Old and New Projects, Engaging the Public

For the last two months, I’ve been working, working, working, and so that’s why I haven’t been writing here.  I’ve been working on contract projects, in both of my regular jobs, and in trying to figure out how to move forward with a research project I’ve been itching to launch. What is most important though is that, in the work I’ve been doing for the last few months, I’ve had a chance to interact with a number of members of the public in Ohio who are not art historians and not museum workers, but who are incredibly interested in supporting culture and maybe in making art or writing stories.  These are the people I left academia for.

The sky above Sts. Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church in Youngstown.

One project found me in Youngstown, Ohio, leading an art and architecture tour of the city’s historic churches—many of which are stellar examples of their architectural styles and of what a city at the peak of its wealth and power can accomplish. Now, many of these churches rest potentially on their last legs as their congregations age and populations shift.  Even though Youngstown is experiencing a cultural renaissance of sorts and encouraging businesses and people to move back into the city, the churches are unlikely to be benefactors of that.  They were constructed along the old ethnic lines of the city, and the groups that once patronized them have long been gone, at least to the suburbs if not further away. The tour was incredibly moving because the people who participated seemed genuinely engaged by the treasures their city revealed.  I believe that when they left they understood the consequences of losing such historical structures, once pillars of the community.  

Another project that I worked on in the last month, one that I’ve been involved in for awhile now, asks people to respond to texts from the humanities as a means of reflecting on their own experience.  Most of these texts are chosen because they have inherent value—value that is not predicated on, for example, knowing that Charles Baudelaire was a poet and critic who produced most of his best stuff in mid-nineteenth century France.  The beautiful thing about this program is these texts do have value that is inherent; their words are words from which anyone can find strength or solace and through which anyone can grow as a person. Helping people have intelligent conversations about what they’re reading helps to increase the ability of those people to engage beyond a controlled discussion setting.

At my day job, I’ve been teaching more and taking more time to drill down on what it means when we teach students about primary vs. secondary sources, how bias and perspective function in historical documents and literary texts, and how to evaluate information they encounter.  All of these skills figure prominently in the state standards for education, but it’s important to show how they can be applied outside the classroom. After all, the goal is for students to carry these skills beyond school, into their college years or their career, and through their adult lives. Not everyone will go to college, but everyone will need to understand how to decide whether or not the information before them is true.

These projects and programs all, in one way or another, embrace and promote ideas and values that are important to me. They all suggest ways of moving forward in my career and types of projects to continue to seek out to promote my interests.  In each case, the project is, at its core, about civic engagement—about gaining the tools to look around you and read the world for what it is.

Rotterdam Case Study: Unique, High-Tech Immersion at the Maritime Museum

Let’s go back to Rotterdam, shall we?  Previously this summer, I wrote about interpreting damaged churches in the city and the Erasmus Experience exhibit in the Rotterdam Public Library.  Now, I want to talk about the Maritime Museum of Rotterdam, a museum visit that I crammed into a late afternoon after returning from Kinderdijk. (There will be no post about Kinderdijk because it would just be pictures and fawning, but the further and further away I get from it, the more thoughts I have about how the site was interpreted.)  The Maritime Museum gets rave reviews on travel guides, which is why I chose it over the city museum or other historic sites.  I’d already taken a boat tour of the industrial harbor and ridden a water taxi to Kinderdijk, but I wanted to learn more about how the shipping industry had evolved from what I knew about the Dutch Golden Age into the massive industrial power that the Rotterdam port is today.

So I raced to the Maritime Museum, with only about two and a half hours to go through it.  I say only because I found, upon my arrival, that the museum had a little mini-harbor behind it, an outdoor museum of boats in the actual water, that closed earlier than the rest of the museum. Some of the small boats could be boarded, while some primarily demonstrated types of exteriors or the industrial machinery visible on them.  All around me, kids skipped on and off of boats, and the signage reminded me more of an American science museum than a history museum. When I went inside, that perception continued to grow—they had whole exhibits geared specifically toward children and families with hands-on activities that seemed state-of-the-art in their execution.

Exterior of the Maritime Museum with part of the mini-harbor of boats and cranes. (My photo, 2018)

Once inside, I hurried past the rest of the children’s exhibits and upstairs to the main exhibit, having no idea what would come next and only knowing its name: the Offshore Experience.  When I reached the top of the entry ramp, the museum employees told me that I needed to hurry because the “training” had already started. They ushered me into another room, past countdown clocks and increasingly industrial-looking décor. In the next room, I found a video screen and seating that reminded me of the Star Wars ride at Disney World—the one where you watch a video and the seats shake and sound effects come from all sides, but you never actually leave that one room until you exit on the other side.  In this case, the video explained that we were all training for work in the offshore energy industry and that, while the work may be hard and dangerous, it’s an increasingly important part of the worldwide shipping industry.  After the video ended, we stepped into the next room, where we found hard hats and fluorescent vests that we should wear throughout the rest of the exhibit. It was truly wild - you can see some of that in the video below.

The hard hats and vests turned out to be far more than just costumes—the rest of the exhibit was HIGHLY interactive.  Visitors moved from station to station trying out video game-style and augmented reality tasks that gave explanations of actual jobs on offshore rigs and tested the ability of the “trainee” to complete them.  Signs and the initial training video told us that we would need to complete three of these tasks to successfully complete our training, so I tried a few.  And they. were. HARD.  I flat-out failed one that involved waving a large shipping container dangling from a crane into place on the dock.  (This will likely come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever seen me play Mario Kart.) 

When I finished with these interactive activities, I was directed to an elevator, which took me down to another floor. Training was over, but it was now time to learn a little more about the business side of offshore activities and renewable energy. They had video screens with real (real?) entrepreneurs and scientists who proposed plans for finding, developing, and using energy across the planet—each video was in its own little booth, which made it feel as if these experts were pitching to me directly.  Before heading out of the exhibit and back into the museum, they asked you to vote for the one that seemed best. The rest of the museum was split between kid-friendly, immersive experiences and more traditional museum displays of exceptionally beautiful and unique artifacts from the shipping industry.

I’ve been wracking my brain since I returned from my trip to think of any exhibition or other experience that mimicked the Offshore Experience in its total synthesis of experiential learning principles.  Still, there are few comparisons I’ve remembered. There’s the Titanic Exhibition that has been touring for years and years, where you receive a boarding pass upon entering, walk through meticulous recreations of the rooms on board to learn about the history of the voyage, and then check the lists at the end to see if “you,” the name on your boarding pass, numbered among the dead. It productively asked you to get inside the mind of someone on the Titanic, including that person’s particular gender, ethnicity, and social class. Besides that, however, I can think of little else. It’s a salient difference that the Titanic exhibit does most of their immersion without the aid of technology, but few historical events hold so much sway on the American imagination.

With the Maritime Museum, I continue to feel enthusiastic about the Dutch museum world and the lessons that their efforts to interpret their art and history can teach us. Choosing a topic like offshore energy development for a permanent exhibition speaks volumes about how they view the capacity of museums to affect earth’s future. Asking people to engage with contemporary debates at the end of the exhibition applies and tests the material that visitors have just learned, and I suspect that that increases the likelihood they might still be thinking about it weeks later. Much like the Erasmus Experience, which used its technology to thoroughly engage visitors rather than supplement a primary analog experience, the Offshore Experience provides a model for high-tech exhibitions that do not sacrifice content to draw and educate audiences.