Storytelling in Museums - (American Alliance of Museums) by Adina Langer (Paperback)

About the Book

This book demonstrates how museums can use personal stories to make visitors feel welcome while inspiring them to engage with new ideas. It also explores the responsibilities of museum practitioners toward the storytellers included in their narratives and how those responsibil...

Book Synopsis

This book demonstrates how museums can use personal stories to make visitors feel welcome while inspiring them to engage with new ideas. It also explores the responsibilities of museum practitioners toward the storytellers included in their narratives and how those responsibilities shift over time and manifest in different contexts.

Review Quotes

Storytelling can be a key to deep engagement. This broad-ranging collection provides valuable insights on the ways museums and visitors tell stories together--in exhibits and programs and operations, inside and outside museums, online, and across borders. Practitioners offer case studies of projects that have expanded definitions of both storytelling and visitor-centered museum practice.

Storytelling in Museums brings together dynamic storytellers who balance the depth, breadth, and complexity of what it means to intentionally invite storytelling into the heart of a museum's purpose. Through the expert blending of theory, practical application, and lived experiences, the contributors have amplified the importance and feasibility of shaping stories within the context of contemporary museum spaces. As the editor, Adina Langer has made room for a diversity of voices, perspectives, and techniques so that readers can find aspects of their own stories threaded throughout each chapter.

To simply approach Storytelling in Museums as a collection of isolated case studies is to do it a disservice. Through a variety of perspectives this volume brings forth critical perspectives on the essential questions of modern public history practice i.e. whose stories are we sharing, how is the power to share those narratives wielded (and by whom), and what impact do these stories have on museum practice at every step of creation.

Taken individually each article provides a single narrative on storytelling within the bounds of the museum walls, but collectively we are provided a glimpse into the challenges and promise of inclusive storytelling and the ethical considerations that should be a part of every level of public history practice in the years to come.

About the Author

For more than fifteen years, Adina Langer has focused her museum career on interpreting traumatic historical events for diverse audiences while emphasizing the dignity and individuality of the people who experienced them. An active curator, oral historian, educator, presenter, editor, blogger, and published author, she has created or co-curated more than eighteen exhibits with permanent homes at three museums, presence on the Web, and a busy schedule traveling the library, school, and community center circuit. Follow her on Twitter @Artiflection and find her on the web at www.artiflection.com.