Learning & Participation
STANDARD: Factor-in opportunities for host venues, audiences, and creatives to participate and engage meaningfully with exhibition content.
Minimum Practice
Opportunities for exhibition participation are intentional, respectful, and achievable, and communicated to host venues in advance. These engagements do not place undue expectations on host venues or creatives and are agreed upon between all parties with consideration to feasibility, safety, and capacity. All creatives are remunerated fairly in line with NAVA Code of Practice for Visual Arts, Craft and Design Payment Standards.
Best Practice
Embed participation and engagement as core components of the touring model, designed collaboratively with host venues, creatives, and communities. Engagement opportunities are scaled thoughtfully to suit local contexts and capacities. Best practice values reciprocity and prioritises accessibility and inclusion across all platforms. Fostering long-term relationships and contributing to lifelong learning are the aim of engagements.
Guidance
As a part of the exhibition information package, it is expected that opportunities for the community and the host venues to engage with the content and creatives within the exhibition will be incorporated. Including high level decisions about learning and participation activities in the early consultation stage is important, as this will have budget and planning impacts (See Pre-tour Engagement section). Below are different possible additions that can be scaled up or down depending on your budget, capacity, and needs. Creating online or hybrid in-person and online events/programs are an access requirement for many people with disability.
Opening Event
Having a celebratory event at each location is generally an expected part of touring. Most venues will have a process for opening events and your tour may form a part of a series of openings occurring at their venue. If you have certain expectations or inclusions you would like for your exhibition event, communicating this early on to ensure the host venues can accommodate your needs is necessary. For example, access services may include Auslan interpreters and captioning, as well as early seating. You may be able to facilitate creatives attending the opening, or the host venues may have the capacity to facilitate this as well. You may also want to collaboratively decide whether a closing event, a morning tea, dry gathering (without alcohol), or a First Nations only pre- opening should occur alongside or instead of a traditional opening, depending on your exhibition. Including an Acknowledgement of County, or facilitating a Welcome to Country, may form a part of your celebrations, ensuring that this engagement is a genuine and community-informed inclusion.
Audience Engagement
One of the main objectives for touring exhibitions is to engage with diverse audiences across distances.
Strategies for enhancing visitor experiences therefore need to be a continuous part of the touring process. The host venues will know their community best and be able to collaboratively work with you to create pathways to make your exhibition accessible for their audiences. Creating a list of public programming possibilities, with an idea of any associated costs, to discuss with each venue ahead of their presentation is a great way to bring audience participation to your tour. This could include artist or curator talks, making workshops, outdoor trails, sensory experiences, and digital and hybrid events/work. If you have the finances, preparing video and printable resources to send with the tour is a great way to embed a connection between audiences and the exhibition into your offering. This could include artist, curator, or topic specialist interviews available to be played on a television within the exhibition; printable activity worksheets or kids trails; or instructional workshop videos that can be used in the gallery at a ‘creation station’ and sent within the community as outreach. All these resources need to have access and inclusion embedded in the format and design.
Host venues may already have a schedule of programs locked in during the time your touring exhibition is being presented, so it is also important to understand that additional public programs or events may not be feasible for many organisations. Instead, you may need to collaboratively look at where themes or ideas in your exhibition align with or enhance their pre-designed programming.
Education & Learning
The development of an education kit/learning resource is an advisable addition to any tour. For school-aged children, incorporating Australian Curriculum codes, or curriculum links particular to the state or territory your tour is going to, can help educators and school groups use your exhibition within the classroom and during school visits to the exhibition. It is important to provide these education resources to the host venues in advance of their presentation so they can distribute them to local schools with enough lead time to arrange excursions. Engaging an arts and cultural educator to produce these resources is advised, which could involve partnering with one of the venues on your itinerary who have in-house education staff or a connection to a local educator. If creating school-aged or pre-school learning activities is not achievable for your budget or appropriate for the exhibition content, producing an academic reader with a list of texts and resources that University / TAFE students or curious researchers can access is a possible addition. Workshops and masterclasses delivered by exhibition artists are important learning and skills development for local artists and community members, and build further engagement and understanding of the exhibition, its themes, and the artist/s practice.
Professional Development
Providing an aspect of professional development with your touring exhibition is a great value add for potential host venues. This could be in the form of a technician or installer travelling with the tour to demonstrate to staff and volunteers how to use a piece of technology or install a complex work. Professional development could also include bringing all the host venues together for an in-person or online discussion ahead of the tour, where relationships, skills-sharing, educational possibilities, and public programming ideas can be shared and workshopped in a collaborative environment. In these forums, having the creatives, academic specialists, educators, or subject matter experts speak with the group to inform and inspire is an excellent professional development opportunity that also fosters industry relationships. Access and inclusion training for staff and volunteers needs to be included in touring exhibitions to ensure that all offerings can be communicated, used, shared, and created in ways that remove barriers for all participants. It is best practice is upskill the creatives you are touring in access services, for example, producing audio description or tactile objects as a part of the tour offerings.
Cultural Mediation
Creating alternative pathways for audiences to experience an exhibition is referred to as ‘Cultural Mediation’.
The foundation of this practice is a desire for all people to be able to relate to any exhibition in the spirit of cultural democracy. Within this philosophy is allowing staff and volunteers more freedom to find aspects of the exhibition that interests them. For example, an exhibition could be about the impact of recent flooding events on biodiversity, but staff and volunteers may also want to investigate local First Nations floodplain management practices, speak with a local birdwatching group, or delve into how natural disasters are represented in Hollywood movies. These professional development exercises are about building tangential knowledge to help connect with audiences. To encourage this curiosity and investigation, creating a mediation handbook featuring interesting information, key terms, further reading, and conversations connected to the exhibition is a valuable tool. This form of professional development helps the host venues feel invested in the themes of an exhibition that they have not created, leading to organisational ownership. Encouraging programming at each venue to be informed by the interests of their staff and volunteers, as well as engaging local specialists or interest groups, can help vary entry points for audiences and result in community involvement.
Standards In Action
M&G NSW – Case Study: Dennis Golding | ‘POWER – The Future is Here’
An example of a tour by Museums & Galleries of NSW (M&G NSW) with an artist and curator interview that can be played on a television in the exhibition or used as a part of the promotion at each venue; a ‘How to make a cape’ video resource with a worksheet providing unfacilitated engagement with young people to be used in the gallery or for outreach; an education resource with curricular links; and a mediation handbook for staff and volunteers.
Ready To Use Support
M&G NSW – How to Prepare an Acknowledgment of Country Statement
A simple resource by Museums & Galleries of NSW (M&G NSW) on preparing an Acknowledgement of Country Statement.
M&G NSW – How to Develop a Public Program
A guide by Museums & Galleries of NSW (M&G NSW) on how to design public programs that are meaningful cultural experiences for new and existing audiences.
UQ Art Museum & M&G NSW – Cultural Mediation resources
Museums & Galleries of NSW (M&G NSW) and UQ Art Museum have been working closely together to adapt Mediation strategies to the Australian arts and cultural sector. These two downloadable worksheets for staff and volunteers can be used with any exhibition to support the methodology of cultural mediation practice. Both worksheets can be added to the exhibition information package of every exhibition as a useful professional development resource.
Useful Resources & Further Reading
Art? Art! Art.. an audience development handbook for public art galleries and museums
Written by Dr. Jane Deeth and Tracey Cockburn, ‘Art? Art! Art.. an audience development handbook for public art galleries and museums’ is for people working in the visual arts who are engaged with developing audiences in Australia’s regional art galleries and who would like to expand their viewers’ experience of contemporary art.
This guide provides communication strategies for staff and volunteers to connect their audiences with exhibitions.
The Australian Curriculum
This website is for version 9 of the Australian Curriculum. You can search learning areas by ‘subject’ and ‘year level’ to read the learning expectations with curricular codes. There are also cross curriculum aims to explore.
National Association for the Visual Arts Teacher Toolkit
This NAVA Toolkit offers ‘How to’ Educator and Classroom Guides for teaching and applying the Code of Practice in the classroom, with content and learning outcomes linked to curriculums and syllabuses for all Australian states and territories. Resources include ‘How to stage a student exhibition’, an ‘Introduction to Committing to Meaningful First Nations Projects in Education Settings’, and ‘Classroom Guides’ that allow students to discover ideas, themes and topics from the Code of Practice for Visual Arts Craft and Design through the artist’s voice.