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ABSTRACT
Museums and universities have natural connections. Yet with few exceptions, collaborations between them segregate each partner to its traditional sphere of activity. This article presents a practicum course model that blurs and overlaps the distinctive roles of the museum and university in productive and mutually beneficial ways. In particular, working with undergraduates on an applied project with public relevance invites us to reconsider university and museum spaces as labs or studios. This offers strategies for bringing into the museum content that may be ambiguous, sensitive, polarizing, academic, or run contrary to accepted beliefs. This article shares lessons learned over five years of developing partnerships between the Johns Hopkins University and various sized independent and university museums and other heritage organizations such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, Jewish Museum of Maryland, Baltimore National Heritage Area and the Maryland Zoo. It illustrates these lessons with two case studies, one focused on a project at a national institution, the other on a partnership with a university historic house.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
About the author
Jennifer P. Kingsley, PhD, is Assistant Director of the Program in Museums and Society at the Johns Hopkins University. Since 2011, she has built the curriculum in the area of public history (with a particular focus on diversifying content and voices), digital humanities, and living collections. She has developed significant collaborations with a wide range of regional partners from the Baltimore National Heritage Area Association to the Maryland Zoo.
ORCiD
Jennifer P. Kingsley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2745-346X
Notes
1 The National Science Foundation for example, requires grant proposals to include plans on “Broader Impacts.” http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07046/nsf07046.jsp
2 Koster, “Next Generation Museum-University Partnerships.”
3 Kiley, “A Home for Artifacts.”
4 Yount, “Braving (and Bridging) the Great Divide,” 2–7. But cf: “Populist and Profound.”
5 Camhi, “Professor, Your Writing Could Use Some Help.”
6 MacDonald, “Science on Display,” 69–87; Kaufman, “Intriguing Habitats, and Careful Discussions of Climate Change,”A10. A museum colleague confided to me a year ago that she had recently introduced the first interpretive sign to include the word “evolution” at the Zoo where she works. Yellis, “Fred Wilson, PTSD and Me,” 333–348.
7 Grace Golden, email message to author, January 9, 2016.
8 Grace Golden, email message to author, January 9, 2016.
9 Nashashibi, “Visitor Voices in Art Museums.” 21–25.
10 The classic example is Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum from 1992.
11 Over the past year college campuses have seen a surge in student activism around issues of diversity. Wong and Green, “Campus Politics: A Cheat Sheet”; “Johns Hopkins Students Stage Protest Against Racial Discrimination on Campus.”
12 Courtney Little, email message to author, October 14, 2015.
13 Giaimo, “College Students Are Annotating Their Campus Monuments with Notes on Slavery.”
14 Cotter, “Toward a Museum of the 21st Century.”
15 Much early learning about history takes place outside of school, including at museums and historic sites. Barton summarizes these findings and others in “Research on Students’ Historical Thinking and Learning,” 19–21; a bibliography appears on page 20. School programs in museums have been shown to foster the kinds of skills we more typically associate with academic inquiry. Downey, Delamatre, and Jones, “Measuring the Impact of Museum-School Programs,” 175–188.
16 Yellis, “Concerning the Telling of Painful Tales,” 139–151.
17 Smith, “A Forgotten Field Could Save the Humanities,” 6; Conn, “How the Crisis of the Humanities Is Like the Greek Economy,” 18; Reisz, “Humanities Crisis? What Crisis?” For data on the place of the humanities in the university and public life see the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project and website Humanities Indicators: http://www.humanitiesindicators.org.