Interpreting Trauma, Memory, and Lived Experience in Museums and Historic Sites

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. (William Faulkner)¹

The legacies of historic oppression and trauma, such as slavery, confinement, xenophobia, and racially charged violence surround us on a daily basis. While these legacies play out in every museum context, they are especially palpable in museums and historic sites specifically focused on traumatic events (perhaps even where they took place) or narratives of oppression. In these spaces the present can, at times, become barely distinguishable from the past. This comes up for me each day when I arrive to work inside an abandoned prison. I am reminded not only of the 80,000 people who were confined to Eastern State Penitentiary, but also of the over two million people currently incarcerated in prisons and jails all over the country.

Our field typically tells stories of trauma and complex issues through museum educators, tour guides, or docents who are generations or decades removed from the topic or event. This approach utilizes historical empathy, defined as developing “ … understanding for how people from the past thought, felt, made decisions, acted, and faced consequences within a specific historical and social context.”² Research reveals that this approach humanizes historic figures, but is applied inconsistently by educators.

As museum educators we help visitors connect to and learn from our sites. We need to create spaces for visitors to not only encounter and reflect on the past, but also process critical issues facing current American society. But this work is not to be taken lightly. When we take on “difficult knowledge”³ or emotionally charged content, it can result in visitors that are uncomfortable and resistant, or who challenge the information. Visitors can become overwhelmed with the scale of a horrific event, have a hard time relating to what seems like an unfathomable experience, or be triggered by their own past in a similarly traumatic space or circumstance. How can “dark tourism” sites,⁴ places that represent death, violence and disaster, meet the expectations of museum visitors?

Making lived experience central to the museum's interpretation is one strategy to connect to visitors in an engaging way that also humanizes complex information, while fostering empathy and understanding. Culturally specific institutions such as the Japanese American National Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have forged this path. In these spaces visitors can participate in programming led by survivors of World War II concentration camps. Museums focused in other areas can take on similar programming. But this work needs to be done with preparation, intention, diligence and sensitivity. It also needs to extend beyond empathy for historic events, and push visitors to connect past to present in an effort to spark social change.

In 2016, I assembled a panel for the American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting titled “Centering Lived Experience: Stories of Trauma and Museums.” I had just begun a project to hire formerly incarcerated people as tour guides at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. I wanted to meet other colleagues doing similar work in historic sites around the country, provide space for us to learn from each other, and share our work on a national scale. This guest-edited section builds on that conference session and strives to offer new perspectives on centering lived experience, while also serving as a foundational text for others interested in this messy, but necessary work. We stand on the shoulders of the culturally specific museums that have been doing this work for decades. I hope this issue of the Journal of Museum Education will serve as a catalyst for more writings and public presentations focused on centering lived experience and trauma-informed practices⁵ in museums.

As criminal justice reformer Glenn Martin says, “the people closest to problem are closest to the solution, but furthest from resources and power.“⁶ If we want museums to be spaces that address pressing societal challenges, we must involve those who have been impacted by trauma and oppression into the interpretation of an event, experience, or site. Centering lived experience in museums brings up a number of questions:

• How do we prepare visitors for participating in an emotionally complex museum visit? And how do we train staff to facilitate this experience? Mark Katrikh offers the approach utilized at the Museum of Tolerance, a space dedicated to challenging visitors through dialogue.

• How do we balance the power and authority of the museum with that of the interpreter’s lived experience? Noah Rauch explores an approach used in docent training at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

• What happens when museums hire people who have experienced trauma to tell their own stories? How can we do this ethically and without tokenizing marginalized voices? Marvin Robinson and I explore these questions through a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site’s Returning Citizens Tour Guide Project.

Asking questions and spending time reflecting are critical parts of transforming the work of museum educators. If our field is genuine about its will to make space for visitors to process emotionally complex topics, spark social change, and learn from the past to make a more equitable present and future then museum educators are the ones to make it happen. We can create job opportunities for disenfranchised populations and draw in new audiences, but this work is resource intensive, and requires major internal work – both personally and institutionally. If taken on with great care, collaboration and gratitude, creating platforms for marginalized voices and narratives will be transformative for you, your visitors, your co-workers, your museum, and the field at large.

About the guest editor

As the Director of Education and Tour Programs, Lauren Zalut oversees the development, implementation, and evaluation of guided tours, trains tour guides, and leads family and school programming at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. In an effort to encourage empathy in the historic site’s visitors, she most recently designed a groundbreaking program employing formerly incarcerated people as tour guides, allowing visitors to hear firsthand about the human experience of incarceration. This project received the 2017 Innovation in Museum Education Award from the Education Committee of the American Alliance of Museums.

Using the historic site as a catalyst for conversation on social issues, Lauren has worked to incorporate dialogue facilitation techniques and content about mass incarceration into guided tours, as well as into youth and family programming.

She has initiated and coordinated many programs that encourage collaboration between community groups, social service organizations, and museums. This includes her work as Museum Educator and Communications Coordinator at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, where she launched partnerships including the science café, Science on Tap, and the Philadelphia Honey Festival.

Lauren has appeared on the History Channel, and was featured on Billy Penn’s 2016 Who’s Next: Arts, a list of young, heavy hitters in Philadelphia’s arts scene. Lauren holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Art with concentrations in Visual Studies and Art History from Tyler School of Art, a Master’s Degree in Museum Education from The University of the Arts, and a certificate in Non-Profit Leadership from Bryn Mawr College. Lauren believes that museums can be forces of social change, and it is her goal to design inspiring and transformative visitor experiences.

Notes

1. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 73.

2. Endacott and Brooks, “An Updated Theoretical and Practical Model,” 41.

3. Rose, Interpreting Difficult History, 28.

4. Sather-Wagstaff, Heritage that Hurts, 72.

5. Dr. Sandra Bloom's Sanctuary Model (Creating Sanctuary) recommends a commitment to seven principles for creating a trauma-informed environment: non-violence, emotional intelligence, social learning, democracy, open communication, social responsibility, and growth and change.

6. JustLeadershipUSA, “About Us.”