reflective learning portfolio final essay
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Amory Orchard's Reflective Learning Portfolio Final Essay for The Infinite MuseumTRANSCRIPT
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Amory Orchard
Dr. Berg
The Infinite Museum
Final Reflective Essay
My Infinite Museum Experience
If someone had told me that someday my classrooms would include a beautiful old
house, a museum, and the Brooklyn Bridge, I never would have believed them. During the fall of
2014, this is precisely what happened when I was a member of The Infinite Museum class.
Before this immersive learning project, I was someone who preferred being taught the
traditional way—through reading assignments, writing papers, listening to lectures, and the
occasional dreaded group project. Before the first day of The Infinite Museum, I was nervous
because the seminar required my team to create a product starting from nothing. This was
occasionally frustrating because it forced me to take obstacles as they presented themselves. It
often left me feeling uncertain: What did I know about art? Was I really prepared to dedicate an
entire semester to one class project? Would my English major skills ever be useful for a project
about museums? I felt this way for the first weeks of the project until I came across a quote from
one of Dr. Berg’s books, How to be an Explorer of the World:
To enter into the unknown (to partake in an experiment) involves a willingness to
fully experience and study things we don’t understand, and to embrace that lack
of understanding” (Smith 148).
This quote not only became my philosophy for approaching the project; it became my new
philosophy for approaching life. The Infinite Museum experiment taught me to embrace the
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unfamiliar. I applied this new philosophy to my writing, editing, and promotion duties, but to my
Rhetoric and Writing major and Creative Writing minor as well.
EMBRACING THE UNKNOWN: WRITING PROMPTS
When I first signed up for The Infinite Museum, I never dreamed I would call upon the
creative writing process to engage visitors with art. In one of my college creative writing
textbooks, author Dinty W. Moore says there are three modes of thinking we go through when
working on a project: The Child, who tries out ideas and is “fully engaged in seeing, hearing,
[and] feeling” (223); The Adult, who looks at those ideas and begins to ask whether these ideas
serve a purpose; and The Parent—the critical voice who decides whether or not our crazy ideas
are ready for an audience. Writing prompts showed me that creating something original requires
plenty of time to play with ideas, write out multiple drafts, and then—most importantly of all—
show those drafts to other people. When I used to write an essay or a story before, I would try
carefully planning the paper from the beginning to the end. Then I would try to fill in the rest.
Unfortunately, not playing with ideas before judging to see how everything else fits hampers
originality.
I found this out the hard way with my introvert-themed mix tape and Community Day
tour. I constructed my tour like I had done with every other paper I had written before: I first
planned the order of each artwork, and then filled in my commentary about each artwork later.
Although my fellow teammates seemed to enjoy the mix tape—even later choosing it to be
handed out to visitors at the museum’s Community Day event—I never bothered to have fun
with it. In the surveys, guests’ criticism said it was “very long” and boring. They were right.
Because I never allowed myself time to closely look at the artwork, I never gained any new
insights. I never accessed my inner Child.
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Our group’s routine of allowing plenty of time to “play” with ideas in the museum,
testing those ideas in the museums with others, and then submitting those prompts for edits was
extremely beneficial for my writing. Until it came time to write prompts, I had a difficult time
with the collaborative aspects of writing. This experience taught me to keep an open mind when
thinking of ideas and when listening to critiques is an essential part of being a writer. One of the
best prompts I ever wrote was one which suggested people photograph the cracks in the oil
paintings. It happened one day in September when I was at the museum alone on a Friday
afternoon with only a notebook in hand. I remember meandering from gallery to gallery bobbing
my head up and down, trying to see the cracks in the oil paintings. It was the first time in the
museum when I was having fun with an idea I had thought of.
The Adult state of mind came the day after when I opened my notebook. I found my
scribbled note about the cracks, and began freewriting on an open Word document in an attempt
to figure out how I could show how interesting the cracks were to others. Then my inner
“Parent” made certain changes as I wrote the idea out on a notecard for our first notecard-testing
session in the museum. This was the same routine for all sixty-four prompt I wrote for the
website. Learning to keep an open mind for playing with ideas and welcoming constructive
criticism taught me to not be afraid to take risks in my writing. Soon, I was creating scavenger
hunts and other activities for visitors, connecting art with songs and books, and even treating the
artwork as characters to boost other writers’ creativity as well.
EMBRACING THE UNFAMILIAR: EDITING PROMPTS
When it came time to start writing content for the site, I was able to lend my writing,
editing, and analytical skills to the project. However, unless my prompts were being tested by
others, I was still only focused on writing my own prompts. This changed when I became lead
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editor. Prior to this project, I was never the leader on group projects; I was always a follower—
and happy being one. My job as lead editor, however, became an opportunity to gain first-hand
experience with understanding the pedagogical and rhetorical theories I had read about in my
Rhetoric/Writing classes. Most importantly, doing so made me realize I love helping others
write.
The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon revolves around the concept of the audience-
museum in which visitors can “construct their own meaning from cultural experiences” (Simon
ii). I have always closely associated this idea with the student-centered learning vs teacher-
centered learning. I was formally introduced to these pedagogical concepts in my Introduction to
Rhetoric and Writing class two years ago. As Nina Simon explains in her book, museum visitors
do not become engaged when simply reading the labels on the wall; they prefer to learn about the
collections in a personal way. I tried to adopt this same audience/student-centered attitude when I
became lead editor.
Even though my job as editor was to ensure my teammates’ interpretations about the art
were clear and concise, my duties became more about working with the writers rather than
simply telling them what they were doing wrong by pointing concerns out on the editing
checklist, or worse, simply fixing it on our own. Ellie and I made this mistake when we first
started editing one of Janie’s prompts that was confusing to us at the time. We were editing
outside class at the time, so we could not consult her. After we thought we had “fixed” her
prompt, Janie approached us and essentially told us we completely ruined her prompt’s meaning.
We then sat down together, and suggested ways she could make her meaning more clear without
sacrificing her original idea. After this incident, I realized our editing strategy had to change.
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A few days later, I held a meeting with the rest of the editors. I presented them with an
informal script when we come across a prompt whose meaning was unclear. During this meeting,
I told them we were there to work together with the writers. When we did not understand what
the writer was trying to say, we were making the prompt what we thought it should be. Doing so
went against Nina Simon’s (and our The Infinite Museum’s) philosophy that anyone should be
able to construct their own meaning from cultural experiences. Everyone who creates content
and uses our app has valuable outlooks on life. We editors were just there to make that same
vision polished and audience-ready. That meeting worked out the final kinks in the editing
process. A week later, we had edited 800 prompts with zero complaints or other negative
reactions from our teammates. By the end of the semester, my fellow editors and I reviewed over
1,500 prompt pages on the WordPress site.
EMBRACING THE UNKNOWN: PROMOTIONS/OUTREACH COMMITTEE
If editing made me finally see the value in being a leader to help others, being a member
of the Promotions Committee forced me to reach outside my comfort zone one step further:
learning to write to the community about our product. One of the important aspects of being a
creator of an innovative product is being able to sell one's ideas to others. Before, I was never
one to initiate conversation or ask someone for a favor. Writing the back of our showcase
invitation, the proposal to the English Department, and researching a list of possible publications
taught me three things: how to write to a wider audience through research, how to establish my
ethos to these publications, and how to look at The Infinite Museum through an audience's eyes.
I am glad I became a member of this committee because these skills are a crucial part of
my Rhetoric and Writing program requirements. The invitation was the easiest to write of the
three because I did not need to research our audience. However, it did require me to
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communicate to the invited guests (including high-ranking Ball State administrators and faculty)
why coming to our showcase was worth it for them. This all had to be conveyed in three lines.
To do this, I stripped our mission statement down to the heart of our app: “It provides museum
guests with new and creative ways to challenge the traditional museum experience.” I also chose
to refer to our web-application as “cutting-edge” to emphasize how original our product is.
Writing the publications list and writing to the English Department proved a more
difficult task because I had to distance myself from The Infinite Museum—something I labored
over and had become emotionally attached to—in order to see the app through other people’s
eyes. Writing the English Department blog post proposal forced me to ask questions such as:
What’s in it for English majors, anyway? How could The Infinite Museum specifically help
them? I also had to establish my “ethos” (credibility). Instead of just writing an email to the
department, I researched more information about the blog by looking under the website’s “Write
for Us” page. In the end, I described The Infinite Museum as a resource for creative writing
students and emphasized the fact that I (a creative writing student, myself) had already found the
app useful when writing my own essays and stories. I also used this approach while compiling
the list of possible publications for Dr. Berg. When looking under “notes for contributors” pages
on their websites, I had to select journals and other platforms that were looking for contributions
specifically about the topic, “the museum in today’s society.” Even though it was occasionally
difficult to decide that we did not fit a particular journal’s needs, the experience taught me the
rather harsh lesson that our app is not to everyone’s taste.
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CONCLUSIONS
When I told my friends and family I had signed up for The Infinite Museum seminar,
they were shocked. After all, I was someone who always hated group projects. Now, I had signed
up for a Virginia Ball Center immersive learning seminar: the ultimate group project. The
outcome completely depended on the ability to collaborate with others. There were no guarantees
my teammates and I would get along. When my friends asked me what we were making, I could
not even tell them because even those of us in the seminar did not know. Despite all this
uncertainty, my teammates and I succeeded, and new opportunities opened up for me because of
this project. I enjoyed helping Janie and others edit their prompt drafts so much that I applied for
and –was offered—a tutor position at the Ball State Writing Center. This will not only provide
me with opportunities to practice the rhetoric and composition theories I applied to editing
prompts during the seminar. I am now less intimidated by group projects and not afraid to “get
weird” when planning new creative writing projects. Embracing the unknown was far from easy,
but infinitely worthwhile.
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Works Cited
Moore, Dinty W. "On Becoming an Excellent Rewriter." Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide
for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest, 2010.
Print.
Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Museum 2.0, 2010. Print.
Smith, Keri. "The Importance of Getting Lost." How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable
Life Museum. New York: Perigee, 2008. Print.