Museum Educator Professional Development Within Everyday Conversations (Poster 6)

• In Event: Past, Present, and Futures: Intentional Dreaming With Early-Career Researchers About Museum Education and Research

Abstract

Introduction
When museum educators engage in everyday conversations with colleagues, they create for themselves a kind of ongoing professional development — a place where key thinking is done about museum pedagogy or educational theory. This study looks at museum educator conversations in meetings, program planning, and reflections to understand how relationship building within everyday conversation makes space for museum educator learning.
Theoretical Background and Research Question
Some researchers credit conversations between museum (and out-of-school-time) educators as contributing to learning outcomes, but the inner workings of conversations are only analyzed in passing (Bevan & Xanthoudaki, 2008). This study explores conversations in depth to unpack relationship building actions (Erickson et al., 2008; Takeuchi, 2016; Espinoza, 2009) and to hold onto relationship development as the means and end of a learning environment (Uttamchandani, 2021). I also focus on conversational norms which, in addition to organizing interaction (Schegloff, 2007), play a role in relationship building. The research question for this study is: For museum educators, what conversational norms sustain (or curtail) relationship building?

Methods and Data
I employ interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Hall and Stevens, 2015) to investigate conversations on a microgenetic level — attending to small details and participant intentions (Kitzinger, 2000; Siegler & Crowley, 1991) and sequence organization (Schegloff, 2007). Data for this study are drawn from recordings of museum educator conversations in three contexts: 1) a team of educators engaged in long term planning around their state park, 2) a pair of educators planning a coding and music club, and 3) a friend group of museum educators meeting socially for coffee.

Findings
Drawing from a wider set of findings (Author, in progress), here I present one conversational norm – assistance seeking – to demonstrate relationship building moves museum educators rely on to build conversations where they can learn from each other. Assistance seeking happens when participants in a conversation recruit others, through their talk, gestures, prosody, and other interactional elements, to provide help (Wakke and Heller, 2021). Other participants in the conversation can (yet sometimes do not) provide the requested help (Kendrick & Drew, 2016). Assistance seeking organizes participants in the conversation to make visible when help is needed and when help can (or cannot) be provided – shaping local epistemic stances (Melander, 2012). This poster visualizes assistance seeking through two example transcripts, one highlighting how the coffee group of museum educators used assistance seeking to make space for others to share, and a second, longer exploration of the state park educators utilizing assistance seeking to surface and debate different opinions about teaching for equity and injustice.

Significance
These examples demonstrate how, through making space for sharing and offering opportunities for debate, assistance seeking simultaneously does the work of knowledge sharing and relationship building. The potential theoretical implications from this study expand our understanding of everyday conversations as a site of learning and relationship building. Museum educators and those in museum leadership might rethink the designs of their meetings, reflections, and other routine conversations to include supports which make assistance norms more common.

Author

• Wade Berger, Northwestern University