Teen Docents: Breaching the Wall
Article written by Harry Philbrick
Originally printed in Museum News, Museums in An Age of Uncertainty, March/April 1995
This is the story of how our student docent program at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art helped overcome a wall of suspicion and indifference from our community and its schools.
Student docents are elementary,middle, and high school-aged docents who lead their classmates and peers through our exhibitions. This program has not only transformed our relationship with the local schools, but also has profound implications for all museum educators. The program has upended the traditional relationship between museum educator and student, yielding results that far exceeded our expectations.
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art is located in Ridgefield, Conn., a wealthy, suburban community about 50 miles from Manhattan. The museum has no permanent collection: we show
changing exhibitions of contemporary art, including installation work, painting, and sculpture – everything from Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Welcome Home Heroes), which consists of 400 pounds of Bazooka bubble gum spilled on the floor, to Kiki Smith's Dowry Cloth, which is made of felt and human hair. This mix of conservative locale and radical art agenda poses particular challenges to our education program.
To many residents of Ridgefield, the Aldrich is an alien pod landed from Manhattan, a place you drive by but don't visit. For our area schoolteachers the museum was the site of too many misguided and self-serving educational efforts: in the past, our school programs had been either window dressing to attract corporate sponsorship, or had focused on areas where we had no expertise.
For a small museum like ours, with no other museums in the area, the temptation is often to try to be an all encompassing arts resource to the community. This, of course, is impossible. The Aldrich cannot teach art history without resorting to simply showing slides, which the schools can do just as well as we can. In an affluent community such as ours, we cannot compete with the sophisticated electronics our kids have access to, nor can we compete with the sights they have seen: many of these kids go on ski vacations to Switzerland or the Rockies.
The one thing we can do, and do extremely well, is make the kids think. Our challenge as museum educators is to do that, with limited resources, and in a limited time period. The more we challenge the kids, the higher the hurdles we give them, the more they respond. Our goal should not be to make art easy to understand, but to make clear its inherent complexities.
The student docent program was born out of one bedrock conviction and one hypothesis. The conviction is that a museum offers a unique resource that no other institution has: the actual object. Our focus is on the thing itself, not its context or "author." While we may get to its context, we don't start there. We start with observation and analysis of the object. The hypothesis was developed after I learned of research conducted by the Museum of Modern Art, and from personal observation. MoMA analyzed the efficacy of their school program and came to the conclusion that a class teacher, who probably has little or no expertise in art, is usually more effective in communicating about art with her students than a museum professional. Conjecture as to why this is true focused on the rapport the teacher has with her students, and the teacher's ability to relate the art to other topics and ideas with which the class was already engaged.
This seemed to dovetail with another of MoMA's ideas about museum education: that you start with what the viewer brings to the work of art, rather than what the artwork brings to the viewer. This is not to deny the primacy of the artwork but simply to find new ways to gain access to the art and its possible meanings. This observation about the relative merits of museum educators versus classroom teachers did not suggest to me a problem so much as an unexplored opportunity. Imagine a pyramid with the museum educator at the top, the teacher in the middle, and at the broad base, the students. Why not train the students themselves to be docents, pushing the maximum degree of learning further down the pyramid?
Our first goal was to get the local schools' art teachers interested in the idea. Ridgefield has four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. All six schools participated in our introduction of this program. Initial concerns were practical: transportation, time constraints of working within a class period, and faculty participation.
To overcome these problems, we scheduled all training sessions for after-school or weekend hours, leaving the transportation problems with the kids and their parents-ensuring a commitment from those who signed up. Teacher participation in the training sessions was optional; one teacher came to all the sessions, some came to a few, others to none. Student participation was left to the discretion of the teachers. This was a key point: this program is truly a collaboration between museum and school, and mutual trust is essential. The elementary teachers invited students from their ARTLEAP special education program for “visually talented children.” The middle school offered open enrollment to anyone taking a studio art class, and the high school opened enrollment to any student.
Five training sessions were scheduled for middle and high school students, and four for elementary students. The program began with our «Tin1ely and Timeless" exhibition, which filled the entire museum and consisted of paintings by 18 artists, ranging from April Gornik and Alexis Rockman to Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, and Susan Rothenberg. This is precisely the type of show that is most difficult to «do" with school groups: a mix of abstract and representational art loosely based on aesthetic criteria, with approximately 60 paintings in a variety of styles, no “story line" to follow, and works by different artists hung together.
For all age groups training was carried out by me and by a group of our adult docents. We started by explaining what The Aldrich shows, how a show is put together, how it is installed, how the art is shipped, what “contemporary" means – in short, as many nuts and bolts as possible about how this museum works. Our goal was to demystify the institution as much as possible.
Most of the other training focused on the work on display, and took the form of a dialogue. The first goal of this process was gaining the student docents’ trust by acknowledging and respecting their opinions, respecting their opinions, both positive and negative. The elementary school kids thought one painting by Susan Laufer was particularly ugly, so our discussion began by considering why the artist would choose to make her painting look that way. The discussion-led by the kids-included the artist's intent, materials, process, texture, color, imagery, and possible subject matter, which ranged from volcanoes, water, fire, the desert, shelter, archaeology, and natural history. Only at this point did I tell them that the artist herself spoke of her trips to the Middle East and Mexico, her interest in ancient cultures, and her working process as "excavation." I then asked the kids if they still thought the painting was ugly-only two still did. All the kids respected the work by this point, and a few decided it was their favorite.
This approach, which we employed with all the work, is time consuming but rewarding. The student docents began to value their own opinions, and became more receptive to challenges to think through their ideas more thoroughly. They also respected the opinions of their peers. Without saying so, we had laid the groundwork for the approach we hoped they would take with their classmates.
Only in our last session did we explicitly talk about how to lead a group through. We encouraged the student docents to talk with their classmates, not to them, to ask what they thought of the work, and to respect their opinions. Once we had established that the student docents were not responsible for maintaining order or discipline-teachers, parents, and adult docents would be on hand for that-they wanted to focus on which pieces they would talk about, not how they would talk about them.
Our first student docent-led tour was a group of 78 fifth graders, broken into three classes. Each class was divided into three groups of approximately nine kids-each group led by a pair of student docents. The most marked difference between their visit and most adult-led trips was that enthusiasm built as the visit progressed. In this visit-and all our student docent visits we avoided the dreaded "45-minute syndrome" when kids' attention starts to wander. Instead we observed an almost palpable "clicking in" after about 35 minutes, at which point the kids became extremely focused on the art and the discussion.
The timing of the visit was also different. The student docents were comfortable with an in-depth analysis of a given work, and willing to bring up an idea about a work and come back to that idea a number of times until they were satisfied that it had received the attention it deserved. They were patient with their classmates' observations, and willing to take what might seem like a trivial point and follow it to a fruitful analysis of the work.
Often I was reminded that what an adult finds interesting in artwork is not what a fifth grader finds interesting. This is not to say that adults and children will come to- radically different conclusions about a work, but that they will take very different paths to get there. Gaining access to these paths is what museum education is about, and this is one of the attributes of the student docent idea.
“The elementary school kids thought one painting by Susan Laufer was particularly ugly, so our discussion began by considering why the artist would choose to make her painting look that way.”
When looking at Elizabeth Murray's True Air (1988), for example, the fifth graders spent five minutes finding letters in the work and then spelling out words from those letters. The adults were clearly uncomfortable with the amount of time spent with this, but through this exercise the kids were not only really looking at the piece, but giving the student docents the opportunity to use one of the spelled-out words "TRY"-to lead into the idea of "try to breathe," which connected with the shapes the kids had observed in the work: sewer, pipes, lungs, instruments, and the color associations they had made: blue is sky, green is earth, red is pollution. By now they had spent 15 minutes on one work of art, covering technique, materials, metaphor, representation, abstraction, text, intentionality, beauty, nature, the man-made, pollution, and the body.
It was not unusual to see a group spend 15 minutes on a single work engaged in what one of our adult docents referred to as a conversation among equals. The fact that they were discussing contemporary art at length and in depth is all the more remarkable.
The ramifications of the program for both museum and students goes beyond this: From small things, like the obstreperous class clown who was able to channel his energies into leading a lively, well-behaved group, to the parent who said that the most positive experience her daughter had this year was her student docent experience, which had given her the confidence she could not find at school. These experiences have changed The Aldrich from a place-to visit to a part of the fabric of the lives of these children and their parents. The long-term implications of this are very gratifying for the museum.
For the teachers, a visit to the museum changed from a visual experience to the site of remarkable growth for some of their students. A range of issues came up in the course of the visit. In front of works that had either sexual or scatological content, the kids managed some surprisingly detached observations after some initial giggles and snickers. The student docents handled these with a casual impatience to move on to ideas like reproduction or evolution. The respect the students gave the student docents allowed the conversation to reach topics that might otherwise have been embarrassing. Several teachers remarked on the “flowering" of hitherto shy and passive kids into articulate guides. We knew we had a success when a class of fifth graders left the museum chanting "More! More!"
Our recent exhibition, “In the Lineage of Eva Hesse” created particular difficulties for the student docent program. The show contains work that deals with issues of sexuality, gender roles, sexual politics, and AIDS. While no one work was deemed too explicit or ''difficult," the middle and elementary school teachers felt that the show as a whole was inappropriate for their students.
In the course of extensive discussion with the teachers in reaching this decision, my feelings of regret changed to satisfaction as I heard their reasoning. First of all, they did not want to jeopardize the student docent program for the sake of one exhibition. Second, we had discussed not mentioning what one artist had cast her work – condoms – in order to enable the fifth graders to present her work. The teachers felt strongly that we could not lie to the kids about any aspect of the show, that underlying the student docent program is a fundamental respect for the kids and an honest sharing of responsibilities and information. To make any part of the show off-limits or to exclude information about the work would violate the trust we-museum, student, teachers, parents-have invested so much time in building. They were absolutely right.
With a conventional education program, we might have been able to fashion an acceptable tour of this exhibition. The student docent concept imposes limitations and demands time and patience. Its rewards, to the docents themselves, other students, teachers, parents, museum staff, and even artists participating in exhibitions (I've never had artists come specifically to hear docent tours before, but Petah Coyne, having overheard a student docent tour ) scheduled a trip to the museum to hear the kids talking about her work) make the limitations more than worthwhile.