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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.