This Autumn Quarter 2024 Course Highlight is the second 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 Mirka Jablonski, M.Ed. Kim is Museology Guest Faculty and is also a partner at Upper Left Projects.
Conversation is at the very heart of our work. Bell Hooks wrote that by “learning and talking together, we break the notion that our experience of gaining knowledge is private, individualistic, and competitive. By choosing and fostering dialogue, we engage mutually in a learning partnership.” Being in conversation with the Museology 588 students has been a joy.
As our term together winds down, there is an opportunity to reflect on what this group built together, and I can’t help but think of the words family and team. We asked a lot. It is not easy to take risks, rely on one another, consider entirely new ways of being and feel the discomfort that all those things bring. The students shared a generosity and care that will stick with me long after we say our goodbyes. Our hope was to create an environment grounded in collaboration, curiosity and wonder and I have a strong appreciation for all the ways that students experimented, stayed present and trusted the process.
Kim and I have spent a lot of time thinking about the ways that people learn, grow, connect, build understanding and feel a sense of belonging. The design of this class is deeply rooted in a method of facilitating group-centered conversation that invites and celebrates curiosity and the emotion and feeling that curiosity activates. I have a strong and vivid memory of my first experience as a participant in a facilitated discussion. That experience upended everything I knew about leading a group. It is a sensory memory- and one that I could recreate. I can reconstruct the path of the conversation, I can recall what I contributed to the discussion, what my questions were, what my colleagues said and how their ideas changed my perception.
That conversation happened 17 years ago. The learning stuck and the emotion- how it made me feel- stuck. That experience unlocked something for me. It made me realize that as a student and a learner, I had had very few opportunities to be curious. I had been a spectator in my learning. The environment, for me, was not designed to support my social, intellectual or psychological safety. I either knew something or I didn’t and there was no clear path to get from not knowing to knowing.
I just returned from two weeks in Athens, hanging out in museums of all kinds: art museums, cultural museums, archeological museums, a turtle rescue sanctuary, a history museum, and a war museum. I observed a lot of folks. I was looking as closely at the behavior of the visitors as I was to the works on display. I watched tours with groups of all kinds: school-aged field trips, tourists from around the world, groups of colleagues, families and strangers. What I saw was – one person standing in front of an object, talking and a group of people silently watching.
What I love about what we are doing in this class is that we are flipping the script. We are learning to let the group do the talking, do the looking, speculate, infer, build meaning, supply the content, and connect the dots. We are there to let the wonder happen.
In one of the museums, I had been staring at an object for a few minutes when my husband walked up to join me. When he asked, “What’s this all about?” I replied, “I don’t know, but it might be…”- he laughed and pointed to the long placard posted just to the right of us with the “answers”. I smiled and said, “that’s not how I operate.”
