This fall: A sneak peek into John Falk’s new book, ‘Leaning Into Value’

Museums are on a long journey from their traditional role as warehouses of culture for the elite to being centers that support people’s progress.

One obstacle to realizing this transformation is the long-standing practice of project-based learning. Organizations that take a project-based or project-first approach to learning will try to find out just enough about people to produce an “engaging” museum-shaped project (an exhibit, program, etc.). Learning about people is done to support projects, projects rarely emerge from learning about people.

I’ve been reading an advance copy of John Falk’s book, Leaning Into Value: Becoming a User-Focused Museum, which is in press and will be released early next year. In the book, John describes a need for data:

… the greatest single impediment to the future success of the museum community is a lack of data, a lack of both the ability and the desire of the community to use evidence for making its decisions.

What’s got me excited about the book is that it’s not (only) about making better museum products through data and learning. Leaning Into Value is about adopting a more expansive view of the role a museum can play in people’s lives. I hear John inviting us to listen (and listening is a form of data collection) and then determine how the museum can provide value to its communities.

You might be thinking this isn’t relevant to you because you’ve incorporated community discussions into your planning process, but that’s not what I mean.

When museums say they “listen”, they’re usually referring to something like a front-end evaluation process, which is really about improving the museum’s plan or getting buy-in from “the community”.

Kate Haley Goldman captures this well in her definition of front-end evaluation:

Front end evaluation is done during the early stages of a project, during the discovery phase, research phase, or concept design. Front end evaluation allows the team to understand what visitors know about a topic, what questions and misconceptions they have, and what content resonates with them personally.

Notice how front-end evaluation assumes that visitors have questions or misconceptions about a topic? Giving people a say in what you intend to make is learning that supports a project or initiative. This embodies project-first learning, which is a continuation of the problem, not its solution.

That’s not to say that evaluation and incorporating community discussions and feedback into program development aren’t important — they are! But believing that evaluative listening is all that’s needed perpetuates the old way: that museums are about something rather than for someone.

If museums are to become institutions that support people’s goals and the progress that matters to their communities, they’ll need to adopt a learning-first rather than project-first approach to their work.

If your museum is on this path from being about something to for someone, I hope you’ll join us this fall for a conversation with John Falk. John has kindly agreed to give MaP participants a chance to discuss the book and the framework it introduces for value realization in museums. Join the community to get notified when the event date and details are announced later this month.

Have a good week,

Kyle