What Story is Your Museum Project Telling?
What was the last story that you heard?
Perhaps, your child told you about their day. Dashia and her bestie at day care used their dinosaur toys, a slightly haggard T-Rex and colorful triceratops, to act out a drama that sounded suspiciously like Lord of the Rings. Or you and your colleague were catching up; he told you about his weekend trip to a new city. His day began with getting lost but ended with finding a scenic outlook. Maybe you were talking with a grandparent. The phrase “back in my day” began, and you learned how your grandma had once travelled from Alabama to Michigan to start a new life, one suitcase in hand.
Stories seem to float around us; reside in us. And, as a former English student and narrative nerd, I posit that stories are ways we make sense of the world.
As a researcher and evaluator, I also think stories can help us clarify the “how” and “why” of a museum project and its evaluative framework. So, I’d like to explore a few ways in which you might turn to stories as a way to sharpen project goals and evaluation goals. What story is your museum project telling, and who is telling it?
Stories as a Way to Clarify Project Goals and Respect Communal Knowledge
Like most anything, a museum project starts with an idea. From a mere thought, the idea may grow into a proposal, a grant application, or recommendations for retooling an existing program. Putting an idea into motion is hard. Though, what perhaps is harder is communicating this idea to others and understanding how they interpret it. You may write down the project goals but, in your department alone, staff members may each have their own vision of the project, their own story of “why” and “how” the project exists and what it aims to do. So, how might you all get on the same page? Collectively, what story are you telling?
There are a number of ways to identify and clarify your project’s narrative (the collective understandings of your project’s past, present, and purpose). Logic models, impact frameworks, and strategic plans are some ways that come to mind. To build these documents, I believe you can turn to the communal power and knowledge in stories. For example, sometimes museums reshape exhibitions or museum programs. But, often, as staff members leave or move to different departments, institutional memory is lost (e.g., who started a program, how they envisioned it, etc.). These institutional memories are key as they can become an incisive lens into HOW things came about and what, perhaps, needs to change. After all, stories (and reflections on the lessons from them) operate across time, telling us about the past and providing direction for the future. As author Ralph Ellison said, “Telling is not only a matter of retelling but also foretelling.”
Thus, it is important to ask: does everyone know about the history of a particular exhibition or program? Who are the purveyors of this project’s institutional knowledge? As we might say in Black diasporic storytelling, who are the griots, the keepers of knowledge who pass on such stories along to others?
While developing a project, you may designate someone as the story-keeper, someone who learns from staff members who have, at some point, participated in this project or a similar one. Their key question: what is everyone’s story of the project? You can gather these stories in a number of ways, from email correspondence, informal chats, and/or brief anonymous interviews. Or, with your team, you may try the following exercise. Begin with a story prompt (“the project first began when…” or “I remember when the program used to…”), and ask each team member to finish it. Come together, compare your stories, and discuss. What similarities or patterns do you find? Who are the key players? What significant differences do you find, and why? Discussing these questions may be the first step in finding your project’s narrative, woven together across many different stories.
Stories as a Way to Shape Evaluation Goals
In addition to serving as a roadmap for project goals, stories can also facilitate important discussions for determining what you might evaluate—what you hope to learn through evaluation and what audience outcomes you might measure. You may already have evaluation goals and methods in mind (in fact, this is no surprise as often grant proposals require applicants to describe a project’s evaluative measures). However, before beginning evaluation, it can be important to revisit these goals, and you can use stories to do so.
For example, in planning evaluation goals, I love drawing from the narrative and musical technique of call and response, a powerful feature of Black oral storytelling, music, and literary traditions. Call and response, a tradition derived from West African ritual practices and passed down through generations, represents a concerted engagement with the audience. During a song or story, audience members respond to a call, repeating phrases and adding commentary—their answering affirmations and participation underline how stories are dialogic interactions. Similarly, your evaluation is not simply a telling. It’s a dialogic endeavor, a collaborative effort where multiple responses build a layered story.
As such, at the beginning of an evaluation process, rather than brainstorming the evaluation goals with one or two staff members, I enjoy facilitating discussions with the museum’s project leaders, involved staff members, and any other project partners. After all, who is invited to the table to share their thoughts and feedback is important because evaluations, like stories, are shaped by perspective. We call multiple perspectives into the room to help create a fuller picture of the project and how its evaluation can be useful for among and across departments.
In these discussions, I introduce the project and a few possible evaluation goals; then, I use questions to ask staff and partners to share their responses:
What are you interested in learning through the evaluation and WHY? What would be most helpful to learn?
Who (groups or individuals) would you like to learn more about? Whose experiences are you interested in understanding more deeply? WHY?
As a result of participating in this project, what do you think was the most significant change in your organization?
As collaborators, what information or evidence from the evaluation would be most useful for your future work (e.g., future grants, plans, etc.)?
These questions are meant to evoke a conversation akin to call-and-response, to bring stories and feedback to the surface. In a sense, they ask project collaborators to ask themselves and others to identify the evaluation’s plot (what they want to learn), key audiences (whose perspectives are included), and change over time (story of the project’s impact). Importantly, building the evaluation’s goals is a group effort, guided by a chorus of voices.
So, dear reader, how might stories help you clarify your project’s goals and the evaluation process? Slow you down, and encourage you to tap into the communal knowledge around you? Understand the narratives you tell to your fellow staff members, your partners, and your visitors?