Exploring the Curriculum of Museums Through Phenomenological Touch

• In Event: Sensual Curriculum: Making Educational Sense Through the Senses

Abstract

Museums, characterized by their collections of art and artifacts that offer visitors material evidence of the natural world, have long been considered to be sites of education and informal learning (e.g., Dana, 1999; Dewey, 1916; Hein, 1998). The context of the museum provides visitors with sensory interactions as well as those that intersect body-mind perceptions. In this way, the museum functions as a phenomenological text that stimulates the senses through acts of perception, memory, and consciousness (Ellsworth, 2005; Morris, 1998; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 2000).

There are increasing arguments in the museum field (Chatterjee, 2008; Dudley, 2010; Edwards, Gosden & Phillips, 2006; Pye, 2007) that museums must revisit the meaning and purpose of touch as part of the powerful experiences that museums provide. To achieve this level of understanding of objects and ourselves requires a different interaction with museum artifacts. We call this different approach phenomenological touch, that is, the lived experience of making physical contact using ones’ own senses with a real physical thing. This contact forms the bridge between person and object, connecting all that is contained within the person and all that is available with the object and acknowledges that the bridge itself can become something entirely unique from the person or object singularly.

To facilitate these new ways of knowing, museums can continue to build on the notion of educational collections (a.k.a teaching collections) and conscientiously determine which objects can be “sacrificed” for the purpose of allowing visitors to touch a “real” thing in different and more accessible ways. Museums might also employ imaginative touch. Simply stated, imaginative touch is when we help the visitor to imagine touching an object. This idea (Author, 2009) stemmed from listening to people describe their deeply moving encounters with museum objects as well as from studies of touch with the blind (e.g., Sacks, 2005; Candlin, 2006). In nearly all of their accounts, people who discussed these intense encounters described what it would be like to touch the normally off-limits museum object. The detail they used to describe this imagined touching was so specific and rich that one might even believe that they had indeed touched the piece though they had not. Museums can use various methods to bring people to such points of experience—text that directs visitors to imagine the feel of an object, facilitated experiences with museum workers that ask people to think about how it would feel to physically interact with an object, and/or imaginative, evocative displays.

By creating moments where the museum visitor can imagine and transact with objects—the connection to human experience—we can re-invigorate our understanding and meaning of objects and ideas. Touching, both physically and imaginatively, creates deep levels of reflective meaning; it brings the experience of time, place, and relationship into the foreground. In a museum, this contributes to greater consciousness and intentionality of the visitor around the meaning and interpretation of objects, as well as contributing to the greater purpose and value of the human experience.

Authors

• Elee Wood, Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis

• Kiersten F. Latham, Kent State University