The Multiple Narratives program pilot (MN) sought to incorporate underrepresented and marginalized voices in an art museum, thus opening up the possibilities of whose narratives are valued and shared.

I began this project in 2016 wondering how museums can create a more inclusive environment, one that leads visitors to feel that their lived experiences matter.  

Museum education tours are often comprised of content-based lessons delivered by tour guides, wall text and headphones. This traditional approach to tours positions learners as passive recipients of information.  MN represents my approach to reverse this dominant narrative of museum education, in which the museum has the knowledge and visitors come to listen. By giving others an authoritative voice, we increase visitors’ motivation to attend, learn and remember.

In order to achieve my goal of disrupting the dominate narrative, I focused on inclusive pedagogies that would include personal narratives. Narratives bind us together as collective voices in the human experience. Narratives help us understand stories that connect people to history and to the world around us. Often set in specific cultural contexts, narratives help us understand others and ourselves.

MN was co-created with a local elementary school’s

4th and 5th grade teachers and principal,

in collaboration with a Colorado College Education course and

the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Museum at Colorado College. 

I questioned if pre-tour lessons and an art museum field trip could address my goals of disrupting the dominate museum narrative to create a more inclusive museum environment by ascribing value to student’s lived experiences through integration of student voice alongside curatorial voice To address these questions, I crafted MN  around a community-based learning (CBL) experience to bring together local stakeholders. Elementary students, teachers, CC students and museum staff collaborated to create and participate in:  a series of lessons that satisfied the teachers’ curricular foci, a CBL experience for college students to understand how transfer affects learning, new innovative participatory museum tours, and a series of narratives that could remain in the museum after the pilot to demonstrate that diverse voices can be a valid starting point for conversations and engagements with and about visual art.

The Elementary School Partnership		The Colorado College ED210 – Power of the Arts		The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
A Writer’s Workshop curriculum led to students producing personal narratives that connected to artwork before they took a museum field trip.  They then had an “author share” of their writing while at the museum.		CC students who studied how people learn supported the writing process for elementary students, then planned tours in which visitors would feel that their stories and connections to the artwork matter.		Docents participated in several days of the CC course, working with college students to develop tours that actively engaged visitors in looking at art.  Videos of elementary students’ narratives remain connected to the art through augmented reality.