Ethically Craft a Thematic Tour Narrative: How to Checking for Bias in 3 Steps
Without a doubt, the absolute worst museum tour I’ve ever taken was at a Southern historic house museum. This fact pains me to say, because I worked for over 16 years in a Southern historic house museum, and I know those kinds of institutions can do amazing work. But I digress.
The tour wasn’t terrible simply because the guide was drinking out of a styrofoam cup while giving the tour wearing a 19th-century costume (insert eye roll emoji). And the tour wasn’t terrible just because the guide perpetuated some of the most annoying historic house myths around (petticoat mirror, anyone?).
No, this was the worst tour ever because there was absolutely zero structure to her narrative. In each room we entered, it was as though she looked around the room, picked a few objects to highlight, and then word-vomited bits of unrelated facts about each thing, before moving on to the next space.
Before you think I’m getting up on a high horse here, let me confess that I’ve been guilty of something similar. (Not the “styrofoam cup while in costume” part!) You see, I first started my museum education journey 20 years ago by volunteering at a local art museum. Although their permanent collection had a unifying theme, for the most part, when I gave tours, I just picked my favorite pieces and told visitors random facts about them.
In both instances, the tours were decentralized, haphazard, missing out on the opportunity to tell bigger stories, and worst of all, vulnerable to the bias of the guide.
The Role of a Central Narrative in an Education Program
The backbone of an unforgettable education program is the narrative you tell. All of the disparate content standards and learning objectives you’ve got your heart (and marketing efforts) set on will fall apart if they don’t have something sturdy to hang onto.
For more on crafting a strong central narrative for an audience of children and teens, get a copy of this book for yourself and highlight every other sentence, like I did!
Without a strong central narrative, you’re unlikely to make an impact on visitors. Studies show that we learn best when storytelling is involved; lacking a central story (also known as a “theme” or “essential question”) will leave visitors feeling lost and unsure inside your tour.
Different types of museums and tours require different types of narrative structures, but all tours should have some kind of unifying theme in place. The Tours with Children and Teens handbook explains this concept succinctly, especially for gallery-type museums, which easily lend themselves to a haphazard, point-and-word-vomit type tour: “In planning your tour, start with an essential question or theme. A theme or question provides a central idea to help explore and connect objects, to make comparisons, to shape transitions, and to summarize main points.” (page 11)
The Role of Bias in a Central Narrative
However, museums have long centered the narratives of power in society, marginalizing the experiences of the less privileged. Although museum professionals are increasingly aware of this type of systemic injustice and continue to take important strides in correcting it, the reality is that overcoming bias can be hard.
The raw truth is that all museum collections must be interpreted, which inherently means that one person makes decisions about an item or fact’s meaning and communicates that meaning to another person. The receiver, therefore, is told what is important and what is not. This unavoidable truth of museum work is what motivates the ongoing debate between educators and curators: who gets to choose what information is shared and can visitors be trusted to decide for themselves what the truth of the matter is?
This is a huge topic, but if you want to dip your toes into the history of this debate, check out this episode of my podcast, where I explain the spectrum of museum work that sits between knowledge creation and a visitor’s personal engagement.
Regardless of where you land on the curated-knowledge-to-personal-experience spectrum, it is complicated by the fact that without a central narrative (or theme), your visitors will probably miss out on parts (or all) of your museum’s special contributions. As I mentioned, a central narrative gives your visitors a “home base” in their mind, to which all the other information is relative. For example, a portrait gallery might explore how identity is both revealed and shaped by portraits (and modern-day selfies), while a historic house museum’s narrative could explore how a wealthy person’s possessions can illustrate the story of unseen labor.
Without a central theme, the tour runs the risk of becoming a “what’s that” type of tour, reducing objects to their surface value and eliminating the potential for visitors to become personally invested.
In short, a narrative theme is essential for crafting an unforgettable museum program, but it presents a huge danger to educators who approach it carelessly. Without considering one’s background and implicit bias, an educator can hijack a tour, centering a narrative around themselves, their culture, or their interests.
While overcoming implicit bias takes an immense amount of ongoing internal work, there are some steps you can take to check for bias in any narrative you create. I’ve been honing this process over several years, and while I am still working on dismantling my internal partialities, by taking the time to carefully consider where prejudice might pop up and taking action steps to sidestep it, I’ve been able to craft more equitable narratives.
Step #1: Recognize Previous Historical Bias
Before you can move on to developing your narrative or theme, you’ll want to take your time with this critical first step.
Crafting an equitable narrative begins with acknowledging and confronting the biases that have shaped historical and scholarly accounts up to this point. Educators must critically examine the sources, perspectives, and methodologies employed in constructing any preceding narratives. Only after recognizing the limitations and biases of existing accounts, can we begin to challenge and transcend them where needed.
To find what’s missing from old narratives, ask yourself the following questions:
Who wrote this narrative?
What sources does this narrative rely on?
Who could be in the story, but is not?
Have I seen this exact narrative before, in another museum or program?
What object on display is not mentioned in this narrative? Is there a compelling reason why it is not mentioned?
For example, one of my biggest pet peeves in museum education programming is the overdone “pioneer” living program. You know the one. You’ve seen it at every “heritage days” program you’ve ever been to, where the (possibly costumed) educator has a pair of wool cards, a Jacob’s ladder, a chamber pot, and a story about how hard living was back in “the old days.” The “pioneer” narrative is too often one-sided, simplistic, and rote. Presented in this way, the story lacks dimension because it usually omits the indigenous and enslaved (or recently emancipated, depending on the timeframe) African experiences. It also most often centers married-with-children, Protestant, and abled stories.
Inspired by Maya Angelou’s words, “When you know better, do better,” let’s acknowledge that there is a much better way to craft our narratives.
Step #2: Embrace Multiple Perspectives
At this point, you might be thinking that this is too much. There is already so much on an educator’s plate, and we are constantly asked to do more with less. And, I can’t deny that is too often true (and another topic we should dive deep into). But that isn’t an excuse to cut corners in developing our program themes.
Using our example of the simplistic pioneer program, once you determine perspectives that have been lacking, commit to including them in the future. Has the story up to this point been all about the wife carding wool and harvesting vegetables, the children carrying water, and the husband, plowing the fields? Ask yourself: was it just them? Were there enslaved people on their property? Did they live in community with others? Were there other jobs or lifestyles common in that community? Where are the Indigenous people? Were there other ethnicities represented there, other than Black and white people? Was there an economic threshold for owning property in that area? What happened if you were physically unable to do that kind of work? What if you didn’t get married? What if you couldn’t have children? Find the “other” stories and embrace them.
The best part is, when you do the work of ethically culling bias from your program development, you’ll find it’s easier to fill your narrative because you don’t have to do all the thinking for yourself. Instead, by including narratives from different social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds, you will immediately achieve a more nuanced understanding of historical events, artistic themes, and scientific values.
Lucky for us, it has never been easier to locate, read, and be exposed to the stories of marginalized groups, including women, people of color, Indigenous communities, LBGTQ+ communities, and other historically underrepresented voices. If the idea of embracing multiple perspectives is new for you, start by reading books about your subject, written by an author of a different race, nationality, gender identity, or ability than you. But remember, simply reading about another experience will not sufficiently qualify you to speak on behalf of someone else.
For that, you must go on to the next step.
Step #3: Engage in Collaboration
To create an equitable narrative theme, collaboration is key. Educators, researchers, and communities should work together to unearth untold stories, exchange knowledge, and challenge conventional interpretations. Engaging with local communities, oral histories, and grassroots organizations can provide valuable insights that can reshape the meaning we assign to the pieces in our museum collections.
Collaborative research and storytelling promote a more democratic approach to study, enabling multiple perspectives to converge and enrich the narrative. Essentially, collaborating brings more voices to the story, more people to the table, and more stakeholders to the “room where it happens.” Collaborative work goes beyond simply considering another perspective; it actively invites and includes multiple perspectives in the process. In the case of developing narrative themes for museum education programs, collaboration can look like this:
Creating a multi-perspective Community Advisory Group to offer suggestions for program development
Hiring more diverse staff members
Working with diversity advisory consultants
This step, admittedly, is hard. It requires your institution (and your department) to commit resources of both time and money to program development. And, as we know all too well, particularly when you’re talking about programs for children, resources in a museum tend to dry up rather quickly.
But I encourage you to stand your ground here when you can. Look critically at your budget and see where you can find some wriggle room. What can you afford? Where can you trim expenses elsewhere to make space for compensating collaborators?
Bonus Tip! Ask yourself, “What about my friend?”
If you’re looking for a quick check to assess if a theme or narrative is too one-sided, imagine a friend of yours who identifies differently from you. This can be any kind of difference, from race to economic status to gender/identity to physical ability, whatever. Consider your theme and ask yourself, “Would this person be able to locate their own story here?”
This is something I started doing a few years ago and it revolutionized my ability to check for bias sneaking in. Whenever I would write a program, I’d think of my friends and ask myself, “Would she find her story represented here? What about him?”
Key Takeaway: Inclusive Narratives Ensure Ethical Representation
Remember, although a narrative theme gives structure to your program, and therefore gives your audience a critical center point to return to as they learn, as museum educators, we have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the center point is well-rounded and representative of anyone who might have a stake in that story.
When we take the time to ensure ethical representation in our themes, we ensure that our education staff will treat our interpretive topics with sensitivity, respect, and a commitment to portraying diverse voices and experiences accurately.
This mindset shows up in historical narration that is not simplified or romanticized, but rather presented in all its complexity and nuance. It shows up in gallery tours that highlight artists of color or female creatives, and allows for questioning the qualifications of “good art.” It illustrates the breadth of human achievement, rather than narrowing in on accomplishments by the scientific elite.
Inclusive narrative themes encourage conversations about privilege, colonialization, repatriation, and globalization. In short, they set up your programs to be successful in the 21st century, as museum professionals increasingly ask ourselves “What is a museum?” [link]
What’s Next?
Now that you’ve considered the ethical implications of developing a narrative theme for your program, it’s time to craft your actual tour. Next up in the series, we’ll look at practical tips for ensuring you (and your education staff) stay on theme each time.