Please Touch the Artifacts: Education and Collections Departments Co-Design an Exhibit for Family Audiences to Practice Primary Source Inquiry

ABSTRACT

Pack It Up! was a fully interactive history exhibit for all ages, targeting primarily families with elementary-school-aged children. It invited visitors to work collaboratively through open-ended object inquiry and primary source analysis. Collaborative exhibit design between the education and collections departments led to an exhibit that answered these questions: 1. How can an object-based exhibit be made fully hands-on? 2. How can an exhibit support young visitors to develop empathy for people from the past?3. How can an all-ages exhibit address elementary school social studies standards?Even as highly interactive exhibits become ubiquitous, in the museum field we often see artifacts and interactives as mutually exclusive. Pack It Up! made local history accessible to a unique range of audiences and learning styles without facilitation by fusing museum education and collections pedagogies. The collaboration between the collections department and the education department led to creative solutions to exhibit challenges we saw an opportunity to address. The exhibit offered a new way to use objects to teach the processes of historical inquiry to audiences of all ages.

KEYWORDS:

• Object inquiry
• education collections
• family exhibits
• artifacts
• interactive history exhibition
• tactile

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This paper specifically responds to the call for projects that address how cross-departmental projects reshape models of learning, expertise, and agency within the museum.

2 The Museum of Boulder’s in-use collection is identified with accession numbers beginning in “U,” and have been donated or acquired with the understanding that they will get used and may end up damaged or destroyed. Ordinarily the in-use collection contains duplicates of similar objects to the Museum’s collection, and their significance is in their utility, not provenance.

3 Proxy objects were stand-ins for the actual object. They were of the approximate size and shape of the object but did not attempt to directly replicate the original. The primary purpose of them was to have an object that stood in for the footprint that was required for the actual object, and so that a visitor could have access to each object taken on the historic trip. The curators were ultimately dissatisfied with the proxy objects and the ways they observed visitors responding to them. Visitors did not seem to understand why the objects were there if they were not real unless the object represented was a weapon. Enough evidence of these experiences led the curators to conclude that the visitor experience did not place the act of packing on as high of a level as the experience of handling real objects. If our team were to iterate on this exhibit we would allocate a more generous budget to purchase and replicate all objects required.

4 Van Dyke and Thompson, “Recapturing the Authentic: The Power of Props in Immersive Art Exhibitions,”.

5 In other words, the gold-seeker had an individual experience, but history defines him as one among many who were having comparable experiences. Similarly, the unhoused individual had an individual experience, which was intended to humanize the experiences of many people experiencing homelessness.

6 A travois is a type of sledge used by some nomadic Indigenous people. They can be pulled by a variety of animals, including dogs.

7 Pitts, “Visitor to Visitor Learning: Setting up Open-Ended Inquiry in an Unstaffed Space,” .

8 Ibid.

9 German and Harris, “Agile Objects,”.

10 Colorado Department of Education standards SS.2.1.1, SS.2.2.2, SS.2.3.1, SS.3.1.1, SS.3.1.2, SS.4.1.1, SS.4.1.2 (2020).

11 Denison and Wisne, “Blended Object Interactives,”

12 Ibid.

13 Meow Wolf began as an immersive experience in Santa Fe with local collaborating artists. It now exists in several cities (including Denver, CO) with a new set of artists working in the respective city and different experiences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Zinn

Emily Zinn is the Director of Education at the Museum of Boulder. She has followed an enthusiasm for sensory and immersive free-choice learning environments across continents to work in museums, galleries, zoos, and replica ships. She has taken on a range of projects at the Museum of Boulder to bring this new institution to life. Previously, she created interactive exhibits at the Longmont Museum and Cultural Center, an Australian replica ship at port in Brisbane, Australia, a zoo for native Australian animals in Daintree, Australia, and an art gallery in Colorado Springs.