Much of the work of museum education is to help audiences to notice things that will resonate with them, through focused observation; open-ended dialogue; and technical, historical, and biographical information. There are a number of ways to embark on this task. A prosaic, verbal exposition is not always the most useful, whether because of the limitations of language among a particular audience (for example, among a group of six-year-olds) or because constructing and parsing linguistic meaning always has the potential to distract from the sensorial thing at hand.
Multimodal inquiry—using modes other than discursive language—is pursued with a tacit acknowledgment that there are ways other than through language of constructing and expressing knowledge. These modes include drawing and sculpting; poetic speech and writing; music and sound associations; material and tactile associations; and kinesthetic associations (or embodiment).
(For a thorough account of multimodal forms of object-based inquiry, see Hubard, Olga M. [November 2007]. “Complete Engagement: Embodied Response in Art Museum Education.” Art Education, 60[6].)
Among these multimodal tools are visual percepts—such as colors, pictures, and icons—that may be used to reveal metaphorical links to the art objects at hand. In practice, these visual percepts may be presented on flash cards or on a handheld screen. Shannon Murphy, Head of Education at the Noguchi Museum, has created a set of flashcards used regularly in her repertoire of gallery teaching tools. The cards feature visual percepts in a few categories, including natural elements (air, water, earth, fire); sense organs; colors; and cosmic forces (an atomic explosion, the Earth, outer space). Participants use the cards to signify their responses to Isamu Noguchi’s abstract sculptures.
Area 10 of the Noguchi Museum
At the Noguchi Museum, where I am a freelance educator, I subsequently introduced a set of flash cards inspired by a gallery of the museum that contains many (relatively) small works by the sculptor in a variety of materials and forms. Each of the eighteen flash cards in the set exhibits one character from a few different symbol fonts that are included on most computers (Wingdings, dingbats, etc.). The symbols have been chosen for their openness to interpretation. (Although some of them are direct icons of things [a floppy disk, a microfilm reel, etc.], these things are unfamiliar to most students, particularly as abstracted icons.)
“Wingding” cards printed by the author
I have developed an activity for the cards, but this does not preclude using the cards in other activities. Each student in the group pulls a card at random (they are presented face down). Then, the group is given some instructions:
The symbols on the cards were not created or chosen to match with the sculptures in the gallery. They were found and chosen at random.
Look at the symbol and then look for a sculpture that is similar, in some way, to the symbol. This could mean that the entire sculpture looks like the symbol; or some part of the sculpture looks like the symbol; or both the symbol and the sculpture have a similar arrangement of parts, a similar “logic.” (Depending on the age of the group, this explanation can be more or less complex; I’ve found that the first sentence is enough to get students of all ages involved in finding similarities in a variety of ways.)
Once you have chosen one sculpture, think about why you have chosen it. I will ask you to share.
Whatever the mode or medium, we typically return to language, because it—in cases wherein the members of a group speak the same language—affords sociality through conventional forms suited to a range of objective and affective expression. Language is the mortar that binds concrete experiences across modes and among people.
So participants in the card game are asked to regroup and are invited to share their reasoning for associating objects with the forms on their cards. There are, of course, no wrong answers.
In the sharing portion of the activity, students get to explain some of the surprising discoveries they have made about Noguchi’s sculptures while searching for some equivalence of the symbols in the sculptures.
This process of discovery might involve a physical rotation of the card or of the object (in this case, the student’s movement around the object), or a conceptual rotation of both, looking for the “fit” between the symbol and object.