From Curiosity to Creativity: Unpacking Museum Magic
Join Kassi Kincaid in a compelling conversation with Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva, Head of School programs at the Bob Bullock State History Museum in Austin, Texas. Kaitlin shares how her interest in history sparked her career path and mission to connect people with the past to help them discover their own interests.
Transcript:
Kassi Kincaid (00:00):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Edge of Creativity podcast. I'm your host, Kassi Kincaid, and joined with me today is Head of School Programs at the Bob Bullock State History Museum, Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva. Kaitlin, thank you so much for being here today.
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (00:19):
Well, thanks so much, Kassi. It's good to reconnect with you and to be able to join you on this podcast.
Kassi Kincaid (00:24):
This is so awesome that we get to do this podcast interview. I know a few years ago I came down the museum and we were able to film around the museum. I'm so excited to share with our viewers today, or listeners, just your perspective on creativity and impact. So let's just dive right in today. In the beginning, I always like to go back to people where people started because in order to understand where they are today, you kind of have to understand where they started. So what has been your path leading up to the Bob Bullock Museum? It's such an incredible museum. Our state history museum, especially since I'm in Texas, grew up in Texas, still live in Texas. What was that like- kind of the beginning of it all?
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (01:11):
Sure. So I've been at the Bullock Museum for a little over 10 years doing this role, but I had several jobs before this that I think kind of prepared me for this position. So always when I'm talking to students, especially about my career path, I kind of always actually go back to high school. And as I was getting ready for college, I was a good student. I enjoyed being in school. I thought maybe I wanted to be a doctor since that seemed like a job that people do if they've been good at school. So I prepared to go to college, prepared to, I signed up for some science major because I thought what you needed to do so you could prepare to be a doctor. And early on I was thankful that I had kind of a realization just inside me that A, I don't really like science.
(02:00):
B, I'm not really good at science. And three, I didn't really have an interest in medicine other than I thought that's what good students did. So I kind of wiped the slate clean. I told the college I wasn't ready to declare a major, and I just decided to take a lot of classes in a lot of different subjects until I could find something that I was really interested in. And I found that I gravitated more towards my classes that were history or political science based. So that's what I ended up majoring and minoring in is history and political science. And then college is ending up and there's not necessarily a clear career path for someone with a history major. And so I did what a lot of history majors do, which is just continue studying history. And I decided to go to graduate school. And so I was researching different graduate school programs and learning more about them and stumbled across this field that's called Public History or it's called Museum Studies.
(02:59):
The two are fairly interchangeable and I had no idea that that career existed working in museums. And so that's what I ended up deciding to do for graduate school. I went to North Carolina State University to get a master's degree in Public History. And what public history is, is it is kind of those institutions that help the public connect to history. So it would be places like archives, places like museums. I kind of like to describe it as we take the stuff that the academic historians and the researchers research and write about, and we find ways to make it interesting and digestible to the public. And so when I started that course of study, I wanted to be a curator because that's what everybody wants to be in museums or that's the only job you've ever heard of that exists in a museum. So naturally that's what I wanted to do as well.
(04:00):
But part of my program required that I do a summer internship. And so I was applying around looking for internships, and I did not get an internship in a curatorial field. I actually got an internship in an education department at a museum, and it was a really unique museum. It was the Nantucket Historical Association on the island of Nantucket working at the Whaling Museum. So I got to go to this really unique place and learned about this really unique topic, which is whaling in the northeast. And my role there was working in the education department, which meant that it's a lot of interacting with the public. You're the one in the museum maybe giving tours or leading hands-on activities. And one of my main jobs was working in what they called the discovery center, which is where families would go during their visit and we would do different craft activities or story time type activities.
(05:00):
And that experience, I would say really did lead me to my career path because I learned that I loved interacting with visitors, especially young visitors, talking to them about history, helping them see that they can be interested in history too. And usually learning about it through really unique ways like craft activities, hands-on exploration activities, activities where they're getting to discover something. Not to knock anything for the curators, but being a curator is a lot of research and writing and being by yourself in your office or digging through archives. And it's fun in its own way because getting to kind of solve hist history mysteries and track down things and find things and documents that are really unique that you want to tell people about, but it is not necessarily a super social or forward facing job. And I love talking to people. I like being out in the museum interacting with our visitors.
(06:00):
So that is kind of what showed me that I was more interested in museum education as opposed to curation. So my first couple jobs were along those lines. I started off as a part-time field trip person who gave a field trip at a historic cotton farm in North Carolina. So I'd work with the school groups when they came in and we made butter and we did laundry, and we learned all about historic cotton growing and cotton picking and the cotton industry in the south and just living at that time period. And then I got my first full-time job at the North Carolina Museum of History where I worked doing what was called distance learning. So it was programs specifically working with students when they were in their classrooms, but we were in the museum, so it was virtual live programs and then also a thing called traveling trunks where we would send them a trunk of a Rubbermaid bin ultimately with replica artifacts and lesson plans about a specific topic.
(07:07):
And so I managed that program and then I was ready to come back to Texas. I'm from Texas and New Mexico and all my family's here. So I was ready to move back to this part of the country. And the job at the Bullock Museum opened up. And so I came here. And so working in the school program side of the education department here, I work with anything related to teachers and students. So whether that is the students that are coming on field trips, helping to design learning activities for them or special student activity days where they get to do a lot of hands-on activities, whether that is designing teacher workshops so the teachers come to the museum to get training either on a specific historical topic or about different teaching methods, often dealing with artifacts or primary sources. And then we also have a distance learning program here where we teach virtual programs into classrooms every day. So we're ultimately interacting over Zoom, for instance, with students while they're in their classrooms. So that's what my team and I do here at the museum now.
Kassi Kincaid (08:16):
I love that you specifically do education with the museum. And like you said, most of the time when people think about museums, it's they go straight to that curator mindset, like the research and the artifacts. And there is a whole other field in museums for jobs like yourself that make it super relatable and super hands-on. And I remember the training that we did when I was a preschool administrator at the Bullock that you did. It was so incredible and so much creativity went into that how to take a big concept like history and make it really accessible for anybody.
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (08:55):
Definitely. Yeah, the curators, they do keep that in mind when they're writing the exhibits and writing the labels. But then our education department will kind of take it a step further, whether it's with adult audiences or whether, for me specifically, I'm mostly centered around student or educator audiences, trying to find ways to make it more digestible, to make it more interesting, to make it more impactful for them during their experience here at the museum or their interactions with us at different trainings or events.
Kassi Kincaid (09:29):
So you mentioned the crafts that you do different hands-on things. What are some of the other ways you use creativity in your role?
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (09:36):
Sure. So I get to work on the exhibits in some capacity exhibits are created by our curators as well as our exhibit designers. So curators are the ones thinking maybe about the content and what artifacts are going to go in the exhibit. And then our exhibit design team are the ones who are thinking about how it is actually going to work and how people are going to experience it, like the physical space of it. I get to be involved in the exhibit design teams and my teammates as well in my department where we are helping design what we call interactives. So if you've ever been to an exhibit and you get to touch something that is an exhibit interactive. So we find ways that people get a chance to do more in the exhibit other than viewing an artifact or reading a label that they might get to play a game, they might get to manipulate something they might get to, sometimes it could be a craft activity just depending on what the topic is. And when we design exhibit interactives, we kind of have two goals in mind. What is the experiential goal? What are the things somebody is going to do when they're doing this interactive? And then what are the learning goals of the exhibit or the interactive? So what will they walk away having or not controlling what people think about, but what types of things will they have maybe thought about or learned as a result of doing this experience?
Kassi Kincaid (11:13):
I love that. And I love too, since you work at a museum, the creativity can be seen on a physical level. I feel like some elements of creativity are more like a thought process or different things that are intangible. And I love in the museum setting where you are, it is physical, people can touch it, people can experience the creativity that you put into the design process. And I just have to mention, Kaitlin, we have to talk about for a second for our listeners, the carts.
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (11:41):
Sure, sure.
Kassi Kincaid (11:42):
Yes. That is one of my favorite elements that you guys have implemented, especially for the younger audience of the Bob Bullock.
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (11:49):
Yeah. So Kassi's talking about these things that we have that are called Discovery Centers are kind of big kiosks on wheels, except we kind of have them stationary right now that are designed with typically a Pre-K audience in mind. And I actually can't take credit for their creation. They were created by my colleague Angela, who handles families and their experiences in the museum as opposed to me handling schools and their experiences in the museums. We realized we didn't have too much for our much younger visitors, especially tactile experiences, which is really important for them. So they designed a series of six Discovery Centers that are stationed throughout the museum, and they're on different topics, and they help really young children and their caregivers be able to interact together to explore a topic a little bit more either by looking at something, feeling something, hearing something. And so yeah, those were something that we created several years ago, and we've just started having them permanently be out in the exhibits as opposed to we just bring them out for special programs. We've decided, you know what, a lot of people would benefit from this. Even our school groups have really been enjoying them as well, instead of just our, only our Pre-K parent child audiences.
Kassi Kincaid (13:15):
I took my nephew this summer to the Bob Bullock, and it was his first time. He's pretty young six, and he absolutely adored those. He did. He was touching everything, manipulating. And a lot of times in museums too, you're like, don't touch this be and that kind of vibe. But yeah, he was able to just use it and just hats off to you all for doing that. I don't think I've ever seen anything in a museum quite like that. So that's just a testament to your thought and creativity for all your visitors there at the Bob Bullock.
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (13:53):
Yeah, we really focus on, we're not necessarily going to be the one place where you're going to learn everything on a topic. That's not what we have the capacity to do. But we do hope that you will find something that sparks an interest or sparks a curiosity that you'll then take into your life and connect to other things, or maybe explore a little bit more in the different ways that you can. I cannot be responsible or able to teach something, everything that they would need to know about something, but I can help you see how it might impact your own life, how you have connections to this thing, even though you didn't think you did, how your family legacy matches up with other Texans, family legacies, things like that where your story fits into the stories of others or how this one thing that got invented a hundred years ago is impacting your life and maybe you want to invent something now that's going to impact everybody in the future. So we're kind of about making connections, sparking curiosity, helping people think about where they fit in to our collective stories.
Kassi Kincaid (15:07):
Absolutely. And you were talking right now about impact and everything that you all do at the museum and how you strive for the curiosity and the inspiration. How would you say, to sum it up in one nugget, how all of that creativity has made an impact or the one thing that you hope all the creativity you implement the museum for impact?
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (15:31):
Well, I think there's a way to think about it on a big scale and on a small scale. We are the state history museum for the state of Texas. We have really high visitation, whether that's from our school field trip population or tourists coming in from out of town or families in the area coming in for special events or visiting the exhibits. We do have very high visitation. So it makes me really proud to think that the work that I do and the work that the team here does, touches the lives of so many people on this really broad scale when you're thinking big numbers. But also I find just as much satisfaction seeing one child's face light up when they see something or try something or hear them turn to their parent or their caregiver and say, wow, I didn't know X, Y, Z, or, oh, I recognize that.
(16:21):
I saw one of those at my grandma's house, and then just kind of launching into a story. So even just impacting one person and seeing their face light up in that way and seeing the interest that they're developing is really satisfying. And hopefully, who knows what that's going to spark in that person's life. Me visiting a museum in my hometown and seeing a pioneer wagon and reading Little House on the Prairie when I was eight or whatever, sparked an interest in how people lived in the past for me. And I followed that interest so far up until this point in my life. So you never know what you, how you can impact even just one person that encounters something in the museum.
Kassi Kincaid (17:05):
Absolutely. And I love that creativity inspires creativity for you at the museum and that you're hoping to continue that with the impact for others. Thank you so much for being here today. This has been such a joy to talk with you again and to this time focus, give our listeners a perspective on creativity and impact. Thank you for the impact that you're making, not only in the Austin area with Bob Bullock, but for visitors that come in from all around. Thanks for your time.
Kaitlin Lloyd-Leva (17:36):
Thanks, Kassi. Good talking with you.
Kassi Kincaid (17:37):
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode on The Edge of Creativity Podcast. Be sure to follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming conversations. We'll see you next time.
