When museums come alive!

I am a day late in finishing my first blog reflection but I came away from our second day of the field school bursting with ideas and struggled to collate them into one piece. So here goes…

The question I was asking myself this morning is ‘what can a Vietnamese Fine Arts Museum teach me (someone very passionate about natural history and science) about engaging with communities… for my work in Australia’? The answer to my question was much more thought-provoking and valuable than I could have predicted.

In the world of public engagement and community outreach, there is a high premium on museums to connect with their communities in a meaningful, engaging, collaborative and sustainable manner. Today it became clear to me that that this task is near impossible to perfect.

Museum communities are diverse, unpredictable and hard to define. In a similar fashion so too are their needs and expectations of museums, museum collections and staff, and public programs. Our organisations invest ample time and resources to try to understand our audiences and I have read much research on this topic, however questions of how to best engage with our communities still continues to flood my mind.

One of the principal questions I have is what to do we mean by a ‘museum community’, as the term community itself is almost as difficult to describe. So who then are these people that museums are here to serve, who is it we want to connect with, and importantly why… why do we want to create these engaging and sustainable relationships?

One of the principle reasons I am interested in museums is for their capacity to act as institutions promoting and supporting life-long learning. To borrow a phrase from the Deputy Head, Department of Organisation, Administration and External Relations at the Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts, I love that community engagement and public programming can ‘bring museums to life’. The story of an object, its importance, value and worth is much, much more fun to understand when its biography is brought alive! This is why I get excited by public programming and museum education, to see the reactions, hear the stories and share memories between people, all triggered by an object in our museums and a connection with people.

I learnt three important things today;

Firstly, art museums can be interesting.

Secondly, that Vietnamese museum education departments are challenged by similar constraints that I have found in Australia and within the UK, in regards to resourcing, finding time in busy school curriculums to connect with younger audiences and in developing creative, valuable programs that audiences want.

Thirdly, that a museum community is as difficult to define as our audiences own motivations and expectations of our museums.

I am far from being able to answer these questions bubbling away in my head but I look forward to more days like today. I hope to learn many more techniques for how to strategically, meaningfully and sustainably engage with audiences to be able to bring our museums to life!