The Goals of Object-Centered Learning
Like many collections-based institutions, our interpretive efforts leverage learning from encounters with artifacts. The end-result, hopefully, is the generation of ideas. Our objects are the starting points, not the ending points, of the inquiries we hope to launch. However, our human materials can have such a visceral power that their mere presence in a gallery can transcend any specific learning messages we may want to foster.
It has been a (somewhat) unspoken conviction among many of our museum staff that an encounter with human materials, particularly pathological specimens, is a deeply individualized experience and a deeply valuable one. We have defined this visceral response as a part of a learning experience and value it as such. But how do we move beyond the initial attraction/repulsion response to a different kind of learning? What types of contexts are helpful? What type of labeling is informative? How much do people want to know about individual case histories; how much do they want to know about progression of disease? Are there certain categories of specimens that are harder for visitors to look at? Does it matter whether materials are bony or fleshed, from the past or of recent times? Does it matter whether materials are of external or internal body parts?
In 1998, the museum contracted with Randi Korn & Associates (RK&A), an evaluation firm specializing in museum visitor studies, to help sort out these issues and form a study to explore museum visitor responses to exhibitions that include human remains and other graphic depictions of pathological and normal human anatomy.
Defining the Research Objectives
The staff, in consultation with RK&A, identified four research objectives for this study. The objectives were:
- To determine visitors' motivation for visiting the museum and their expectations of the museum;
- To identify reactions to a range of specimens including models, illustrations, fluid-preserved specimens, skeletal elements, fetuses, and plastinated organs;
- To ascertain what aspects of the human specimens cause visitors to respond as they do to the specimens;
- To identify ways to display human specimens and depictions of human anatomy so that visitor experiences include learning. We defined learning as including, but not limited to, understanding that the museum's human specimens are used to study disease, comprehending that collecting and studying human specimens over time is valuable, or having a revelation about one's own body and how it works.
Study Design
RK&A suggested two research methods to help answer our questions and recommended utilizing focus groups as well as open-ended interviews with our museum visitors.
Focus Groups. The focus group participants were selected through random telephone solicitation and were screened using criteria developed specifically for the research project. We were equally interested in hearing the opinions of women and men, and we wanted to hear the thoughts of parents who might bring their children for a visit. We targeted people for participation who would be likely to visit our museum by screening for those visit museums and, specifically, for those who visit natural history museums.
In the focus groups, we learned that the participants had a general sense that museums are educational institutions. As one of the focus groups put it:
"I guess to educate us…[I think the museum is trying] to make our children, or just make people aware that [disease] is something real, everyday, and to teach them how to deal with it and not to have fear or be scared of it."
Discussion of the specimens and objects themselves consumed the largest portion of the focus groups' time and attention. To facilitate this discussion, we selected 12 artifacts to present to the focus groups that conveyed both a sense of the range and breadth of our collections as well as providing a degree of overlap in specimen type. In order to assess those labels that the groups found most compelling, we attempted to employ a range of interpretative labeling strategies - explanation of the pathological condition, relaying the personal story associated with the specimen, or describing the preservation technique. The following are the specimens and objects that we presented to the focus groups.
