Hein: Learning in the Museum

George E. Hein's book is part synthesis, part manifesto. He attempts to synthesize a variety of educational and social science theories developed over the last century, and discusses their implications for understanding museums as places of learning. In particular, he draws upon educational theories and the field of "visitor studies." All of his conclusions from this synthesis ultimately become supporting arguments for a programmatic vision of an ideal museum that he calls The Constructivist Museum. Essentially, his argument is that, if we consider all that we now "know" about learning and museums, this particular vision is the logical result.

The postulate that "learning takes place in museums" is Hein's starting point. He also asserts that the educational responsibility of museums in our society has increased, particularly their roles as "interpreters of culture" and ideational venues.

Hein breaks down "educational theory" into three broad components:

• Theories of knowledge (epistemologies)
  
• Theories of learning
  
• Theories of teaching (pedagogy, or "andragogy" for adults)
  

Hein schematically summarizes all theories of knowledge as falling along a continuum between realism and constructivism. An extreme realist would say that there exists a reality independent of our consciousness, which can be known empirically. An extreme constructivist would say that nothing can be empirically verified or falsified and that all knowledge is essentially an artifact of our consciousness. (It's worth noting that, in this book, Hein is generally not concerned to define his terms with exhaustive rigor, and he uses "constructivism" a bit loosely; however, he mostly tends to use it in the sense of cognitiveconstructivism rather than what we'd call "social constructivism" in STS.)

Likewise, Hein describes theories of learning as falling along a similar bipolar axis. At one extreme is the basic assumption that learning is a passive process of receiving static information, which accumulates incrementally in the learner's mind like sediment. At the other extreme is the idea that learning is an (inter-)active process that dynamically restructures the mind.

The interesting move is the synthesis of these two axes onto a single heuristic plane with four quadrants, each corresponding to one extreme on each axis. This becomes the theoretical framework for Hein's typology of educational theories:

• Didactic, expository (realist epistemology + passive learning)
  
• Discovery (realist epistemology + active learning)
  
• Stimulus-response (constructivist epistemology + passive learning)
  
• Constructivism (constructivist epistemology + active learning)
  

(Already it's apparent from the characterizations of each term and theory where Hein's sympathies lie.)

Hein emphasizes that these theories are not particularly useful without corresponding teaching methodologies. He goes into less detail here, but his description of "the Constructivist Museum" can be seen as a program for constructivist pedagogy.

In the next section of the book Hein reviews the history of the field of visitor studies and its major theoretical and methodological traditions. As he describes it, there have been two main schools of thought. One of these he calls "experimental-design," which takes behavioral psychology as its model and tries to study museum visitors with quantitative rigor. The other tradition, "naturalistic," is more reminiscent of anthropology and uses qualitative methods to draw conclusions. Hein says that, roughly speaking, the former school prioritizes the reliability of data over validity, while the latter does the reverse. (For example, using anecdotes or actual visitor quotes is more likely to accurately represent at least those visitors' experiences than statistical aggregation, but the latter gives more generalizable, repeatable and "scientific" data.)

Hein makes more than the usual obligatory reference to Kuhn when discussing the significance of paradigms in the sciences, including the social sciences. He also discusses Stephen Pepper's ideas about competing "world theories" based on fundamentally incommensurate "root metaphors," which prefigured Kuhn's work. Hein pretty much says that all social science theories draw upon one of two "root metaphors:" the ladder (linear, hierarchical) or the network (non-linear, non-hierarchical). While he clearly tends to favor the latter (not the ladder), he acknowledges that when applying social theories we have be pragmatically eclectic. So, while he likes his children to learn by exploring and constructing their own knowledge about their surroundings, he had no compunction about delivering a top-down, one-way message about safety when crossing the street.

Hein also takes care to note that theories, and their applications, "have politics," to use Winner's phrase. They draw upon and have affinities with certain political ideas, and also have real-world political consequences.

The penultimate chapter of Hein's book discusses some of the more recent findings from visitor studies with respect to how visitors actually learn things in museums, and what kinds of museum environments are conducive to learning. For example, it's important to get visitors' attention with landmarks. Visitors learn best when they are comfortable, so this means giving them access to amenities and appropriate spaces in which to contemplate, relax, meet family, etc. Prepping them with some sort of conceptual background prior to entering exhibits enhances their ability to understand and retain information. And so on. Furthermore, Hein notes that it's important to allow for -- and even take advantage of -- the fact that each visitor learns differently depending on a host of factors including age, personal experience, how many times he or she has visited before, etc.

The final chapter is Hein's manifesto for creating "the Constructivist Museum." He says that "the basic questions that need to be addressed are:

• What is done to acknowledge that knowledge is constructed in the mind of the learner?
  
• How is learning itself made active? What is done to engage the visitor?
  
• How is the situation designed to make it accessible -- physically, socially, and intellectually -- to the visitor?"
  

Here are some of his answers:

• "The Constructivist Museum makes a conscious effort to allow visitors to make connections between the known and the new."
  
• "The Constructivist Museum will provide opportunities for learning using maximum possible modalities both for visitor interactions with exhibitions and for processing information."
  
• "The Constructivist Museum not only accepts the possibility of socially mediated learning, it makes provision for social interaction and designs spaces, constructs exhibitions, and organizes programs to deliberately capitalize on learning as a social activity."
  
• "The Constructivist Museum will have policies that dictate its desire to reach a wide range of visitors and will have practices that have been demonstrated to do so."
  
• "The Constructivist Museum needs to publicly acknowledge its own role in constructing meaning.... It's important that this human decision-making process -- full of compromise, personal views, opinions, prejudices, and well-meaning efforts to provide the best possible material for the public -- be opened up to view."
  
• "The Constructivist Museum will view itself as a learning institution that constantly improves its ability to serve as an interpreter of culture by critical examination of echibitions and programs. The most rational manner in which to do this is for the staff to become engaged in systematic examination of the visitor experience; in short, to carry out visitor studies."
  

Some of Hein's prescriptions accord well with some of our other authors. For example, one of the consequences of a constructivist perspective which acknowledges that learning is an interactive partnership between the museum and the visitor is that the museum must therefore focus more of its efforts on understanding its visitors' perspectives. Other things seem to contravene what other authors have said. For example, whether people would really want the full messiness of "this human decision-making process... opened up to view" is debatable. At least one author (was it Durant?) suggests that people want museums to be authoritative purveyors of hard facts. They might not want to know how exhibits, and thus knowledge, are constructed.