Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning

4. Learner-Driven Simming

77 Four Learner-­Driven Simming R On his visit to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, in April 2012, President Barack Obama boarded the bus in which Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, a confrontation that kicked off the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott now marked as a powerful and decisive chapter in the civil rights movement.The bus had been restored to a simming of its original appearance in 1955, but with period civil rights broadcasts and voice-­ overs from leaders of the movement playing through the speakers. Obama took the seat Parks had occupied on 1 December 1955. “I just sat in there for a moment and pondered the courage and tenacity that is part of our very recent history but is also part of that long line of folks—­ sometimes nameless, oftentimes didn’t make the history books—­ but who constantly insisted on their dignity, their share of the American dream,” Obama said at a fund-­ raising event that same morning. And at another later in the day, he said,“It takes ordinary citizens to bring about change, who are committed to keep fighting and keep pushing, and keep inching this country closer to our highest ideals.”1 Thousands of visitors have similarly boarded Rosa Parks’s bus at the Henry Ford since the restoration was unveiled in 2003. It is now the centerpiece of the museum’s With Liberty and Justice for All exhibit.Those who visit the exhibit can enter and sit in the restored Montgomery city bus, simming its passengers. Each visitor on entering has several choices. Where will he or she sit? In the front? The back? Will the visitor play out the encounter between Parks and the white passenger to whom she refused her spot? Will he or she, like Obama, simply sit and ponder the courage and tenacity of those that have gone before? After their own virtual embodiment of the bus’s passengers, these visitors have been prompted, like Obama, to articulate how they’ll work for dignity and the American dream, not by issuing an official 78 • Simming remark but by writing and posting sticky notes on a public wall with their own answers to questions like “What are today’s threats to liberty and justice for all?” Part II takes on museum simmings that equip participants with information through immersive performance practices and then ask those participants to manifest their learning through attitudes and actions in the present. These actions can take place starting in the experience itself, as when the Henry Ford asks its visitors to give voice to their reactions to the exhibit, as well as to respond to the words of their fellow virtual passengers. Or the visitors can be called on to make informed decisions based on information with which they’ve been equipped, as a way to generate deep and lasting learning through real-­ time, high-­ stakes application. More and more museums and cultural attractions are offering exhibits and experiences that equip visitors with learning and invite them to step into roles that require real-­ time choices based on that learning. In this chapter, I turn to this phenomenon, what I’m calling learner-­ driven simming, and take a look at a small handful of museum programs that are making strides granting visitors more agency in making meaning through immersive performance . Along with the Rosa Parks bus, I consider the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the Supreme Court exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Each, to a greater or lesser extent,offers what pedagogy scholar Ken Bain terms “deep learning” experiences in which learners are equipped with knowledge, presented with dilemmas, and asked to make choices based on the knowledge they have coproduced with the institution.2 Rosa Parks’s bus is a good example of a learner-­ driven, uncurated meaning-­ making moment in a simulation. Even from the start, the bus differs from most of the artifacts in the Henry Ford Museum (planes,trains,and automobiles, not to mention tractors and harvesters and the Oscar Mayer “Weinermobile”), in that rather than being displayed as an object of reverence on a plinth behind a rope, the bus invites entry, engagement, touch, and sensory interaction. But its position as an entrée into public discourse between visitors on today’s threats of injustice makes it stand out in a space otherwise reserved for silent marveling at engineering and ingenuity. My first...