[MUSIC]
Hello everyone and welcome to yet another episode of Undercooled, a materials education podcast. I am your host for today, Tim Chambers at the University of Michigan. But more important than me is an extra special guest today. We'll have someone who is not in our sort of usual group of people who are into these things. I have brought with me Dave Choberka from the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Dave, good to have you here. Thank you. Good to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
Yeah, I'm hoping that today we can get a little bit into more of the materiality of art and sort of the intersection between art and material science. Also, what MSC as a field can learn from how the art world and how the museum world have developed these ways of communicating with and engaging with the public that we can hopefully benefit from in our professional practice as engineers. Great. Sounds good. So to get things started, if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself.
How did you get into the museum field? What are you doing at UMA currently? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'll start with what I do currently and then sort of tell the backstory of how I got there because there's a little bit of a, there's some sort of stories coming to the fruition in
the position that I'm in right now. So I am the curator for University Learning and Programs at UMA, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, which is a job that I've been doing really with same job, but with various titles since
2012. And the main part of that job is leading our program of what we call curricular engagement, which is working with classes from all disciplines across the university and working with the instructors of those classes to find ways to use art at the museum to, like the main thing I really try to emphasize is advanced learning goals within the discipline that the
students are coming from. I also do, I mean, in this job, I also do like a lot of our collaborations with faculty around exhibitions, collaboration with researchers on projects that involve art, which maybe I'll talk a bit more about later on. So all kinds of sort of intersections between the art museum and the university in general. The way I got into museum work was actually, there was kind of, there's kind of a happy story of serendipity that happened when I was a
grad student. I actually came to the University of Michigan to do my PhD in German studies. And that sounds probably like some odd leap from German studies to museum work, but it's actually not. The very first time I worked, and so I was, I was working, a cultural historian, basically in a German studies program. And I was hired by a curator at the University of Michigan Museum of Art to be a researcher for a show on German expressionism, because they wanted
somebody that could read German. That was the first, I'd never even thought about working in museums before. But I really liked that experience because, I was like working in my area of expertise, but writing and presenting an exhibition for a general audience. So I really appreciated sort of using things I'd learned, but not just communicating them to other experts. I liked that. That
was a great experience. But then also, I really enjoyed the experience of working with the material of a collection, like having these objects and create, and arranging them in a space in order to create experiences that go beyond the individual objects. So that was a really cool experience. And then right after I had that experience, the university started their museum studies graduate certificate program. So there was just kind of a happy, like I was like, that
was a cool experience. And then I like learned that there was this new museum studies program. So I applied to that and got into the first cohort. And then, and that was what really got me into thinking about museums as a possible future career. And that experience in grad school with the museum studies certificate program was really pivotal in the sort of museum work I do, because that that program is very intentionally interdisciplinary, they they bring in 12 grad students a
year. And they try to have them be from all different disciplines. So I was in the first cohort. And my colleagues were like, there was a there was an aerospace engineer in there, there was a zoologist, there was a computer science person who was really interested in sort of creating user apps for museums. There were only a couple of humanities
people. So it really being in that program really helped me to think about the interdisciplinarity of museum work and the way that we can make all museum work relate to multiple disciplines. And, and then so I got that certificate. And then very soon after I finished grad school, UMA actually got a grant from the Mellon Foundation to create the position that I have now, specifically with the goal of increasing interaction between the Art Museum and all sorts
of learning on campus. And so I got that job and have been building this program since then. And we did some benchmarking studies a few years ago for our current strategic plan. And we found that were the most successful university learning program at an art at a university art museum in terms of the breadth of disciplines that we work with, such as the collaboration we did with material science. Hmm. Well, maybe we'll hear more
about that shortly. The thing that I love about hearing your story though, is it's such a great reminder that one single unexpected experience that you have, you know, in a course or in an internship or something can completely change your outlook on your whole career. And you discover this new thing that you never quite knew existed before. And suddenly you're experiencing it and like, wow, I would like to do more of this, the sorts of things we want our students to, you know, have
when they're working with us. Yeah, you know, it's actually, it's an interesting point, because one of the things I've done off and on over the last few years is since I have a PhD, but I don't work in like a, you know, like a traditional academic position, I've been invited to do talks with grad students about what you know, what are often called alternate career paths for PhD students.
And there's so many, so many of the other people that they invite to talk to talk there, like they have this very deliberate story, this very like, oh, I wanted to do this. So I got this credential in order to do this thing. And my story is more like exactly what you said, like being open to experiences and being open to like finding new directions that just happen to kind of come your way and really
embracing those. Yeah, it always blows my mind when some of my students actually know what they want to do with their lives and are intentionally working toward it, because I certainly didn't when I was that age. But that's a story for another time. You mentioned the interaction with the materials department and sort of how you got connected in there.
So yeah, could you give us that part of the backstory of Yeah, yeah, that's a so, um, you know, back back or sort of early on in the job, one of the things I did a lot of was just outreach to different academic programs to be like, we're here, we're gonna if you if you want to bring a class to the museum, contact me, we'll work together to put
together a very cool experience. And so and I'm always like, I've always been trying to work with disciplines outside what people expect to find in an art museum and kind of going as far afield. So I was I was like, I did some outreach with engineering, I can't remember exactly what contact I had with material science people. But then sometime back like a year or two before the pandemic. You're very active and cool graduate student like outreach engagement, like club.
Yep, actually contacted me because they had kind of heard about the outreach I was doing and the work I was doing. And they contacted me just to see if there's anything that they could do with the museum, that would be like, about engaging the public with their interesting knowledge about the materiality of artworks. So we had some very cool discussions, and it was going to maybe go somewhere and then things got derailed by the
pandemic. And then so because of that connection, I actually so when we were sort of getting back to things at the museum, one of the really exciting things I've been able to work on since we've been back at the museum is this ongoing exhibition that we call curriculum collection, which is a show that I curate with faculty, specifically for those faculties classes to use as like sort of learning material throughout the
semester. And I'm always looking for, as I said, sort of wide ranging disciplines to have represented in that exhibition, because it's a really cool experience for the general visitor when they come to an art museum, and then they see, you know, this stuff's on display for material science students, it sort of changes how they think about
things. So I went back to my contacts with the grad students and said, you know, I'd really like to put together something in curriculum collection with material science, and they directed me to you. And then we started talking and we ended up collaborating on a curriculum collection installation, which actually had two really
cool components. One was we got some really interesting art made with different materials, wood and metals and, you know, just like my main criteria was like, I think these students will see things in this that are interesting that I don't have access to, because I'm not in material science, but serving up some interesting materials for them. But then we also worked with that grad student club to create what we call the materials
tour of the museum. So they picked out, I think, six objects that are on display in various parts of the museum, and wrote some really cool, like, specialized but accessible texts about the materials that went into the creation of those things. And I don't know if you knew this, when that was on when that was kind of active on the website, that was the most popular thing on our website for a few months. Oh, that's fantastic.
That's very valid. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that was, you know, that was sort of the long story of how we started working together. And it culminated in this collaborative exhibition. And then and then Tim, who I'm talking with here right now, Tim and I actually did a public program that we do, we do a public program in association with curriculum collection called subject matters, where we basically try to like provide the kind of university learning experience that we do for the students
to the general public. And Tim and I had that was one of the best subject matters as well. Because that was we had some really interesting wide ranging discussions about culture and materiality. And I finally remember switching roles at one point where you kind of talked about the culture. And I did my best to talk about the materiality. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, that was a really great time. We should do that again. I'll say that. Yeah, public. So
it's on the record. But you've already brought me into I think the next topic, which is that as you're doing all this public engagement, and, you know, you've been interacting more with some of these technical disciplines, how has your experience and learning a little bit about, you know, about engineering and about material science, has this influenced how you think about the art that you're working with and how you communicate that art to the
public? Yeah, I mean, profoundly, and really in kind of like, two connected but disparate ways. So one one being like the technical side of things, and one being how the working with material science has also changed my experience of like the aesthetic, right? I'll talk a little bit about both
of those. So on the on the technical side, like, I mean, people, me and just people in general are always interested to learn about how objects are made, and how the materials are manipulated in order to produce the effects that we're seeing.
And working with material science actually gives me a little bit more informed, like discussion, sort of informed, informed material for discussion about the creation of metals, like talk a little bit about the crystal structures in there based on, you know, the things that we learned about with you. I know a lot more about ceramics and glaze from
working with your program. So I'm actually I have some facility to kind of respond to that curiosity that pretty much everybody has when we're working with those sorts of materials to talk a bit about how the materials that they're made with and the way those materials are used produces the macro effects that we find in the pieces. I remember you saying at that subject matters that micro structures produce macro effects.
And I think about that often as well. Oh, and that relates to the other thing that's that's really kind of in this is kind of a more profound way in which it's influenced me. And this is getting kind of into the speculative territory here. But like, so I think so our experience of visual art is actually more synesthetic than we think it is, then we sort of acknowledge it's like when we look at something, it activates our other senses as well. Right.
Okay. Yeah. And then it also, whenever we look at something, it produces an embodied experience as well. Right, which could be, I mean, it might be like an embodied experience of like the form of the art. And you kind of imagine like how your body would move to produce that form. Or it could be something about like the texture of it. And you kind of imagine how it would feel and like maybe how it would crumble if you touched it
and that sort of thing. So thinking like, being more attentive to the material qualities of the that the objects are produced with actually gives me access to some interesting kind of like synesthetic and embodied
experiences of them. I especially experience this with like similarly with like ceramics, like, you know, I used to be attentive to the ways that, you know, there's different porosity in ceramics that that I mean, I sort of was like, it has to do with how the molecules are clouded, try to get together or something like I had some idea that it must have something to do with some of the micromateriality in there. But I feel like I have a little bit more of a handle on that from working
with you. And so I actually have a more powerful kind of embodied experience and almost like a feeling experience of objects that is informed by that by that experience with you. That's, that's such an interesting observation about the different sensory channels that we're engaging, even if we're just looking at something with our eyes, but really, it does become the sort of whole body experience when you're engaging your imagination and consider how did a person
make this right? What must that have process have been like? And that's the sort of thinking that I want my students to do, right, to approach this as an engineer and say, what was the manufacturing like? What, what's the physicality of how this material behaves as someone's trying to shape it into a product? And now you've got me thinking on the side of how could I use something a little bit more artistic to get students to engage with that more complete sensory experience. So I'm
going to chew on that. But I do also want to ask about another topic that is very very topical in MSC and very much a present day concern, which is that we have this, a much broader awareness, I think now in our field, that there is a lot of inequity and inequality in society that is caused by engineering.
And in many of the problems that we're dealing with as engineers, that the the cultural context in which we're doing our engineering work is so critical to doing it well and to doing it ethically and to understanding how we're going to affect people in our engineering practice. But as someone in the art world, I feel like my naive belief from the outside is that in the art world, it's like you're always thinking about the human element of these
problems. So what my question is then, as engineers, what can we learn from the art community and from the museum community that's engaging the public? What can we learn about how to better get our students to think about the cultural context of their work? Gosh, you know, I'm going to talk about sort of how we engage in that kind of work in the art museum. And then let's see if we can bridge that to how we can use that to form the work of engineers. I have maybe some speculative
ideas about that. But yeah, let me let me so I was actually thinking about this question ahead of time. And I actually came up with like several different metaphors for like the value of art in these in these sorts of discussions. So one is like art as a mirror. So one of the things that are, I mean, it's not true of all art, but a lot of art does address sort of representation of people, which we can connect to larger discussions
about identity. So there's like the sort of in this in art being visual means that we're, you know, we're sort of thrown on dealing with visual identities, right, which is where a lot of stereotypes reside and a lot of bias reside, right. So just the subject of art in itself, which is about people and about identity means that it's kind of a mirror that we can hold up to ourselves. And we can talk about ourselves in relation to the art and talk about our relations with
others in relation to the art. So art is a mirror of identity is one aspect. But then at the same time, I would say art is a kind of screen that it doesn't mirror us, it actually allows us to talk to one another without directly addressing one another, we can address the art. So or like a filter or
something like that. Oh, that's one of the things I find really valuable is like, when we're in the museum, and we're looking at a work of art that is addressing like racism or some sort of like, or a topic of social justice. The main thing we try to do is talk about kind of what the artist is communicating, and then kind of what our response is to that. But so we're, we're really talking about an artist complex communication
about this topic. So rather than talking about our own opinions, it allows us to talk about issues of identity and social justice, without it being sort of personalized. And it allows us to like engage with like the artist is probably saying something kind of complex and interesting that's not reductive. So it allows us to get at these things without
it. I mean, if people feel uncomfortable about addressing bias and stuff like that, it's it's a way of doing it without them feeling called out quite as much. Right? Yeah. Screen or a filter. There's something there that I want to connect to what some of us do in our classes in engineering, which is that there will be this technical problem, usually without a unique correct answer that we want our students to
work on. But as we get the students to frame the problem and to describe and define what is the problem you're trying to solve, this often teases out many assumptions and many, you know, sort of unconscious biases that this yes have. And just in that aspect of getting them to describe what the problem is, you're right, I think it becomes a little bit less personalized of here's how I feel
about my identity in the world. And it makes it a little bit more, as you said, just a little less personal, where they can start to unpack some of these ideas more because there's this other there's this third party that they're getting to to use their ideas. That's really interesting. Yeah. And one of the things you said there was actually the next point that I was going to make.
And it was actually one of the places where I could see definitely see some intersection with sort of the training of engineers, which is like art is really good at ambiguity. It's very good at like presenting things to us that we can read like compellingly read in multiple and even opposing ways at the same time. And so art has an ambiguity in it that we can like, we sometimes we have to like, get past our initial simplistic responses to it to get to the
ambiguity. But then if we have multiple people looking at the same work of art and having different thoughts about it, that is also another form of ambiguity of meaning that has to do with kind of social interaction around the art. So all of these kind of discussions, like help us to sort of realize that there's multiple ways to look at something.
And when you said you give them technical problems without a unique correct answer, I mean, that's that's kind of the core of things right there is like, there's not a unique correct answer to the to the meaning of a work of art or to like questions about sort of identity. It's like it's something we have to kind
of talk about and work through. You know, and just one other thing on this sort of question of bias, like one of the one of the great values of art is actually in dealing with biases that so many biases reside in our visual capacities, and they run on autopilot, you know, like our visual faculties are not designed to like look at things, and we don't actually accurately see the world, we see a very filtered version
of the world. Like before we even think about it, our brain has decided, you know, this, these are the things that are out there, these are the things that are worth paying attention to, and then your eyes look at them and get information out of them. So like biases reside so automatically in in visuality. And so visual culture is a really good way to kind of help people get go through exercises to notice how they jump to a conclusion
at first. And then when they looked more and thought about it, there was more going on. Yeah, I think I think you just answered my next question, which is why should every engineer take an art class, but I feel like we just knocked it out of the park on that one. Yeah, I think so. Well, I, you know, there's two answers to that. I mean, we could talk about sort of the, is the sort of socio cultural engagement that we can get through
art. But then we could also talk about, you know, engineers working with like art materials. Yeah, there's, you know, we've had, we've been talking about bias, and we've been talking about how our our perception of the world is filtered through our brain
unconsciously. And because there are so many layers to this system of how we perceive and engage with the world around us, there's also can be a lot of difficulty in building just connections with people, right to open dialogues about difficult questions, and to get to a place where you can have these hard conversations about problems that don't have right answers. And I know that's a space that you work in a lot, because you have so many student
groups from different disciplines. And as you mentioned earlier, right, you have public groups as well coming in. So what are your some of your, what are some of your techniques for, for starting to build those connections and for creating a space where people can talk about these questions in a productive way? That's a great
question. So I mean, like, first off, like, I see one of the most important roles that we play in engaging with students in the public around these sorts of topics is like acting as facilitators and trying to get people to, like, talk and listen to one another and respond to what one another
are saying. And the way we do that is, like, you know, there's a lot of talk of engaged learning in sort of university settings, we feel like we really walk the walk the walk the talk of engaged learning at the museum and the way and there's also these different definitions of engaged learning, the one that I think is like sort of most salient, which actually I heard the like my director say one time was that engaged learning is asking people to do something instead of telling them something.
Right. And so one of the ways that we so you would think like, how do you do that? How do you ask people to do something with a work of art? We're standing in front of a painting. What do you ask them to do? Well, we ask them to describe it. We ask them what they see, and then we ask them what it gets them to think about. And we try to forefront all those sort of active discussions, active
responses. We try to put that upfront in the discussion before we bring in any information about the artist or the title or anything like that. So we're really trying to I mean, seriously, we're trying to hear what people think. Yeah, yeah. And that makes them feel invited into the discussion. Right. And then as facilitators, a really important thing that we do. And this actually, you know, as I said, my background was in German studies. So when I was a grad student, I did a lot of language
instruction, like German 101 and 102. And there's some core things that I learned in that pedagogy that we apply all the time in museum work. So one of the most important things in language learning is that people feel inhibited, right? And they feel inhibited because they're worried they're going to make a mistake. Right. So the language program that I was in was all about not correcting people. It was all about just like making people feel confident that even if they make mistakes,
they're going to be understood. So we taught for comprehension rather than accuracy. Right. And so that creates an environment in which the students aren't worried about making an error. They're trying to communicate for understanding just like in cultural and social discussions, we're trying to communicate with one another for understanding without worrying about making mistakes. And then being affirmative about what people say.
And then this is like a key thing, what's called in language instruction, what's called recasting, which is where you repeat what somebody said correctly. Right. So one of the things I often do in discussions with people is people say insightful things. Sometimes they don't quite know how to
articulate it. I try to kind of take what they say and repeat it in a way that puts it in dialogue with the things other people are saying, or with some of the kind of like, you know, sort of like background knowledge that I have about
the piece or something like that. And so this kind of invitation to speak an affirmation of what people are saying and then an active effort to I mean, one of the things I do in my work all the time is I use ideas from other disciplines and kind of metaphoric ways that maybe are interesting, but maybe kind of abuse them a little bit. But in this case, I would say the, you know, within a discussion, the participants are providing a kind of material,
right. And one of my goals is the facilitator is to take that material and work with it to make something that the whole, to help the group make something together. Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. And I think there's a good overlap there with what we're doing in engineering classes as well. This idea of it's okay to be
partially correct, right? You need to convey the ideas that you're having, because so many of our courses, especially our upper level courses have so much of a teamwork component, that it's not expected for any one person to know everything or to get it totally right. But it's like, well, if person A has a good idea, person B has a different good idea, person C has a different good idea, you start to really put together a very effective approach to the problem that the
students are trying to solve. So then the role for the teacher in that context is to be I guess the recaster, right, to take all these aspects of correctness and to be able to synthesize it and say, it sounds like what you're proposing is, and then to put it out in a way that the students will resonate with and say, yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, I would add to that also, like as the instructor in such a setting, having as an explicit goal, like helping the students to have an experience of sort of social learning, fun social learning, it's actually fun to work on a team. Right, collaborative, it's not competitive. Yes, exactly.
Exactly. It's not competitive. And when we listen to one another and talk with one another and facilitate making something together, it's going to be like, it's going to be a more enjoyable experience. And we're probably going to make something that's cooler. Yeah, absolutely.
You know, and that, you know, just one of the things that I talk about, and you know, when, you know, in the, you know, museum world, we're always kind of talking about our work to, you know, other museums and to other people at the university. And one of the things I always emphasize is kind of like the primary goal of everything we do at the museum is to give students or the public, and when we're working with the public, an experience of fun social learning. And like if they learn stuff
too, that's great. But if they leave being like, wow, that was really engaging to, I was listening to other people and I was being heard and we talked about important things together. And we changed one another or we changed together in some way. That's all like super important, core stuff of our experience. What I wanted to ask you is in your experience working, especially with public groups, do you see, do you see the museum visitors getting excited about the science behind
the art? And like, what does it mean? And how does it work? And is that a vehicle that we can use to to drive more, you know, interest in the sciences with the public? Yeah, I think there's a lot of there's a lot of room there to meet public interest. And in most of the most of that, most of the questions that the public have in this area are around the topics of your making, like how was this made? What were the materials that were used? How do you
manipulate them? And like, I feel like it's like the more expert that explanation can be, the more it gives people access to some really deep understandings of the, you know, the materiality, the objecthood of what we're looking at, which going back to what I was saying earlier about synesthetic experiences, I really feel like those sorts of that sort of understanding and knowledge can really kind of undergird a more, this is a more powerful and multifaceted experience of works of art.
Yeah, it's, it's so good to be reminded of how layered these topics are, right? That there's, there's the cultural context, there's the aesthetics of the art itself, there's the physicality and the materiality of what it's made out of that all these things intersect, right? It's not just, they're not even separable. You can't have one without the others.
No. Yeah, you know, a really good example of that is going back to the the QR code tour that we that the grad students put together for material science for that curriculum collection installation we did a ways back. One of the, one of the objects that they wrote about was a piece of celadon wear and it was, it was in the, like the technical side of it was like, why is it green? Like what makes it green? But then, like, why did they want it to be green? That had to do with the popularity of jade
and the rarity of jade. And so it was an effort to make a ceramic that had similar color qualities to jade. So it's like a really cool example of like the intersection between cultural history and understanding and the science and bringing the two together in a way where each sort of like had something interesting. Yeah, and we're trying to parallel those same multifaceted conversations in our engineering classes where it's, okay, what is the technical performance of this
system? Sure, great. What's the value of it economically? Sure, but also culturally, is this something that people want? Is this something that will convey some sort of status to the owner? Like these are all aspects of, of this problem of product design aesthetics, like does it look good? If it's ugly, people aren't going to
want it. And it's so easy for students to get in this narrow vein of what is the technical performance that any, any venue or any vehicle that we have to get them out of that limited mindset and say, what about the rest of the world? I feel like it's very important. Yeah, yep. It actually reminds me of like, one of the definitions of art that I really dislike is this definition. Like art is anything that doesn't have to do with survival, right? Because it's like, we have survival needs and
we make tools to help us survive. And then art's like this extra thing. And I'm like, when we think about design, that's exactly where those two come together. Like the way a tool is designed is like integral to how usable it is, right? And it's integral to how it like supports life. So like, so like, design is a like a very, like, it's a place where sort of like the technical side and the cultural side come intimately together. And
they're vital, right? They're not, it's not like, oh, we make a tool and then we give it design just so it looks nice or something that design needs to be integrated into the functionality of the thing. Yeah, it's, it sometimes gets to be this problem that's left aside until the end. And then people will try to tack on the other considerations after they've declared the problem solved. And well, that's not going to give you an effective solution. It's going to be obviously disjoint. And
absolutely. And it goes, I mean, that goes back to like early 20th century Bauhaus principles of design, which is like the meat, like things should be designed for the meeting of form and function. And it's in design isn't about putting a facade on something in order to make it look better. Design is part of it. It certainly is. I do have to keep an eye on
the clock. But before we wrap it up for the day, for people in the audience who might be interested in this sort of collaboration that you and I have had, right, where worlds have collided, and we created this new thing that didn't exist before. How does that happen? For you and me, it was just as you said, it was serendipity, someone happened to reach out to someone
else. But if someone wants to start a community engagement program, or if someone wants to work with their local art communities or local museum, to have that collaboration between the technical discipline, right? And that legendary other side, the humanities, how do we get that started? What's the right way for someone like me to approach someone like you and say, hey, we should hang out together? Yeah. Man, I mean, in a way, that's like part of my job.
So I mean, if you're at the university, and you want to do something interesting with a class or academic program or anything at all, I mean, I'm the person you'd get in touch with, but sort of just speaking in general. So I guess I got sort of two ways to think about this. So one, as far as like working with communities and just doing something that's interesting to communities, like doing something that's like making like a hands on sort of thing is going to be way more
appealing. And if you can, like, if you're interested in bringing, like, you know, like knowledge about the properties of paper to a broader audience, doing it through like an origami workshop or something would be like the way to do that, because people are always interested in hands on activities. And then if you can tack on the sorts of like, expertise on top of that, then it's like, you know, it's an
enticing package. And then also, it's like you're going back to that engaged learning thing as you have people make something and then ask what their experience of the materiality was and then bring in what you know about the things, you know, that
sort of thing. So like really doing something participatory and inviting their involvement, as far as like working with an institution and, you know, trying to partner with them to do things, I would say, like, in general, like culture workers are like very overworked. And it's like, there's so many cool things we could be working on. And it's hard to decide what things to prioritize. So having some kind of organization or some kind of clear idea of what you want to do can be really
helpful. And then like working with the museum as kind of a platform to present a program that you put together can be really helpful. Also, another, I guess, another sort of key part of working with like cultural institutions is like, we tend to work really far in the future. So like, you know, talking early about something you want to do in the future is also extremely helpful. Like we're working on things that are going to happen in two, three years.
We're working on things that are going to happen next week, six months, a year, two years, three years. So it's hard to keep a handle on. Yeah, I guess the takeaway I'm getting here is actually plan ahead and actually have a concept for what you want to do. And it's amazing how if you do that, you can get people to, to be on board with it. Yeah, yeah. And hands on things, hands on things are great.
That's something I'm always like, I'm looking for new ways to add, just like drawing activities or just, you know, with a lot of classes, just doing something where the students are doing a little little bit of making, even if it's just asking them to draw some lines in response to prompts. That's a, it's a really, it's participatory and fun. And there's not right answers.
All right. Well, yeah, since it's time to wrap up for today, I'll say if you have a minute and you want to talk about anything that you're doing right now, anything you want to brag about anything you want to plug to the audience, tell us what's going on at UMA. Oh, man. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So just in my, in my work area, we just put up a new set of curriculum collection displays. One of which is in this, like a very
cool, cool combo. So in my exhibition space on one side, we have a class on interfaith understanding. So it's a lot of art about different religious faiths and also about sort of interfaith identities and experiences. And then sharing that space is a new class in the history of art called Arts and Cultures of Star Wars, which is actually a collaboration with the Museum of Anthropology
as well. And that's a class that's looking sort of like doing sort of a cultural critical look at the sort of representation of otherness and difference in the context of Star Wars and sort of paying attention to the way that so much of that representation is sort of conditioned by settler colonialism. So those are some, you know, those are the current curriculum collection installations
we have up. Another thing I'd like to just like give a plug for, which is just because I think it's a really interesting project is I'm working with a faculty in the School of Nursing named Clayton Schumann on a project that we're calling Art-spective, which is actually, so Clayton works in, he works on bias in medical care. And he was specifically looking for a way to, looking for a new way to do anti-bias training, especially with neonatal nurses.
And specifically, he has this project where, you know, he's trying to reduce bias of neonatal nurses toward new mothers suffering from opioid addiction and trying to support the mothers and, you know, in recovery and in being mothers. And but so I did a like, I did like a, what's a pretty standard sort of empathy building exercise in museum pedagogy,
like I did not invent it. It's called a perspective flipping exercise where you basically look at a photograph and kind of describe it for as a from a third person perspective. And then somebody else approaches it from the perspective of one of the people in the image. And then you kind of compare how you read the image differently, depending on if you're taking an outside perspective or a first person perspective.
The person who takes the first person first person first person perspective, sees much more agency in the image, they like give a story and they give reasons to like whatever the person's doing. Whereas when you do the third person perspective, people tend to be kind of like biased and judgmental. So that we did that exercise with him. And we did some studies with
some nursing students. And we actually, you know, he did some before and after surveys and proved statistically that it increased the empathy of the people who participated in it. And so now we're actually working on trying to turn it into an online education platform that like, hopefully, like, you know, medical organizations can can buy this as an anti bias training and people will go on and they'll sort of do the exercise online, the way that we facilitate
it in person. But going back to the thing we were saying about bias earlier, so the thing that's cool about this exercise is different than a lot of other bias training, is it kind of puts people through an experience where they notice their own bias and become aware of it. And it's not like somebody else was saying like, you were biased right there. It's like they notice it themselves.
And then they there makes people less defensive and hopefully just like, like, you know, more aware of it and trying to reduce it in themselves. So I think that's one of the effectiveness. One of the reasons that that's effective is because it once it's like what I was saying about art is a screen in a way, it's like it allows people to think about bias and think about their own biases without being put on the spot. That sounds
fantastic. I'm very much now thinking about how that might be employed in a case study analysis and engineering class, right? Describe this case from the perspective of someone who experienced it rather than what we see historically after the fact. But that's an exercise for a future episode. Yeah, I was gonna go on. I'll stop. I've taken enough of your time. I'm really glad that you were able to make time to join us today. Great to have
you here. And hopefully I'll talk to you again soon for everyone out in the audience. We'll see you next time. Great. Thanks so much.