This Autumn Quarter 2024 Course Highlight is the first of three exploring Kim Aziz and Mirka Jablonski’s new course: Facilitation in the Museum: Creating a place for curiosity and wonder. This course explores how museum practitioners can actively and intentionally cultivate an experience that evokes awe and wonder within the museum space using visual thinking and other strategies. This highlight is written by Kim Aziz, M.Ed. Kim is Museology Guest Faculty and is also the co-founder of Upper Left Projects.
Maya Angelou famously observed, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Educational, developmental and psychological research tells us that to learn we need to feel ok with not knowing. Humans need to feel curiosity. It is the key to learning that not only sticks but moves us as well. How we make students and museum visitors feel is critical.
I pivoted from teaching in a public-school classroom into the museum space over 20 years ago in order to find a place to engage in content and community without the restrictions of state mandated testing. Back in 1998 testing consumed about 40% of our time. This system left me little space to reinforce the trust-building in our classroom necessary for curiosity and wonder to run rampant. But in the museum-world there was all kinds of freedom to connect community to content in a meaningful way. It was in museums that I moved from being a “teacher” to a “facilitator” and that shift has made all the difference.
This fall, we began our MUS 588 class (Facilitation in the Museum: Creating a place for curiosity and wonder) with the question, “what do you want your future visitors to get out of their museum visits?” Student answers were insightful and inspiring. Museology students want their future museum visitors to experience something “life affirming,” to “engage in a way that leads to action,” to “find a place of belonging” and a “place of mirrors and windows” where guests see themselves and learn about the unfamiliar.
We know museums have the capacity to hold all these possibilities – to be places of access, learning and inspiration.
How are we supposed to make all of that happen in a museum?
These are bold and ambitious human experiences. One way…a skilled, group-centered facilitator can support these goals of group empowerment; fostering a place of curiosity and community where people are encouraged to take a risk and feel good in the not-knowing.
Three critical ingredients to a facilitator’s toolkit are simple in name but can be challenging and mind-bending in practice. First, show up with genuine curiosity about your visitors and what they are wondering about. Curiosity begets curiosity. Next, express your authentic interest with open-ended questions. When I ask a group open-ended questions that reflect my genuine curiosity it inspires wonder and curiosity within the group. “What’s going on in this image…this display…this series of graphs…this animal?” And finally, listen. Listen deeply and listen for understanding to what they notice and question. Share back what you hear to be true for that speaker, so they know they are heard and everyone in the group has heard and understood.
As a facilitator, I am the weaver, connecting ideas and people. My job is to honor that not knowing is a glorious place to be, to encourage the curiosity implicit in not knowing, and to empower the problem-solver in every museum visitor. The priority always remaining the same- how did I make that guest feel during their time in the museum?