t know. The kids didn’t remember anything … . But it’s a very popular show, judging by the crowd Audrey and Elizabeth (the rats) attracted today. … The kids declared the museum ‘so awesome,’ weren’t ready to leave after four hours and want to go back during spring break … For me, finding myself strangely into the Rat Basketball game [was] the best thing about going to the museum … . Miller
34 Mickle, “She Shoots! She Scores!”
35 Yellis, “From Insurgency to Re-Branding,” 63.
36 Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects.” Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science.
37 Adams and Gupta, “Informal Science Institutions.” Gutiérrez and Barton, “The Possibilities and Limits.”
38 Yellis, “From Insurgency to Re-Branding,” 64.