Ellis Island and Teddy Bears: Finding What’s Personal in a Museum (Crafting Valuable Experiences, Part 4)
In this episode of the Modern Museum Education podcast, we dive deeper into the concept of crafting valuable experiences in museums, focusing this time on the personal context of a visitor's museum journey.
Building on previous discussions, we explore how museum exhibits and programs can create transformational experiences that deeply resonate with individuals. I’ll explain what “peak personal experiences” are and why creating opportunities for them to arise is invaluable to the success of your programs.
Key Takeaways include:
Creating peak personal experiences in museums leads to visitor satisfaction and meaningful memories. These experiences are highly personal and unpredictable, often resulting in strong emotional reactions and attachment to the museum.
How “culturally privileging” certain experiences over others limits our programming reach, particularly to children audiences.
4 tips for immediately improving visitors’ opportunity for personal satisfaction at your museum
Resources Mentioned:
Did you know Rachel can run a personalized workshop for your staff, based around the latest research on creating valuable programming? Find out more at https://modernmuseumeducation.com/services.
Looking for your next professional development read? Links to Rachel’s recommendations, including Family Spaces in Art Museums and The Value of Museums, can be found at https://modernmuseumeducation.com/bookshelf.
Want to be a guest on the podcast? We are looking for museum educators of all kinds to share their experiences, expertise, and ideas. Click here to let us know you are interested!
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hi, I am Rachel, a resource expert and career coach for museum educators who are stretched thin, but long to fall in love with their world-changing work. After over 15 years with my own hands in the glitter, I know how it feels when your Board thinks your work is childish because you work with children.
I know how hard it is to lead a tour on a difficult subject, and I know the frustration of waiting on a school bus that is 20 minutes late or worse, 10 minutes early as I'm heading towards the second half of my career. I find myself with a passion to help my fellow educators reverse the chronic state of being overworked and underappreciated so that they can reclaim their creativity and emotional energy.
Join me and my museum buddies as we share our best tips, tricks, and techniques for modern museum education.
Rachel: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Modern Museum Education Podcast. My name is Rachel and I'm your host. We are [00:01:00] continuing with our series, looking at crafting valuable experiences in the museum, a conversation that's based largely on Dr. John Falk's latest book, The Value of Museums. If you haven't gotten a copy of that book for yourself yet, what are you waiting for?
This book is an invaluable resource to anyone who works in museums. If you are curious about the role that museums play in our current culture, or how best to leverage that role to everyone's benefit, you have to read this book.
It will change your professional life.
You can read my full review of this book at ModernMuseumEducation.com/bookshelf, or you can get the link in the show notes.
So speaking of my bookshelf, I have just started reading my next museum read called What is a Museum? It's a collection of essays by national and international museum leaders.
And so far it has been a great read. It, it's, it's proving to be very thought provoking in terms of, um, the conversation around not just the role [00:02:00] but the relevance of museums in the 21st century.
And I think that when you take this book, and, and you read it in connection with more, uh, research heavy books like The Value of Museums that we're talking about today, it will offer museum professionals a lot to chew on, so. You can get the link to that book, um, as well as my review once I finished it again at ModernMuseumEducation.com/bookshelf.
And I do wanna take a minute and thank you so much for using the affiliate links as they help support my work and the cost of producing this podcast.
Okay, so this week we are picking back up looking at the various contexts that make up a person's museum experience. In episode three, we set the stage for what we're talking about. We defined the terms, and we sort of gave an introduction to the idea of museum visits as both experiential and transformational.
And then in episodes four and five, we looked at the physical and the [00:03:00] social contexts of museum experience. But now we're gonna shift a little and explore how museum exhibits and programs can move a person along a transformational journey. So we're gonna sort of make our way towards a conversation about intellectual learning experiences, but today we're gonna, we're gonna stop short of that and talk about how people personally enjoy and derive satisfaction from museum experiences.
Okay. To illustrate this idea of museum experiences as being highly personal, let me tell you a story about my son and our visit to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island a couple of years ago. So, when we were on this trip, I, I really wanted him to learn about the history of immigration. I wanted him to, [00:04:00] I wanted him to be transformed by the ideas of hope and possibility that the US offered, and then juxtaposing that with the perils of Ellis Island.
This story to me, um, the immigration story particularly at Ellis Island is haunting and it is compelling and I was personally very excited to see Ellis Island for the first time. I had never been before. I'd been to New York, but I'd never been to Ellis Island. So I was really excited about seeing that place and that museum.
And I really wanted my kids to engage with the narrative the way that I wanted to engage with it. Of course, I am a grown woman with a master's degree in history, so it was a little unfair of me to expect them to have the same personal experience that I was expecting to have. But even though [00:05:00] I'm a museum professional and I know how these things work, I was still expecting him to have the same personal experience that I was expecting, which is why this story sort of sticks in my brain so much.
So when we first got off the ferry at um, Liberty Island, you know, where the Statue of Liberty is um, naturally the first thing we had to do was use the restroom and get a bottle of water because it was a really hot day. So, by the way, see episode three about physical needs and how important meeting physical needs
are before you can even get a person moving along a learning or transformation journey. We got there. I was excited, but the first thing we had to do was stop and use the restroom. So of course we had to go into the gift shop to find the bathrooms and the water, and immediately we were greeted with a display of stuffed animals.
Now you have to [00:06:00] understand that my kids, especially my youngest son, he is obsessed with stuffed animals, kind of like the silly bands that I was talking about a few episodes back. He finds stuffed animals to be of extremely high value. I find them to be of lesser value. But anyways, he was desperate to go ahead and buy his souvenir, and we tried to reason with him.
You know what, if you find something else better later on, I mean, he was not having it. It did not matter to him. It was barely 10 o'clock in the morning. We had literally just stepped foot off the ferry. He had to have this stuffed animal. It's a, it's a bear, has a Statue of Liberty crown. He's holding a torch.
It's the whole nine yards.
So he had to have this bear. There was no changing his mind. So, okay, fine. This is what you wanna spend your money on. He spends his money [00:07:00] on this stuffed animal, promptly names it Liberty Bear.
Okay. I was low-key annoyed, but he was thrilled. He carries this bear all around the entire Statue of Liberty, through that museum. We're on the ferry. We're going to Ellis Island, and I of course am pumped to get to Ellis Island. He really was only interested in his stuffed animal.
Now once we got into the museum at Ellis Island, I was trying my absolute best to get him emotionally invested in this story, and it was just not happening. He was tired. It was in the afternoon it, this subject was not his thing. It wasn't ringing his bell. To be honest, he was already like one day ahead of us in the future.
In his mind, he was already at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, which he as a little artist kid was very excited to see. He did [00:08:00] not care about Ellis Island, the story of immigration. He didn't care. I was trying so hard to get him to care. He was just kind of along for the ride until we turned a corner and he froze
because there on a text panel, huge text panel on like kind of inside this exhibit case was a picture of a teddy bear.
It was a story about a young girl named Gertrude and her family's experiences immigrating from Europe through Ellis Island to the United States. And along this journey, she had this teddy bear and this bear is pictured in the the text panel.
The second he saw that bear, he connected to the story.
Because here is a picture of a bear. He's standing there holding a bear, and he was [00:09:00] able to emotionally connect to the story through this ridiculous stuffed animal that I honestly tried to get him not to buy in the first place. Here's the thing, his investment in this story fulfilled a deep desire for me personally, but he was only personally invested on the level
that mattered to him, right? Not really the whole story, but just the story of this stuffed animal teddy bear. Okay, so what this story illustrates is the idea of what are called peak personal experiences. So, let's explore how we can create programming that allows for these peak personal experiences, which in the book, The Value of Museums, Dr.
Faulk explores at length. Essentially, when you have a peak personal experience, you are completely absorbed in what you're doing, [00:10:00] and moreover, you are fully satisfied by it. Toward this end, John Falk begins the chapter on personal context, um, in relation to museum visits by quoting CS Lewis, where he says, " what does not satisfy when we find it was not the thing we were desiring."
And if we think back and remember Maslow's hierarchy, right, the triangle, um, of our needs with the, you know, the base of the, the triangle is about our physical needs, and then we move through our social needs and eventually you move into your personal needs. Peak personal experiences are found at the very top of this pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
They are, of course, entirely dependent on our physical and social needs being met first, but once those needs are met, we can move on up to acquiring [00:11:00] and having our personal needs satisfied . When we have peak personal experiences, we are experiencing what Maslow defined as self-actualization. In other words, it's a moment when we feel fully, and completely satisfied. We have actualized our deepest needs. This feeling shows up as energized focus, or happiness. Um, a sense that the passing moment was memorable and special, um, or important.
Researchers have found that people often describe peak personal experiences, um, using the sentiment that time was flying by. Okay. You know, that feeling of, of just being fully immersed and completely satisfied with what's happening around you. That's what we're talking about, peak personal experiences. [00:12:00] Importantly,
peak personal experiences are always transient, but they go hand in hand with strong emotional reactions. So because of this, Dr. Falk says, and this is a quote from his book, " people find them, (meaning these peak experiences) to be extremely memorable and attach a high degree of meaningfulness to such experiences."
So essentially, when someone experiences a moment that for them is a moment of peak satisfaction. It meets their deepest needs, whatever it is that they want, they're getting it in this moment. For that person, that moment means everything. So when we're talking about in terms of museum experiences, we want those experiences to be meaningful to our visitors.
. What makes that moment meaningful [00:13:00] is entirely dependent on whether or not that moment is meeting their emotional needs. Now we're gonna circle back around to that idea that meeting the visitor's needs is more important than meeting the museum's needs. But before we get there, I wanted to kind of pause and go a little deeper into something that Dr. Falk kind of almost glosses over. But for me as a museum educator who primarily deals with children and family programming, this point is so incredibly important.
When children experience, peak personal moments, we often call that play.
So this brings me to my first point about crafting valuable experiences from the context of a visitor's personal [00:14:00] interests, the idea of culturally privileging experiences. So, Let me explain what I mean by that. Many of us consider high value museum experiences, like my reaction when my son finally connected to the Ellis Island story through the experience of the teddy bear to be unique and special moments, we think, oh, that was a special moment. We had this deep connection. I was just kind of on top of the world feeling great about myself as a parent. Feeling great about myself as a history person. Um, I really just felt fully satisfied.
We often think that those moments are unique and special, but here is the actual truth. Researchers have found that, and this is again a quote from the book, The Value of Museums, " neurologically museum experiences are totally indistinguishable from other, more common positive experiences, like the joy of [00:15:00] biting into a perfectly ripe peach."
So it's moving on into summertime now. Fruit is, you know, the best it's gonna be all year long. Last night, actually, my family, we cut up a pineapple and it was, oh my goodness. It was maybe the best pineapple I have ever eaten in my life. It almost tasted like pineapple flavor because it was so, so perfectly pineapple.
Like it was sweet, and I can't even describe how delicious it was, the feeling that I had when I ate that perfect pineapple. In my brain, what was happening was the same exact firing, um, and, and, and like brain activity that I had when I was standing in Ellis Island, having a moment with my son where he finally got the story and I felt like I was a fantastic parent because I, I managed to get him to understand the import of what was happening.[00:16:00]
It's, in my brain, the same thing was happening. So the point here is peak personal experiences are not all that unique. They're actually rather common, which is good for people because we experience happiness and we have the ability to experience happiness often. Um, but from an evolutionary perspective, any moment that brings us personal satisfaction is tied up in the circumstances that we have evolved to appreciate as meaningful.
Okay, let me say that again because again, we're getting into this sort of concept of like evolution and, and how we sort of have evolved as a species that sometimes reading this book, it does make it a little hard to understand. But if you just kind of back up a little bit and allow yourself the space to consider what's being said, you'll realize it makes a lot of sense.
So I'm gonna say that sentence again. From an evolutionary [00:17:00] perspective, any moment that brings us personal satisfaction is tied up in circumstances that we have evolved to appreciate as meaningful and therefore conducive to our survival and our wellbeing. Okay, so a delicious tasting piece of fruit is healthy.
That's going to help me be a healthier person. You know, if you eat a lot of fruit, it's gonna help you survive. If we as a species eat a lot of fruit, we will survive as a species. So I tasted this fantastic pineapple. It made me happy because I knew that this was good for me. I had a moment in a museum where I felt like I was teaching my son something important.
It made me happy because I knew that it was good for him. Okay. What is so interesting though, about this idea of [00:18:00] personal satisfactory moments, being connected to things that we assign value to, is that as a culture, we have evolved to label certain experiences as more refined. In my thinking, this connects a lot to what we talked about in terms of social wellbeing and, and.
And the idea that we as humans label certain circumstances to be more valuable because of their association with, um, our role in society. So like for example, I mentioned in the last episode that parents perceive museum visits to be, um, something worth their time because it illustrates their success. As parents, like we culturally think, "Ooh, if I take my kid to a museum that shows that I am a [00:19:00] good parent." We associate going to museums with something elevated and refined.
This is an important point. Now, Dr. Falk in this book does not go deep into this idea of cultural privileging. He kind of just touches on it and then sort of bounces off into another kind of part of this conversation. But I find it enormously impactful, particularly from the perspective of someone whose life's work is dedicated to raising the appreciation of children's programming in museums. Too often, museum education programs are dismissed as nothing more than play, and they aren't considered real museum work. Right.
But I would argue that as museum educators, if our primary audience is children, then creating a program where children can [00:20:00] play on topic is the highest level of programming that we can attain. So let's go back to my story about the bear. When I was preparing for this podcast, I asked my son, "Hey buddy, do you remember when we went to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island?" And his immediate response?
"Oh yeah, that's when I got Liberty Bear." That's what he remembered. Again, I was slightly annoyed. I was like, "yeah, but also didn't you learn something important?" And here's, here's the sad truth. It's sad for me. It's not sad for him because it's not that important to him. He didn't, he didn't remember it long term.
I was like, "don't you remember this, the picture of the bear, the story of Gertrude?" I even showed him the picture of the text panel and he was like, "meh, uh." He honestly, it didn't stick with him, but. [00:21:00] Perhaps, and I'm just throwing this out here because this is just conjecture, but perhaps if there had been more opportunities in that moment for him to engage in playful learning with the teddy bear related to that historic story, maybe it would've stuck in his mind more because he would've been doing something he found deeply, personally satisfying, playing with the stuffed animal that was important to him.
Or you know, maybe not. But the reality is of course, that he never cared all that much about Ellis Island in the beginning. To him, Ellis Island was an obstacle to what he really wanted, which was to see MoMA. Which brings me to my second point.
The second point is that what is personal is personal.
When I asked my son about his memories of MoMA, he was much more forthcoming. He's a self-proclaimed artist. He once told me that he wanted to be a painter when he grew [00:22:00] up so he could sign his paintings and then die and then become famous. So he, he was very excited to see MoMA and when I asked him about his memories of MoMA, he remembered, "oh, we saw paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh", but importantly, he also remembered, "that's where I got my t-shirt."
Here's the thing about my son. He does derive peak personal satisfaction from souvenirs. He orients pretty much everything around his entire life, um, around whether or not he has the opportunity to go shopping. That's just who he is. He loves to shop. He loves to window shop.
He loves to go to souvenir shops. He loves shopping.
Now while I could subscribe to the cultural privileging, that tells me that my intellectual engagement with the museum [00:23:00] is higher and more refined than his souvenir shopping,
John Falk makes the point to highlight that humans can and do often derive peak personal experiences from possessions, and he actually in the book, tells a fantastic story about a woman's emotional connection to a scarf that she purchased from a museum gift shop.
Basically, the point here is that there are many paths through a museum that lead to peak personal experiences, which are related to happy, meaningful moments that we remember for a lifetime. On that trip, for me, to Ellis Island and to New York as a parent, seeing my son happy with his teddy bear made me happy, but having a moment with him where we connected to the story of Ellis Island
through that bear, although it was fleeting for him, it was deeply meaningful to me. And that moment could not have been planned by an exhibit [00:24:00] designer or an educator. It was entirely dependent on a series of circumstances that just happened to happen in the order they happened in.
At the end of the day, as Dr. Falk says, this is again a quote from his book, " these experiences are highly personal and quite unpredictable, almost serendipitous in quality. These outcomes stand in stark contrast to the very reasoned and calculated outcomes many in the museum community today seem to be striving for. Knowing exactly what aspect of a museum experience any particular user will find personally relevant and educationally beneficial is hard to predict."
He goes on to say, "ultimately people use museum experiences to satisfy their own needs as opposed to the museum's needs."
So that's a big sentence with a lot of words. I'm gonna say part of it again because I think it's really [00:25:00] important. So if you are listening to this podcast, take a take a moment, stop multitasking, focus on what I'm saying, and really absorb this information.
" Knowing exactly what aspect of a museum experience any particular user will find personally relevant and educationally beneficial is hard to predict. Ultimately, people use museum experiences to satisfy their own needs as opposed to the museum's needs." Which can be kind of disappointing when you think about a career in exhibit design or education,
if everything that we hope to accomplish is entirely dependent on the user and not on us. It, it feels, uh, that's kind of a hard, it's kind of a hard thing to accept, but I think in the end, if you take the whole of [00:26:00] what we've talked about over the course of several episodes together, what you end up with is a freedom to do the best you can, and then you kind of leave it for the user.
Like what ultimately happens is, the ball's in their court. Okay, so we're gonna do all these things the best we can. We're gonna set up physical experiences that make them feel safe and secure. We're gonna set up social experiences that allow them to exhibit their social success.
We are going to create as many opportunities for them to find peak enjoyment on a personal level as we possibly can. And we're gonna kind of leave the rest of it up to them. Which brings me to my last point, which is what can we as educators do today to make a difference in our visitor's personal experiences on site?
So my first suggestion is this. Notice them, what did they bring with them? What are they wearing? Many times these, [00:27:00] these things will give you a clue as to their personal interests.
For example, are they in town for a big sporting event or a concert? Maybe they're wearing a jersey or the concert t-shirt.
Children also often carry around special items like teddy bears, uh, or other things that you can remark on. "Oh, that's an interesting, whatever it is. Are you interested in that? Is that your favorite character? Um, Is, you know, tell me more." Right?
That's a great, a great phrase that you should just always kind of keep in your back pocket.
Tell me more.
Um, the more you can say that, the better your conversations on tour are going to be. So ask lots of questions about what drew the family or the group to your museum. "Why are you here? What do you wanna learn about? What are you interested in seeing?" And then say it. "Tell me more. Why? Why are you so interested in that?
What [00:28:00] brings you here?" Get them to tell you what they want and then, you can direct them to those things. Okay? So when possible, direct them towards items or story elements that they will find relatable. So for example, I used to work at a museum where we interpreted the history of horse racing a lot. Now horse racing is not super relatable, but in the context of the 1800s, horse racing was the major national sport.
So anytime I had a group of kids who showed any interest in sports at all, we started there. "How many of you like sports? What are your favorite sports? Tell me more about why you like that sport. Is it the raw athleticism? Is it the, um, is it because the athletes have to think critically? Like, what is it that you love about that sport?
[00:29:00] Okay, now let me tell you about horse racing in the 1800s", and I could connect any sport that they like now with this sport from the past. Now, I'm not suggesting that just because I made a tangential connection between football and horse racing, that these kids were having a peak personal experience.
But what I am suggesting is that by establishing the fact that there is something related to something you're interested in right here, I'm, what I'm doing is I'm opening the door for the students to think "maybe there's something here that I actually am interested in." I'm helping them to see I'm setting the stage for them that this subject matter, if they're open to it, can be relatable.
It's exactly like when my son saw a picture of [00:30:00] that teddy bear. He, in that moment, was open to the fact that maybe the story is not quite so distant from me as I thought it was at first.
So this leads me to my second suggestion. My second suggestion is this, try to create spaces in your museum where children and families can engage in activities that are likely to foster personal enjoyment.
Now, I know I said we're talking about things that you can do right now today, and maybe this feels like something that would require a little bit of planning, maybe a little bit, but don't feel like you have to completely, you know, reinvent the wheel here.
You don't have to completely overhaul your family gallery or start a new program. Just think about what you already have in place or at hand that you could pull out to create a, an opportunity for deeper personal enjoyment. So for [00:31:00] example, you might, um, you might have a backpack that can be rented and you can put paper and crayons and even toys and other activities in them.
Or maybe you can just put all those kinds of things in a basket and you set that in your gallery. Or, um, maybe you have, this is an idea that comes from the book, um, Family Spaces in Art Museums, which I'll put a link to that in the show notes, um, that's a really great book. But there's um, an example in that book where an art gallery, um, encouraged families to just reflect on what they learned about each other after having gone through the exhibits together. And the only thing that activity required was a couple pieces of poster boards, some sticky notes and some markers. So you don't have to go overboard here. The point is that you can, you know, I have [00:32:00] seen kids have peak personal experiences doing laundry in a wash tub.
Um, and I've also seen them having peak personal experiences doing problem solving puzzles in an escape room type activity.
So the point is that not every activity is gonna ring the bell for every kid and every family, but the more different kinds of things that you can offer, the more likely you are to get it right for someone. So don't be afraid to throw some spaghetti at the wall here. Pull out all the stops. It doesn't have to be a home run for everybody, but it might be a home run for somebody.
Okay. So my third suggestion kind of goes along the lines of suggestion number two, and it is this: embrace play and fun.
Too many times, educators, you know, we find ourselves pitted against [00:33:00] researchers or collections managers or you know, other departments in our institutions for, you know, for whatever reason, they think our work is frivolous or somehow less than compared to, you know, more elevated museum work.
And yes, changing mindsets takes a long time, but right now, for today, I just wanna say this, be confident in what you're doing. Remember that when we assign a value to play and we consider it to be less than adult type experiences, we are culturally privileging one type of experience over another.
The fact is the research shows that for those who enjoy it, play can be as impactful, as meaningful, and therefore as important to the learning journey as anything else. [00:34:00] Now a quick caveat for those of you who deal with difficult history or difficult topics at your museum, we can be often wary of including play in our programming and for good reason.
So for the purposes of this episode, we're not gonna get into the nuance of all of that. However, I will say this again, as adults, we have a culturally impacted understanding of what play is and its role in learning. And as such, we assume that play cannot be part of serious learning. So if you are navigating this admittedly tricky line between playful learning and serious subjects, I would say err on the side of caution, however, if your subject does not require quite so much delicacy, my suggestion is go for it. Pull out the Play-Doh, set out the blocks, [00:35:00] create play stations around your space. Encourage lots and lots of playful opportunities for visitors of all ages, and I think you will be surprised by how successful that turns out to be.
Now I have one more suggestion and then I'm gonna wrap it up. My last suggestion is this.
Let go. Release control.
Remember that what is personal is personal. And just like my experience with my son and his Liberty Bear, there is no predicting what is gonna make a
memorable impact on someone.
As always, this conversation is just hitting the highlights of what Dr. Falk covers in his book and what I cover in workshops that that draw heavily from this material. So if you want to move a little deeper into this topic, you can, number one, buy the book for yourself, or you can contact me and we can explore an in-person deep dive workshop for [00:36:00] your staff where we look at the process of crafting valuable experiences at your particular site.
I am also in the process of turning all of this training into an on-demand virtual workshop that you could access with your staff at any time. So if that sounds interesting to you, make sure that you're on my email list so that you are the first to know when that launches at a discount later this summer.
And remember to check out the show notes for this episode for all of the resources that I mentioned, and that's where you can find the transcript for this episode.
All of that is found at ModernMuseumEducation.com/podcast/006.
Thank you so much for joining us. If this episode has been helpful to you or interesting, please take a minute to like, subscribe, and leave a review. Which will help other museum educators find this resource. As always, if you would like to work with me more directly, have any questions or would like to be a guest on the podcast, you can find links to all that and more on my website, [00:37:00] ModernMuseumEducation.com.
I'll see you back here next time. And in the meantime, please remember that your work is not childish, just because you work with children.