Monthly E-News from Michael Bouman, Executive Director
Missouri Humanities Council
Contents:
Interpretive Training - New Wind Blowing
My friend Carey Tisdal is a museum consultant who specializes in the exotic field of Visitor Studies. There are only about two hundred people in the U.S. who work in this field. They think a great deal about how people learn, which is why Carey is part of our lead article this month.
Carey helps museums determine if visitors are learning anything important, if they are happy with their experience, if they have a clear idea of what a new exhibit is about, or even what the museum is about. Recently she helped us design a process for involving the closest friends of the Chautauqua program in thinking about how to improve it.
Last month Carey told me about a huge training project undertaken at the Conner Prairie Living History Museum in Indiana. http://www.connerprairie.org/
Blacksmith at Conner Prairie. Photo by "berriehol" from Flickr. Used by permission.
Conner Prairie is a big organization with a big program and a big clientele. As part of strategic planning, Conner Prairie undertook research to understand what their visitors were learning and how they were learning. The museum wanted to learn how to do a better job. There's a link here to a report from Conner Prairie about this "Opening Doors" initiative.
http://mohumanities.org/library/PDF/ConnerPrairie_OpeningDoorsOverview_2006.pdf
There are a couple of gigantic ideas in this project for any history organization of any size:
- Knowing something about how people learn should affect the way we shape their experience when they visit.
- No matter what we do, our visitor will have an experience. We affect its quality.
- Having ideas about what we hope visitors will learn, or think about, should drive us to eliminate "clutter" and shape our own site's plan for interpreting history.
- We, the people at the site, have to learn to act in ways that help people learn at a higher level than we've previously achieved.
Conner Prairie's report talks about the need for "institutional change." The entire organization had to arrive at a new "attitude" about its relation to is mission and the people it served through helping them learn. Our term for this transformation is "interpretive retraining." It is only possible when there is an "interpretive plan."
Conner Prairie has produced a DVD and CD-ROM on their training program. Until October 31, advance copies will be available for $9. I'm putting a link here to their flyer about the DVD. If your museum or historic house wants to see what the cutting edge looks like, I suspect you'll see some of it in their DVD.
http://mohumanities.org/E-News/Oct06/ConnerPrairieTrainingDVD.pdf
The annual "read one book together" project, ReadMOre, has selected Daniel Woodrell's novel, Winter's Bone for programming in 2007. It's an "Odyssey tale" of a Missouri girl who must find her bail-jumping father, dead or alive, or see her mother and younger brothers rendered homeless.
Woodrell lives in West Plains, Missouri and has written seven previous novels set in the Ozarks. This new one has attracted rave reviews from all over the country.
Writing in the September 17 edition of the New York Times Book Review, David Bowman says, "Winter's Bone is as serious as a snakebite, with a plot that seems tight enough to fit on the label of a package of chew. Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly lives deep in the Ozarks, where she looks after her two younger brothers and her crazy mother, a woman who mostly sits on a chair in a kind of feline catatonia. Ree's father is a methamphetamine cook who jumped bail after putting the family's house up as collateral. Ree has a week to find Dad before the county repossesses the place.
"Woodrell's seven previous novels, featuring a population scraped from the underbelly of Arkansas citizenry — even the children are often grotesqueries — arrive from a genre you might want to call "hillbilly noir." In Winter’s Bone, he has hit upon the character of a lifetime. Young Ree Dolly allows Woodrell to glide this novel seamlessly from violence to innocence. She is hard-boiled. She is harsh. She can be sweet. She knows her way around firearms. She has a clinical compassion for her crazy mother. Ree nurtures her two preadolescent brothers by teaching them how to shoot and skin squirrels. She herself can withstand a brutal beating as well as any doe-eyed heroine of a Japanese underground comic book."
I've added my two cents to these reviews in a small piece titled, "Ears."
http://mohumanities.org/E-News/Oct06/ears.htm
ReadMOre is a yearly activity designed by Missouri librarians and readers with support from the Missouri Humanities Council. Information about programs and events will be posted at http://readmoremissouri.org/
Baseball in Children's Literature
Julie Douglas has hit another bases-loaded homer with her new review of children's books involving baseball. http://mohumanities.org/E-News/Oct06/tagup.htm
Sac and Fox Heritage Exhibit Available
The Sac and Fox Heritage Exhibit has moved to Effigy Mounds National Monument in Harper's Ferry, Iowa. Already, in the first three weeks there, 4,500 people have viewed the fascinating display. The exhibit is easily portable and suitable for small spaces such as libraries or local museums. The exhibit is available on loan to Missouri sites after January 16. Please contact me (Michael Bouman) if you're interested in having the exhibit on display in your town. Preference will be given to locations in northeast Missouri.