Museum Educator Conversations: Building Relationships Through Reciprocal Storytelling

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore how relationships can change the teaching practices of museum educators and strategies of entire organizations by empirically studying conversations museum educators have every day in meetings, in the hallways, and all the places where they talk about their work. I present the possibilities of reciprocal telling exchanges – where museum educators engage in a reciprocal exchange of stories – as a way they jointly organize learning for and with each other. Through transcripts and interaction analysis methods, we review four case conversations drawn from two groups of museum educators. Findings implicate the value of small talk as useful for museum educators to strengthen the relationship-building muscles for future reciprocal story exchanging about museum teaching and learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum educator learning
• on-the-job learning
• relationship building
• everyday conversations
• professional development
• interaction analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I refer to the participants in this study as museum educators for clarity purposes. Every participant in this study works in place-based learning environments, and some work in museums. For those who do not work in museums, they are educators who build programs around collections: living, curated, or activity-based. Because I find commonalities among a wide group of out-of-school educators who work in museums, community centers, parks, science centers, and libraries, I have included data in this study from folks who might not be traditionally considered museum educators and refer to them all as museum educators.

2 Schegloff, “Sequence Organization in Interaction.”

3 Ash, Lombana, and Alcala, “Changing Practices, Changing Identities as Museum Educators.” and Allen Crowley, “Challenging Beliefs, Practices, and Content.”

4 Ross, “Urban Youth Workers’ Use of ‘Personal Knowledge’.”

5 Bevan and Xanthoudaki, “Professional Development for Museum Educators,” 116

6 Hall and Stevens, “Interaction Analysis Approaches to Knowledge in Use.”

7 Takeuchi, “Friendships and Group Work in Linguistically Diverse Mathematics Classrooms.”

8 Marin and Bang. “‘Look It, This Is How You Know:’.”

9 Vossoughi et al., “Embodied Pathways and Ethical Trails.”

10 Uttamchandani, “Educational Intimacy;” and, Kitzinger, “Doing Feminist Conversation Analysis.”

11 Jordan and Henderson, “Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice.”

12 Schegloff, “Sequence Organization in Interaction”; Chubak, “I Feel Like a Bag Lady”

13 Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, “A simplest systematic for the organization of turn-taking for conversations.”

14 Pomerantz and Fehr, “Conversation Analysis.”

15 Schegloff, “Sequence Organization in Interaction”

16 Schegloff, “Sequence Organization in Interaction”

17 Chubak, “I Feel Like a Bag Lady”

18 The transcripts in this paper closely follow standard formatting known as “Jeffersonian transcripts,” what many call the foundational work on transcription for interaction analysis by Gail Jefferson. These transcripts combine talk with other interaction elements, such as gaze and gestures, and elements of speech, such as pauses, stresses, speed, and partial words. Some symbols are omitted in these transcripts to make the transcripts more readable. A comprehensive guide to these kinds of transcripts can be found online here: https://www.universitytranscriptions.co.uk/jefferson-transcriptionsystem-a-guide-to-the-symbols/

19 Chubak, “I Feel Like a Bag Lady”

20 Vakil and McKinney de Royston, “Exploring Politicized Trust in a Racially Diverse Computer Science Classroom.”

21 Booker, Vossoughi, and Hooper, “Tensions and Possibilities for Political Work in the Learning Sciences;” and Nasir and McKinney de Royston, “Power, Identity, and Mathematical Practices Outside and Inside School.”

22 This idea is not new to many museum educators, as it is how many of us frame learning in the museum experiences and exhibits which we build and museum/learning sciences researchers have extensively studied the social and political aspects of learning for museum visitors (for an example, see a favorite of mine from Kevin Crowley and Melanie Jacobs [1]).

23 Chubak, “I Feel Like a Bag Lady,” 21

24 Ibid, 23

25 Ibid

26 Ibid; Holmes and Stubbe, “Power and Politeness in the Workplace.”

27 Chubak, “I Feel Like a Bag Lady”, 13

28 This is especially true for some museum educators who are working to upend histories of inequity at their organization while still working alongside those who sustain or perpetrate those inequities. For an example of this, see Bianca Baldridge’s work with Black youth workers working in organizations lead by white, neo-Liberal executive leadership.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wade Berger

Wade Berger is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in the Learning Sciences. Wade studies how informal educators learn on the job and in the workplace. Much of Wade’s research looks at conversations and how learners build the relationships they need to learn collaboratively. Before Northwestern, Wade led teen programs at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, IL, advised other informal learning organizations with the Chicago Learning Exchange, and taught teachers with the Games + Learning + Society at UW-Madison. Wade uses he/him/his pronouns.