A Community of Global Learners
Technology in the Service of Reach, Responsiveness, and Relevance
This series of posts celebrates the 80th anniversary of The Museum of Modern Art’s formal commitment to museum education. Sara Bodinson is director of Interpretation, Research, and Digital Learning in MoMA’s Department of Education.
Since its founding, MoMA’s Department of Education has developed programs and resources to help people understand, enjoy, and use the art of our time. Throughout his tenure (1937–1969), the Department’s founding director, Victor D’Amico, used both innovative methods and new technologies to engage people with modern and contemporary art and to catalyze their creativity well beyond the Museum’s walls. These included circulating exhibitions in New York City high schools, prototyping an art-making caravan that he hoped might travel the world, and producing network television shows about art making for children and adults. Engaging audiences with art outside the Museum is still a core value of the Education department, albeit one that has shifted and expanded along with technology itself.
Besides expanding reach, technology has also helped expand the number of voices and perspectives represented at the Museum and online. One of the first digital projects I worked on was Red Studio, a site for teens that launched in 2003, featuring interviews with artists, animators, and curators. The teens engaged their subjects in lively, candid conversations that often went to unexpected places. They asked Vito Acconci, for instance, about how serious a high school student he was, how his parents reacted to his early videos, and even why his middle name is Hannibal. They spoke with Shahzia Sikander about her love of road trips and where she wanted to travel next. These conversations allowed for a more holistic understanding of the artists as people, while also providing new insights into their work.
Recognizing that teen perspectives were not present in MoMA’s in-gallery interpretive resources, in 2007 and 2008 I collaborated with our Youth Advisory Council to develop MoMA Teen Audio. Participants selected and researched works of art in MoMA’s collection — conducting interviews with visitors and staff, mining archival audio of artist interviews — and ultimately produced a range of funny, poetic, and informative audio pieces for anyone to access in the galleries or online. One of my favorites was about Marisol’s LBJ, featuring wildly differing visitor responses to Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and interpretations of what the sculpture might be saying about the man.
The Education department has also been at the forefront of using technology to expand the reach of successful on-site programs. In 2009, Deputy Director for Education Wendy Woon created a Digital Learning team to collaborate with Adult and Academic Programs to develop online courses. Largely consisting of videos of gallery walkthroughs; conversations between artists, educators, and curators; and studio demonstrations, these courses reached thousands of learners — far more than could be accommodated in our classrooms — including many with disabilities or stay-at-home parents who cited accessibility as a key benefit. The peer-to-peer discussion forums were active throughout the week, as opposed to the necessarily limited time for discussion in on-site courses. Furthermore, online course alumni formed their own social media groups, which are still active years later.
In 2012 MoMA partnered with Coursera, a massive open online course (MOOC) platform with a mission “to provide universal access to the world’s best education.” Seizing the opportunity to experiment with offering free online courses to a global audience, we produced three MOOCs for K–12 teachers about the strategies (inquiry, activity, and theme-based teaching) our educators use with students in the galleries and in their classrooms. When surveyed, nearly 40% of learners in those courses did not identify as teachers, and for the vast majority this was their first encounter with MoMA. These statistics suggested that developing digital learning content such as MOOCs offered a tremendous opportunity to engage new audiences with our collection and resources, and in 2015 we began developing MOOCs for general-interest audiences.
The first of these, Seeing Through Photographs, made in collaboration with our Photography and Digital Media departments, uses works from the collection as a point of departure to encourage participants to look critically at photographs through some of the diverse ideas, approaches, and technologies that inform their making. From a pedagogical perspective, we felt it was important to introduce learners firsthand to the widely varied ideas and processes of artists today. In vérité films and audio interviews, learners hear directly from artists ranging from Katy Grannan, who aims to foster a feeling of recognition and empathy for the strangers she photographs, to Hank Willis Thomas, who discusses the importance of taking “responsibility in mining and looking at the images that our society is creating so we can really get a broader perspective of our time.”
In 2017 we launched In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting, a free MOOC that builds on the content of a successful on-site (and later fee-based, online) course taught by Corey D’Augustine. Each week features a studio demonstration of the materials and techniques employed by a particular artist, which students use as a point of departure for making their own work. The aim of these videos is similar to Victor D’Amico’s network television shows, particularly his 1939 series of studio demonstrations about printmaking and theater design techniques. Both the show and the MOOC encourage learning through participation and aim to foster creativity, while reaching the broadest possible audience.
While they do not share a physical classroom, at any given time thousands of learners from around the globe are engaged in lively exchanges and debates in the MOOC discussion forums, and peer-review each other’s final projects. This is consistent with many of our on-site education programs, which aim to foster peer-to-peer learning rather than top-down knowledge sharing, acknowledging the value of the diverse perspectives and experiences our participants bring to bear. The discussion forums for In the Studio are particularly active as learners post their weekly creations, sparking vibrant conversations that blend feedback, inquiry, and encouragement. To celebrate the creativity of this global community of learners, the Museum will host an exhibition of images of their artworks in January 2018.
Because the MOOCs are offered on demand and learners can register at any time, we continue to activate them in different ways — broadcasting exhibition walkthroughs, hosting Q&As, and sharing resources and programs, which can then be archived in the course as additional content. For example, curator Sarah Meister hosted a Quora Session in which she answered questions submitted by the Coursera and Quora audiences related to topics explored in Seeing Through Photographs, and it had over one million views in the first week. Corey D’Augustine has hosted popular In the Studio: Live Q&A sessions on YouTube, responding to questions about artists’ materials and processes and fielding requests for future studio demonstrations. (You can watch many of Corey’s In the Studio videos on MoMA’s YouTube channel.)
Technology allows us to continually take the pulse of our visitors and develop content that responds to their needs. Through qualitative research we know that most visitors’ interest in modern and contemporary exceeds their formal knowledge of the subject. Today they can also express their skepticism and even dismissal of works of art (Readymades, monochromatic paintings, and Conceptual art are frequently mentioned) in online reviews of their visit to the Museum. The Department of Education saw this as an opportunity and partnered with WNYC Studios to produce the A Piece of Work podcast last summer. Hosted by Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson, each episode aims to address questions visitors have about modern and contemporary art but are often afraid to ask — through conversations with artists, curators, and Abbi’s friends. These discussions and debates, punctuated by visitor voices, have a decidedly non-institutional, and often irreverent, tone, while encouraging listeners to look closer and form their own opinions.
In reflecting back on the Department of Education’s use of technology and media some common threads emerge. New platforms offer opportunities to connect with new audiences: in the past few years, hundreds of thousands of learners have taken our MOOCs, over a million have downloaded the podcast, and still millions more have watched videos on our YouTube channel. Technology has allowed us to represent a diversity of voices and perspectives about art and what it means to them. It has also offered opportunities to reach audiences in new ways, connecting people not only with art, but with their own creativity and with one another. If used thoughtfully, nimbly, and creatively, technology will no doubt continue to be an integral tool for keeping the Museum relevant and responsive to the interests, questions, and needs of our audiences.
Stay tuned for a forthcoming post by Museum archivist Michelle Harvey about the Department of Education’s early forays into radio and television.
