Facebook as Staff Backchannel: A Simple Way to Promote Transparency and Intimacy

A month ago, one of our front-line staff members, Sarah Groh, came to her supervisor and me with a concern. Sarah and some of her colleagues in visitor services feel disconnected from the work that happens "upstairs" in the office and in our creative project development.

This problem is nothing new. Any place with people working different schedules in different parts of the building suffers from it. It can be easy for front-line staff to feel like second-class citizens; they can't make it to regular staff meetings, they work on days when other people are off, and their work, while deeply important to our overall mission, can be repetitive and deeply unsexy.

At our museum, we've gotten better at communication up from the front desk to the office. Visitor services staff write synopses of weekend days, notable visitor interactions, and events that help me and others get a sense of what's going on. But as Sarah pointed out, that communication is one-way: from front-line to office, never from office to the front desk.

And so we decided to try something really simple: a private staff Facebook group. We thought for a minute about more complicated backchannel options but realized that what we really wanted was an easy-to-use, opt-in space where people could share what's going on with their work.

At first, from a managerial perspective, I was unsure. Would people feel pressured to post and follow? Would enough people use it to make it work? Would it help with the basic problem we were trying to solve?

Within just a week of its creation, the "MAH Stories" private Facebook group had proven itself as a ridiculous success. People use it to share surprises in the archives, inspiring meetings with artists, dead birds in the lobby, and free food in the fridge. People post silly photographs from the basement cleanup and cheer on each other's small successes. A colleague who's out on maternity leave posts photos of her baby and makes everyone jealous.

The group organically and immediately put an end to all-staff emails (except for the highly administrative). At the same time, it opened up opportunities to share things that never would have felt "important enough" for an all-staff email - like the fact that three people were wearing purple pants on Tuesday, or a photo of an exhibit in development, or the false alarm on a bomb threat due to an overturned crockpot in the driveway. For several of us who were traveling in May to conferences, the Facebook group became a natural place to get reconnected with the flow of what's happening at home and to share some of what we were learning on the road.

I doubt this would be the perfect solution for every organization, but it really is amazing how quickly it has changed the nature of cross-institution communication at our museum. Here are a few things I'm learning from this experiment:

• Promoting openness and participation on staff takes just as much work as it does in the community. We're an institution that focuses intentionally on being transparent and collaborative with our community members. It's ironic and a bit surprising that I didn't realize sooner that we need the same level of intentionality to bring this ethos inside the museum as well. Kudos to Sarah for making it happen. 
• There's a healthy creative tension between transparency and intimacy. Sometimes, I look at the internal Facebook group and I think, "this is what our regular Facebook page should look like. This is the kind of creativity and personality that we want to share with everyone." But then I realize the incredible value of the intimate space behind the closed door, where we can be silly and experimental without fear. It's also the one place we can get away from the constant dialogue with the community. The privacy of the group binds us together as a team, even as it highlights ways we could be more "ourselves" in the public sphere.
• Connectedness builds staff culture. No one wants to get (or send) an email about a weird work dream. But on Facebook, it becomes a funny thing to comment on and connect with. The Facebook group has allowed us to cheerlead for each other, make jokes, and banter in ways that don't always happen in an intense work environment.
• Using a tool that everyone already knows is a heck of a lot easier than converting people onto something new. We could have adopted a tool like Yammer that is made specifically for private company conversations. But everyone was on Facebook, knew how to use it, and was using it in the course of daily life already. We didn't have to become "friends" on the site to be in a group together. The adoption was automatic and smooth with zero time spent in trainings or plaintive emails reminding people to use it (a fate I have seen many intranets suffer).

What tools do you use to stay connected behind-the-scenes?

Thinking about User Participation in Terms of Negotiated Agency

Early this month, I got the chance to hear legendary game designer Will Wright (Sim City) give a talk. I've followed Wright's work for years because of his unique perspective on the potential for game-players to be game-makers - in other words, to co-create the gaming experience.

In his talk, Wright said one thing that really stood out:

Game players have a negotiated agency that is determined by how the game is designed.

In other words, the more constrained the game environment, the less agency the player has. The more open, the more agency. Think about the difference between Pacman and Grand Theft Auto. Both games have a "gamespace" in which they are played. Both games have rules. But Grand Theft Auto invites the player to determine their own way of using the space and engaging with the rules. The player's agency is not total, but it is significant.

"Negotiated agency" strikes me as a really useful framework in which to talk about visitor/audience participation in the arts. "Negotiation" implies a respectful relationship between institution (or artist) and user. The institution initiates the negotiation with a set of opportunities and constraints. But users play a role via their own agency--both in how they engage and when they break the rules.

Sometimes the negotiation works beautifully. You offer visitors markers and tape and a wall, and they agree tacitly only to write on the tape and not on the wall itself.

Sometimes the negotiation is contested. You tell people they can't take photographs in the gallery or the performance, but the phones sneak out, covertly or defiantly, to reassert personal control of the experience. Patrons clap between movements. Visitors talk over the tour guide.

Sometimes the negotiation can be exploited for artistic means. The theater is dark and the artist breaks the fourth wall and asks for conversation. The symphony conductor asks everyone to raise their phones and join the orchestra. The museum invites art-making in the elevator. This is a kind of negotiation jui-jitsu that can create art through creative tension.

In my experience, this negotiation works best if we acknowledge people's agency and seek ways to create something surprising and high-value through it.

And so I humbly submit two questions to ask yourself when thinking about user participation:

1. What is our negotiating stance in developing this relationship with participants? How can we make it a win-win?
2. How will participants seek to assert their agency in the experience? Will we encourage these activities, denounce them, or divert them?

AAM 2013: Let's Talk in Baltimore

I'm heading to the American Alliance of Museums' annual conference this weekend, and I'm psyched to reconnect with friends and mentors and meet new people who can inspire and stimulate fresh ideas.

This year, I'm involved in two sessions:

Tuesday, May 21, 10:15AM in Room 309 - Success: What Does it Look Like?
This session wil feature varied perspectives on what it means for a museum to be successful from a longtime museum planning consultant (John Jacobsen of White Oak), a director whose museum pushes for environmental stewardship (Stephanie Ratcliffe of the Wild Center), a director whose museum is a beacon of community activism and creativity (Jane Werner of the Pittsburgh Children's Museum), and me. It will be hosted by Eric Siegel, chief content officer at the New York Hall of Science and consummate rabble-rouser. Rapid-fire presentations followed by honest conversation. Join us.

Wednesday, May 22, 10:15AM in Room 322 - On the Edge: A Talk Show about Risk and Reward
Kathleen McLean and I are back again to host a freewheeling talk show in which we chat with unusual guests and terrific audience members--this year, on the topic of risk-taking and its attendant rewards and perils. This year's guests include Ian David Moss of Createquity fame along with museum folks who have thrived and suffered because of the risks they've taken. This session has been so rowdy in the past that this year they dropped my name from the program in hopes it would calm the crowds. No, really. I'll be there, even though the printed program doesn't say so. And we'll be just as loud as usual.

I'm also hoping while in Baltimore to have conversations to explore a few of these topics:

• Social bridging: how to design for it, how to assess it, who it works for, who it doesn't.
• Hybridizing programs and exhibitions. How can we look at "experiences" across space and time instead of separating place- and event-based projects?
• Developing transparent formats for exhibition proposals from outside. How can we invite in new ideas and link them clearly with our institutional goals?
• Small-scale evaluation for non-professionals. How can small museums with limited resources do some meaningful research with our staff and volunteers?
• Supporting staff in a time of growth. Growth feels exciting and fabulous, but it's also tiring. We have a strong innovative team right now, and there are some particular issues that come up because of the high energy, creativity, and drive in the office.
• Creating spaces in the museum for open exploration of the behind-the-scenes. Permanent prototyping, museum inside out, working in public spaces.

If you're interested in exploring any of these topics next week in Baltimore, let's do it. I don't care what type of institution you are from or what your experience is, or even if you are attending the conference. I just care about having good conversations and learning from each other. Monday afternoon is looking particularly open for some meaty chats. Let me know.

And FYI, we will soon be opening a full-time Education Associate job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. If you want to talk briefly about job/internship opportunities at AAM, I'm up for that too.

Using Social Bridging to Be "For Everyone" in a New Way

Like a lot of organizations, my museum struggles with two conflicting goals:

1. The museum should be for everyone in our community.
2. It's impossible for any organization or business to do a great job being for everyone. We're more successful when we target particular communities or audiences and design experiences for them.

How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to target? In the past, I've subscribed to the theory that an organization should target many different groups and types of people to serve a constellation of specific audiences across diverse affinities, needs, and interests. 

But ultimately, that's still targeting. It's still grouping. And while it may be effective when it comes to marketing, it's limiting if your mission is to reach and engage with a wide range of people. It can lead to parallel programming: bike night for hipsters, bee night for hippies, family night for kiddies. And rarely the twain shall meet.

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we're approaching this challenge through a different lens: social bridging. One of our core programming goals is to build social capital by forging unexpected connections between diverse collaborators and audience members. We intentionally develop events and exhibitions that matchmake unlikely partners--opera and ukelele, Cindy Sherman and amateur photographers, welding and knitting. Our goal in doing this work is to bring people together across difference and build a more cohesive community.  

We have been explicitly focusing on social bridging for more than a year now. What started as a series of experiments and happy accidents is now embedded in how we develop and evaluate projects. We've seen surprising and powerful results--visitors from different backgrounds getting to know each other, homeless people and museum volunteers working together, artists from different worlds building new collaborative projects. Visitors now spontaneously volunteer that "meeting new people" and "being part of a bigger community" are two of the things they love most about the museum experience.

This has led to a surprising outcome: we are now de-targeting many programs. This isn't just a philosophical shift--it's also being driven by visitors' behavior. "Family Art Workshops" suffer from anemic participation whereas multi-generational festivals are overrun with families. Single-speaker lectures languish while lightning talks featuring teen photographers, phD anthropologists, and professional dancers are packed. Programs that emphasize bringing diverse people together are more popular than those that serve intact groups. Why fight it?

And so, while we continue to acknowledge that specific communities have particular assets and needs, we spend more time thinking about how to connect them than how to serve each on its own. We're comfortable being deliberately unhip if it means that a seven year old, a seventeen year old, and a seventy year old all feel "at home" at the museum. This approach allows us to sidestep the question of parallel versus pipeline programming and instead create a new pipeline that is about unexpected connections and social experiences.

Focusing on social bridging also leads to tricky questions as to how we develop new programming, especially when it comes to outreach. When we offer programs at a school or neighborhood festival or community center, we do it to work with the group who live or learn there. Ironically and somewhat depressingly, our partnerships with marginalized communities often involve more segregated work because of our desire to engage in their space, on their terms. There are some groups who we work with terrifically in their own space but who we rarely engage in ours. This leads to good bonding, but very little bridging.

I don't have the answer to how we can incorporate bridging across the various ways we work with intact and blended communities. When it comes to school programs, we are now actively exploring how our approach might shift to emphasize bridging--among students in the same school, among students from different schools, among students across their school and home life. When it comes to working with intact cultural and ethnic communities, one of the resources that is helping me think through these questions is a 2004 paper by Dr. Pia Moriarty on Immigrant Participatory Arts in Silicon Valley. In the paper, Dr. Moriarty puts forward a paradigm of "bonded-bridging" to describe the way that ethnically-identified programs and organizations contribute to bridging in a majority-immigrant community. It's a thoughtful and intriguing paper, and I encourage you to read it.

I'm still chewing on the idea of "bonded-bridging" and the limitations and possibilities of a bridging strategy in a diverse community. But for now, I'm happy that we've been able to address some of our hand-wringing over targeted programs and inclusion with an approach that serves both our visitors and our core goals.

Does social bridging make sense for your institution? How do you reconcile inclusion and targeting in program design?

Open Thread: Your Stories of Risk and Reward

What's the biggest professional risk you've taken? What happened after you took the risk? 

In three weeks, Kathleen McLean and I are co-hosting a freewheeling talk show at the American Alliance of Museums conference. The theme is "risk and reward," and we plan to explore both individual and institutional relationships to risk-taking. 

Kathy and I have each spent a lot of time advocating for experimental practice and risk-taking in museums, both as consultants and on staff. We've seen the mixed results--lots of excitement, lots of push back, some progress. For me personally, risk-taking has led to incredible professional opportunities, for which I feel lucky and grateful. I'm particularly indebted to Anna Slafer, my amazing boss at the Spy Museum in the mid-2000s. Anna would kick me under the table when I shared ideas out of turn, yet she also fiercely defended me (and our whole team) so we could do creative, risky work.

But many organizations don't have an Anna. Many people struggle with fears of punishment or marginalization for taking risks. It's hard for me to evaluate the extent to which these fears are well-founded, and whether the climate for risk is changing in the arts sector broadly. 

So I'm curious: what is your experience? Did you or your institution take a risk that got rewarded? Punished? Ignored? 

Please share your story in the comments. 

And if you're coming to Baltimore, please join us on Wednesday May 22 at 10:15 for a lively conversation informed by your stories. 

Museums, Divided Attention, and Really Bad Commercials

Ready for something ridiculous? Check out this inane AT&T commercial about a woman whose absorption in her smartphone is so great that Facebook updates become substantiated as pieces of art in the museum through which she strolls. It's like a bad public service announcement about the relationship between ADD, self-absorption, and psychosis.

It also suggests that for young people, masterpieces in museums are not nearly as interesting as a good friend's new haircut. And while I'm heartened by the fact that YouTube commenters were offended and dismayed by the commercial, I do think this commercial reflects common fears that museum-lovers have about younger generations and museums.

There are two fears at work here:

1. People are so distracted by technology that they can't disconnect to pay attention to what's really important. 
2. People are more interested in their own social lives and whatever is happening right now than in the big ideas, stories, and themes that have traditionally defined us as humans and communities. 

Both of these fears have some truth to them. People (of all ages) are making bad decisions because of technology rapture--whether that be texting while driving or spending more time with screens than with family members. And social media can promote a kind of narcissism in which each of us lives in a tiny bubble of friends' rants and raves.

These issues are important. But I feel that they are societal issues, not issues specific to museums or art institutions. I think this commercial could have just as easily been framed in another context that affords focus--work, a dinner party, playing sports. This kind of behavior is a violation of attention no matter where it happens. You could even argue that the commercial inartfully points to the ways that people map their own imagination onto museum artifacts. That it suggests that museums are sufficiently populist that people feel they don't have to check their interests and comfortable behaviors at the door. In some ways, this behavior is no more objectionable than people walking through a museum chatting about their personal lives and occasionally turning to engage with the art. It's just more visible, and offensive, because of the device-mediation.

Many people feel that museums are sacred spaces for a particular kind of attentive experience, and that it would be better if people understood and valued the specialness of that experience. I agree. But I think we have to earn it. We have to help people make connections to the power of artistic mastery, scientific discovery, and historical leadership in ways that push people out of the everyday. We have to provide the interpretation, the linkages, and the sparks that bring people into meaningful engagement with our artifacts and stories.

Visitors don't want to see their own lives on the wall. But they DO want to see reflections, expansions, and distortions of their experiences in ways that allow them to form new connections. That's what compelling relevance is about. It's not pandering. It's bridging.

Seeking Clarity about the Complementary Nature of Social Work and the Arts

When we talk about museums or cultural institutions as vehicles of social and civic change, what does that really mean? Last week I had a conversation that changed my perspective on this question.

I was with two close friends who work in social service organizations focusing on homelessness and criminal justice respectively. We all work for nonprofits. We all care about making a difference in our community. And we each have specific interests in increasing access, connection, and empowerment of marginalized people.

But when you switch from the "why" to the "what" of our work, the similarities end. Here are some of the big differences we noticed:

• Their work involves life-or-death situations. Museum work is mostly non-contact. The consequences of risk-taking and experimentation are incredibly different.
• There is infinite demand for their services, whereas we struggle to generate demand for ours. There will never be enough meals for hungry people or mental health facilities for those who need them. Meanwhile, arts industry leaders worry about "oversupply" of organizations in the face of dwindling demand. 
• Social service providers often find themselves working in a reactive stance to unexpected incidents. Arts organizations can operate on their own timelines and internal values. Those that want to be more relevant often have to push themselves to be work responsively to events outside their domain.

These differences made me realize that even as we talk about arts organizations as vehicles for civic engagement or social change, we have the opportunity (and the necessity) to think of our work in a distinct way. This may sound obvious, but the rhetoric about cultural organizations working in the social sphere often ignores our inherent differences. We champion a historic house museum for hosting a soup kitchen, a children's museum for tackling family wellness in low-income housing, or an arts organization for writing poems with convicts. We talk about these projects as if they were analogous to the work being done by a social service agency, and we wonder where the line between cultural and social work blurs.

This is the wrong analogy and the wrong question. Instead of asking whether we are focusing too little or too much of our attention on social work, we should be asking HOW we can approach the work of community development in a distinctive way.

Looking back at the bulleted list above, every one of the differences between arts organizations and social service organizations presents an opportunity for us to do really interesting, specific work. We CAN take risks with more flexibility than social service agencies. We CAN devote some of our resources to reaching communities with incredible demands. We CAN develop programs that are visionary and unusual because we are not wading in crises to which we must respond.

When the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum hosts a monthly soup kitchen, they are doing it to open up conversations about social justice around food. When the Boston Children's Museum initiated the GoKids wellness program, they did it to empower families to co-create meaningful shared experiences that emphasize health. When my museum brings together homeless and non-homeless volunteers to restore a historic cemetery, we do it to encourage people in our community to look at history and each other with respect. I admire all of these projects, and I also acknowledge that they achieve different goals by different means than social service agencies do.

Cultural organizations have the luxury to do work that supports community development in ways that are more creative, experimental, and yes--supplemental--than social service organizations. The very fact that the work we do is "extra" shouldn't be a downside. We're doing it because we have the unique capacity to do so. We're doing it because we care. We're doing it because that's what "adding value" means.

Quick Hit: Upcoming Opportunities in Santa Cruz

I'm starting this post with an annoying, fabulous number: 73.

That's the predicted high temperature today in Santa Cruz. It's the typical temperature here all spring, summer, and fall. It's pretty freaking beautiful.

The weather is hopefully the least of the reasons you should want to come work with us here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History... but it doesn't hurt.

We have a couple of upcoming opportunities with looming deadlines that might interest you:

• Summer Internships. We have five open positions in Community Programs and one in Exhibitions. These are unpaid, part-time internships in which you will make a significant contribution to our work, and at the same time, learn a heck of a lot about participatory design and community engagement. Check out the descriptions and how to apply here, and learn more about the MAH intern experience on their blog here. 
• Participatory Performing Artist-in-Residence program. This is a new program we created with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to enable performing artists to develop work at the MAH that invites active audience participation. We are funding four residencies per year at $2,000 apiece so that performing artists can partner with our staff to co-create meaningful, community-centered work. We started this project because of conversations with performing artists who wanted more experience exploring audience participation in a supportive environment. In 2011, at the Wallace Foundation Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference, I was really struck by artists who expressed concern and frustration about being "cut out" of participatory shifts by institutions and consultants... and I have always wanted to find ways to invite them in. We are PSYCHED to have the support from Hewlett to make it happen in a small way with this residency program. You can read more about the program and how to apply here. Priority will be given to applicants from the greater Monterey and San Francisco Bay region.

Applications for both of these opportunities are due at the end of April. So start dreaming about the sun and exciting museum experiences. 

Why Do We Interpret Art and Science So Differently?

A genius has just created a major body of work. Her work is monumental in her field, but her achievements are somewhat opaque to the general public.

Imagine seeing a museum exhibition related to this person's work. What will you experience?

The answer depends on what kind of museum you are visiting.

If we're talking about an an artist working in the context of an art museum, it's likely that the genius' work will be presented with minimal interpretation. Labels will reference the importance of her work in the context of the art world. The curator and any educators will work around and noticeably behind the artist herself.

If we're talking about a scientist in a science museum or science center, the presentation will be completely different. Museum exhibition designers will distill her achievements into stories, objects, and interactive components that are understandable to lay people at the middle school level. The genius might have a quote, photo, or object on display to give context to the story, but the majority of the content will be developed and produced by the museum, not the scientist.

Both of these approaches have plusses and minuses. Science museums get criticized for "dumbing down" big ideas for a general audience. Art museums struggle with seeming "pretentious" and narrow in their interpretation.

As someone who has worked in both science and art museums, I'm confused as to why there is such a gulf in our perspectives on how and why interpretation fits into the picture. Artists and scientists both work in specific contexts on big, complicated ideas. There are huge opportunities for science and art museums to cross-program with geniuses like Olafur Elliason, James Turrell, and many, many folks working across the art/science spectrum. While a few institutions have capitalized on the intersections between art and science (notably, the Exploratorium, Science Gallery, and the New York Hall of Science), most stay squarely in their own camps.

Why do we think science is impossible to communicate in its "pure" form but that art must be communicated in that way lest it be distorted? Why do we think scientific research is any more or less understandable to the general public than fine art? Considering the emphasis in schools on science and the evisceration of art programs, I wouldn't be surprised if science literacy is higher than art literacy in contemporary American society.

Both types of institutions would be well-served if we examined the expectations underlying our work and whether we are going overboard to disassociate ourselves from them.

In science centers, we try to combat the notion that science is complex work for a limited, rarified few. So we focus on the idea that "you can be a scientist" and that "science is fun." Do these democratizing messages prevent us from pursuing interesting ways to present the extraordinary genius of some scientists and the incredible complexity and repetition of scientific work?

In art museums, we try to combat the notion that art is something your child can do, and if you like it, it's art. So we focus on the idea that "artists are special" and that "art is complicated." Do these elitist messages prevent us from exploring useful ways to honor the creativity in everyone and the simple pleasures of aesthetics?

It's ironic that the stereotypes we're trying to run from lead us to each other.


Thank you to the ISEN listserv for helping spark this post, via the controversy over Richard Dawkins' denigrating remarks about informal science.

Kids, Coercion, and Co-Design

There's a constant dialogue in participatory work about how to make peoples' contributions meaningful. I've written about different structures for participatory processes (especially in museums), and recently, I've been interested in how we can apply these structures to the design of public space. Here in Santa Cruz, my museum has embarked on a major project to redevelop the plaza outside our doors into a vibrant, cultural hub for downtown, and we are trying to make the development process as open and useful as possible.

One of the key constituencies for this plaza are families. While we spend plenty of time talking with parents and adults about what makes a place "family-friendly," there's no substitute for kids' unique perspectives. In January, as part of a series of place-making workshops facilitated by the Project for Public Spaces, we worked with a local dad to coordinate a workshop explicitly for kids (full writeup here). Their ideas were delightful, and their contributions shifted the conversation about what family-friendly really looks like.

I came out of the workshop with a mixture of joy and unease. What should we do with the ideas the kids had generated? How does their participation, which is expressed in a somewhat haphazard and spontaneous fashion, integrate with that of adults? I'm not suggesting that the kids are less valuable as participants than their parents--or even less realistic in their impulses and desires--but that our whole adult approach to collaborative processes doesn't easily absorb youthful exuberance.

Kids frequently suffer from tokenism. We given them a gold star for participating and then sweep their drawings under the rug. Children are easy to applaud, and easy to ignore.

This grappling led me to a fascinating "ladder of participation" about kids' engagement in environmental design written by Dr. Roger Hart of Cornell (1992 paper). While Dr. Hart is focused on the design of public gardens, his overall message is broad: there is participation, and there is tokenism. He's explicit about different project structures and their implications, listing five levels of participation and three of non-participation. Here's a synopsis:

Participation

1. Child-initiated, shared decisions with adults:

• Goal isn’t about “kids’ power.”
• Young people feel competent and confident enough in their role as community members to understand the need for collaboration and that in asking adults for their input, the project may be strengthened.
• Lots of trust involved
• Adults serve as listeners, observers and sounding boards (i.e. they don’t jump in with their own designs on the project, or to organize the project). For example, young people may determine that they want to clean up an old wooded hang out area in their community to create a nature trail. They learn about all aspects of creating such a trail, hold meetings to plan it, but check in with a friend’s parent in local government, several parents, and a teacher with an interest in ecology, for their diverse ways of thinking about certain aspects the project.

2. Child-initiated and directed projects:

• Adults notice a youth-led project emerging and allow them to occur in a youth-directed fashion.
• Hart places this second on the ladder because occasionally young people don’t trust adults enough to seek their input. The caution with this rung is in children carrying out their projects in secret because of fear of adults, or being intimidated by them. An example is a literally secret garden/ landscape that adults are not aware of.

3. Adult-initiated, shared decisions with children:

• Adults assume nothing about what children want in the landscape.
• Children are involved to some degree on every part of the process of garden planning, design, and implementation.
• Children understand issues such as fundraising, garden design, or organization and management
• Children understand how and why compromises are made, if they are necessary. They may also begin to cultivate a “language” of talking about this with others.

4. Children are consulted and informed about project:

• Project designed and run by adults, but the children’s views and opinions are taken seriously.
• A good example is with a survey designed to gather young people’s input into a school garden: children are informed of the purpose, they may be asked to volunteer, and afterward, they are fully informed of the results.

5. Assigned but informed:

• Children are assigned to a project and may not initiate the project themselves, but they are fully informed about it (i.e. a school garden project)
• Children may still have a sense of real ownership of the project.
• A key aspect of this rung is the degree to which children are engaged in critical reflection. For example, are children just viewed as a free source of help for the garden project, or do they have a chance to reflect on it, consider it, and learn from it?

Non-Participation

6. Tokenism:

• The most challenging and most common among very well-meaning adults.
• Adults are genuinely concerned about giving children a voice, but haven’t really begun to think carefully about the best approach for this.
• The appearance of children’s involvement is there, but in fact, they have had little choice about planning the garden project, communication around it, and no time in which to critically reflect and form their own opinions.
• An example is that adults select charming, articulate youth to talk about the garden in a public venue, but those youth haven’t had ample opportunity to critically reflect or consult with their peers. The key here is symbolic versus actual engagement and involvement.

7. Decoration:

• Involves, quite literally, decorating children
• For example, they may sport garden T-shirts with no involvement in organizing or understanding the program.
• Adults use children to bolster the program as if the children were understanding participants.
• For example, adults make children sing garden songs at a harvest festival, and it may even appear that they wrote the song, or that they were involved in organizing the garden or the festival, when in fact they were not.

8. Manipulation or Deception:

• Adults consciously use children’s voices to carry their own message about the gardening project.
• For example, they produce a garden poster, advertisement, or publication with drawings by children, when children aren’t involved in the program planning.
• Adults may deny their own detailed involvement in meetings, planning, shaping the project because they think it diminishes the effectiveness or impact of the project – they may say that children are genuinely engaged, when engagement constitutes weeding or planting.
• Adults may design a garden, have kids do a simple planting, then tell the local newspaper that kids designed and built the garden. 

Reading this ladder reminded me how easy it is to fall into the "non-participation" part of the ladder when working with any amateur participants, but especially with children. The explicit nature of the examples on levels six through eight (especially "decoration") may also be helpful in identifying times that we are treating adults as non-participants in more understated ways. We may not dress them up and make them sing songs about our projects, but sometimes, we might as well.

In the case of my project, level four is probably what is appropriate. We are engaged in active collaboration with so many stakeholders for this plaza, and kids are important but secondary contributors to the process. But more broadly, I can look at this and think about what we DON'T want to be doing--with any of our participants. Thank you, Roger Hart, for reminding me of the range of participatory opportunities and non-opportunities a project can provide... and how disastrous it can be when our words and our actions are misaligned. Let's make sure not to decorate our projects with false participation where real collaboration is possible.