Report Pre-conference Workshops CECA 2015 1 Pre-conference workshops 2015 Washington DC, United States, 16-09-2015 During the CECA 2015 conference in Washington DC two workshops took place at the Smithsonian Offices at l’Enfant Plaza on Wednesday September 16, led by Luciana Sepúlveda Köptcke (in English) and Ashley Naranjo and Ranald Woodaman (in English and Spanish). Workshop A and D A “How-To” Workshop: Connecting Learners to Your Museum through Digital Access 9:30-12:30 in English and 14.00-17.00 in Spanish, by Ashley Naranjo and Ranald Woodaman, Smithsonian Museums, US Number of registered participants: 23 in the morning and 14 in the afternoon. From 19 countries. Short description of the workshop: The session started with a hands-on analogue activity (with pictures of shoes) that allowed participants to get to know each other and think about digital accessibility and versatility of museums objects in an education setting. Much of the discussions centred around defining digital accessibility in everyone’s own settings and the spectrum that each might encounter in their home countries. Many of the participants were eager to share their own best practices and obstacles faced in incorporating digital accessibility into their museums. From Ash ley’s reflection Allowing for an open discussion during the workshop, perhaps with some guided questions, hits the right level of formality-informality. All the participants were eager to share their own experiences throughout the session. The pre-conference workshops were a great way to ease in to the theme of the conference, for colleagues to reconnect with each other, and/or meet for the first time. In retrospect, perhaps having the hashtag of the conference available and widely known from the start of the pre-conference workshops would help everyone keep a better record of photos and major takeaways during the session. Ashley was very pleased by the amount and quality of the feedback from the participants. The session held in Spanish was a wonderful opportunity for CECA participants from Canada, Latin America, Spain and Brazil to share experiences and unique challenges that they face with Spanish speaking museum goers.
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Report Pre-conference Workshops CECA 2015
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Pre-conference workshops 2015 Washington DC, United States, 16-09-2015
During the CECA 2015 conference in Washington DC two workshops took place at the Smithsonian Offices at l’Enfant Plaza on Wednesday September 16, led by Luciana Sepúlveda Köptcke (in English) and Ashley Naranjo and Ranald Woodaman (in English and Spanish). Workshop A and D A “How-To” Workshop: Connecting Learners to Your Museum through Digital Access 9:30-12:30 in English and 14.00-17.00 in Spanish, by Ashley Naranjo and Ranald Woodaman, Smithsonian Museums, US Number of registered participants: 23 in the morning and 14 in the afternoon. From 19 countries.
Short description of the workshop: The session started with a hands-on analogue activity (with pictures of shoes) that allowed participants to get to know each other and think about digital accessibility and versatility of museums objects in an education setting. Much of the discussions centred around defining digital accessibility in everyone’s own settings and the spectrum that each might encounter in their home countries. Many of the participants were eager to share their own best practices and obstacles faced in incorporating digital accessibility into their museums.
From Ash ley’s reflection Allowing for an open discussion during the workshop, perhaps with some guided questions, hits the right level of formality-informality. All the participants were eager to share their own experiences throughout the session. The pre-conference workshops were a great way to ease in to the theme of the conference, for colleagues to reconnect with each other, and/or meet for the first time. In retrospect, perhaps having the hashtag of the conference available and widely known from the start of the pre-conference workshops would help everyone keep a better record of photos and major takeaways during the session. Ashley was very pleased by the amount and quality of the feedback from the participants. The session held in Spanish was a wonderful opportunity for CECA participants from Canada, Latin America, Spain and Brazil to share experiences and unique challenges that they face with Spanish speaking museum goers.
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Workshops B and C Making museums accessible: learning from experience 9:30-12:30 and 14.00-17.00 in, by Luciana Sepúlveda Köptcke, Programa de Educação, Cultura e Saúde, Fiocruz-Brasília, Brasil Number of registered participants: 23 in the morning and 22 in the afternoon. From 22 countries. Short description of the workshop: Luciana got in touch with all participants about two months before the workshop. They filled in a sheet describing their expectations concerning the workshop, what they enjoy most about their work, etc. They also had to send three pictures representing what accessibility meant to them. The photos and the information were directly used in the workshop, see below. 1. Presentation of participants
People walked around the room and at Luciana’s clapping stopped by the closest participants gathering in 2 or 3, presenting themselves to each other. After 2 minutes people changed groups and started introducing themselves again. The morning group was smaller than expected, so here each one presented him/herself to the whole group.
2. Expectations Each one held one or two “expectations clouds” (see pictures), containing the expectations participants had written to Luciana in advance, and read it out loud. Together they organised the expectations in categories on the flip chart.
3. Presentation of workshop program, goals and methodology by Luciana By doing so the group made the “initial deal”, all agreed it was what they wanted.
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4. ‘Image traders dynamic’ This is like a reflective representational exercise to help sharing new concepts. Luciana printed big postcard displaying the images about accessibility everyone had previously sent to her. Each participant had to choose up to 3 cards that would best relate to key questions: Accessibility is about... (what it really means to us in ways of challenges, practices, goals...) After each participant had chosen 3 cards, they discussed in groups why the chosen pictures represented accessibility to them. Together they prepared the group synthesis of what accessibility meant to them. Each group did a presentation.
5. Powerpoint by Luciana to share a conceptual frame Concepts discussed together were equality, equity, inclusion, diversity, difference, ‘universal design’, accessibility and social approach.
6. Preparing guidelines Next step was to go back into groups to exchange and discuss their meaningful experiences about making their museums more accessible, the challenges they faced and how they overcame them, in order to build common guidelines.
7. Sharing Guidelines Each group summarised what they learnt out of the previous experiences.
8. Evaluation Participants wrote down on sticky notes what they would take home from this workshop, and what could be even better.
What was the most discussed item? They discussed a lot about differences, diversity and equity. The participants were happy to improve their perception of their practices using those concepts. They also were happy to learn from exchanging experiences and see how professionals from other countries were dealing with similar and different issues. The guideline exercise helped them sharing practices and strategies. Learning ‘practical solutions’ was one of the most demanded expectations for the workshop. Nevertheless, they did a lot of thinking! The tension between financial and human resources and a deeper sense of ethics and values that lies under the accessibility issue, making it a political one, was a common core point of discussions. What did participants take home? See above. Also, some participants appreciated the workshop methodology, they said they would use similar strategies to their own classes. How did you experience leading the workshop? Luciana had a wonderful enriching experience. Each group was diverse, gathering participants with different backgrounds, diverse relations to museum field , age, sex and nationality, making it a cultural melting pot. She felt she could engage with them all with no communication difficulty. They were very enthusiastic and responded well to the exercises proposed. Only one participant did not really engage with the proposal.
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Anything else to mention? Special, unexpected things? The support team was great, they were of huge help and participated as well. Luciana wants to thank them! The organisation was fantastic. Feedback from participants Luciana used open ended questions to be completed on sticky notes that were organised under each question on a flip chart. Participants mostly emphasised the opportunity of broadening their perceptions and understanding about accessibility, discussing Universal Design and concepts of inclusion, diversity, equity and equality. They seemed to like the opportunity of sharing and discussing with people from all over the world and felt the workshop was a good warming up for the Conference.
Concluding remarks from Arja van Veldhuizen Organising the pre-conference workshops for 2015 has been a pleasure to me. Conference organiser Pino Monaco and I discussed possible workshop contents linked to the theme of the conference: ‘Museum Education and Accessibility’. Pino suggested Ashley and Luciana and the cooperation with them went really smoothly. All basic appointments were already made by early December. Registration for the workshops was included in the general registration procedure, easy and effective, and much better than the year before. We planned to have all 3 ICOM-languages represented in the workshops, with one French, one Spanish and two English spoken workshops. Soon the English workshops were full (maximum 20 each), whereas we only had two subscriptions for the French one. So at the end of May we decided to replace the French workshop by another English one. Soon this was full too. Finally we accepted 82 registrations altogether. On the day itself some participants showed up at the wrong time, this was not easy for Luciana who therefore had to deal with different group-sizes. Learning from last year’s workshop, I asked the workshop leaders to contact their participants in advance. This worked very well, see Luciana’s report above. Unfortunately there was some delay in making this report. Evaluation was done during the workshop in an informal way. Next time I will stress the importance of collecting direct feedback from the participants too, in a more structured, written way. Arja van Veldhuizen Co-opted member of the CECA Board delegated for professional development 17 02 16 Thanks to Ashley and Luciana for their input and pictures, and Vaida Rakaityte and Tine Seligman for pictures.
