The Mexican Gallery at the British Museum: an Evaluation of its Impact as an Educational Resource
Christopher Winter
Dissertation submitted for an
MA degree (Museums and Galleries in Education)
at the Institute of Education, University of London, September 1995.
e-mail me if you have any comments: chriswinter@clara.net
This dissertation may be made available to the general public for borrowing, photocopying or consultation without the prior consent of the author.
Contents
EVALUATION OF THE EDUCATION PROGRAMME
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the new Mexican Gallery at the British Museum, concentrating in particular on how the gallery is used as an educational resource for a wide range of target groups.
Chief among these is schoolchildren, but the educational programme related to the gallery also embraces events, activities and publications for adults and families, and the impact and effectiveness of this whole programme is the subject of this evaluation.
In the Introduction, my philosophical approach to the subject and the research methodology employed are outlined.
Chapter 1 examines the background to the creation of the Mexican Gallery, concentrating on the complex relationship between ethnographic and archaeological collections within the British Museum. The curatorial, educational and design processes which contributed to the creation of the gallery are discussed, in order to illustrate that the gallery is a result of input from a number of quite separate disciplines within the museum profession.
Chapter 2 analyses who visits the gallery, and how it is used by the general public, rather than by organised groups. Some comparisons are made with visitor profiles and behaviour in other parts of the British Museum, in order to discover how effectively the gallery engages its audience, and how successful is the level of interpretation which is built in to the gallery itself.
The education programme for schools, adults and families is described in depth and evaluated in Chapters 3 and 4. Particular attention is given to the responses to two questionnaires, one for schools visiting the gallery, and one for adults visiting film shows. A detailed analysis of these responses leads to the identification of those parts of the programme which succeed, and of those which fail.
Chapter 5 summarises these findings, and discusses the lessons learnt from the Mexican Gallery which might be applied to future projects at the British Museum.
I would like to thank everyone who has suffered my pedantic questioning so patiently, especially Penny Bateman and Colin McEwan.
Thanks are also due to Laura Malins, Jodi Laumer, and Simon James for their help with my research, and to Saul Peckham, who took the photographs.
"If collections are the heart of museums, what we have come to call education - the commitment to presenting objects and ideas in an informative and stimulating way - is the spirit"
(cited in Stapp and Munley, 1986)
This quote comes from a 1984 report by the American Association of Museums which called upon museums to re-dedicate themselves to their historic mission as agents of popular education, and is used to support the assertion that:
"The philosophy of educational responsibility is firmly embedded in the foundation of most North American museums... Public programs, especially exhibits, are central to museums fulfilling their educational role in society. Because audience research provides understanding of the interaction between museums and their visitors, it has become an integral part of responsible programme development".
(Seagram, Patten and Lockett, 1993, p.29)
Sadly, that philosophy, and the attendant endeavour to understand how the museum and its visitors interact, is not central to the institution of the British Museum, and I offer this document as a contribution, however peripheral, to this neglected field of audience research.
Before continuing, I should declare my own involvement with the educational programme under consideration, as my job within the Education Service at the British Museum means that I am involved with the programming of the films and videos for the public, and I have helped with the design of one of the resource packs under examination, but I shall nevertheless approach the task with as objective an eye as possible. Some, of course, may question whether this is feasible, and would contend that an involvement of any sort with the programme being assessed means not only that I have a strong vested interest in the outcome of the evaluation, but that my research must be bound by a covert set of values and assumptions. In countering this view, I can only say that my sincere intention is to tackle the subject with as open a mind as possible, and to reach my conclusions through thorough and rigorous research, rather than presenting material in order simply to confirm my own ideological standpoint. The position from which I approach this evaluation is, however, as someone with a profound belief in the duty of publicly funded national institutions, such as the British Museum, to seek to serve the public in the widest possible sense, by making strenuous efforts to become as accessible as possible, both physically and intellectually. This requires an understanding of the motivation of those who visit, and of the attitudes of those who do not, and a commitment to constantly improving the service to all of these constituents.
Since I am concerned with researching a variety of programmes and audiences, I have used a range of techniques for gathering data; these I will outline here, although I shall be talking about them in more detail at the relevant times. Firstly, in order to find out in detail the history of the creation of the new gallery and the processes involved, I have relied on conducting a number of interviews with some of the key people involved in those processes. With the notable exception of the Mexican architect and designer of the gallery, I have had access to many of those whose input was most important, and have treated each interview in a largely informal and open-ended manner, as each of the people interviewed views the history of the Mexican Gallery from a very distinct perspective. These interviews are listed at APPENDIX A.
Secondly, in order to get some idea of how the general public relate to the gallery, I have relied mainly on observations of visitor behaviour, without going in to very great depth, or interviewing visitors at length about their responses to the gallery. I have deliberately limited this aspect of my evaluation, since I am not primarily concerned with conducting a statistical survey, but rather with understanding how the gallery tends to be used by visitors, against which I can compare the patterns of behaviour of school groups.
The bulk of my research concentrates on schools, and here I have utilised a very catholic methodology. Structured and unstructured interviews with teachers and children, observation of classroom work and of museum visits, questionnaires for teachers and participation in formal and informal discussions have all contributed to the data gathered and to my understanding of the issues. The remainder of the educational programme, comprising a variety of events for adults and for families, I have researched less exhaustively, relying on questionnaires and observation of various activities, with interviews forming only a small part of the exercise.
If one was to categorise what type of evaluation I am conducting, one would conclude that the emphasis is on what Korn describes as the 'naturalistic' approach, but not to the exclusion of 'scientific' evaluation. Broadly, these two paradigms are characterised as being independent of, if not actually opposed to, each other:
"...the fundamental difference between the paradigms is the assumptions on which they are based. These assumptions are as follows: the scientific paradigm seeks results by rejecting or confirming theories using quantitative methods; and the naturalistic paradigm seeks results by generating theories using qualitative methods."
(Korn, 1989, p.222)
However, as Korn and others point out, neither paradigm can satisfy all evaluation needs, as each has different strengths and weaknesses, and although the emphasis of this dissertation is on a qualitative approach to evaluation, quantitative methods are also used where appropriate. The purpose of the exercise is not to test any preconceived theories, but rather to collect or construct ideas based on a thorough understanding of people's responses.
Prior to the opening of the new Mexican Gallery in November 1994, the British Museum's large and academically important collection of material from Mesoamerica had remained largely unseen by the general public since coming into the Museum's possession through various sources, mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the adventurers and explorers responsible for transporting this material to England, three particular individuals stand out as having contributed most to the British Museum's stock: Alfred Maudslay, William Bullock and Henry Christy.
Maudslay made a number of expeditions to Maya sites in Guatemala, Mexico and Belize (then called British Honduras) between 1881 and 1894, and as well as acquiring a large collection of original Maya sculpture he took a vast number of plaster casts from inscriptions and architectural ornaments. These were housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum until the British Museum accepted them in 1922, and displayed them for a number of years in the 'Maudsley Room'. Maudslay's book 'Biologia Centrali-Americana' is still considered a classic work by students of Maya archaeology, and among the many now-famous pieces in his collection were a series of carved stone lintels from Yaxchilan. Bullock was a private collector, and the source of much of the material from Isla de Sacrificios, a sacred island off the Gulf Coast, while Christy is to thank for the fact that the British Museum now holds some of the most striking surviving Aztec objects. From his collection come turquoise mosaic masks and other regalia, including perhaps the most well-known and most often reproduced, an ornament in the shape of a double-headed serpent (fig. 1).
Fig.1
Interestingly, all the material collected from Mesoamerica falls under the auspices of the Museum's Department of Ethnography, the department ostensibly devoted to the anthropological collections, and which moved in 1970 from the main Museum site at Bloomsbury to its current home at the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. The rationale for this demarcation is especially hard to fathom in the case of the material from Mesoamerica, since the objects in question date exclusively from the region's ancient history as opposed to its recent past, yet historically have not apparently been treated with the same esteem afforded to what we understand as the great civilisations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Asia. Indeed, the question of what to do with the ethnographic collections has apparently troubled the British Museum throughout its history, and the material from Mesoamerica has been cared for variously over the years by the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities, the Department of Ceramics and Ethnography, and the Department of Oriental Antiquities and Ethnography.
With a shortage of permanent gallery space at the Museum of Mankind, very little has been seen recently of this material beyond a large temporary exhibition of Maya art, 'The British and the Maya', in 1973, and a small permanent gallery devoted to the most famous part of the collection, the Aztec turquoise mosaics. Many of the objects have been out on loan to other museums and galleries throughout the world - including, in 1992, the exhibition, 'The Art of Ancient Mexico' at London's Hayward Gallery - and have been available to scholars for study purposes, but the only opportunity which visitors to the Museum of Mankind have had recently to see anything but the mosaics, and a few objects on display in a gallery showing 'treasures' from the ethnographic collections was when a handful of pieces were included in the extremely popular exhibition, 'The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico'. This exhibition, which ran from 1992 to 1994, focused on the contemporary arts and culture of Mexico, whilst making links with the country's pre-Hispanic past, in a truly 'ethnological' manner. The response to the exhibition was overwhelmingly positive, many adults and children describing it as the best exhibition they had ever been to, and it seems that this success had a direct influence on the decision to create a new gallery at the Museum's main site at Bloomsbury to accommodate at last some of the ancient material in the collections.
Although for many years the curatorial staff within the Department of Ethnography had been pressing for a permanent display area to be made available, it took the external influence of the then Mexican President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, to provide the impetus needed to realise this ambition. Stimulated by the success of 'The Skeleton at the Feast' exhibition, President Salinas obtained assurances of money from Mexican businesses and from two Mexican cultural organisations; the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, and the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia. With the funding guaranteed, 'as part of a programme of cultural collaboration' (BM Management Plan, 1995), a room which was previously being used by the British Library was converted into the new gallery. This fitted in nicely with the Museum's long-term aim of welcoming the Ethnographic Department back to Bloomsbury, once the British Library have moved to their new building at St. Pancras, freeing more space for the Museum's use.
However, the money from Mexico did not come without strings, and one important condition was that the new gallery be designed by the Mexican architect Teodoro Gonzales de Leon. Thus began a difficult collaborative process of design and construction of the gallery with a great many people involved: the architect and his appointed 'museographer', Miguel Cervantes from Mexico; the curators from the Ethnographic Department, Elizabeth Carmichael and Colin McEwan, assisted by Norma Rosso; Penny Bateman from the Education Service; the British Museum's Design Office staff and those responsible for the Museum's 'Architectural and Building Services', as well as a number of different contractors.
After something of a false start, the central curatorial role of selecting objects to go on display and of writing the labels fell to Colin McEwan, of the Department of Ethnography, who himself was ultimately answerable to the Keeper of the department, John Mack. His task, for which the time scale was by now very short in museum terms, was to select the final number of objects from an already existing list which his predecessor on the project had drawn up, and which itself consisted of several hundred objects from the total number of 8,000 to 9,000 pieces in the collection. Some objects were almost self-selecting, in that they are recognised as artefacts of outstanding quality or academic significance. The collection of Aztec turquoise mosaics come into this category, as do the Mayan lintels from the site of Yaxchilan (fig. 2),
Fig. 2
which illustrate accession rituals such as bloodletting and conjuring ancestral spirits, and which are central to modern understanding of Maya hieroglyphic writing. Conversely, a good many objects from the collection would not have been suitable for selection for permanent display as they would frankly be of limited interest, such as the vast number of potsherds recovered from archaeological digs. Between these two poles, though, the criteria applied to the selection process were broadly to show the best of the collections, and in keeping with one of the British Museum's five primary objectives:
"to make the collections available to the general public, maintaining attractive and informative exhibitions and to provide a source of knowledge and enjoyment"
(British Museum Management Plan, 1995, p.4).
Colin McEwan's conception of the gallery was that it should endeavour to reflect in a balanced way the very wide range of different cultures that go to make up what archaeologists and historians call Mesoamerica, but there were two particular barriers to the full realisation of this ideal. The first was that some of the cultures in question are poorly represented in the British Museum's collection, particularly the Toltec, who are not represented by a single object, and there are therefore some important historical gaps. The second constraint was that, geographically, the lands peopled by the Maya fell largely outside the boundaries of modern-day Mexico, and extended into what are today Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Despite this, none of these other countries are represented in the gallery, since one of the constraints was that the gallery should display only objects recovered from Mexico itself. However, Colin McEwan is adamant that there were no significant omissions from the selection for the sake of political expediency, and that the gallery as it stands represents as broadly and as thoroughly as possible - given the limitations of space - the various cultures and civilisations under consideration. This assertion is open to challenge, however, as there are certain well-known Maya objects, such as the Fenton Vase, which one would expect to find in a comprehensive survey of Maya art in the British Museum, but which are excluded as they were originally excavated from Belize or Guatemala. It is reasonable to share Brian Wallis's concerns about how nations can present a view of themselves to the world through exhibitions of art, where :
"...the boundaries of the modern country can be swelled to fill the expanse of a far earlier empire...'The Nation' is perceived as an empty and elastic container into which can be fit any variety of art objects."
(Wallis, 1994, p.272)
Although Wallis is here writing specifically about exhibitions arranged as part of national cultural festivals, his misgivings are pertinent in the case of the British Museum's Mexican Gallery, as the funding for the whole project came directly from Mexican capital:
"...these exhibitions scarcely broach the complicated issues raised by any contemporary, multicultural society or touch on the contradictions or conflicts in the histories of the countries they represent.
And in terms of the museum's role, these shows are far from the disinterested scholarship most museums claim to provide. Though scrupulously researched and painstakingly displayed, nationalist exhibitions are, in the end, a blatant, self-admitted form of propaganda. Yet museums, strapped for cash now more than ever, are reluctant to resist the allure of these well-endowed crowd-pleasers, even when they verge on exploitation of the museum's intellectual resources and professional integrity."
(Wallis, 1994, p.279)
An important consideration for Colin McEwan was how to make sense of so many different and discrete cultures within a single gallery, and the favoured solution was to divide the areas of the gallery geographically along the lines of the five main areas where these civilisations developed, namely The Gulf Coast, The Maya Region, West Mexico, The Central Highlands and the Oaxaca Valley. Within each of these areas the various cultures which dominated at different periods in history are then charted, and these divisions are made implicit using a system of colour coding which links the areas of the gallery to a large map on the introductory panel, and to a time-line illustrating the relative dominance of the different civilisations (fig. 3).
Fig.3
This mode of display conforms to what Susan Pearce characterises as an archaic approach to displaying ethnographic material, rather than to the approaches which came to dominate in the wake of the establishment of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in the late nineteenth century:
"The collections were arranged not geographically or by find site, but typologically, with objects of the same type from many places grouped in sequences which were intended to show how the complexities and the different designs which they exhibited could be related to each other, and to a common ancestor. Pitt Rivers's debt to Darwinian ideas of evolution is obvious, but equally clearly the concept also holds the germ of functionalist ideas about adaptation to circumstances which were later to dominate British anthropology. The gulf between him and earlier collectors is demonstrated by his remark that his material was 'not for the purpose of surprising anyone, either by the beauty or the value of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction.' "
(Pearce, 1989, p.4)
In this context, the exhibition of artefacts in the Mexican Gallery can be seen as being at odds with what one understands ethnographic displays to be, and by Colin McEwan's own admission the collection represents not anthropology in any sense, but archaeology, with an overall approach to presentation of material culture that is not didactic, but primarily what Furst (1989) and Belcher (1991) describe as 'aesthetic':
"The aim of the presentation is that the visitor should appreciate the beauty of the objects, which are selected for exhibition on that basis... The design of the presentation is compatible with the aim, and an 'aesthetic' ambience is created"
(Belcher, 1991, p. 60)
The challenge which this presented to Colin McEwan as a curator was, as he saw it, to find ways of creating layers of meaning for people with different expectations of the gallery, by using a variety of means of interpretation. On the one level, then, the objects relate to each other visually in a number of subtle ways that are intended to convey the sense that the major civilisations of Mesoamerica not only had contact with each other, but drew influences from each other's sculptural styles and techniques. One certainly receives a sense of this cross-cultural coherence by spending time in the gallery, although some of the very deliberate juxtapositions of objects which are intended to convey this message, such as the Aztec seated figure of Mictlantecuhtli gazing across the gallery towards the Huaxtec female deity Tlazolteotl high on a plinth (fig. 4), work only on a very subliminal level, if at all.
Fig 4
Going one step further, the labels which relate to each object, and the general case labels, are intended not only to decipher the sometimes obscure forms, but to explore some of the historical and cultural context. Thus, the label for a Huaxtec shell pendant tells us that:
"The scene inscribed into the surface of this pendant depicts an individual who is being sacrificed by decapitation. A stream of blood pours down into the upturned open jaws of the squatting earth deity. Blood sacrifice was offered to nourish the earth and to assure the growth of crops necessary to sustain human life. The pendant was fashioned from a section of conch shell and worn suspended from the neck."
This introduces us to one of the recurring themes that we find throughout the gallery, that of bloodletting and sacrifice to the gods. Another label, this time for an Aztec jade figure of an eagle warrior, gives us some information about military structures, and leads on to other objects:
"Eagle and jaguar warriors were schooled in the art of war in special precincts in the heart of Tenochtitlan. They earned their status in military orders by performing feats of bravery and daring, notably securing captives for sacrifice. Warriors were awarded insignia, such as cloaks, helmets and shields, according to rank (See Aztec shield with turquoise mosaic inlay)."
This level of language and content is fairly typical of the text on the labels as a whole, and is intended to give more information than just a bare description of the object, as was the case with the previously mentioned exhibition of ancient Mexican art at the Hayward Gallery, or as has at times been the case at the Museum of Mankind, to judge from the following description:
"..the Introduction to the Collection room seems to contain a series of objects from a vast range of countries and peoples organised in a way which reproduces the comparative and typological taxonomy associated with many large ethnographic collections of the nineteenth century such as the Pitt Rivers Museum. The emphasis here is on form and function: the only information accompanying these objects is provenance and date, and it is a date which indicates the time when it was acquired by the museum, rather than when it was manufactured."
(Coombes, 1984, p.116)
The system of contextualising the objects using the colour-coded maps and time-lines persists also in all the publications prepared specifically to tie in with the gallery: the short Gallery Guide, available to visitors for a charge of 30 pence, albeit from a dispenser situated outside the gallery itself; a hastily written book, 'Ancient Mexico in the British Museum' by Colin McEwan; and the 'Mexican Gallery Resource Pack' and 'The Aztecs Resource Pack', both written by Penny Bateman of the British Museum Education Service. In fact, the degree to which all of these materials relate to each other and to the gallery itself is testament to the heavy involvement of Penny Bateman in the curatorial process, and it is true to say that the level of collaboration and genuine co-operation that took place in this instance between 'the curator' and 'the educator' was abnormal by comparison to the customary processes involved in putting together permanent exhibitions at the British Museum. Why this should have been so in the case of the Mexican Gallery can be attributed largely to the personalities involved rather than to any coherent policy on the part of the British Museum. It was apparent from the beginning of his involvement that Colin McEwan, coming as he does from a background in American museums, took what he describes as a holistic approach to the processes involved in creating a new gallery, with the broad concerns of education very much at the centre of his thinking, and that this seemed to him a very natural way to approach the project. Consequently, the appointment of his wife Norma Rosso as a research assistant, working closely with Penny Bateman on aspects of the education programme as well as being concerned with complicated and time-consuming organisational matters, helped to cement the relationship between curatorial and educational interests, and enabled information and ideas to flow freely between the two. The outcome of this strategy of collaboration was that the educational programme could be designed and planned in harmony with the gallery itself, and thus should ideally complement the exhibition in way that might not have happened otherwise. Likewise, the educational input into the curatorial work of selection and display of the objects themselves was itself of great value.
The British Museum had not previously been involved in a collaboration on such an ambitious scale before, and from the very start of the project there was scepticism from within the Museum about the practicalities of the architect's conception of the gallery, which was strikingly at odds with the established traditions of the British Museum. Although compromises were made along the way from both sides, it is evident that many of the anticipated problems were not adequately examined before work began, and most of these remain as unsolved problems which will need to be addressed at some time in the future. For example, in the original design, a large pyramidal plinth which supports stone figures of female deities was meant to taper down to a point at the floor on two corners, which it was obvious would present a serious hazard to visitors, who would be certain to trip over them. The compromise reached was to truncate these points at a slightly higher level (fig. 6); this resulted in an injury to someone's shin, since when temporary rope barriers have been placed around the plinth, detracting from the elegance of the design which had been so important.
Fig 6
There are similar problems with the glass cases, the lighting and the slate walls and ceiling, and one other feature is worthy of discussion here, as the nuisance caused by an alarm in the gallery has been mentioned by many people. Along one wall of the gallery, against a bright red background, are mounted a series of Mayan lintels from Yaxchilan, which are not protected by glass but by an electronic beam which when broken sets off an alarm. In an effort to keep visitors away from the lintels the bottom section of this wall is angled towards the centre of the gallery, thus keeping the visitors' feet from encroaching beyond a certain point (fig. 7).
Fig. 7
However, the labels describing the scenes on the lintels are themselves set very low down and are dimly lit, so that in leaning forward to read them and decipher the complex scene portrayed, one is surprised by a shrill alarm, and immediately made to feel self-conscious. There can be no argument about the need to ensure that these objects are not touched by the visiting public, but the logic of this particular arrangement is obscure, since other objects in the gallery are quite happily placed behind glass while some are completely unprotected, having been placed in the open at the perfect height for visitors to accept the implicit invitation to touch them. One might accept the explanation that these particular objects are either less precious or more hard-wearing than the lintels, were it not for the fact that outside the entrance to the gallery is mounted another lintel from the same series, unprotected by either glass or an alarm, in an area which does not generally boast the presence of a vigilant gallery warder.
These absurdities and complications notwithstanding, the Mexican Gallery opened in November 1994, only slightly behind schedule, and immediately attracted widespread praise for its striking originality of design. This is an attribute for which the British Museum, whatever the other qualities of its exhibitions, is not renowned, as the current policy is to maintain a deliberately bland 'house style' throughout the galleries.
The new gallery contrasts with the rest of the British Museum in a number of ways, and its location within the building also marks it out as being different to the norm. Whereas most of the other galleries serve also as passages through to other parts of the Museum, the Mexican Gallery, in common with the Islamic Gallery, finds itself physically rather isolated from the rest of the exhibition space, located as it is at the north end of the King's Library, the largest of the British library's exhibition areas. Consequently, this gallery attracts less 'passing trade' than most other galleries, and it might be fair to assume that a higher than average proportion of its visitors have made the effort to find it, rather than stumbled upon it. On entering the Mexican Gallery, whether by accident or design, the visitor is likely to be struck by the dramatic effect of the lighting, and by the unusual architecture of the room and its contents (fig. 8).
Fig. 8
Although occupying an unpromisingly small rectangular space, the gallery succeeds in conveying something of the feeling of a Mayan temple, being inspired by the motifs and forms of Ancient Mesoamerican architecture. On opening in November 1994, the Mexican Gallery was greeted with widespread acclaim, as evinced by this florid account in The Architectural Review:
"A former cataloguing room has been impressively transformed into a numinous, temple-like space, presided over by a pantheon of stone deities from various Mesoamerican cultures. Throughout, the aim has been to exploit and express the inherent drama and primeval potency of the exhibits in a series of theatrical tableaux. Instead of being clinically arrayed in standardized display cases, many of the larger pieces are free-standing in an attempt to suggest their original contexts as part of sacred or secular buildings. Crossing the threshold of the new gallery from the lofty confines of the King's Library, the visitor experiences a palpable and slightly disquieting sense of entering into a different time and place. The entrance is guarded by a carving of the Aztec fire serpent, Xiuhcoatl, mounted on a stele...
The main exhibition area contains a pair of pyramidal plinths clad in Ancaster limestone - solid geometry out of which the awe-inspiring representations appear to grow. On one side the central space is framed by a semi-suspended showcase painted in a rich ultramarine. This case contains the jewels of the collection, Aztec ritual masks, serpents, and other objects clad in minuscule turquoise mosaics...
The rear wall underneath the portico is finished in blood red stucco reflecting the original colour of many Mayan ceremonial buildings and providing a dramatic backdrop to a thematic sequence of intricately carved stone lintels from the ancient Mayan city of Yaxchilan... The intention is that these precious relics should be viewed and experienced in a setting inspired by their original architectural context.
The entire design is a bold and considered attempt to create an atmosphere that consciously refers to original Mesoamerican architectural forms and materials. Through such sensitive abstraction, the marvellous treasury of objects on display assumes an even greater mystical and archaeological resonance."
(Slessor, 1995, pp. 38-39)
Without conducting a large scale and in-depth survey of visitors, it would be impossible to provide an accurate picture of who exactly makes up the audience for the Mexican gallery, but some observations can be made on how the audience for this particular gallery might differ from elsewhere in the Museum. One benchmark against which to measure these observations is the British Museum's most recent survey of visitors conducted between August 1992 and June 1993, the results of which are summarised thus:
"British Museum visitors divided almost evenly between men and women. The largest single age group were the 20-year olds, but the number of visitors in their 30s and 40s is quite high. Even with the exclusion of school parties, from 30-40% of respondents were aged under 30. The majority of visitors were in employment but there was a high percentage of students. Most were in social classes ABC1 and well-educated (70% with degree or professional qualification).
(British Museum Management Plan, 1995, p. 103)
In order to gather my own data on visitors to the Mexican Gallery, observations were made in the gallery itself at different times of the day and on a number of occasions from February to May 1995. In order to make a genuine comparison with another location in the Museum, the methodology applied echoes that of Simon James of the Education Service, who conducted an earlier survey of visitors to Room 40, the Roman Britain Gallery. This involved conducting a fairly primitive 'tracking' survey, observing a visitor as he or she entered the gallery, and making notes on their route, where they stopped, and how long they spent in the gallery, as well as noting their sex and guessing at their approximate age. These observations are of necessity very limited in their scope and extremely subjective, but nevertheless offer some insights into visitor behaviour in two different galleries in the British Museum, which differ in character in one important respect. Whereas the Roman Britain gallery also acts as a through route to adjoining galleries, the Mexican Gallery only has one doorway through which visitors both enter and exit, and is also located in a position where a casual visitor would be less likely to stumble across it. As a result of this difference between the two galleries, one would guess that a relatively larger proportion of visitors to the Mexican Gallery are there because they have made a decision to look at that part of the Museum, whereas more of the visitors to the Roman Britain gallery might be simply passing through. This is reflected in the findings of the length of time which visitors spend in each gallery, as illustrated by the following table (fig. 9).
The far greater percentage of visitors spending less than a minute in the Roman Britain Gallery can probably be partly attributed to the differences in location between that and the Mexican Gallery, but what is more telling is that more people were observed to have spent in excess of 10 minutes in the Mexican Gallery - 7 from a sample of 100 visitors - in contrast to the Roman Britain Gallery, where only 5 from a total sample of 422 stayed for 10 minutes or more. There could of course be many factors contributing to this marked difference, and one of these may be that the very fact that the Mexican Gallery is so new means that visitors of a scholarly bent were undertaking their first visit during the period of observation. Future surveys might well find the pattern more closely reflecting that of the Roman Britain Gallery, but it is also possible that there are qualities inherent in the Mexican Gallery which encourage visitors to stay longer and to absorb more. Although once again very difficult to quantify without a more detailed form of survey, the impression which Simon James recorded was that only about 20% of visitors to the Roman Britain Gallery looked at one or more labels, or scanned the first line of panels, whereas in my estimation the figure for people reading at least some of the text in the Mexican Gallery was more like 60%. This is a significant finding, and an encouraging one for the curator, who had such faith in the ability of the labels to aid the visitor in interpreting the objects in the gallery.
An important part of the labelling concept was that the gallery should be 'read' from left to right, starting with the panel introducing the plan of the different regions and cultures, and then moving through a chronological line within each cultural area, in a generally clockwise direction, but the design of the gallery itself does not make this implicit. As a result, although 44% of the visitors who I observed did indeed turn to the left on entering the gallery, 32% turned right and headed straight for the Aztec material, and the remaining 24% more or less walked straight ahead on entering the gallery, after skirting round the figure of the Aztec Fire Serpent, Xiuhcoatl which stands immediately inside the doorway (fig..10).
Fig. 10
What this means is that fewer than half of the visitors were exposed straight away to the main introductory panel which clarifies the structure of the gallery, and although a few who had turned to the right eventually came back to read this, a majority of the visitors did not. Nor did many visitors purchase the Introductory Guide, which also sets out very clearly the structure of the gallery. The net result was that this particular aspect of the labelling, and the rationale for the colour-coding of the cases, was probably lost on most visitors. Almost all of the longer visits, that is to say those of 5 minutes or more, and up to the longest of 26 minutes, saw the visitor take what one could call the 'proper' route, and this perhaps suggests that an understanding of the structure of the gallery through exposure to the introductory panel actually helps to focus interest in the gallery and thus to prolong the length of the visit. If that were indeed the case it would be a powerful argument in favour of the labelling system adopted here. This route, which was followed quite closely by many of these less hasty visitors, involved turning left on entering the gallery, and travelling clockwise around the perimeter, taking in the wall cases and the Yaxchilan Lintels on the far wall, before arriving at the Aztec material, and spending a good deal of time looking at both sides of the suspended case containing the mosaics. However, even among the longer visits, very few people then went on to look closely at either of the central, open plinths, which is perhaps surprising given Colin McEwan's vision of these objects as extending some sort of personal greeting to the visitor. My impression was that people tended to observe these unprotected objects in passing, whereas the very fact of an object being in a glass case seems to invite closer scrutiny, of the artefact as well as any labels, the received message being that such objects are more precious or more important and therefore more worthy of attention. How far any exhibition should attempt to proscribe a route or an order of viewing exhibits to its visitors is an issue which continues to be debated among exhibition designers, and in looking at this issue, the Science Museum in London have done some work on developing a 'model of visitor behaviour', which is based on several assumptions, one of which is that:
"Visitors do indeed appreciate a comprehensible structure to the exhibition as a whole, even if they don't follow it. They like to be able to orientate themselves within the exhibition."
(Bicknell and Mann, 1994, p196)
This seems a fair assumption, especially when one is concerned with an exhibition that contains some form of time-based narrative, as the Mexican Gallery does, and one wonders whether it might be desirable somehow to find a way of directing visitors to the left on entering the gallery, and towards the introductory panel. To some degree this happens already, as the lighting of the pyramidal plinth to the left is more inviting than the gloom to the right, but from my observations a majority of visitors do not respond to this subtle suggestion, and short of making it compulsory to turn to the left, it might be an extremely useful device to repeat the 'introductory' panel somewhere on the right hand side of the gallery, or even centrally.
The only factors which can be accurately measured by this tracking survey, and by that conducted in Room 40, are the time spent in the gallery and the routes taken, but it is worth reporting here on the estimated age and sex of the visitors by comparison to the visitor profile of the Museum as a whole, if only to exclude any wild variations from the respective samples.
Figure 12 indicates that both the Mexican Gallery and the Roman Britain Gallery have a slightly younger visitor profile to that discovered by the 1992-93 visitor survey, with slightly more visitors in their 30s and 40s compared to the Museum-wide sample, with the only striking anomaly being that in the Mexican Gallery people in their 30s were noted as the largest single age group, as opposed to people in their 20s elsewhere. One can not make too much of this, however, as the accuracy of guessing a person's age from brief observations can only be very approximate, and far more accurate work would need to be done to reach any valid conclusions, but the number of visitors in their 50s and 60s does appear to be significantly fewer in both of the galleries being examined than in the overall sample, and this is another issue that would require an extensive amount of survey work to discover which particular galleries are attracting which particular age group the most, and why. One figure which I am more confident is an accurate one is the breakdown of visitors by sex (fig. 13), and here there is clear consistency in the results, which tends to validate the various samples.
Overall, then, one can summarise these results as demonstrating that the profile of visitors to the Mexican Gallery is not significantly different to elsewhere in the Museum in terms of age and sex, with nationality not even being guessed at, but that the time spent in the gallery tends to be longer than that spent in the only other gallery for which data is currently available, the Roman Britain Gallery.
The one other observation of visitor behaviour that is worth noting is the effect which the alarm protecting the Yaxchilan Lintels has on them. During the observations in the Mexican Gallery, mostly when there were no school groups present, this alarm was set off on average once every 5-10 minutes, with the result that visitors were startled out of their concentration on whichever exhibits they were looking at, and glared towards the direction of the alarm, or whoever had set it off. This clearly interferes with the enjoyment of the gallery, and I have had many comments to that effect. It is significant that on all of these occasions the alarm had been triggered not by somebody deliberately attempting to touch the objects, but by a bag or clipboard accidentally breaking the beam, or by somebody's head as they stooped to try and read the dimly lit and poorly located labels. Indeed, on one occasion a visitor persisted in breaking the beam and setting the alarm off for more than a minute continuously, since he had poor eyesight, and the warder in attendance quite rightly felt that he was not entitled to tell the gentleman concerned not to read the labels. This raises again the issue of the tension which existed from the outset between the purist, aesthetic concept of the designers of the gallery, and the practical needs of a public institution which by definition should be not only considering but insisting on a mode of display which widens physical and intellectual accessibility rather than restricts it, and this tension is far from being resolved.
In order to attract funding for the educational programme linked to the new gallery, Penny Bateman of the Education Service composed a document called an 'Education Plan' which was presented to The Baring Foundation, the potential sponsors of the programme. This contained broad aims and specific objectives to be achieved over a two year period from the opening of the gallery, the aims of the programme being four-fold:
"i) To play a key role in developing public awareness of and interest in the archaeological past of Mexico and the broader region of Mesoamerica as well as their ethnographic heritage throughout Mexico and Central America.
ii) To take advantage of the first Museum of Mankind collection to return to Bloomsbury by providing a high profile and integrated programme of educational events aimed at the full range of our public from scholars and adult visitors to school parties and families. Many primary schools now study the Aztecs and Maya as part of the National History Curriculum, for example.
iii) To build on the considerable interest developed by the highly successful exhibition, The Skeleton at the Feast, for which the Baring Foundation generously helped to support the visiting artists programme.
iv) To produce a long term programme for which we are seeking partners to complement this permanent gallery."
(Bateman, 1994d)
In order to meet these aims, the plan was for the programme to be targeted at three main types of audience - adults, families and schools - and to be structured around three main subjects: an introduction to Mesoamerican cultures; the integration of art, religion and science in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica; and change and continuity in contemporary cultures in Mexico and Central America. The other target group, who are not specifically mentioned here, but who were considered to be important by Penny Bateman, were what one might call the indigenous audience of people from Mexico and elsewhere in Central and South America, an audience which had been built up considerably during the earlier Skeleton at the Feast exhibition and activities at the Museum of Mankind, but who now needed to be wooed back to the British Museum once again. In devising a programme for the three stated target audiences, this earlier experience of running events related to an exhibition of Mexican art was built upon and a series of events proposed which fell into one of the three categories as defined, although there is naturally a degree of crossover between them.
For adults, one of the first events was an academic conference on 'Mesoamerican Studies: Mexican-European perspectives', which attracted scholars in that field as well as students and members of the general public to whom it was also open, and although it appealed to a fairly narrow audience it was nevertheless regarded as a great success in terms of the exchange of ideas between academics in an area which has not had great exposure to date in Europe. Of a less specialist nature, study days were planned for the general public focusing on particular objects in the collections or on particular themes such as 'Jades and other precious materials', or 'The natural world in Mesoamerican art'. Less formally, a series of visiting artists would be invited to run workshops for the public and to take part in 'master classes' involving British artists and students. This was the type of activity which had proved most successful during 'The Skeleton at the Feast' exhibition, when a number of artists and craftspeople came from Mexico to work at the Museum of Mankind, sometimes for up to a month at a time. These included artists whose own work was represented in the exhibition itself, such as members of the Linares family who work with papier-machÇ, and the sculptor, Saulo Moreno, and without exception the opportunity to learn about and to experiment with various processes and materials was enthusiastically received by children and adults alike. Finally for adults, it was proposed that there should be a series of gallery talks, lectures and films as part of the regular programme of such events at the British Museum, thus legitimising the place of the Mexican Gallery alongside the established staples of Egypt and Greece.
For families, it was proposed that there should be such events as storytelling and craft workshops which could attract groups of families with children, and that the educational organisation Mexicolore should conduct inter-active workshops available not only to school groups, but to family groups as well. Once again, the involvement of Mexicolore with the educational programme is a legacy of their extensive work previously for 'The Skeleton at the Feast' exhibition, which I know from my own observations at the time to have been extremely popular, and to have added a completely new dimension to people's experience of that exhibition.
The third target group specified at this proposal stage was schools, with events ranging from study days for teachers to artists' workshops and, once again, inter-active workshops with Mexicolore, although the bulk of the effort was to be put into the production of two resource packs for schools, one on the Aztecs and one on the Mexican Gallery itself. Other planned publications and materials were also included in the proposals, including the full colour book, 'Ancient Mexico in the British Museum', the short gallery guide leaflet, and a children's 'Aztec Activity Book'.
These proposals were skilfully tailored to fit the expectations of the potential sponsors, and once the sponsorship funds of around ú60,000 were agreed by The Baring Foundation, the Museum was able to plan and execute the programme in earnest, beginning with the preparation of the various publications.
Since the idea of a National Curriculum was made statutory as part of the Education Reform Act of 1988, and more specifically since the introduction of the History National Curriculum in 1991, the British Museum has found itself having to cope with something like a three-fold increase in demand from schools for visits, and along with this has come an enormous demand for resources on certain topics, such as Ancient Egypt, for which the Museum is one of the primary sources in the country. Despite this massive increase in demand, however, there has not been a concomitant increase in resources available to the Education Service, and they have found themselves increasingly able to do little more for schools than point them towards areas of the collections which might serve their needs within the limits of the National Curriculum, and produce printed resources tailored very closely to the programme of study proscribed therein. It was against this background that the two resource packs for schools were planned, one on the Mexican Gallery and one specifically on The Aztecs, although they can also stand alone as educational materials without reference to the National Curriculum.
The Aztecs resource pack was designed primarily to help teachers of History at Key Stage 2, who must teach the Core Study Unit known as 'Exploration and Encounters 1450 to 1550'. Within this Unit:
"Pupils should be introduced to the developments which brought Europeans into contact with American peoples. The focus should be on the reasons for the voyages of exploration, the Spanish voyages, the nature of Aztec civilisation, the encounter between the two cultures and its results".
(DES, 1991, History in the National Curriculum, p. 29)
This document goes on to specify that pupils should be taught about Montezuma and the Aztec Empire, the Aztec way of life, Aztec gods and religious practices, crafts and technology, and art and architecture, and the differences between European and Aztec civilisation, for much of which the new gallery provides an ideal source of information. In fact, until the creation of the Mexican Gallery, there was very little material on the Aztecs that was accessible to schools, and the opening of the gallery therefore provided an ideal opportunity for the production of printed resources on the Aztecs which could be supported by material evidence.
The Aztec Resource Pack, then, was designed very precisely to support this area of the National Curriculum, and specifies that the material contained in it has been written for the benefit of teachers teaching the subject, to provide the background information required and ideas for using the material in the Mexican Gallery, and is not designed to be used in its own right by pupils at Key Stage 2. The author, Penny Bateman, felt that there were a number of children's books on the Aztecs already in existence, but that they tended to be very thin in content and inclined to repeat a few truisms about the Aztecs that are of little use to teachers needing to find out in more depth about the subject. As a way of avoiding teachers having to wade through weighty books on the Aztecs in order to have the confidence to teach the subject, Penny Bateman felt that the Resource Pack could be used to supply an intermediate level of information which could be digested by teachers, yet which would also equip them with a fairly sophisticated level of understanding. The pack is divided into 12 sections which can be separated from each other, with sections on topics such as 'Symbols and Writing', or 'Art and Artists', as well as a glossary of unfamiliar terms and a reading list. Accompanying the text in each section are many illustrations drawn from various sources not in the British Museum, such as pictures from Codices and other manuscripts, as well as photographs of objects which are in the Mexican Gallery, and illustrated borders containing various signs and symbols. The section 'The People' (APPENDIX B) demonstrates the typical mix of information and illustration, with the main text supported by quotes and drawings taken from the Florentine Codex, and a photograph of a sculpture from the Mexican Gallery, showing an Aztec woman's appearance, noting her costume and hairstyle, while along the border is another drawing from a Codex, of a merchant. One of the sections of the pack, 'Using Evidence', is particularly useful to teachers as it emphasises the fact that much evidence of the Aztecs is missing to us, and that the objects which are on display in the British Museum are mostly religious objects and luxury goods, and tell us little about everyday life. The pack also contains the time chart from the gallery (APPENDIX C), which places the Aztecs in their Mesoamerican context, and refers teachers to the second resource pack on the Mexican Gallery itself, suggesting that a visit to the gallery could be combined with visits to other galleries to make comparisons between cultures.
Whereas the Aztec Resource Pack is very narrowly focused on teachers of a particular age group, the Mexican Gallery Resource Pack "is for teachers at all levels of education and for use particularly by secondary students, but it can be adapted for other ages". Expensively produced, and available free to groups actually visiting the Gallery, the pack contains full colour posters of ancient sites in Mexico, and of some of the 'star' objects, including the turquoise mosaic of a double-headed serpent. There is also included a colour map and time chart corresponding to that in the gallery, and a copy of the short gallery guide. The main sections of the pack can again be detached from each other, and each covers a different theme which can be explored throughout the gallery, and across the various cultures: 'Earth, Water, Sky', 'Time and Space', 'Thresholds', 'Rulers', 'People', 'Animals' and 'Sacred Art'. Concentrating very much on the objects in the gallery, with a plan indicating the location of each object illustrated, the text is far less dense than that in The Aztec Resource Pack, and emphasises the ideas and beliefs that were shared throughout Mesoamerican history. The section 'Earth, Water, Sky' (APPENDIX D), which deals with the symbolic representation of the elements in the form of deities, shows the layout, which is consistent throughout the pack. As well as these thematic sections, there is a glossary and a guide to pronunciation, a reading list, a sheet of line drawings of objects which can be photocopied, and suggestions for activities to be done at school and in the gallery.
In contrast to the specific area of the National Curriculum catered for by the Aztec Resource Pack, this pack suggests that it may be used for a whole number of curriculum areas, including the Maya option at Key Stage 2 History, as well as Art across the four Key Stages, Religious Education, and cross-curricular work such as design and technology and science, without being very specific as to how individual elements might relate to the Curriculum in these areas. Essentially, whereas the Aztec Resource Pack approaches its task from the point of view of trying to cover a particular subject in sufficient depth to satisfy the National Curriculum, drawing on material from a variety of sources, the Mexican Gallery Resource Pack is concerned with trying to interpret aspects of the collections in the Mexican Gallery, and the Gallery itself, and to draw attention to some of the themes common to the various Mesoamerican civilisations which would perhaps not be apparent otherwise.
The final component of the programme for schools was the engagement of Mexicolore to run a series of 16 half day workshops for pre-booked groups, designed specifically around objects in the Mexican Gallery and themes covered in the two resource packs. Mexicolore had previously worked along similar lines at the Museum of Mankind throughout the 'Skeleton at the Feast' exhibition, and the reaction of children to those events had been exceptionally positive, so that this at least was one area of the educational programme which the Museum felt fairly confident would be judged a success by those using it.
The debate about how one best assesses learning amongst schoolchildren is as far as ever from being resolved, as one can see from the fury which the present government's insistence on formal testing from an early age has provoked from so many teachers, who have resisted the introduction of proposed Standard Assessment Tests with unprecedented vigour. In trying to gain some measure of the effectiveness of the educational programme related to the Mexican Gallery, though, one should consider not the number of facts learned, or even whether the schoolchildren have 'correctly' understood whatever material they have been presented with, but what impact the experience has had upon their imagination or emotions. This is perhaps where museum visits come in to their own:
"..the true learning potential of the museum is in the opportunity for the imagination and the emotions to engage in an enjoyable way with knowledge-related concepts through active learning... In planning museum and gallery programmes, there is no point in replicating that which can be done elsewhere. The experience of the visit should enable the making of imaginative and emotional links to artefacts, specimens, historic sites and environments."
(Hooper-Greenhill 1991, p116)
If one takes the view that the learning of facts is only a very minor part of one's education, albeit that part upon which most emphasis is placed in the examination process, then one must declare that much of what one learns through formal education and beyond is intangible and unquantifiable. Put another way, if it was possible to measure out the component parts of any individual's consciousness, the bulk of what that individual 'knows' would actually turn out to be what they feel or think about the world, based on the experiences of that world which have most impacted on them. What I am looking at, then, is whether the use by schools of the Mexican Gallery is likely to have any bearing on the way the children's knowledge of or feelings about the world are formed.
As a first step towards evaluating schools' use of the Mexican Gallery and resources, I made contact with some of the schools who had booked a visit to the gallery, and arranged where possible to observe and discuss with the teachers in charge the three identifiable stages of work: preparatory work done in the classroom; the visit to the gallery; and any follow-up work back at school. From these initial exercises I then hoped to be able to concentrate my lines of enquiry in the form of a questionnaire to be sent to a far wider sample of schools, and this I was able to do once I had identified some concerns common to many of the teachers to whom I spoke. For the initial study I chose five different schools visiting the gallery between February and April 1995, and for the second stage questionnaires were sent to sixty schools who had visited between December 1994 and the end of April 1995. Visits made before that period were excluded on the basis that the gallery had not been open long enough for teachers to have had time to prepare their group visits in the light of a personal visit to the gallery.
The first school whose gallery visit I observed was St. James the Great Roman Catholic School in Thornton Heath, who brought a group of 60 children aged between 9 and 10 years old. Although they were studying the Aztecs as part of the History Curriculum at Key Stage 2, because of the timetable for that term they had not yet done much classroom work on the topic, so that their visit in effect served as an introduction to the subject. Fortunately, two of the teachers from the school were able to visit the Mexican Gallery a week prior to the school trip, and designed the visit to take account of the limited space in the gallery by splitting into groups of eight children and rotating these groups around not only the Mexican Gallery but the Medieval and Roman galleries, as well as the King's Library. Once in the Mexican Gallery, the children focused on three specific themes - animals, people and religion - by choosing from a series of worksheets which had been hastily prepared by the two teachers who had visited previously. These sheets, although superficially quite simple, encouraged very close observation of the objects as well as asking the children to make their own deductions. A good example is the sheet on 'Animals' (APPENDIX E), which invites the children to find and list their own selection of objects on which animals appear, and to deduce whether these are real or mythical creatures. Having noted several examples, the children are then asked which one they think is most true to life, and to consider how the artist has managed to achieve this accuracy, looking at materials, colour and texture, and then to do as detailed a drawing of this object as possible. Another sheet consisted simply of four images photocopied from the Mexican Gallery Resource pack which the children had to find and discover what materials they were made from, which involved searching the whole gallery and looking very closely for the specified objects. Thus the small group of children were each engaged in different activities and in different parts of the gallery at any given time, and the potentially difficult space was used effectively.
I was unable to observe how the children made use of the other parts of the British Museum, but I was able to visit the school some time later to discuss with both the teachers and the children how useful or interesting the visit had been. The teacher explained to me that the visits to other parts of the Museum had been useful not only in terms of managing the trip, but because they were able to make links to other topics. For instance, the school has a visiting Art teacher who was at the time involving the children in production of a large mosaic for the school entrance, and they were able to look closely at not only the Aztec turquoise mosaics, but at the many mosaics on display in the Roman galleries. The trip was also linked to the Science Curriculum through consideration of materials and processes, and part of the follow-up work was for the children to write about their first impressions of the Museum, which was not so much a History project as a language exercise.
In talking directly to the children themselves, I was interested to find out what they remembered from the visit, and they answered not in general terms, but were very specific about particular objects which had made an impression on them. They mentioned the double-headed serpent and the turquoise masks, which was no surprise, since a colour reproduction of the serpent was pinned to the classroom wall, and they had looked closely at this object before as part of their work on the Aztecs prior to the visit. They also remembered the large statues of female deities which are displayed on the pyramidal plinth, and which they had also come across before, as a poster of one is included in the Mexican Gallery resource pack. Less predictably, though, one boy named a bust of Quetzalcoatl, another cited the lintels, again using the correct term, and other objects mentioned included a stone sculpture of a rattlesnake (fig. 14), a depiction of an old man and a boy, or a 'father and son' as they interpreted it (fig. 15), an obsidian mirror and, with great relish, a sacrificial knife. The children's recollections were not confined to the Mexican Gallery, however, and the Roman mosaics which they had seen were recalled, along with a sextant which had been looked at in the Medieval galleries, and a display on Aztec writing from the British Library.
I then asked the children how they felt about the Mexican Gallery itself, and the words which they used to describe the experience indicate that the architect's original conception has perhaps been well realised: "dark", "atmospheric", "secret", "old", "like a temple", and even "comfortable". These were all put to me as positive impressions, and the children also volunteered the fact that most of them had wanted to stay longer in the gallery, and a couple of them used the same word: "amazed".
The two teachers who had been principally responsible for planning and organising the visit were enthusiastic about the way in which this particular gallery trip had helped to focus the attention of a group of children with "low concentration", and had been of enormous value in introducing them to a new subject in a way that, they felt, left a lasting impression. Although they had not had as much time as they would have liked to prepare materials, they said that the background information in both of the resource packs was invaluable to them as teachers, and that they were "spoilt for choice" by the suggestions for activities included therein. The three themes on which they had concentrated in the gallery - people, animals and religion - were selected from those suggested in the Mexican Gallery pack, and they had also used games and puzzles from The Aztecs Activity Book for some of their follow-up work in the classroom. The one criticism of the printed material offered, though, was that the two teachers felt that the packs might have included some materials such as activity sheets which could be used directly by young children, without having to pass through the conduit of interpretation and adaptation by a teacher. The other negative comments about the visit concerned the paucity of lunch facilities, the abrupt and unhelpful attitude of some of the gallery warders, and the badly organised children's shop. While not suggesting that any of these problems ruined the day as an educational exercise, it was clear that the teachers were annoyed by what they perceived as unnecessary failings on the part of the British Museum, and were given the impression that, as an institution, the attitude towards schoolchildren in particular is "take it or leave it".
Another school whose visit I observed at this early stage was Prospect House Private School in Putney, and although I was unable to visit the school later to assess the follow-up work, discussion with the teacher raised some more interesting points on how schools might approach working in the gallery. In this instance, the teacher had prepared sheets for the children to work with, consisting of partially-drawn images of objects in the gallery, which had to be first found and then completed, with a couple of fairly simple questions about the object, such as what they thought it was made of, or what it might have been for. The emphasis here was very much on encouraging the children to look very closely and to use their drawing skills, rather than to think too much about the questions raised, but the exercise certainly seemed to be successful in making sure that the objects on show made an impact and were memorable to the children, again 9 and 10 year-olds. Two things particularly impressed this teacher about the whole experience. Firstly, the Aztec Resource Pack contained far more than she had expected in terms of background information on Aztec culture, and this had given her confidence in tackling the subject which she certainly would not have had otherwise. Secondly, the close proximity of the objects to each other within a single gallery space made the whole visit easier in practical terms, and consequently more effective.
Continuing with my initial research, I made contact with one of the schools - Hall School, Wimbledon, again a private school - who were able to take advantage of a workshop at the British Museum run with characteristic enthusiasm and vigour by Mexicolore. During the course of two and a half hours spent largely in a room within the Education Service offices the children were introduced to dozens of themes relating to ancient Mexican society, including costume, trades and professions, jewellery, war, the place of women, reincarnation, worship and sacrifice, and the ritual ball game. During this time they also dressed in costume, enacted the Aztec creation myth, played musical instruments and danced, as well as visiting the Mexican Gallery in groups to find and produce drawings of objects for later use by those among them playing the roles of scribes and creating their own version of a Codex, a Mexican painted book. My strong impression from observing and becoming involved with this workshop was that the class of twenty 7 and 8 year-olds not only thoroughly enjoyed it but as a result learned a great deal, and I was able to follow up this research by going into the school two days later and discussing their experience with them.
When asking any sort of qualitative question of somebody, there is very often a tendency for that person to give the answer which they believe the questioner wants, particularly if the questioner is seen as somehow representing or being responsible for whatever is being asked about, be it a product, service, event, or as in this case, an educational programme. If this is generally true of adults, then it is emphatically true of 7 and 8 year-old children, whose eagerness to please by giving the desired response can sometimes be almost chronic, so that one might well be sceptical of the children's response to my first question to them, which was "Did you enjoy going to the British Museum?". I can only report that their replies were so overwhelmingly positive, and spoken with such conviction, that I, although frankly sceptical myself prior to conducting this evaluation, am convinced that the children were genuinely enthused by their experience at the Museum. Working in the British Museum one becomes accustomed to seeing groups of schoolchildren who appear merely resigned to the fact that they have to endure trudging round the galleries. Perhaps this is not the case at all, and I am projecting my own perceptions of museum visiting on to what I observe, but for whatever reason I find myself surprised by the simple fact that schoolchildren can enjoy a museum experience in this way, and refreshed by that revelation.
I was keen to find out whether the children had any previous experience of visiting museums, and although this was the first time they had visited the British Museum with the school, some of them had been previously with their parents, and most of them had been to the Natural History Museum, which some thought was the same institution. This blurring of the distinctions between institutions was something that was common to many of the children from the different schools that I visited. Not only the Natural History Museum, but also the Museum of London and the Science Museum were often confused with the British Museum, but this confusion no more than mirrors that of many adults. When asked what they did and did not like about their participation in the Mexicolore workshop, there was virtual unanimity that they thoroughly enjoyed the role-playing, dancing and playing musical instruments, and one boy commented cryptically that he "felt like thin air" when he was playing the music, which was offered as something which he enjoyed. The one dissenter was the boy who had played the role of the 'poor god' in the enactment of the creation
myth, simply because he would have preferred to have been the `rich god'. I then asked specifically what they liked or did not like about the gallery itself, and the list of objects which they remembered best was similar to that previously cited, with the turquoises, the large female deity, the sacrificial knife and the stone rattlesnake all being not only mentioned, but remembered in some detail, with the consensus that:
"It was good to see real things that were old, rather than just pictures".
When nudged into talking about the atmosphere of the gallery itself, the comments from the children again suggested that the intention of the architect to create a certain response among visitors had been fulfilled: "I felt like I was in a dream"; "I thought I was in Aztec times". They did, however, feel a bit cramped for space when they were trying to work in the gallery, that "other people were in the way", and "people kept stepping on my drawings", which is a telling shift of perspective from the comments received so often by the British Museum from members of the visiting public, that the presence of school parties mars their own enjoyment of the galleries, not being conducive to silent contemplation of the wonders before them. As was common to all of the groups of children who I spoke to, these found the alarm which protects the Yaxchilan lintels fascinating, and were very aware of the different reasons why one might not be allowed to touch objects in a museum. Despite this understanding, about half of the group admitted that they did indeed touch one of the stone figures in the centre of the gallery, with the rattlesnake offering the strongest temptation. This is a phenomenon which I have also observed among adult visitors, and which suggests that the decision to exhibit these pieces unprotected may in time need to be reconsidered, for reasons of conservation if nothing else.
It is clear that the children from this group found their visit to the Mexican Gallery, along with their participation in the Mexicolore session, not only enjoyable but also highly memorable, but how can one assess what they learned, or what the educational value of the visit was? The class teacher is herself an enthusiastic student of the Aztecs, and the children undoubtedly benefited from her own enthusiasm for covering the subject in some depth, which was apparent from her outline of the topics which they had studied or intended to cover. These included looking at the other peoples of Ancient Mexico, the growth of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, the structure of Aztec society, the lives of children, and the ritual ball game, a custom to be found in various forms throughout Mesoamerica. She was delighted that the visit to the British Museum gave the children direct contact with artefacts and involvement in activities relating to all of these topics which made them more real. A good example was the explanation of the ball game during the Mexicolore session, which was illustrated by a slide of a reconstruction of a ball court with players as they might have looked, as well as photograph of an actual ball court which survives today in Mexico. The children were quite fascinated at how the game was played, and the idea of the losers being sacrificed, which in turn lent meaning to the actual objects in the gallery which related to this particular ritual.
In general terms, the teacher had nothing but praise for the experience, but was well aware that in all likelihood any future visits would not include the Mexicolore session. However, she was planning to not only take groups regularly to the Mexican Gallery in the future, but to devise materials and even to modify her classroom teaching to embrace some of the methods learned during this visit. While she appreciated the depth of information for teachers included in the two resource packs, she did comment that she would have appreciated the inclusion of some sort of activity sheets for children which might focus attention on particular objects and factual points, citing the Natural History Museum as somewhere that does offer such materials, although she also remarked that their activity sheets tend to be too narrowly focused on specific parts of the National Curriculum for her liking, bearing in mind that, as a private school, they are not bound by those statutory requirements, and are therefore able to devise their own curriculum. She plans in the future to take up some of the suggestions of the Mexican Gallery pack, especially the 'Two detective games' based on the illustrations on stone boxes (APPENDIX F), and some of the other ideas for activities. What was very clear to her, having visited and looked closely at the gallery, was that there was little material to do with 'daily life', or that would do much to enhance the children's comprehension of the structure of society or how they lived - in other words, the anthropological dimension - so that it was essential when planning a school visit to concentrate on the areas where the collection is strongest, namely ceremony, ritual and gods.
The same point was made by teachers from two other schools, Gifford Primary School from Ealing, and Streatham Hill and Clapham Girls' School, who brought groups of 10-11 and 8-9 year-olds respectively to study the Aztecs for History. Although the former is a state school and the latter privately funded, there were many similarities between the way that they used the gallery, and the issues raised by the teachers. There was general agreement, for example, that the density of information in the Aztecs Resource pack was of great value to the teachers, but that they would have appreciated the inclusion of some materials for children, perhaps a simplified version of the pack itself. The activities in the gallery concentrated on finding and drawing particular objects using sheets prepared by the teacher, using the ideas of a 'scavenger hunt' and 'detective work', and once again the children remembered in detail many of the objects which they saw, as well as the atmosphere of the gallery - "spooky" was another adjective used by one boy - and the different coloured materials such as the red and black of the walls, and the turquoise and jade objects. Overall, the children from both of these schools were quite excited by what they saw, with only one child saying that it was boring, and many said that they would try to persuade their parents to go on a visit, although once again the Natural History Museum was given a mention as a preferable alternative, as one boy's 'dad would like it if it had sharks'.
One notable difference between the state schools and the private schools which I observed was that whereas the private schools approached the Mexican Gallery strictly from the point of view of studying history, the state schools used the visit in a far more flexible way, and sought to make use of their time to make links to a variety of topics across the subject areas of the curriculum, particularly Art and Design and Technology. This was reflected in much of the follow-up work in school, which tended to emphasise working from drawings completed during the visit, as well as discussing and writing about the children's experience.
Several strong themes emerged, then, from this preliminary research, and in composing a questionnaire (APPENDIX G) to be sent to all schools who had visited the Mexican Gallery between December 1994 and April 1995, the following issues and questions were identified as those which would be meaningful to a wide cross-section of visiting schools:
1) What the primary area of study was, and whether there were other reasons for the visit, particularly of a cross-curricular nature.
2) Which of the printed resources they received, and how useful these were.
3) Whether there is a wide demand from teachers for ready-to-use activity sheets.
4) The practicalities of managing a school trip to the Mexican Gallery.
5) The children's response to working in the Mexican Gallery
6) The educational value of the visit.
In order not to make the questionnaire too daunting for teachers receiving it, I decided to limit the length to two sides of A4 paper, and to mix closed, quantifiable questions (the age of the group, the time taken to travel to the British Museum, which printed resources they received, etc.), with more open questions, such as: "Can you broadly describe the children's response to working in the gallery", and "How did the visit compare with previous visits to either the British Museum or other Museums", which were designed to offer the respondent the opportunity to raise issues of importance to them. As I was especially interested in the question of activity sheets, I asked on page 1 of the questionnaire: "Was there anything missing from the packs which you would have liked us to have included?", before asking specifically about activity sheets on the second page, in order see how many teachers expressed a need for these without being prompted by the question.
Of 60 questionnaires sent out, 24 were returned, which exceeded expectations, and which is a large enough sample from which to draw some valid conclusions about the issues raised, since among those returned there was a good range of types of school, from large mixed Comprehensives to private single-sex schools, and with ages ranging from 5 year-olds to 18 year-olds. Three of the schools described themselves as Special Schools, one for children with physical special needs, one for speech and language impaired children, and one for pupils with moderate learning difficulties. Finally, one school replied to the questionnaire with a letter which explained why they had in fact decided against a visit, the content of which I shall come on to later.
When considering the age of the groups who visited (fig. 16), I have taken the figures from the information given by schools at the time of booking, so I am not relying on the questionnaires actually returned, but on the bigger sample of all the schools who had visited during the time period under discussion.
I am here categorising them by Key Stages as defined by the National Curriculum, and it is clear from these figures that an overwhelming majority of the groups - 71% in total - fell between the ages of 8 and 11 (Key Stage 2). If one adds this figure to the 8% of 5-7 year-olds (Key Stage 1), then primary schools comprise 79% of the pre-booked school visits to the Mexican Gallery, compared to only 64% across the British Museum as a whole, according to the figures for the academic year 1993-94 (see: British Museum Management Plan 1995, p42). The disproportionate representation of this age group can perhaps be put down to the fact that, in the History Curriculum at least, there is specific mention of either The Aztecs or The Maya only at Key Stage 2, whereas other areas of the British Museum's collections are introduced at Key Stage 3, notably 'The Roman Empire' and 'Medieval Realms', and this confirms that Key Stage 2 is the age group at which the printed resources for the Mexican Gallery should most profitably be targeted.
The amount of time which schools spent getting to the British Museum was surprisingly high, and while the average time spent was 75 minutes each way, several schools made a journey lasting up to two hours, and this is indicative of the importance which many schools place on visits such as this, and makes it all the more incumbent on the Museum to do whatever it can to make the visits worth their while.
When asked 'What was the main reason for the visit', 16 of the 24 respondents were studying the Aztecs for History at Key Stage 2, unremarkably enough, and additional comments included:
"We hoped to use the trip as an inspirational starting point for our topic."
"As we got the visit at the end of our study it was a 'grand finale'."
The expectations of many of the respondents seemed to be that the visit would enable the children to engage with the Aztec artefacts on an emotional level, and typical descriptions of what it was hoped would be achieved were:
"To give the children more empathy with that period."
"An understanding of Aztec technology, a feel for Aztec culture."
"To connect school work with actual objects, making school work more real."
Only one respondent mentioned the Mayans as the primary area of study, which is perhaps a little disappointing, given the strength of the Maya collection in particular, and the potential for studying the Maya as an alternative to studying Ancient Egypt as one of the options at Key Stage 2. Four schools were using the visit primarily to support their Art studies at GCSE level, and one was studying Mexico for Geography at Key Stage 2, leaving an American School, who were studying Native Americans for their Social Studies curriculum.
If it seems from this that the range of subjects being studied is quite narrow, then this impression is countered by the fact that several visiting schools not only used the Mexican Gallery to inform other areas of the curriculum, but also looked at other galleries, such as the Oriental Gallery, which related to work done on Buddhism during R.E. classes, and the Egyptian Galleries, which topic many had already studied, or were about to study. Once again Art as a subject was listed by many schools as a secondary reason for the visit, both to study techniques, particularly of mosaic work, and to use observation of the artefacts as a stimulus for the pupil's own drawing and sculpture.
All of the visiting schools had received the Mexican Gallery resource pack in advance, and all but one of those who had specified The Aztecs as their main area of study were sent the Aztec resource pack. About half of these had also purchased the Aztecs Activity book, presumably during a preparatory visit. The questionnaire asked whether there was anything in these materials which was particularly useful for work at school, and the responses ranged from a few which were luke warm, such as:
"Not especially. Helpful for preparation of project, but not for visit."
to many which were very positive:
"The packs were excellent for teacher reference as they provided excellent background material on what was in the gallery".
Many respondents were particularly pleased that colour photographs and posters had been included in the Mexican Gallery Resource Pack, as this was of enormous benefit when preparing the children for what they were going to see during their visit. The effectiveness of using these pictures is confirmed by observation of school groups visiting the Mexican Gallery, who are invariably drawn with some excitement towards the objects with which they are already familiar, especially the turquoise serpent and the Huaxtec female deity, and this initial thrill on entering the gallery seems to set the tone for the visit as a whole.
A lot of the teachers responding to the questionnaire understood well that the primary purpose of both resource packs was to furnish the teachers themselves with some detailed knowledge of the subject on which to base their approach to tackling either the Aztecs or Mesoamerica generally. Nevertheless, there were several comments that the level of information was too advanced for the children at Key Stage 2, and was more appropriate for children at secondary level or for adults, which is in fact how the Mexican Gallery pack is presented. Although it was never intended that the material in either pack be immediately usable by pupils at Key Stage 2, this was one area where there was a large measure of agreement that more might have been included, both for the benefit of younger children, and for children with language difficulties. As expected, when asked whether there was anything missing from the packs which they would have liked to be included, the idea of having activity sheets in the pack which could be used by the children without having to be adapted was raised by several teachers, without the suggestion having been put to them.
Later on in the questionnaire, the teachers were asked more specifically both whether they prepared any activity sheets themselves, and whether they would have liked them included in the packs, and I was surprised by the quite sharp division in attitude to this question, with 13 respondents saying that they had prepared some kind of activity sheet to use during the visit, but 7 others saying that they had not, some of these remarking quite emphatically that they didn't work that way! The sort of sheets which were used ranged from simple lists of objects to look for and draw, to more complex sheets using the notion of different themes, of which that devised by The Park Lane Primary School in Cambridgeshire (APPENDIX H) is a good example, and one where a lot of work has obviously been put in, including reproductions of the illustrated borders from the Aztec pack. The sheets, stapled together to form an A5 booklet, give some simple background information on the Aztecs in a Mesoamerican context, and introduce the children to the themes of Aztec religion and sacrifice, Aztec crafts, and Aztec writing. They are invited to choose objects which interest them within these categories, draw them, and answer questions about them, some answers being found from labels, and some from guesswork and deduction. That this particular visit, by 7 and 8 year-olds who had travelled for two hours to the British Museum, was judged a great success by the teacher, was due largely to her own efforts in digesting the information and ideas in the Aztec Resource Pack and adapting them to suit the needs of her pupils. Remarkably, the group also found time to visit the Oriental Gallery, for which the teacher had also prepared similar activity sheets, and one can quite understand why her response to the question of whether activity sheets should have been included in the resource pack was:
"YES: it would have saved a lot of time!"
Regarding the gallery itself, it was no surprise that most respondents found it smaller than they had initially expected, but nevertheless more than half considered it 'about the right size' for the group which they brought, as opposed to being 'too small'. In many cases this was because the teacher had visited the gallery in advance of the school trip, and had organised the activities to take account of the size of the gallery, either by incorporating visits to other parts of the Museum, or by putting more work into devising activity sheets, one teacher asserting that without them:
"the children would have been bored after five minutes!".
Although both resource packs include caveats about the size of the gallery, and about the fact that it contains material from many other cultures apart from the Aztecs, these were only fully understood after prior visits by teachers, and although one might imagine that a preparatory visit to an unfamiliar gallery was essential for any teacher arranging such a trip, it seems that several teachers had not been able to find the time for this, and invariably wished that they had. One very good reason for doing this is the very fact that so many cultures are represented, and although a large part of the thinking behind the selection and display of the artefacts was to demonstrate the interrelation between these cultures, this can cause a problem for teachers wishing to concentrate very specifically on the Aztecs, as one teacher pointed out:
"As our topic was, strictly speaking, meant to be on the Aztecs, having to differentiate and keep separate Mixtec and Huaxtec artefacts was slightly tricky, especially for me when designing the worksheets! A room with purely Aztec artefacts, and displays explaining about them clearly, would have been far more user-friendly".
Conversely, the one school who had visited primarily in order to study the Maya requested that there should have been more objects from that culture, and one could argue that the emphasis in the gallery might profitably be on the two major 'crowd-pleasers' of the Aztec and the Maya, at the expense of the less well-known cultures, but this would certainly diminish the historical validity as well as the aesthetic variety of the gallery, quite apart from being contrary to the Mexican financial backers' own stipulations.
Despite reservations about the size of the gallery, most of the comments on the actual design and layout were extremely enthusiastic, but one negative aspect which several respondents remarked on was the content of the labels, and one teacher was particularly expansive on this subject:
"It is a great shame that the way in which items are labelled in the cases adds so little to one's understanding of the objects. Museumspeak is a language all of its own, which is readily understood by curators, but totally incomprehensible to mere mortals. Some museums have begun to use lay people to check their case labels to see if ordinary visitors can use them effectively and this has led to an enormous improvement in the text used. I am not suggesting that labels should be written in such a way that children can gain the full meaning of the text, but that, at least, their teachers should be able to understand something about the object. Quite honestly, some of the labelling helped my comprehension not one iota! It is such a good gallery, that it seems to me very sad that the ship should be spoiled for a ha'porth of tar."
This kind of response was not an isolated one, but it came as something of a shock to Colin McEwan, the curator, who had expressed to me his pride that he had written useful and accessible label copy, although he also felt that he had to do justice to the objects in the eyes of his peers. It was less surprising to Gill Hughes, responsible for editing the text, who, although she felt that the labelling in the Mexican Gallery stood out from much of that to be found throughout the British Museum in terms of clarity, agreed that there were nevertheless many examples of obscure or difficult language within the labels which she would ideally have liked to have removed or replaced, but that shortage of time was one of the factors that prevented her having as much influence on this aspect as she would have wished.
The strongest consensus among teachers came when answering the question: "Can you broadly describe the children's response to working in the gallery?". Apart from one teacher who remarked that the children were too squashed, the answers to this question were very positive and words such as "excited", "thrilled" and "enthralled" all cropped up more than once, as did the phrase, "they loved it". Of course, this is the teacher's interpretation of the children's response, and one might expect a teacher who has invested energy in planning and executing such a trip to be inclined to look for signs that the effort had been worthwhile. The unanimity of answers, though, persuades me that these are accurate assessments, and confirms my earlier impressions of children whose visits I had observed, and who were apparently equally enthralled, or "amazed", as several teachers expressed it. If one takes these comments at face value, then it would seem apparent that whatever use the Mexican Gallery may or may not be in terms of the transmission of information, it nevertheless succeeds in stimulating a genuine interest among the children in the subject being studied, and for that reason alone is absolutely invaluable to teachers attempting to teach a difficult subject. It would make sense, then, for any teacher who intends bringing a group to visit the Mexican Gallery to try their utmost to plan the visit at the beginning of the study of The Aztecs, for instance, in order to capture the attention and imagination of their students.
When I had previously asked children in the schools which I visited what they had particularly enjoyed or remembered, although a wide range of objects were mentioned, it soon became clear that the turquoise mosaics were the favourite pieces - the masks and sacrificial dagger as well as the double-headed serpent - and the same question in the questionnaire attracted if anything an even narrower range of recalled objects. There were a few different artefacts named as being memorable or enjoyable, however, such as the stone coiled rattlesnake, the Codex, the musical instruments, and some other details including the "poetry on the stone by the entrance", and the traces of paint on the Yaxchilan Lintels, which perhaps reflected the emphasis placed on certain objects by those particular teachers, who were willing to look beyond the obvious.
There were two main complaints in response to the question, "Was there anything which was particularly offputting to the children?", the main one being the intrusiveness of the alarm protecting the Yaxchilan Lintels, as well as several comments about the wording of the labels, but it should be emphasised that almost all of the respondents found nothing offputting for their particular group, and felt that they had achieved want they had wanted to from the visit, and would be visiting again. To judge from the teachers' comments, the single most positive reason for using the Mexican Gallery with the children was that it enabled them to see authentic objects from the civilisations and times being studied and "made it real". All but one of the teachers responded enthusiastically to the question: "Did the visit to the gallery add anything to the children's understanding and knowledge of Mexico or Mesoamerican cultures that could not have been gained elsewhere?", with answers such as:
"Yes. Being able to see actual artefacts 'in the flesh' - their colour and size."
"Yes. The scale of the sculpture, impact of real objects, not just books."
"Yes. Enhanced our other visits and their research."
"Added a lot to their understanding of Aztec culture."
This touches on a key reason for using museums and galleries as educational resources; the fact that direct contact with real objects adds a dimension to one's understanding of the people who created and used them that is not always easy to explain, and which can not be gained elsewhere, which is best described as a form of empathy.
There were, despite this almost unanimous enthusiasm for the gallery, a few mild complaints that the display was "rather static and restrictive", and "very hands-off", as well as the previously mentioned comments on labelling. However, most of the negative responses to the question "How did the visit compare with previous visits to either the British Museum or other Museums?" concerned what one might call external factors, aspects of visiting the Museum rather than the Mexican Gallery itself, and some of these were rather more serious:
"The cloakroom arrangements were a nightmare! The staff were rude and unhelpful and the crush was awful."
"The children's shop was a major problem - much worse than in the past, especially with children so young."
"We visit a lot of Museums, and, to be honest, the guards at the British Museum have a real reputation for being overbearing. It's sad to say that given the choice I avoid the British Museum if at all possible."
"It is the only place we have visited that couldn't provide eating / drinking facilities for a school group, despite booking several months in advance."
Each of these four problems - the cloakroom, the shop, the attitude of warders and the lack of lunch rooms - attracted more than one complaint, but the most commonly mentioned of these failings was that there is nowhere for all but a very few of the hundreds of schoolchildren who visit each day to go to eat their lunch, and again this situation was contrasted with that at the Natural History Museum:
"Something along the lines of the brilliant lunch set up at the Natural History Museum is needed to lift school facilities at the British Museum onto the 1990s."
From the evidence of this particular survey, and from talking to many teachers, I am quite convinced that this is one particular area of provision at the British Museum that does not satisfy those making use of it, and that offering a service to schools implies more than allowing them to come in to the galleries, but should involve every aspect of their visit.
At the beginning of this section, it was mentioned that one school had written a letter in response to the questionnaire, having decided not to visit the Mexican Gallery, and it is reproduced here verbatim, as it contains many of the points made in other ways by other teachers, although I am not suggesting that these thoughts are representative of the attitude of teachers as a whole, who were mostly vastly more positive than this particular one, from Danegrove Primary School in East Barnet, Hertfordshire:
"In reply to your questionnaire, we decided against a visit to the Mexico Gallery for our children for a variety of reasons:
1) We feel that the British Museum does not really go out of its way to cater for KS2 pupils. By this we mean that the displays are at adult level in terms of reading information. There are no hands-on exhibits and very little is done to explain things in terms that young children would relate to.
2) The size of the gallery was a problem for us. We are a three form entry school and therefore need to bring 3 classes along at a time. The Mexican Gallery is not big enough for this and we would have had problems knowing what to do with 2 classes while one class was in the gallery.
3) We were studying the Aztecs and we felt that the amount of exhibits and information on that subject was not enough on its own to occupy the children for a whole day. We would like to see talks and workshops offered. Children at this age learn by doing rather than just by looking at display cabinets.
Lunchtime facilities are also important and we would like to see an improvement in these.
We were very keen to visit when you were offering the Mexicolore sessions, but by the time we found out about these, they were fully booked. In the end, we booked Mexicolore to visit our school and were very pleased that we did. The children gained a great deal from the visit and we feel that this was far more appropriate for them than a visit to the British Museum. It may have cost more but it was worth every penny.
The teachers pack you sent us was useful for giving us information but not useful for worksheets or activities to do with the children.
We found the Aztecs was an extremely popular topic with the children and provides a wealth of opportunities for artwork and display and we feel that the British Museum could do a lot more to support this topic in junior schools. We would certainly plan to do this topic again with our children and better facilities at the British Museum would certainly help."
The usual response from the British Museum to a letter of this nature might be to reply that only so much can be done with the limited resources available, and this particular teacher herself raises the point of how expensive it is to have events such as Mexicolore sessions, which normally cost in the region of ú200 to ú300, but which were offered free to a limited number of schools thanks to the sponsorship from the Baring Foundation. It certainly would be desirable in many ways for the British Museum to be able to offer some level of direct teaching to all schools who request it, but this is a very long way from being practicable in terms of resources available to the Education Service. It would not be accurate to say that money is not available for these sorts of activities, rather that within the structure of the British Museum they are not seen as being priorities for allocation of resources, which sets the institution apart philosophically from other National Museums and Galleries. Both the National Gallery and the Natural History Museum aim to provide direct teaching in the form of talks, tours or 'hands-on' sessions for all pre-booked school groups, and the Tate Gallery and Science Museum provide the same for about half of those wanting such a service. The British Museum, however, currently pursues a policy of using the staff of the Education Service to train teachers and to produce resources. While it is certainly debatable which of these approaches most efficiently uses the time and talents of full-time museum and gallery staff, it is apparent that those institutions which do offer a good deal of direct teaching are responding to a very clear demand from teachers in a way that the British Museum is failing to do.
The educational programme for adults and families covered a wide range of activities and audiences, from the academic conference which I have already described to storytelling and craft workshops, and I will concern myself here with the events which took place from the opening of the gallery up until May 1995, although they have continued beyond this date. As part of the regular ongoing programme of public events which are organised to reflect all the areas of the collections, a number of gallery talks, slide lectures and films on themes related to the Mexican Gallery were programmed at the British Museum. This in itself was something of an innovation, since the audience for such events had previously been confined to the Museum of Mankind, and there was some question in people's minds as to whether the people who regularly attend these events at the Bloomsbury site would readily warm to the introduction of Mesoamerican themes on an equal footing with the old favourites of Egypt, Greece and Rome.
During this period there were 20 slide lectures or gallery talks either offering a general introduction to the new gallery or to Mesoamerican culture, or on more specific subjects such as 'The transference of power: Mixtec dynasties' and 'The murals of Teotihuacan'. Each lasting between 45 minutes and an hour, these events attracted audiences of between 25 and 40 people, apart from a special evening lecture on "The Meanings of Ancient Mexican Art" which nearly 200 people attended. According to Penny Bateman, who herself delivered some of these talks, the response and feedback from those attending was good, and many members of the public came back time and again. Her feeling was that there would certainly have been an audience for more of these talks, but that there is not a vast pool of lecturers able to offer themselves as authorities on Mesoamerica. Nevertheless, the audience figures compare well with what one might expect for talks on most topics with the exception of Ancient Egypt, and certainly indicate that it is worth continuing with a similar programme of talks and lectures in the future. In addition, there were 31 separate afternoon film shows, with 11 different titles shown, including some from a BBC series on Mexico, 'Of Gods and Men', two films from a Mexican series on cities of Ancient Mexico, and an animated version of the Mayan creation myth, 'Popol Vuh'. Again the audience figures for these shows were roughly in line with what one expects for film shows in the Museum, ranging generally from 15 to 65 people, with an average attendance of 34.
The only data available on the audiences for gallery talks, lectures and film shows are bare attendance figures, and no concerted attempt has been made recently to find out what sort of people come to these events, why they come, what they get from them, whether they would like something different, or indeed whether a whole potential audience is not attending because the programme does not meet their needs. There was a survey conducted in 1983, the findings of which John Reeve summarises thus:
"Peter Mann's very limited survey of one week's participants in adult museum events revealed that 45% of them were aged 55 and over, and that 36% of those attending more than one event were over 65. Three-quarters of the lecture audiences were UK residents, although many foreigners came to gallery talks and films. Only 19% of lecture audiences were first timers."
(Reeve, 1988, p. 72)
What one can immediately deduce from this is that the audience for adult events is different in nature to the Museum's general audience in terms at least of age and nationality, and this is a specific area which needs to be researched more thoroughly.
Between the two extremes of talks on Egypt, which are invariably full, and talks on coins, which tend to be delivered to a few friends of the lecturer and a handful of others, there is a tacit acceptance that the type of programme on offer is appropriate. There was no examination of this issue as part of the Survey of Visitors carried out in 1992-93 which, however, did prompt people to comment on issues such as their level of satisfaction with the restaurant and the gift shop. If one looks at the results of this survey, one compelling reason emerges why the British Museum does not apparently seem too concerned with finding ways to improve the quality of service which it is providing to the public, since between 92% and 99% of those asked about their overall satisfaction with the Museum rated it either 'very good' or 'good'. On the face of it those are convincing figures, especially when one considers that only 14 people out of a total of nearly 3,000 rated it as 'poor'.
Although not wanting to become bogged down in conducting surveys of my own which could only be very limited exercises with the time and resources available, I felt that it was worth trying to find out directly from members of this adult audience some of their responses to the programme, and I therefore designed a short questionnaire (APPENDIX I) aimed at those who had come to see films which were part of the Mexican Gallery programme. I chose the audience for films as I felt that this would be less intrusive than questioning those attending gallery talks and lectures, and I distributed 100 questionnaires over the course of four separate days, of which 47 were completed and returned. The questionnaire deliberately avoided any questions relating to age, sex or nationality, as it was concerned purely with the responses rather than the composition of the audience. I was interested, however, to find out how often the audience visited the British Museum, and discovered that 44 of the 47 respondents had made two or more visits during the past year, with 26 of them saying that they had visited more than 10 times during that period. I was surprised that this figure was quite so high, although I was aware that there are quite a large number of very loyal visitors for whom visiting the British Museum has become almost a regular part of their daily or weekly social routine, partly thanks to the fact that unlike most other comparable institutions there is no admission charge.
More than half of those responding to the questionnaire stated that they had attended films, lectures or gallery talks twice or more during the past year. Among these the lectures were the most popular, with 12 from the 47 having attended 10 or more public lectures within the past year, which it is fair to interpret as a judgement of sorts on the service on offer. The table overleaf (fig. 17) is of course distorted by the fact that the questionnaires were handed out only to those attending film shows, but gives some indication of the relative appeal of the different events.
When asked how they had found out about the film show, 38 of the 47 said that they had learned of it from the Museum's bimonthly events list, 5 from the information screens in the Museum, 3 from either 'friends' or 'my mum', and only one from the special publicity sheet of events relating to the Mexican Gallery. Not one of the respondents, therefore, had simply stumbled across the Lecture Theatre, and all of them had made a conscious decision to attend the film, although I am certain from my own observations that there are always a number of visitors who happen to be passing the Lecture Theatre during an event, and I suspect that these more casual visitors, among them tourists, simply did not return the questionnaire. Three quarters of the respondents had visited the Mexican Gallery at least once, and more than a third of these had been three or more times, which indicates again that quite a large proportion of those attending the film shows, and presumably the lectures and gallery talks, are treating the events and the gallery itself as resources for quite a concerted course of personal study. Although they are not designed as a formal course in the same way as can be found, for instance, at the National Gallery, these events could be seen as units on an adult education course on Ancient Mexico at the same time as being available as self-contained events to the more casual visitor, and there may be some potential in publicizing them as such in order to attract more participants.
The first qualitative question on the questionnaire asked: "What were your reasons for attending this event, and were your expectations fulfilled?", which broke one of the cardinal rules of designing questionnaires, in that it contained two questions, but it nevertheless stimulated some informative responses. For instance, 31 of the 47 respondents cited a specific interest in aspects of "Mexican culture" or "Mexican archaeology", as opposed to a general interest in history, and 8 of them commented that they had already visited Mexico, or intended to shortly. Many of the comments spoke of 'learning' from the films, and the following responses are fairly typical:
"Having visited the Mexican Highlands (including Oaxaca) I wished to learn more about ancient Mexican civilisation. I intend at some future date to visit Yucatan (hopefully on a British Museum tour)."
"I wanted to learn about the ancient civilisation of Mexico, before I would visit there. I have done the Egyptian civilisation. I have attended several lectures before visiting Egypt and after the journey. My understanding of the ancient world were fulfilled."
"To increase my knowledge of history and pre-history. These films on Mexico were utterly absorbing. They were clearly presented and imparted a great deal of information. I could watch a lot more films of this nature."
What is apparent from the answers to this question is that most of those answering had a good idea of what they were going to see and why, with only one exception:
"Chance - getting some exercise out of the office. Not bad."
From my own experience of audiences for film shows, I would have expected a great many more people to have mentioned the element of chance, or that they were taking refuge from the weather in the Lecture Theatre, but if the returned questionnaires are to be taken at face value, then the audience is far more committed than I had previously believed. Furthermore, their appreciation of the events for adults is something which is not often expressed, but when asked for comments on the programme of events, their response was astonishing:
"The programme of films, lectures and gallery talks are very good. I have already attended many of these, but I still wish to repeat it again and again."
"All those that I've been to I have really enjoyed and found very informative"
"Everything is excellent. Please don't try to change anything just because someone wants to do this for really no reason. Too much of this goes on in museums."
"Very good. I must say I feel impressed with the efforts of all the people involved. Many thanks, is all I can say. I would like to see more films on the subject of Mesoamerica."
There was much more in this vein, with the only adverse comments being that the seats were uncomfortable, and that the films were sometimes 'fuzzy'. When it came to comments or suggestions about the British Museum as a whole, some of the replies bordered on the embarrassing:
"It's the best place in London."
"The British Museum is a place of wonder."
"I consider the Museum one of the wonders of the cultural world."
"The British Museum contains treasures of the highest order - it is a treasure itself as it stands and as operated."
"It has greatly enhanced the quality of my life."
Perhaps people have low expectations of what can be offered in the name of public service, or perhaps the British Museum and everything about it really is as good as these people believe, but it is certain that there is a core of visitors who use the Museum repeatedly and are extremely appreciative of what it offers. The only real conclusion that one can draw from having conducted this survey is that for this part of the Museum's audience at least, the programme of events linked to the Mexican Gallery has been extremely worthwhile, and enthusiastically received.
The remainder of the programme for adults and families consisted of a variety of events ranging from pre-booked study days composed of lectures, gallery talks and discussions, to less formal events such as drop-in workshops with Mexican craftspeople, and storytelling sessions during the Christmas holidays, which were well attended and attracted a wide range of participants. As an example, a drop-in session for people interested in textiles held within the offices of the Education Service on 19 April attracted about 15 people to work with the Huichol artist Maria-Luisa Rentera Lara and to discuss Huichol embroidery and textiles. Among them were an artist who had been drawing inspiration for her own work from the Mexican Gallery and had been to several other events; a food historian who was finding out about the gastronomy of other cultures by looking at visual representations of food; a student teacher who was doing a project on Mexico as part of her school placement; several people who worked with textiles themselves; and a couple of Mexicans living in London who had found out about the event through being on the mailing list for publicity, and were interested in attending as many events as possible.
Other workshops with the same artist and with Francisco Carillo Zamora, demonstrating the making of yarn paintings, were held in the British Library Seminar Room, the only space available within the Museum itself which is near to the Mexican Gallery. The audience for these was somewhat different, with quite a lot of passers-by dropping in to join those who had come as a result of publicity, so that the room was full for most of the time and could not have accommodated any more people. There was also a session along the same lines, but with the artist explaining his work in Spanish, without translation, and this drew a more specialised audience of Spanish speakers. What was noticeable about all of these events was not only the range of people attracted, but the fact that so many of them returned on several occasions.
All of these events and activities for adults and families are related to the Mexican Gallery itself only fairly tenuously in some cases, being seen more as a way of adding some of the elements which are missing from the display itself, such as the continuity between ancient and modern peoples and the expression of their cultural identity through traditional crafts. However, the two publications which were envisaged as contributing to the broadly educational mission were the book 'Ancient Mexico in the British Museum', and the Introductory Guide to the gallery, which both offer different ways of approaching the displays for adults, in the same way that the resource packs do for teachers of school children. The Introductory Guide firstly lays out very clearly the geographical arrangement of the gallery, and reproduces the colour-coded time lines of the various cultures, which is helpful for visitors, as it enables them to more easily orientate themselves in time and space wherever they might be in the gallery, without having to refer back to the introductory panel. A selection of 7 key objects are reproduced, each with a single paragraph of text relating them to the themes of Gods, Thresholds, Fertility, Rulers, Ritual Dress, Death and Creation, and suggesting other objects from different cultures to look at which also relate to each theme. This acts as an introduction to the idea of cross-cultural fertilisation, which does not come across as clearly as intended in the gallery itself, and is an excellent device for stimulating interest and enquiry in the visitor.
By contrast, the book 'Ancient Mexico in the British Museum' explores in greater detail facets of each civilisation, and replicates much of the label copy. The emphasis is on placing objects within a cultural context, and as such it is not strictly speaking a catalogue of the exhibition, but it is written in such a way that it helps to make sense of how the gallery is organised, and of the cultures represented. As with all the printed materials, these two publications reflect the complex nature of Mesoamerican art, and resist the temptation to over-simplify for the benefit of the less inquisitive visitor, while at the same time helping to make the collections more accessible to a non-scholarly audience. Thus, the problem of how to interpret at different levels and for different audiences what is essentially an aesthetic gallery, is tackled and fairly successfully solved by using the whole range of additional resources and activities which make up the programme for adults and families.
In conducting this evaluation of the Mexican Gallery as an educational resource, I have concentrated on the more formal aspects of the education programme, and in particular on the printed resources available to schools, but I have also tried to glean some idea of the impact of the programme on the adult and family audience, whose opinions and responses are less easy to harvest. I have had the advantage of being able to refer to an existing 'Education Plan' against which I might be able to measure at least partially whether the Museum has achieved its aims, and the brief conclusion must be that those targets have on the whole been met very well, so that were I conducting this evaluation exercise on behalf of the sponsors of the programme, I would be unequivocal in reporting that the money had been well spent. The intended range of audiences were catered for and attracted to the Mexican Gallery, the printed resources were produced and well used, and the profile of the Mexican Gallery and of Mesoamerican issues has been significantly raised within the British Museum. What interests me more, though, is what can be learnt from this exercise and used to improve the programme, or applied to the planning of future programmes.
As far as schools are concerned, the first thing that has to be said is that under current policy the British Museum can not provide the thing that schools most require - direct teaching - but that both the Aztec Resource Pack and the Mexican Gallery Resource Pack can make a great contribution to the way in which teachers use the gallery with their schools. The levels of interpretation of the collections which these provide are in fact essential, since the information available in the gallery itself is of minimal use to school children, and is not intended to be otherwise. The net result is that teachers need to put in a great deal of preparatory work if they are to make really successful visits to the Mexican Gallery, and it seems that most are prepared to do this, as the resource packs provide ideas and a framework which help to make that manageable. There is a case though, for simplifying the packs by reducing the amount of information contained within them, and one candidate for exclusion might be the section on 'Thresholds' in the Mexican Gallery Resource Pack, since this seems to be a rather difficult concept, and not one of the teachers who I spoke to or who answered the questionnaire made any reference to it, which they did frequently with such themes as 'Rulers', 'People' and 'Animals'. Such a reductive approach would not find favour with Penny Bateman, the author of the two packs, as her concern is to give teachers as many options as possible, despite her own observation that so many of them prefer to be 'spoon-fed'. More realistically, the idea of including some form of pre-prepared worksheets in the packs for children at Key Stage 2 or younger, is worth considering. Although there was no overwhelming mandate for this from my findings, with many teachers adamant that they needed to prepare their own worksheets for use with children of a particular age and at a certain point in their learning, enough teachers expressed a wish to have this option that it is worth exploring the possibilities. Immediately, though, one encounters the problem of exactly what it is that one is trying to achieve with worksheets, and how one can avoid the many possible pitfalls of poorly designed or inappropriate materials. Since so many teachers had referred to the Natural History Museum as a provider of the type of worksheets which they found useful, I looked in some detail at how they go about producing these 'activity sheets', as they call them. I was impressed to find that the Natural History Museum have developed an approach which ensures that each sheet has clearly defined goals and is thoroughly evaluated before being finalised, and that the reasoning behind the use of activity sheets is also clearly stated:
"All our exhibitions have something in common; they have been designed for the Museum's typical visitor, a committed learner' with an adult reading age and an adult understanding of concepts. Clearly, many visitors do not fit this description, in particular the 200,000 children who visit the Museum each year in organised school groups. Almost 90% of these students do not have an adult reading age. The children benefit from support in interpreting the specimens on display and learning from the exhibitions. They and their teachers have particular needs which must be met by the visit, and so require help to focus on and make sense of the exhibits.
We find activity sheets to be an effective way of providing support for such large numbers of visitors. The activity sheets can take account of the difference in reading age and conceptual understanding between the sheet's user and the exhibition's intended audience. Each activity sheet is designed to 'bridge the gap' for a particular target audience, and therefore make learning in the Museum more stimulating and enjoyable."
(Natural History Museum, 1995)
This basic principle, of addressing the fact that an exhibition as it stands will need an alternative mode of interpretation for different age groups, is one that applies equally to a display such as the Mexican Gallery, since it is one that is so certain to be used by schools. The Natural History Museum have found that providing these materials for schools is a way of retaining control over aspects of the message being conveyed by the display, and of focusing the attention of the users on very specific objects or concepts. The activity sheets are very carefully structured so that, for each exhibit included, the user has to first observe by looking, listening or touching. They then have to carry out some kind of cognitive processing, such as comparing, deducing or calculating, and finally they are asked to record information through means such as drawing, writing or ticking. In this way the sheets are easily evaluated in terms of information or ideas correctly perceived, and this is where this approach to using activity sheets would fail when applied to a display such as the Mexican Gallery, for which it would be difficult to identify what the Natural History Museum call 'teaching points.' With scientific subjects, schools will tend to use museums to enable the children to find out about facts or scientific principles, in a way which engages their interest and makes that information stick, but the objectives of a museum visit for the purposes of teaching history are less clear cut. Although some galleries at the British Museum may be organised around a historical theme, such as the current small exhibition on Benin at the Museum of Mankind, most of the material is essentially displayed as art, and this is emphatically so in the Mexican Gallery. Not only is it difficult for children to search for and find information from text panels, but it would be wasteful of their time at the Museum to ask them to do so:
"The whole point of going to a site or museum is to learn from physical things and the questions should direct attention towards the object not the label... Asking questions about the object requires an understanding of the potential of artefacts to reveal information about the societies that made, used and preserved them. The main emphasis of the work should be on observation not reading."
(Durbin, 1994, p. 282)
To take the Mexican Gallery as an example, the strictly historical facts which might need to be learnt would be those of the rise and fall of the distinct cultures through time and across the different regions of Mesoamerica, which are explained in the gallery through the use of maps and time lines. To spend any time in the gallery trying to 'learn' this information, with so many unfamiliar terms, would be pointless, as this is something which can be pursued more fruitfully in the classroom. Instead, the time spent at the Museum should be used to look closely at the objects, to speculate on how or why they were made, to make comparisons between similar objects from different areas, or around a common theme, and to try to achieve that feeling of empathy which has been suggested previously. Attention to text panels should be minimal, since the language is largely impenetrable, and should be confined to perhaps finding out the name of a particular god, or what material an object is made from. Therefore, any activity sheets which the British Museum devises could be used to concentrate children's attention on close observation of particular objects, and to stress the themes already identified as running through Mesoamerican culture.
The theme of animals is one which many teachers and children have been very keen on, and this would be a good subject for an activity sheet, which would not need to be very different from the section on animals in the Mexican Gallery Resource Pack, with the language simplified somewhat. Likewise, for those specifically studying the Aztecs, an activity sheet which explores 'the differences between European and Aztec civilisations', as specified in the National Curriculum, could be used to direct pupils to a few key objects in the European Galleries, making comparisons with those in the Mexican Gallery. The argument which I would put forward in favour of such materials is that, although it is true to say that sheets devised by teachers for children at a particular stage of learning about a topic are perhaps the ideal, in reality not many teachers are able to devote the time and energy needed to produce these well, and poorly produced work sheets are not necessarily better than none at all. The Natural History Museum are convinced that the provision of attractively designed, carefully thought out activity sheets is invaluable for schools wishing to use the Museum effectively, even though they have to charge the schools for them in order to maintain the standard of design and printing. The Mexican Gallery would be an ideal place for the British Museum to begin a similar process, since a great deal of the ground work of identifying themes and specifying objects has already been done during the process of creating the two Resource Packs.
In evaluating the effectiveness of the programme for adults and families, I have relied on less extensive research than that which I applied to the schools programme. What is apparent, though, is that all of the events for different types of audiences, and the publications, added greatly to their appreciation of the Mexican Gallery, and provided a way in to the subject of Mesoamerica for a good number of people who might otherwise have found the gallery itself rather daunting. In particular, those events which emphasised the continuity between ancient and modern Mexico succeeded in bringing the subject to life in a way which does not happen at all in the Mexican Gallery, which is resolutely archaeological in nature rather than ethnographic. These types of events have continued with a series of textile workshops and performances by Mexican musicians in June and July 1995, all of which were extremely well attended, and there is already growing evidence that a Mexican and Latin American audience is being built, as it was during the 'Skeleton at the Feast' exhibition. However, the difficulty will be in sustaining a programme of events varied enough to keep attracting and establishing these audiences, as the money which came from the Baring Foundation is now nearly exhausted, and resources will have to be found from within the British Museum if such a programme is to continue beyond the autumn of 1995.
Perhaps the best way to evaluate the usefulness of the education programme is to consider what impact the Mexican Gallery might have without the benefit of the supporting material which currently exists. Schools would certainly still use the gallery, since there is no comparable resource elsewhere, but without the two Resource Packs, teachers might find themselves struggling to delve beyond a quite basic level of understanding. The children would probably still be struck with a sense of wonder, but it would be more difficult for teachers to build on that and to channel it constructively. Something else to consider is that, from September 1995, the Aztecs becomes an optional subject at Key Stage 2 rather than a compulsory Core Topic, and many teachers will need to be persuaded that it is worth their while tackling the Aztecs, which would be much harder for them if the Resource Packs were not available.
Without a programme of events and activities for adults, the Mexican Gallery would remain a very static and traditional display of archaeological artefacts, albeit in a striking setting. There would be no reference to Mexico today in terms of surviving traditions and peoples, and the profile of the gallery within the British Museum would recede to the point where it might have relatively few visitors, being physically remote from the rest of the collections. All this is not to deny that the gallery itself can offer an enlightening and enriching experience, but simply to stress that the variety and liveliness of the education programme can only add new dimensions to that experience, and help to make it available and appealing to a great many more people.
Finally, what was exceptional about the way in which the Mexican Gallery evolved was the high level of input from the Education Officer, and the degree of collaboration with the Curator. This resulted not only in benefits for the gallery itself, but in an education programme that was truly integrated with the exhibition from the very beginning, rather than being an adjunct to it. To return to the quote from Stapp and Munley used in the introduction to this dissertation, the idea of collections and education representing the heart and the spirit of museums implies that they should operate in concert, and that this is very desirable model for museums to emulate. The extent to which this happens in the British Museum varies from exhibition to exhibition, depending more on the personalities involved than on any policy decisions. A case in point is the proposed North American Gallery, which will occupy the space adjacent to the Mexican Gallery, making up the second of a planned suite of 'New World' galleries. Despite the overwhelmingly positive experience of the Mexican Gallery, the North American Gallery is apparently being planned without the involvement of the Education Service, and there seems to be no mechanism for enforcing such a collaboration, which could only be of benefit to the public in the long term. Any education programme which may be devised to complement the new gallery will simply be reactive, and seen as something entirely separate from the exhibition itself, or as an afterthought. One would hope that in the future, and partially as a result of the success of the holistic approach adopted in the case of the Mexican Gallery, this kind of fission between collections and education, between heart and soul, becomes the exception rather than the norm.
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