The Visitor Studies Group

Can't come. Don't come. Won't come.
- Visitor Studies with underrepresented, excluded and hard to reach audiences

VSG Summer School in collaboration with the
Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
Thursday 2nd July & Friday 3rd July 2009

Programme

Thursday 2 July

10:00 Registration

10:30 Welcome & introduction to event

10:45 Speaker 1: Jocelyn Dodd, Director, Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, University of Leicester: "No Simple solutions- visitor research with hard to reach groups" - How can researchers engage with the complexity of the experiences of hard to reach groups? How can we really understand their experiences of using museums? No simple solutions will look specifically at the experiences of looked after children and refugees and asylum seekers, it will investigate how we need to collect multiple perspectives to properly understand the context of these visitors and the impact visits have on their lives.

11:30 Speaker 2: Maggie Esson, Education Programmes Manager, Chester Zoo: "Achieving Audience Inclusivity" - 21st century zoos are urged to deliver powerful environmental education experiences and to attract under-represented audiences. In order to demonstrate inclusive education provision and commitment to community, Chester Zoo, in partnership with the One Parent/ Gingerbread charity, devised and delivered a series of zoo-based workshops on an environmental awareness theme. The project 'Learning Together' was the subject of visitor research where parents participated in focus groups and the Project Engagement Officers kept diaries in the style of field notes. Text analysis using Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Objectives was used as a method of analysing the conversations. This presentation provides an overview of the project and the process.

12:15 Lunch

13:15 Concurrent workshop sessions

Workshop 1: Andy Moss, Education Research Officer & Maggie Esson, Education Programmes Manager, Chester Zoo: "Getting the Most out of Words" - Focus groups, visitor feedback and conversations can be rich sources of qualitative data. But how do you make sense of all this information in a reliable and robust way? This hands-on workshop will include coding dialogue using carefully constructed definitions; how to streamline your data to reveal your key concepts; from words to stats, adding analytical substance to qualitative data; and an introduction to automated text analysis, tis use and limitations.

Workshop 2: Saima Kaur, Outreach Officer & thanh-Giang Vo, Outreach Officer, Leicester Arts and Museums Service: "How to get them hook, line and sinker!" - An interactive workshop to think who you want to attract and activities on getting them involved in your service in more ways than one. The workshop will include group discussion, object handling and break out activities.

Workshop 3: Monica Callaghan, Head of Education, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow: "Making Sense of Museums" - This workshop will include a short PowerPoint presentation which will cover how the Hunterian set up consultancy groups with people with sensory impairment; created work placement opportunities for children and teachers; delivered pilot activities for those with sensory impairment; presented volunteering opportunities; and covered basic costs of quick fix solutions to simple access issues. This will be followed by a practical handling session with objects from the hunterian's collections with discussion about how to make objects more physically and intellectually accessible for the widest possible audience. The workshop will conclude with 'Understanding Objects', considering personal responses to collections.

Workshop 4: Kate Pontin, Freelance Consultant: "Listening to Visitors" - This practical session will look at using visitor conversation to help evaluate our museums and the learning opportunities they provide. We will consider the pros and cons of such activity, how to undertake it, and consider previous research in the field.

14:45 Break

15:15 Concurrent workshop sessions

Workshop 5: Gail Durbin, Head of V&A Online, V&A: "Setting creative community tasks on the web" - Good user generated content on the web is about task not technology. This workshop will be about how you might use your own website, Flickr or online publication sites to set tasks to engage your audiences. You need no technical background to take part and it is hoped that all participants will go away with a few good ideas that could be put into practice back in the work place.

Workshop 6: Sheena Muncie, Director, Scotinform Ltd: "Reaching the hard to reach" - How do we define 'hard to reach' audiences and how can we ensure they form part of our consultation with visitors and non-visitors? Sheena Muncie's workshop is informed by her experience in recruiting and facilitating qualitative research with 'hard to reach' audiences from gypsy-travellers to teenagers. The workshop will include group discussion and break out activities.

Workshop 7: Emily Dawson, PhD Researcher, King's College London: "Social responsibility and inclusion" - This session will combine theory with practice to explore frameworks for developing socially responsible practice. Touching on issues including inclusion/exclusion, social justice and deliberative democracy, we will critically investigate some of the common problems and potential solutions for making public engagement more socially responsible and what that means for visitor studies professionals.

Workshop 8: Dr Sheila Watson, Lecturer and Programme Director for the MA in Learning and Visitor Studies in Museums in Galleries, Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester: "Engaging with the disengaged: how to get the best out of focus group work with those who do not visit your attraction" - Ever thought of doing focus group work? Have you any experience of this type of consultation? What are the benefits and pitfalls? How do you do it and why should you attempt it? This workshop will look at ways in which focus group work can help you discover some of the reasons why some potential visitors stay away.

16:45 Speaker 3: Dr Anni Oskala, Strategy Officer (Research), Arts Council England : "Culture vultures and time-poor dreamers: what can national level research tell us about drivers and patterns of arts consumption and non-consumption" - This presentation presents the findings of recent research on the patterns and drivers of arts engagement, including a 'segmentation' of English adults into distinct consumer segments and the findings from a recent workshop testing ideas for Arts Council's forthcoming national engagement campaign.

17:30 End of programme

18:00 - 19:00 Networking reception at New Walk Museum

Friday 3 July

09:30 Registration

10:00 Welcome back

10:15 Speaker 4: Richard Sandell, Director and Head of Museum Studies, Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester: "New Ways of Seeing - Capturing visitor engagement with social issues" - Museums are increasingly concerned to engage visitors in debates concerning contemporary (often contentious) social issues and to frame the ways in which audiences - and society more broadly - conceives of and talks about difference. How do we capture and analyse the social effects and consequences of these socially purposeful interventions that are very often slippery, difficult to trace and elusive to empirical capture? This presentation considers this question by drawing on the findings from a recent action research project - carried out by RCMG in partnership with 9 UK museums and a think tank of disabled activists, artists and cultural practitioners - that sought to offer visitors more progressive ways of understanding disability.

11:00 Marketplace of ideas

• Beverley Casebow & Emma Faragher, National Library of Scotland: "Voyages and Discovery - Engaging users of the mental health care services in Edinburgh" 
• Dr Sue Cavell, Techniquest, Cardiff: "Science for All - Bringing in local families." 
• Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
• Dr Sue James, National Waterfront Museum, Swansea: "Hard to reach or Failed to reach? Steps and guidelines for setting up inclusive community heritage projects. "
• Ceri Jones & Anna Woodham, University of Leicester
• Saima Kaur, Leicester Arts and Museums Service: "Matching Collections to Communities"
• Suzanne Kirkbright, Hands on Heritage: "Hands on Heritage"
• Louise Lamming, Brent Museum and Archive: "Journeys of Change - Supplementary Schools learning with Museums"
• Christine McLean, National Museums Scotland: "CAN come, WILL come, DO come - learn about a wide range of outreach projects enabling people to enage with NMS museums and resources, WHEREVER they are and WHOEVER they are"
• National Galleries of Scotland
• Claire Ross, Geevor Tin Mine Museum, Cornwall: "Geevor Rocks - Inspiring and engaging hard to each audiences"
• Borut Rovsnik, City Museum of Ljubljana, Slovenia: "Is the City Museum of Ljubljana recognised by non visitors?"
• University of Leicester Bookshop will be running a bookstall and handing out copies of their catalogue.

12:00 Lunch

13:00 Speaker 5: Verity Walker, Director, Interpretaction: "Confronting apathy through interpretive planning"- Apathy is one of the hardest attitudes to cope with when considering audiences during interpretive planning. This presentation will explore ways in which a recent Interpretaction project at Merkinch (a community facing huge social challenges in the city of Inverness) has set out to address this issue.

13:45 Concurrent workshop sessions

Workshop 9: Verity Walker, Director, Interpretaction: "Consultation and engagement techniques that work for challanging audiences" - You will come away with a toolkit approach for consulting audiences who would really much rather be anywhere else than talking to you, using techniques successfully developed during two contrasting projects: the Merkinch planning process and the Flashpoint Programme at Leeds Royal Armouries

Workshop 10: Jennifer DeWitt, Research Associate, King's College London & Helen Featherstone, Research Fellow, University of the West of England: "Qualitative analysis: Beyond the interview" - Recent years in visitor studies have seen efforts made to widen our repertoire of techniques and adopt more creative approaches to evaluation. But once we gather data that may look different from 'traditional' data, what do we do with it? And how do we use such methods and continue to meet the requirements of exhibit designers, programm developers, funders and others? This workshop will challange participants to think about how to make the most of such methods and provide hands-on opportunities to work with data.

Workshop 11: Dominique Tessier, Local Historian: "New Object Lessons: a positive approach to audience development" - This workshop will present an alternative approach to audience development and invite participants to reflect on their perceptions of hard-to-reach audiences through a series of short activities. it will also explore the use of evaluation forms as educational outreach tools.

Workshop 12: Crawford McGugan, Open Museum Curator, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre: "Connecting objects, people and place" - "Next year sees the Open Museum reach its 20th anniversary of engaging communities throughout the city. This workshop will recap on some of the projects and programmes that the Open Museum has worked in partnership on. It will include opportunities to discuss and reflect on effective ways of structuring engaging and relevant outreach projects."

15:15 Speaker 6: Gail Durbin, Head of V&A Online, V&A: "Using the web to engage new audiences" - Taking examples mainly from the V&A, this session will cover a range of projects that have encouraged people to contribute their ideas and creative output to a museum website.

16:00 Plenary session

16:30 Event ends