What Does It Teach?

Over the weekend we went in to Boston for a day. Along with everything else he does, Mark also plays tuba for a concert band in Concord, MA, and they played in the Boston Festival of Bands. It’s a very cool way to spend an afternoon, sitting in historic Faneuil Hall, where so much of early American history was made, listening to some amazing music. As I listened, I looked around at the pictures on the walls, showing George Washington (with his horse), a scene from an early meeting of patriots, and so on. It occurred to me that these stylized “snapshots” of history are sometimes the only way people have of visualizing what those early days of the U.S. were like. But, they don’t really convey the day-to-day life for those people, or the look and feel of reality as it was back then.  That’s history for you, I suppose, but it really doesn’t  (and probably can’t) let you know what it was really like ‘way back then…

Well, that got me to thinking about museum exhibits in general and science museum exhibits in particular. Granted, I write science museum exhibits, and I’m pretty good at it, but I always wonder what we’re teaching with them.  Yes, I know there are whole schools of thought about what an exhibit should say, how many words and images it has to get its message across, and so on. But, do exhibits (of any kind) really convey how science is done and how it feels to do it?  Do they really give a visitor the “feel’ of science?  I often ask myself those questions when I see exhibits.

I don’t have good answers, but I do know that exhibits are NOT doing science; they talk about it. Even if it’s a hands-on exhibit, it’s a very small part of what it IS to DO science. So, a good science museum tries to have exhibits that let you get your hands on some scientific “toys” as well as some that just let you stand and look and think about the message. But, I still wonder..what are we teaching?  What’s the message that gets across about science?