Protoyping Millennial Engagement

Abby Parsons and Morgan Haller

For the past two months, our Morristown education team has been working to address the issue of millennial engagement. We know as a smaller museum we are up against larger scale programming, high tech exhibits, incredible collections, and the culture of habituated distraction that is plaguing us all. We decided to take that challenge head on because, heck, we have some incredible collections ourselves and we have access to some pretty fantastic millennial representatives too. Our Centennial SCA Abigail Parsons and interns Morgan Haller (Centenary University) and Joshua Knighten (Rowan University) have been assisting archivist and museum educator, Sarah Minegar, in prototyping a new learner-centric education model.  

Prototyping, a term borrowed from the process of Design Thinking, is a way for teams to make brainstorming tangible so that they can collaborate and work to move ideas into actionable tasks. This week our team got the chance to put that hard work into practice with our first target audience group, 18 students from Lycee International Jules Guesde in Montpellier, France. Stay tuned for our interns' take on the prototyping process, what they learned, and how this process has impacted our approach to high school programming.