CIRCA 89 Art Education Supplement
HANDS ON, HANDS OFF
Debates about museum education continue to grow. Here, Helen O'Donoghue, Senior Curator, Education and Community programmes at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, explores some of the key issues with Michael Cassin, Head of Education at the National Galleries of Scotland.
Michael Cassin, Head of Education at the National Galleries of Scotland, created what he modestly called "a ripple" at the November 1998 education conference in the National Gallery of Ireland. Although he admits to feeling "a bit guilty if people were upset, the idea was to be provocative and to present an alternative view to the one that was being offered as Gospel during some of the other talks." And for that he is unapologetic.
Michael Cassin heads the education services across all the sites that make up the National Galleries of Scotland. His formal training was a combined Art History and Painting degree from Leeds University where he was taught from the outset that both are interconnected, and it is this that informs his philosophy for museum education today. In former times he taught Painting and Art History, and at one stage tried to be a painter until, he says, he was lucky enough to discover something he was better at.
Michael Cassin disagrees fundamentally with the assertion that children learn more by doing—a presumption on which most Irish cultural institutions predicate their art-education practice—rather than by looking, thinking and discussing. His presentation at the education conference was provoked by listening to comments like: "Children are natural artists" (which to his mind makes about as much—and as little—sense as saying "Children are natural scientists, musicians, politicians"!). Cassin refutes the theology that ‘hands-on' sessions and handling collections are the essential elements in a successful museum visit, the implication being that if you don't touch or make something you won't learn anything and you certainly won't enjoy yourself.
"I know that's simply not the case," he argues. He was especially indignant at the notion that suggests "there must be something in your museum that is unprecious enough to find a place in a handling collection." He maintains that not only can you not touch anything in his museums, but he doesn't know why people assume you should have to in order to learn about the art, be excited by it and enjoy the process of exploring it. "My whole professional life and my daily experience over 20 years demonstrate to me that what's central, first, last, everything…is the art. I get sad (and frustrated and occasionally angry) when people forget that," he says.
At the Irish Museum of Modern Art, however, we would take issue with him. The social changes in Irish society in the 1980s and 1990s included political changes in relation to arts policy, part of which was the establishment of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 1991 which, in turn, has contributed to creating innovative models that challenge older models of museum education and community and artist collaborative practices. These have addressed needs in both the formal and informal education sectors and we do this by combining both the practical and theoretical strands.
We've explored a type of learning strategy that integrates the intellectual and the emotional response which includes hands-on work. This approach to learning offers many participants a more direct opportunity for responding to and articulating their experience than a conversation might. It also reflects one of our core policies which is to work directly with artists and to offer many ways into a work of art. Artists use a visual language and this approach is a further validation of this form of communication.
Conversely, Michael Cassin believes that what museums and galleries should do stems from "transparent logic." He argues that you can go to an art gallery to do an art lesson, if you want, but you can get that elsewhere; the one real reason for going there is to do something that you can't do anywhere else, and that one thing is to interact with and to explore the collections. Like all art educators, he wants to find ways of working with people, with those who come specifically in search of the art, with those who have come in out of the rain, and with kids who have been dragged there by teachers and would not have come through the door of their own accord. "I want to try and find ways of suggesting some of the delight and excitement that those of us who go willingly get from what we do there," he enthuses.
And he does this by starting, finishing and designing everything around ‘the real thing'. "We try to do as much as we can, in the gallery, in front of the real things, even what we do outside the buildings is designed to encourage people to come inside the buildings—outreach to provoke in-reach—where the art is. And while we might include the occasional interesting background story, if it's relevant, the lectures are about the artwork and are not full of anecdotes about what the artist had for breakfast…"
The National Galleries of Scotland have both historical and contemporary collections, whereas in Ireland most galleries tend to specialise in either historic or modern/contemporary works. An attendant problem for art educators concerns how to deal with those respective distinctions. Michael Cassin maintains that methodologically there is no difference. "We try to suggest a conversation with the audience—it's very much a dialogue. What we try very hard not to do, however, is misrepresent the works or mislead people. Nor do we want to make art ‘easy', because by and large it's not, although we don't want to go to the other extreme either. I don't want our lectures to be so formal that people are scared to have opinions of their own but I do think it's important that these opinions should relate to the work. I really don't go for the airy-fairy stuff about art being about anything we want it to be about: a piece of sculpture by Henry Moore which relates to the Spanish Civil War might remind someone of ‘a walk in the woods' but that's not what the sculpture is about."
Michael Cassin rails against the "huge and dubious pre-occupation with ‘hands on', touchy-feely stuff. You simply can't touch a Rembrandt and I'm really not convinced that getting a kid to dress up in a reproduction eighteenth-century costume will show him or her why a Gainsborough is wonderful." While he might despair at programmes which include role-playing, acting and dressing-up in the museum, he politely allows that if you know why you're doing these things, if they're structured carefully and not simply gratuitously, and if you build these elements into larger schemes which include lots of time spent with the real things in the museum, then they can be effective.
"Sadly I think a lot of museum educators are a bit frightened of the art they work with. Many come from a practice-based training and so they don't always feel very confident of their own responses to a painting by Rembrandt or a piece of sculpture by Joseph Beuys, so it's not surprising if they hide behind ‘oh well it is up to you to make up your own mind.' If you're a teacher of poetry you are expected to understand words and be confident in using them, if you're employed to teach people about Mozart or rock-and-roll, you don't tell your students that musical structures are simply a matter of opinion. Personal preferences should, of course, be encouraged, but they should be informed." To follow this pedagogic line, both school teachers and museum educators need to be highly informed themselves. Cassin argues that what is needed is a reflective mind. "We need to encourage people to think open-mindedly, but also to be aware that there are facts which may influence our opinions. If people get excited by what they see, they might be prompted to go and look for the facts they feel they need."
Few would disagree with the qualities necessary for a good arts educator: a sensitivity to what's going on between the work of art and the audience; a good imagination; the ability to demonstrate a sense of excitement about objects; good communication skills; and flexibility. In Ireland, there is a continuing frustration with the lack of a co-ordinated Government policy for the professional development of the sector and the lack of training opportunities. Learning ‘on the hoof' is one way of coping but there is a need to professionalise the practice on all levels—for teachers, mediators, curators and educators—and to identify the core resource and unique learning that an encounter with an art object can create. A co-ordinated infrastructure is needed to support the growth in current trends of demands.
A cornerstone of approach at IMMA with both teachers in the primary and youth sectors is the provision of intensive in-service which has made access for the children and young people that they teach more profound. It aims to create possibilities for teachers and tutors to build a programme around the gallery visit which has a valuable impact on classroom practice and young people's lives. In Scotland, the museum education department also works with a number of different colleges of education on their teacher-training programmes. Although previous emphasis was on in-service teacher-training sessions for primary and secondary schools, they now work increasingly in collaboration with regional museums around the country to suggest how teachers can get the most out of their local museums. They also devise projects which will attract teachers using the galleries for the first time. About a third of the schools which participated in their recent poetry project, which resulted in the book It Doesn't have to Rhyme, had not visited the galleries before; many of these teachers were primarily interested in English and Creative Writing rather than Art.
At IMMA the full time gallery staff of Mediators are invaluable when it comes to interacting with the public. What is so unique about IMMA, however, is the extent to which we involve artists who have, over the past eight years, dedicated a large part of their practice to facilitating learning at the museum. IMMA operates on the principal that meaning and value resides in the individual; that the artwork acts as a catalyst to unlock that meaning; and that people are capable of dealing with even the most challenging aspects of contemporary art. Michael Cassin brings up the projects explored in A Space to Grow which rationalises and documents the art-education work at IMMA. He describes it as "fantastic, successful, even moving," but nonetheless argues that that type of work is not appropriate to every situation on the basis that it is precisely the unique features of IMMA that make them appropriate. In other words, it is the additional dimension of the artists' studios on-site and the continuing tradition of working directly with artists, using them to help establish links between the art on display and the schools, that validate such work in IMMA.
It may, however, be time to move on from the hands-on/hands-off debate. In IMMA, it is significant that the role, traditionally defined as Education Officer, is defined as Curator of Education. This designation has been crucially important in bringing projects beyond the workshop studio or marginal educational context into the public domain—centre stage to the main business of a museum, as it were. Internationally this position is rare in museums where the general practice finds educators cut off from access to exhibition-making, for example. And this position, ultimately, must be of major interest to the museum educator, because until education is brought into the centre, it will continue to be under-resourced, under-funded and under-valued.
Helen O'Donoghue is Senior Curator: Education and Community Programmes at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
