Empathy Tours

Project: Empathy Tours
Name: Karleen Gardner, Director of Learning Innovation; Jeanine Pollard, Research and Project Manager for CEVA; Juline Chevalier, Head of Interpretation and Participatory Experiences, Kara ZumBahlen, Associate Educator; Debra Hegstrom, Senior Educator; Ann Isaacson, Senior Educator; Sheila McGuire, Head of Student and Teacher Learning
Division/Department: Learning Innovation (Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts)
Other Mia departments involved: N/A
Project date(s): Summer 2019 (Children Empathy Tours: 5/14, 5/17, 5/23, 5/24) (Adult Empathy Tour: 8/21)

Audience/user: Museum professionals (especially educators), and anyone interested in empathy-related work.

Project goals: To prototype tours that encourage museum visitors to practice empathy and experience new points of view.

Project description: These Empathy Tours were designed to encourage visitors to engage with the collection in new ways. Rather than examining artworks through a purely art-historical lens, the tour museum educators invited participation and prompted visitors to examine their own perspectives and experiences. They are part of an ongoing, iterative, and visitor-centered design process.

The goal is to create a new kind of tour, one that invites visitors to practice empathy and understand divergent points of view. In part, this project was informed by the work of empathy scholars like Jamil Zaki, who argues that empathy is not a fixed trait, it can be learned and cultivated (Zaki, 2019).

Two tours were prototyped: one for school-aged youth and one for adults. On average the tours groups included 8-10 participants and lasted about 90 minutes. Each tour began in a different gallery and followed a unique route with 5-6 stops (allowing for detours if students expressed interest in a particular gallery). In some cases the museum educator had participants focus on a specific piece (eg. “Untitled by Yayoi Kusama) while in other galleries, the entire space was used. (eg. the Kunin Portrait Gallery).

During the school tours, museum educators asked questions like: “What part of this artwork represents a feeling you have now, or want to have? Why?” “When have people made assumptions about you? When have you made assumptions about someone else?”

Museum educators encouraged participants to name their feelings and take on alternative points of view. The artworks on the tour were chosen with particular attention to this goal—portraits and abstract works, for example, that convey emotion. On the tours, some children were vocal participants while others preferred to journal in response to these prompts. Participants appeared to enjoy imaginative exercises (i.e., crafting stories around the images they saw, or acting out a scene in a painting).

During the adult tours, similar exercises were undertaken. On one tour, a museum educator prompted visitors to pick a piece in the gallery that was “most like them.” This led to story-sharing, after which one participant remarked, “It’s a good reminder that everyone has baggage—be gentle.”

Evaluation tools: After the school empathy tours, students were asked to respond to a series of statements by grouping around one of three signs: “yes,” “meh,” or “no” (held by chaperones to create a sort of human continuum). The statements ranged from “I had fun” to “I saw art that I could connect to my life” to “I felt respected by the adults on my tour.”

After choosing their answer, participants were asked for further feedback and suggestions for improvement. Data collectors recorded this feedback to discuss and incorporate into the next iteration of empathy tours. After the adult tours, participants were asked to respond to similar questions by placing stickers along a continuum to indicate their response. The four key questions were: “I felt comfortable sharing something about myself on my tour.” “I got to make choices about how I participated on my tour.” “I considered someone else’s perspective or new points of view on my tour.” And “I had opportunities to practice listening openly, without judgement on my tour.”

Resources used: Staff time, tote bags, clipboards, notebooks, pencils, chart paper, stickers, sticky notes and other office materials. The tours were principally designed by members of Learning Innovation in collaboration with Deb Ingram, an external program evaluator associated with the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI) at the University of Minnesota. Tours were led by Mia’s museum educators and costs were covered under CEVA’s grant.

Reflection:

What worked?
On the whole, students liked having agency over where they went in the galleries and appreciated being asked questions. Most said they felt respected by the adults and would come back for another visit to Mia. The older kids (6th and 7th grade) were able to find art they could connect to their lives, citing an ability to relate to certain feelings and expressions. Most kids seemed to enjoy creative exercises (i.e those requiring them to make up a story or narrative). These results indicate 1) students successfully related their feelings and experiences to something outside themselves and 2) students successfully took on new points of view via storytelling. Both are key components of empathetic thinking.

The adults responded best to exercises requiring personal connection (eg. “What does this piece of art make you feel? Remember?”). They appreciated being asked to guess what an artwork was about and then noticing how that perspective changed once they received the artist’s background story. Like the students, they successfully took on new points of view and made connections through their feelings and experiences. With the adults however, the impact of these exercises seemed to run a bit deeper. Whereas the students experienced the perspective shift, the adults seemed better able to identify and learn from it.

What were the challenges?
Most students were hesitant to share things about themselves, and as a result did not learn much about one another. Some students (mostly the younger ones in fourth and fifth grades) were tired out by the length of the tours (one to one-and-a-half hours of walking). Some students felt that the adults talked too much, and that they weren’t given enough time to reflect/respond. While students seemed comfortable sharing general opinions (“the person in that painting seems sad”), they seemed less comfortable relating those observations to more personal experiences. Moving forward, the tours might be adjusted to accommodate more discussion in pairs and/or independent journaling.

For the adults, abstract questions were somewhat ineffective (e.g “What’s one way you could bring compassion into your life?”). They found it easier to respond to questions calling for an emotional/personal response. For example, “How does this artwork make you feel?” Notably, questions in the negative were harder to answer (“Is there a piece you have difficulty connecting with?”). Some thought the tours could have been longer to accommodate deeper conversation.

What was surprising?
For the adult tours, the museum educators remarked that participants were more willing to share than they expected. However, they also noted that conversations took deep dives, leaving them with less time than anticipated.

To what extent did this project support the strategic plan, Mia 2021?
Fostering Empathy is a pillar of the strategic plan. In effect, this means creating programming that invites visitors to practice empathy in the museum setting. The empathy tours prototyped here provide one example of how that programming might look.

Relevance

At Mia:
The main project of Mia’s Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts (CEVA) is to find ways to actively cultivate empathy in museum spaces. Empathy tours were one approach to that goal, prompting visitors to share personal experiences, think critically about points of view, and take an active role in creating meaning. The tours proved successful in empowering visitors to bring their own perspectives into Mia’s galleries, and suggested a good entry point for empathy-driven programming at Mia.

In the museum field:
Empathy tours provided a prototype for new ways to facilitate art engagement at the museum, more focused on the human experience behind a work of art than art-historical facts. While the length and topics of these tours still need to be refined, these initial prototypes provided a jumping-off point for the questions that might best foster empathy in a museum environment. In general, they demonstrated that having a group of individuals look at the same image and share what they see is an effective way to foster empathy and gain insight into new perspectives.

Public:
Why does this matter to a general visitor? Why should they care about this? In our increasingly divisive and polarized world, it becomes clear that our failures to understand other people’s feelings are exacerbating prejudice, conflict, and inequality. If we wish to develop not only a more equal society but a happier and more creative one, we will need to look outside ourselves and attempt to identify with the experiences of others. Moving forward, empathy will continue to shape Mia’s programming and inform the way visitors engage the collection. In particular, findings from this case study will be worked into all visitor tours, including empathy development sessions for docents and museum educators.

References:

Zaki, Jamil. The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Crown Publishing Group, 2019.

Illustrations & Figures