META-MUSEUM’s version
It is a matter of fact that many people go to museums. More or less, we know why (“because it rains”), but who knows what happens exactly, when a taxi driver or a dentist is watching a statue from ancient Rome? Are they experiencing something pleasant? Are they trying to recall what they know about Rome? Are they asking themselves, where Romans found all that marble? Or perhaps they are still in mental touch with traffic or tooth?
Obviously, if museums only had an idea of what visitors really live at museums, they could become better – keeping our ordinary troubles as far as possible. And in fact, museums already tried to better understand what happens, at their homes: delivering surveys, spying how people move, or counting how many seconds visitors stay in a room. All what museums could do, so far, was to observe visitors from a certain distance. And focus has been on what visitors learnt, more than on what visitors felt and lived.
The challenge of the Meta-Museum project is trying to put a close light on the real experience of real visitors. The idea is that human emotions are at the heart of what visitors live at museums.
How to face this challenge? By measuring several parameters from real life testing in the participating archaeological museums in France, Italy and Spain, and the parallel tests done in the hospital in Italy by our colleagues from La Sapienza.
Obviously, we are far from discovering what is the head of our taxi driver. Let’s say that we have some hints. At the moment, we could already prepare an “educational module”: it means 60 minutes to tell colleagues and students what we wrote here, with many more details and a space for debate.
We prepared this module in close collaboration with our colleagues at POLITO and the Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning & Creativity (NCK). We have tested for museum professionals online at the Forum of Slavic Culture Summer School in Koper and at a workshop during the EMA Award Ceremony and Conference in Budapest. We have tested face to face with master students in museum and heritage education at the EMA Summer Schools in Östersund, Graz and Nicosia. We have now finally tested the latest version for invited META-MUSEUM partners at an online session in November.
We have already learned that META-MUSEUM’s methodology raises some interesting and important ethical questions which we have naturally needed to give attention too. The challenge may sound simple: Should museums, if they indeed can, really consciously try to foster or change attitudes among their visitors? We have realised through the test sessions with museum professionals and master students that it is not enough to state that museums have tried to foster and educate their visitors and users since the very beginning of the epoque of museums. It has been one of the very fundamental reasons for opening and having museums. It is neither enough to refer to the definition of museums from ICOM where the educational mission and the reflective stimulation of visitors is pointed out specifically. That is clearly something which makes our colleagues in museums think a little extra.
The EMA Team