What is Community Engagement and Why is it Important?

A Google search on “community engagement” yields many, many different results.  Principles of community engagement, strategies for increasing community engagement, organizations that focus on leadership and community engagement -- the list goes on and on. But what is community engagement, really? Though specific definitions vary, community engagement is typically described as the process of forming a mutually beneficial, ongoing partnership or relationship between an institution and its surrounding communities.

So what role does community engagement play in museums? The Colchester + Ipswich Museums in Ipswich, UK consider community outreach and community engagement an important part of their core vision and values. On their website, they do an excellent job of explaining why community engagement is essential in museums:

“As part of the process of attracting new audiences it is necessary to have more inclusive and accessible services, and ones that reflect the diverse histories and stories of the whole community.  A way to produce more inclusive services is to directly involve the community in helping to develop and deliver a particular project or service, display or exhibition.  This helps bring about a feeling of ownership, break down initial perceptual barriers as well as creating a better end result.  Empowering the community to play a part, to continue to be involved and to have an influence on service development can only be of benefit to a publicly funded organisation.”

Our group's blog posts will focus on the many ways in which museums are involving different communities through their programs, exhibitions, and events. We will present case studies, look at how museums are engaging specific audiences and communities, and discuss some of our own personal experiences as students in the Museum Education Program. To kick off our blog about community engagement in museums, we thought that we could each share what community engagement means to us:

Joo Lee: Actively engaging the community has become very important as museums have evolved. Its survival and growth had been previously depended on the elite and had been closed off to the public. Now the museum relies on the support of its community for its survival and has taken on a different role. By focusing on the importance and the benefits to its community, it better advocates for our museums.  This blog will focus on successful case studies analysis of why they worked and what the  museums are doing now to reach out to specific audiences. building a strong relationship with the community strengthens trust and provide a sense of  ownership of the museum in which museums rely.

Julie: To me, community engagement is all about building relationships -- with individuals, with other institutions or organizations, and with the community as a whole. I believe that education and open, honest dialogue each play a major role in achieving these kinds of sustained relationships.

Kaitlyn: Like Julie, I believe community engagement is about building relationships. Museums must take a special effort to nurture the connection between groups that visit the site often, in addition to those that visit less frequently. Hopefully, by making a conscious effort to support all members of the community, they will encourage diverse audiences to participate in programs, events, etc. This participation between and among groups is an important component of community engagement.

Shadayna: I  agree with  the statements already written by my fellow colleagues. I believe the two most important factors of  community engagement within the museum setting  is establishing trust  with communities and providing an open environment for diverse visitors and discussions. Once a museum achieves these two factors they will  continuously have new and loyal visitors for the museums duration.

Yi-An: Like those had been said by our group members, community engagement is every effort made consciously by the museums, to get the communities museums might be involved with most comfortably engaged. Both providing a welcoming environment and atmosphere for a diversity of visitors, and have diverse members from the communities join the design and display of the exhibitions and programs are very important. To me, I honor the idea of having community representatives engaged from the early stage of program, exhibition and education development. The input of community members can no doubt lead to a more successful community engagement. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Multicultural Audience Development Initiative is an example of increasing community’s awareness of the museum’s programs and collections.

As we close this post, we invite you to consider your own definition of community engagement. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts!

Museum-School Partnerships

Museums are natural partners with schools; they provide opportunities that deepen formal curriculum, often in a more interactive, hands-on environment. These partnerships exist in a variety of ways - some work with only certain schools, others are more informal and open to student applicants from the area. We as museum educators need to continually advocate for this special relationship between museums of all genres and students. Our group has compiled a list of several interesting and effective partnerships between schools and museums to illustrate their benefit to students.

1. Oakland Museum of California and Korematsu Discovery Academy and La Escuelita (Oakland, California)

http://museumca.org/museum-school-partnerships

The science education department of the Oakland Museum of California partners with three fifth grade classes from Korematsu Discovery Academy and La Escuelita throughout a school year. The program, Water Striders Junior Guides: From Creeks to Coastline, helps students better understand the ecology of local watersheds and the affect their own actions can have on the surrounding habitats. Over the course of the year, students visit a creek, salt marsh, bay, and coast to observe both fresh and salt water environments. The students then use their observations and discoveries to create tours for the Natural Sciences Gallery at the Museum. Additionally, the students work with docents to design activities for younger students and lead students from their own school on tours to teach them about what they have learned during the project. Finally, the students use their new skills and knowledge to participate in a family event where they host their friends and family on a tour.

On-line exhibits of students’ work:

http://tinyurl.com/http-rosa-com
http://tinyurl.com/http-ali-com
http://tinyurl.com/http-rusche-com

2. The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Student Docent Program (Ridgefield, Connecticut)

http://www.aldrichart.org/education/docent.php

This program is not a partnership with a specific school, but rather open to students from local schools. There are two levels of the program - Student Docents in grades 5-12, and Varsity Docents in grades 9-12. The Student Docent Program trains students in small groups to facilitate discussions with their own peers about contemporary art. The hope is that when their own classmates lead them on a tour, students are “more likely to make connections between the work on view and their own experiences.” Students who have gone through the docent program twice and are willing to make a more serious commitment are eligible to apply for the Varsity Docent Program. This program functions similarly to an internship, and introduces students to additional aspects of the museum environment, including multiple programs and audiences. This on-site experience is combined with discussions with staff members, field trips to New York, and artist workshops, and is intended to give student participants a strong foundational understanding of museum work.

3. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, Massachusetts)

http://www.gardnermuseum.org/education/school_partnerships

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum partnerships with a small number of schools each year in order to build deep working relationships. This year they are working with Boston Latin School, Maurice J. Tobin K08 School, Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers, Dudley Street Neighborhood Charter School, and Rafael Hernandez K-8 School. Isabella Stewart seeks to help students explore art in a way that they can make connections through their own experiences and knowledge. They do this using Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a discussion-based pedagogy that asks three questions: “What’s going on in this picture?” “What do you see that makes you say that?” and “What more can we find?” Through this discussion, students develop skills in reading artwork, becoming more flexible thinkers, and learning ways to become better speakers and listeners. The program is a true partnership between school and museum, as teachers must  present 10 VTS lessons, and students visit the Museum multiple times. These visits last for several hours, and include an art-making project in the Education Studio or Greenhouse Classroom.

4. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (Los Angeles, California)

http://www.nhm.org/site/for-teachers/teacher-resources/education-arts-roundtable/history

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has created the Education and Arts Roundtable, a partnership that connects Los Angeles-area schools with mid-sized arts organizations. This new initiative developed out of a strategic plan that sought to more deeply engage the community with museum programs. Staff and board members asked, “what sorts of student learning opportunities would emerge when unencumbered by practical needs and logistics.” These partnerships work with grades K-12, and they develop learning projects inspired by the Museum’s collections and resources. The Natural History Museum also includes an area on the first floor, Inter/Act which shows both the students’ work as well as the process they used to reach their questions and discovery. The goal of the Roundtable is help students learn to “use visual and performing arts as a catalyst to learn about the natural and social sciences.”

5. Early Elementary Science Partnership (Chicago, Illinois)

http://fieldmuseum.org/schools/school-partnerships

This partnership is a different from those listed above in that its purpose is to provide K-3 teachers with professional develop opportunities to improve their abilities to teach science. Ten schools have partnered with the Field Museum, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Children’s Museum, Lincoln Park Zoo, CPS Office of Science and Northwestern University as part of a two-year intensive plan of 76 professional development hours. One hundred teachers participate in this professional development, along with university-based coursework, collaborative teacher teams, and field trips, that will eventually reach 3,000 teachers. The goals of this partnership are to improve science content knowledge for both students and teachers, teachers’ ability to use museums as informal learning environments, and to pilot this cooperative partnership between schools, the University, and informal learning environments.

To finish this post, we wanted to provide you all with a website that provides a background, practical ideas, and resources for museum and school partnerships:

www.artbeyondsite.org/handbook/az-museum-school.shtml

Who are those teenagers anyway?

Who are those teenagers anyway?

Teens are forming their identities

Perhaps the most important tool for success with a teen audience is to really understand this stage of development and the risks and opportunities involved.

This time of life:
Adolescent people are in a stage of life distinguished by rapid physical, psychosocial and cognitive changes. Erik Erikson, educational psychologist, said “The growing and developing youths, faced with this physiological revolution within them, and with tangible adult tasks ahead of them are now primarily concerned with what they feel they are, and with the question of how to connect the roles and skills cultivated earlier with the occupational prototypes of the day.”(1) They are asking universal questions like “Who am I? Is this what I will be like from now on? Who needs me? Am I normal? Am I loving and lovable? Who thinks I am important? What can I do well? Who will show me how to...?”(2) Such questions lead to behaviors that are testing boundaries, testing society and testing out the adult-version of their identities.

Friends are important support and teachers of what is good and bad in life. Peers teach them what is acceptable and desired. This can lead to the formation of distinct social groups, that at times operate using exclusion and meanness. From an outsider, who has already navigated this stage of life, their behavior can seem cruel and narrow-minded, but developmentally, young people are protecting themselves and their own identity by filtering out what they don’t want to be and adhering strictly to the model they hope to emulate.  Erikson explains ”Adolescents not only help one another temporarily through much discomfort by forming cliques and by stereotyping themselves, their ideals, and their enemies; they also perversely test each other’s capacity to pledge fidelity...It is important to understand (which does not mean condone or participate in) such intolerance as a defense against a sense of identity confusion.”(3)

From the horse’s mouth:
Teenagers explain in their own words what teen identity means. Made by Anthony Clarke and Mark-Peter Johnson and Travis Cramer made this video for a high school class project where they interview classmates about what they think identity is. 

What do teenagers need?
Teenagers need to be supported through their formation of a positive identity. They desire independence, but also meaningful relationships with adults and each other. Also, abstract thought is beginning to develop. Erikson has described adolescence as “a psychosocial stage between childhood and adulthood, and between the morality learned by the child, and the ethics to be developed by the adult.”(4) Teenagers are in a stage of life where decisions they make can affect the rest of their lives. When proper support is absent during this time of added gravity, teenagers can become victims of unhealthy behavior in their quest for identity (substance abuse, unwanted pregnancy, delinquency, failing school). Deanna Banks Beane says “When a community cannot give its youth socially acceptable modes for carrying out the tasks of adolescence, the young people become vulnerable to other, less positive vehicles for finding answers to those universal Who am I? questions of youth.”(5)

What can museums do?
Youth need to develop positive relationships, opportunities, competencies, values and self-perceptions that help them grow into caring and responsible adults. Although school is where they spend the majority of their time, schools cannot provide all the experiences a young person might need. In reference to science literacy John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking propose that 95% of learning takes place outside of the classroom.(6) Like learning, positive developmental opportunities happen largely outside of the school, and can happen in museums!

Successful Programming is characterized by youth programs that are not designed to redeem those in need of “fixing.” Rather, they should be responsive to changing local needs and value young people’s input. “These programs do not view the young people as deficient, but rather as resources to be developed, valuable to themselves, their organization, and their communities.”(7) Because developmentally, teenagers are looking more to each other than any other group for information, fun, and acceptance, what better resource for reaching this audience than the teen audience themselves?! Youth program staff must be people who can be counted on. Consistency and stability are essential in establishing trusting relationships with young people. Also, understanding youth, loving them and holding them to high expectations are critical attributes for being an effective coach.

Do you have any examples of good youth programming?
Stay tuned! Our upcoming posts will highlight many opportunities for museums and teenagers to collaborate, thereby strengthening both parties, as well as the community.

References:

1. Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed., pp. 247-274). New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

2. Beane, Deanna Banks (2000). "Museums and Healthy Adolescent Development: What are we learning from research and practice." Journal of Museum Education, 25 (3), 3-8.

3. Erikson

4. Erikson

5. Beane

6. Falk, John H. and Lynn D. Dierking. "The 95% Solution." American Scientist. Nov-Dec 2010.

7. Beane