According to the poet Muriel Rukeyser: “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.” To keep the museum visiting flag flying, especially at present, museum storytelling skills should be working at maximum capacity.
I was first alerted to some of these fundamental skills by a 1990 English Heritage book, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning from Objects, edited by Mike Corbishley and written by Gail Durbin, Susan Morris and Sue Wilkinson, all experienced educators.
This is a seminal work. The book’s observations may have been borrowed in part from Victorian collectors or even from the camp fires of antiquity. But they hold sound whatever age we are in.
Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects could have come straight out of that publication – the cunning thing about that delivery was it was orally based – you couldn’t see the objects on the radio. Your mind had to do some serious imagining.
Very often in museum labels we use descriptive techniques: what, why, where, when? With many objects in a small area, often that’s all the space we seem to have.
But while we can’t tell even short stories about all objects, we would do well to think of narrative instead of descriptive approaches to exhibiting.
While a curator or education specialist in the flesh can offer the unique personal touch of the storyteller – one that can respond to audience questions and can go off at any tangent, we know this is not always possible.
What we need to do when refreshing displays or creating new ones is to ask ourselves, how might a good story bring this more to life? This has to be selective and resonates with thematic approaches. Yet by no means all themes are proper stories in themselves.
The teacher’s guide asked you to create 50 questions of a Big Mac Box. That box might be any object, and in finding the interesting, stimulating backgrounds attached to objects, you can make bigger stories come alive. In part, being told great stories stimulates museum visitors to return.
The teacher’s guide aims to “show how the ability to interpret objects aids our understanding of the world”. You might tag on “and provides enjoyment”. A heady mix of enjoyment and understanding is what will keep our museums vibrant.
Mike Butler, cultural manager, Canterbury Christ Church University
I was first alerted to some of these fundamental skills by a 1990 English Heritage book, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning from Objects, edited by Mike Corbishley and written by Gail Durbin, Susan Morris and Sue Wilkinson, all experienced educators.
This is a seminal work. The book’s observations may have been borrowed in part from Victorian collectors or even from the camp fires of antiquity. But they hold sound whatever age we are in.
Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects could have come straight out of that publication – the cunning thing about that delivery was it was orally based – you couldn’t see the objects on the radio. Your mind had to do some serious imagining.
Very often in museum labels we use descriptive techniques: what, why, where, when? With many objects in a small area, often that’s all the space we seem to have.
But while we can’t tell even short stories about all objects, we would do well to think of narrative instead of descriptive approaches to exhibiting.
While a curator or education specialist in the flesh can offer the unique personal touch of the storyteller – one that can respond to audience questions and can go off at any tangent, we know this is not always possible.
What we need to do when refreshing displays or creating new ones is to ask ourselves, how might a good story bring this more to life? This has to be selective and resonates with thematic approaches. Yet by no means all themes are proper stories in themselves.
The teacher’s guide asked you to create 50 questions of a Big Mac Box. That box might be any object, and in finding the interesting, stimulating backgrounds attached to objects, you can make bigger stories come alive. In part, being told great stories stimulates museum visitors to return.
The teacher’s guide aims to “show how the ability to interpret objects aids our understanding of the world”. You might tag on “and provides enjoyment”. A heady mix of enjoyment and understanding is what will keep our museums vibrant.
Mike Butler, cultural manager, Canterbury Christ Church University
