Galleries & Gardens: Applying Museum Education Strategies to Botanical Learning

Claire Enerson (‘27) is an Anthropology and Italian Double Major, and a Museums concentrator. She works at the SCMA as a Student Museum Educator.

What if museum education strategies used on artworks could also apply to plants?

At Smith College, two student educator groups work to engage visitors with collections on campus. The Student Museum Educators lead K-12 school group tours in the SCMA galleries and the Botanic Garden Student Educators support student involvement in Lyman Plant House. I organized a collaborative workshop with these two cohorts in February.

My work as a Student Museum Educator and anthropology major inspired this workshop. I drew inspiration for the workshop from my experience in the course Research Methods in Anthropology. The class culminated in a policy brief that proposed recommendations to the Botanic Garden based on research. My policy brief maintained that museum education strategies could extend to botanical education. Close-looking strategies used in museum education could also help visitors practice observing plants without requiring botanical expertise. I experimented with my theory alongside the student museum and botanic garden educators.

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Photo by Claire Enerson

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a strategy that utilizes a set of specific questions to facilitate a collaborative group discussion, is one technique that fosters close looking. VTS builds on each participant’s contributions and promotes evidence-based reasoning. The process requires no specialized background knowledge to participate.

After experiencing VTS with a work of art during the workshop, the educators and I applied VTS to a dragon fruit plant. We began by pointing out details of the plants’ texture, color, and shape. When prompted to support our observations with evidence, our conversation focused on ideas about the plant’s structure, predators, and identification. This showed how VTS may work on both artworks and plants to deepen our analysis through discussion.

Beyond VTS, the Student Museum Educators and I brought a variety of activities typically used in the museum into the Botanic Garden. One activity, grounded in the senses, allowed us to slow down and name five things we could see, four we could touch, and so on, within the tropical house. Close looking also took the form of collaborative drawing activities, wherein the other educators and I had to visually describe a plant to a partner. Then, we drew it based on the description alone.

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Photo by Audrey Bloom

The workshop engaged with Younes Rahmoun: Here, Now, a multi-site exhibition devoted to the work of one of Morocco’s leading contemporary artists. The artist’s work is displayed in SCMA’s galleries, the MacLeish Field Station, and the Botanic Garden, where the artist’s Habba (Seed) 2008–2011 video animation is on view in the Church Gallery of the Lyman Plant House. The Habba (Seed) drawings that make up the animation are on view at SCMA in the first floor gallery. Engaging with both the drawings and the animation illuminated the artist’s process.

The student educators and I also experienced Younes Rahmoun’s Jabal-Hajar-Turab (Mountain-Stone-Earth) drawings in the SCMA New Media Gallery. In the drawing activity, we depicted ourselves as flowers, beginning at the roots. This reflected the artist’s thought process about how flowers represent people and how their intricate roots symbolize their backgrounds.

The workshop between the student educators at the museum and Botanic Garden created an opportunity for future collaboration between our two groups. The collective experiment in transferring museum strategies to the Botanic Garden showed that education across disciplines can benefit from implementing activities based on close-looking.