Teaching in the Museum: Learning to let go of the plan and just go with it...

I have always been a planner, a fan of the comfortable and the predictable. I was one of those undergraduate students who loved coming to class and listening to an art history lecture. I could absorb all this information and know exactly what would be expected of me. After working in a museum for the past three months, it is safe to say that teaching is anything but predictable. I can stay up the night before planning or putting together a run-down of how our collective meeting will go, or what art activities I’d like to try out with the students, but at the end of the day, I’ve come to learn that working with students is never going to go exactly the way I plan it. The night before our last in-person meeting, I thought about how our spring project brainstorming session would go. We would meet outside and eat our pizza while we chatted about what the students might want to collaborate on for an event in the spring. On the day of our meeting, Anne asked me to put together a plan for the brainstorm session. I came up with a detailed when, where, what and how system that I could use to help guide the discussion along. I was not sure what the students would suggest, but at least I had a methodically devised plan I could follow on a hand-out.  

At 5:00pm the students carried their gallery stools and pizza slices to the sculpture plaza. We all sat in a circle chatting about our weekends, thanksgiving plans, covid, and the cancelling of spring break next semester. Anne guided our conversation towards brainstorming and turned the lead over to me. In that instance, I realized I had left my big brainstorming plan hand-out inside the museum. Great- I was going to have to wing it, or do the little I remembered from memory.  I nervously grabbed a marker and began writing our next meeting dates on the white board. I wanted the students to have a visual of how many meetings we actually had to plan this big event or project. “So, what are you guys thinking? Any big ideas of an event we could have for students who might not know about the museum? Do we want to do this before or after exams? What are you thinking?” As I asked these questions, some of the students began suggesting all kinds of ideas- everything from outdoor student art shows, typewriter and poetry, outdoor music, fluid painting in the courtyard, food trucks and setting up twinkle lights in the trees outside the museum. 

We proceeded to walk around the plaza and more ideas began to flow as the collective started to imagine and visualize their event happening in the different areas of the plaza. Before I knew it, the sun had set and it was dark outside. We had been talking for over one hour. It was time to head upstairs to the Alonso Berruguete exhibition. I realized as I scrambled to put stools back in the closet that we would never get to the art activity I had originally planned to do with students. We walked through the exhibition together and the students continuously asked Anne and I many questions about exhibition design, curating the objects in the space, and even the choice for colors of the walls. I responded to their inquiries enthusiastically encouraging them to ask those questions directly to the curator who joined us on an Ipad stand via Zoom all the way from San Diego. By the end of our meeting, I was feeling upset that we never go to the art activity and unsure if we had gotten enough brainstorming in. I was feeling worried that I had not brought along all the preparation I had done beforehand and how this would reflect on me as an educator. Anne ended up staying with the group until 7:00pm and I was so grateful to have her there to answer questions and get the Zoom connection started for Wendy’s talk. After we dismissed the students and they began heading to the front door, Anne turned to me and whispered “that was the best brainstorming session we’ve ever had with the student collective ever.” I smiled gratefully at the thought that sometimes not following a plan actually pays off in the end.