Educator Spotlight
Primed for Positive Change: Preparing for New Museum Construction
By Susan Bass Marcus, Senior Educator, The Spertus Museum

This article shares highlights of interviews with interpretive planning consultants and others who bring their special skills and perspectives to creating partnerships with museum educators during museum design and construction projects..

Before Breaking Ground. . .

The hardest part of a new building project is just waiting for construction to start, or so I thought until I realized how much Spertus Museum’s planning team would need to do before we even broke ground in 2005. I have worked at the museum, a part of Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, since 1988. Presently I am Senior Educator with broad oversight of all museum education programs, including those of the ARTiFACT Center, and face the challenge of helping to plan an enhanced family center for the new Spertus facility. I’m happy about this opportunity since I believe our educators’ participation in designing the new museum is central to the success of its exhibitions and programs. Although my own participation will be limited, I am helping to identify consultants whose style and skills matched the needs of our institution, so I contacted independent professionals to learn more about how museum educators were involved in the process elsewhere.

The current ARTiFACT Center [AFC] is a destination for families and school groups that emphasizes Near Eastern archaeology through opportunities to work on a “dig” with an “archaeological team.” Visitors practice Old World archaeology with real tools, excavate test pits salted with period appropriate artifacts and record and analyze their findings. While the gallery offers opportunities to learn about cultures and natural resources, the AFC is basically a one-subject area where facilitators engage visitors to help them make connections between seemingly differing cultures, artifacts, and stories.

Rethinking the Family Center

The new family center will cover a broader scope. More culturally specific, it will include a variety of experiences that provide a richer venue for learning about Jewish populations in various cultural settings. At the same time, the center will demonstrate the ways in which Jewish core values are familiar to and shared by people from many other cultural and religious backgrounds. While having several scenarios already in mind, we knew we would benefit during the coming months from adding one or more consultants to the planning team.

As a neophyte in this process, I asked myself the following questions. How do we meet our objective? Who do we call first? What services would a consultant provide? What role will museum educators have in the planning process? How much of the project will the consultant control? What will the consultant charge us?

Finding Consultants—Contact and Teamwork

Spertus Museum’s Director, Rhoda Rosen, encouraged me to contact as many exhibition design and planning consultants as I could to learn more about their philosophies, their accomplishments, and their approaches to collaborating with museum staff. I asked for recommendations from my museum colleagues and acquaintances and I looked at the AAM list of consultants as well as that of The Museum Group. Best of all, my appeal to talk@museum-ed.org for contacts elicited many suggestions. The following text highlights some information that professionals in interpretive planning, evaluation, and exhibition design generously shared.

Consultants responded to my short e-questionnaire in a thoughtful and forthcoming way. Brenda Cowan of Exhibit A Design , Mary Ellen Munley of MEM and Associates, Randi Korn of Randi Korn Evaluation Services, Inc., and Rick MacKenzie of Science North Enterprises kindly offered their expertise during extensive telephone calls or interviews. My thanks also to Keith Helmetag of Chermayeff & Geismar Inc., Ron Pears of Aldrich Pears, Diane Hanau-Strain of Hanau-Strain Associates, Jennifer Marjorie Johnston and Deborah A. Rogus of MetaArts, and Daryl Fischer of Musynergy.

Suzan Reed’s e-mail emphasized the importance of building a good working relationship with one’s client. “Every project and museum is unique… I build relationships with people first before worrying about the job.” My subsequent conversations with Brenda Cowan, Mary Ellen Munley and Randi Korn reflected that mindset.

Brenda Cowan co-owns Exhibit A Design with Eric O’Toole. Sensitive to the needs of educators, the firm includes staff whose strength lies in interpretive planning. They go to local schools for curriculum material, which they integrate into their exhibition design. Their team values communication skills and flexibility, and they have several front-end evaluation strategies for their clients. They promote a project’s longevity by encouraging a buy-in from the stakeholders and establishing good political ties with a community’s constituencies. They encourage their clients to ask the right questions about resources as well as learn what the audience wants to know and understand about the subject. Brenda points out that humor also helps reach these goals.

Strategic Plans and Plans for Action

As Spertus Museum’s new facility became more of a reality, the planning team continued its research on interpretive planning consultants. Some common threads but also distinctive differences began to emerge.

Mary Ellen Munley, principal of MEM and Associates, explained her approach and her association with The Museum Group (www.themuseumgroup.org). The latter is a collective of 25 senior level museum professionals who are now independent consultants. The group provides a network and a learning community for its members as well as a resource for people looking for museum consultants. MEM’s partnerships with museum staffs expecting a strategic plan for an entire public program suite and a determination to have an impact on their constituencies has resulted in many successful projects. The MEM team includes museum educators in its planning process. Together, they review the client’s mission statement and the implications it might have for interpretive planning. They identify the client’s expectations, guiding principles, key audience segments, content resources (distinctiveness), and current or desired strategic partners for programming and sharing resources. MEM then submits all such information plus the project schedule and a fee quote to the client in writing. This process contributes to effective team building with a museum interested in a cohesive strategic approach.

Randi Korn & Associates, a client-centered firm, provides museum evaluation and audience research, according to its principal Randi Korn. Their web site states,” We bridge the gap between public perception and the message museums wish to convey.” The RK&A staff (prepared in social and applied sciences, formal and informal education, with expertise in psychology and statistics) spend a substantial amount of initial time with the client to understand their particular needs. Their conversations always begin with the premise, “Let’s talk about what you want first.” Extensive front-end evaluation forms the basis of the consultant/client partnership with an eye to the unique nature of each project. Museum education departments work with RK&A to create links between museumgoers and the practitioner-developed products that the museum provides.

FEDNOR, a Canadian trade mission, brought Rick MacKenzie to Chicago in 2004. We met and discussed his employer, Science North Enterprises [SNE], the commercial arm of the Science North Science and Discovery complex in Sudbury, Ontario. He presented SNE’s multi-media capabilities—computerized exhibitions, including object theaters, films, and special effects shows—and noted SNE provides design and program planning services as well. SNE’s informal motto is “Storytelling, Meaning, and Showmanship.”

Over 40% of project leaders who contact SNE are educators, which contradicts the standard model of museum directors or curators usually publicize RFP’s or make the first call. SNE bases the development of a project on the institution’s vision and the anticipated needs of its audience. Their clients already have defined the project’s goals, space, budget, theme and subject. The “visioning process” involves all the project’s stakeholders and SNE identifies engaging ways to meet their concerns. After proposing two or three treatments, the SNE/client team makes a choice and proceeds with the project. This service comes at a cost: at the low end, $250,000 start-to-finish for about 1,000 square feet of exhibition space.

“Sticker shock!!!”

We knew that developing a 4,000 square-feet family center was going to be expensive. I understood that we would need to have our project budget, goals, and front-end evaluation plans in place. The question that lingered was what sort of consultant are we looking for? A professional consulting group most interested in the educational and community impact of our family center will be a good match. The group will need to have the skills to guide museum staff and other stakeholders toward identifying our target audience, its interests, and the best ways to communicate our themes. Summative evaluation strategies and suggestions for community outreach will add to the museum’s understanding of its role and impact on the community.