Facilitating dialogue and handling conflicts with Linda Norris

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Together we'll dive into techniques that spark curiosity, foster dialogue, and build deeper. connections. Let's get started with today's episode.

Hello and welcome to a new episode of The Art Engager. I'm Claire Bown, and today I'm talking to Linda Norris, a Senior Specialist in Methodology and Practice at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Linda plays a crucial role in the Coalition's capacity building efforts, leading trainings and workshops for major museums and historical sites.

Site, which was completed in: 2023

She has written extensively on museum practice and social justice, and co authored Creativity in Museum Practice, one of my favourite museum books. In this episode, Linda shares practical tools for building meaningful dialogue and discusses facilitation strategies for handling conflicts. Here's our conversation.

Enjoy.

Hi, Linda, and welcome to The Art Engager podcast.

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[00:02:22] Claire Bown: Well, Linda, it's a delight to have you on the podcast. We've known each other for quite a few years now, and I've been a huge fan of your work for a long time. Can you tell our listeners what it is that you do?

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I am Senior Specialist, Methodology and Practice at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. What that means in the shorter, more intelligible form is that I work with our members and other organizations around the world to think about how to really move the organizations along the path to being, whether you're a museum, a historic site, or a memory initiative, to really being understanding how we can use the tools of the past to create more just futures for everyone.

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[00:03:32] Linda Norris: 25th year, and we were founded by Ruth Abram, the founder of the Tenement Museum in New York City.

We think of the Tenement Museum as kind of our parents, and she had the idea, that it might be interesting to bring together museums interested in social justice because she had come to museum work from activism. In my favorite part of this story, she sent out, like, faxes to everyone, which, right, perfectly captures the time period.

And a group of organizations, global from the very start, said, yeah, we're interested in this conversation. And those initial members included Maison d'Esclavess in Senegal, included the Statue of Liberty in Ellis Island. Perm 36, a Gulag museum in Russia, and they gathered together and signed this agreement and said, we're Sites of Conscience.

I think there was a slightly different name then. We are now more than 370 members in 65 plus countries around the world, and it's every kind of member you can imagine. I have a friend who thinks of, refers to our work as the museums of bad news, and I want to say that is not. True, it is some of it, but not true.

The Kigali Genocide Memorial, or the Tul Seng Museum in Cambodia, those places are certainly important members, but also migration museums in the UK, in the US, historic houses that are beginning to rethink what stories they tell. In the U. S., two presidents houses Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's house, and Montpelier, James Madison house, are members as they begin to come to grips with the challenge of telling the story of our founding fathers who are also enslavers.

We have art museums as members, and we have, in lots of parts of the world, art museums. Places that are not yet museums, but we call them memory initiatives. Something has happened far in the past or more recently, and it's like, how do we remember this? How do we think about accountability? How do we memorialize it?

So it's an incredibly varied group of organizations to work with, which is what makes the work fascinating because we can learn from all of them.

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[00:05:59] Linda Norris: That's a great question.

And we actually have a set of principles that we ask every member to reaffirm every year. They've been slightly revised, I think, but I can do them. One, that you're about place, but that place might be a single place, Monticello, for instance, but it might be an entire country, Rwanda. And it also might now, for different reasons, be a virtual space.

We're broad about the idea of space. We believe, our members believe, that giving visitors or participants, or however we think about audiences, the opportunity to consider what had happened in the past and to take positive action. A lot of our work is really about the idea that we have to be forward looking, that it's not just enough to remember, but you have to use that memory muscle as a tool to move forward.

And the final part is just that all our members understand that we're all in this together. And even though the circumstances may be very different, the idea that we care about more just futures and human rights is what unites us all.

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[00:07:17] Linda Norris: Oh my goodness, that is a conversation we have on a pretty regular basis. And interestingly, it also appears in the media and other kinds of ways when people think about it. A site of conscience to me is a place or an organization, can be both, that is really dedicated to the future part of remembering the past.

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[00:07:57] Linda Norris: So my work is really focused on building the capacity of organizations, building the knowledge, skills, and relationships to enable them to do this work. So I'll give a couple different project examples, which might be helpful. Last year, we wrapped up, much delayed by the pandemic, a reinterpretation of Maison d'Esclaves in Senegal, which is Africa's first world heritage site.

And the new exhibitions that go along at that site. Not only talk about and take a relatively new viewpoint on the transatlantic slave trade, but also really say, Oh, slavery still exists in the world today. And what can we do? So again, both backward looking and forward looking.

I am working on a project right now with one of my colleagues with a, National Park Service Trail in Arizona and California.

The trail is the Juan Baptiste de Anzas Heritage Trail. He's a colonizer. He's Spanish and he comes through and he sets up missions. There's a really different way to look about that. So part of what we're doing is working with the team there and community organizations, including tribal communities. And it's like, oh, how do we switch this story to move away from being a colonizer?

we are also doing increasing amounts of work with organizations that are like, what's the internal work we have to do to make this change about being more forward thinking and being more inclusive? So our work also includes that internal change making work.

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[00:09:53] Linda Norris: When we work with organizations, we work with non members as well, and I should say we always love to hear from organizations who are interested in membership, I will say that. We do webinars that are always open to everyone, but this kind of more directed training. That was open to everyone was new for us, although throughout the pandemic, we did a lot of virtual training, as you might imagine.

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But yeah, tell us about some of the frameworks that you work with.

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Really is a conversation That wherever the goal for everyone is to learn, and it's not to change people's minds.

And we start with thinking about the four truths as one kind of really useful framework. The four truths come from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Lots of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, or whatever they're called, have As their goal, legal accountability.

The goal is to hold someone legally responsible for what happened, wherever something happened. South Africa in its commission about apartheid really came to the conclusion that everyone in the whole country was involved in it in some way. As a victim, as a perpetrator, as a bystander, sometimes all three.

So they came up with this concept of four truths, which we find really useful, even, to be honest, in times when truths seem an elusive concept. The first truth is a personal truth. You and I each have our own truths about sitting here, wherever we are today, about being in this conversation. And they might be different.

They might be the same. They might be different.

of the forensic truths about: 1968

Right? It's a physical truth. And that tends to be the kind of truth that historians, archaeologists are most comfortable with. We love those. We can see it written down, we can hold the object. Right. We're really comfortable with those truths.

Then there's social truths, which are things that societies generally agree upon.

And there's two important parts of that. One, different parts of society hold different truths to be evident to themselves. And also, sometimes those social truths that are held turn out to be, previously mistaken in this country for a long time, a held social truth by the majority of people was that enslaving other people was acceptable.

That was a widely accepted, not by everyone, certainly, but widely accepted truth in this country. But then the fourth truth is a kind of reconciliatory truth, which is really hard to get to. And that involves for everyone, both the individual, it's often a personal reconciliation you have to come to about understanding it, but also a societal reconciliation.

Taking down statues is one part of that both in all kinds of places. Um, ceremonies, one of our members is called the Middle Passage Markers Project and they Their goal is to put up a marker every single place in the U. S. where enslaved Africans were brought ashore. And so they located all these places and they work with the local community to both design the marker and design a ceremony to go with it.

And so they're different everywhere, which is terrific. And that sense of reconciliation, I think, is really important. And lots of our members do other kinds of reconciliation work, but that's what I'm particularly fond of. So that's one framework we use because. We all come with our own sets of understandings about anything.

And so I'm going to suggest a book to people as a great way that I think anyone who thinks about historic interpretation should read. It's a book called, by Clint Smith, called How the Word Has Passed, How America Learns About Slavery. And he does, it's a short, easy, beautiful read, talking about his own experiences at historic sites as a Black man in this country, and he also goes to Senegal as it happens, and what he learns from other people.

And we all come with our own sets of biases and assumptions. And so those four truths help us think about that and to understand that your truth is not the only truth

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We use a framework called the Arc of Dialogue developed by Tammy Borman and Robert Kampt, which is the idea that you have to, in the same way that you scaffold other kinds of learning, you have to scaffold dialogue.

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When we talk about migration, that, earlier questions are, what's your family's immigration story, things like that. But then the phase three questions are really about, oh, what do we think we should happen in this immigration? Who's responsible for it? Who gets to make those choices?

What do we think? And then the fourth phase. Because you can't leave people on that phase three. There's nowhere to go. Phase four are really the wrap up. Well, what are we going to do here? What are we going to do? I think it's really important when we talk about action. Action means all kinds of things.

It might mean running for Congress or Parliament. But it also might mean having a conversation over your dinner table with people who you think really differently than you, because change starts and happens in all kinds of ways. So that arc is a really useful tool to begin to think about it. And We have done arcs of dialogues in all kinds of different ways.

We you can do it, you can sit down in a group, you can design a dialogic tour. You can design a dialogic exhibition within it. One of my favorite dialogic starts to an exhibition is at Eastern State Penitentiary, a historic prison in Philadelphia, one of our members, their exhibit about criminal justice starts with the question: have you ever broken the law?

And you go one way, if you say yes, and you go another way if you say no. And if you say no, you're confronted with, it doesn't say this exactly, but my memory of it is like, never been speeding, never jaywalked, never, right? And of course, how the law thinks about people in this country is very different, depending on all kinds of things, including race.

And so that dialogic question about your own experience gets you started into a deeper exploration.

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Exactly. So good. And the idea of the arc of dialogue, encourage everyone listening to, to look it up as well, is giving that framework to our conversations because quite often when we are having these great discussions or dialogues with open ended questions, they can be quite messy because Open ended questions.

are fantastic. Most of the time, they open up the conversation. They tell us about what people are thinking, feeling and experiencing. But quite often, one, we're not given any training in formulating questions. We never learn this skill. We just pick it up along the way. And secondly, no one tells us how to structure these questions, what order to put them in, how to think about how to sequence the questions in a way that will encourage connections within the group. I love the idea of the Arc of Dialogue being something that can hold everything together for us as a little container.

So tell me about dialogic questions.

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[00:19:19] Claire Bown: Yeah, Guess what's in my head, teaching, when you're getting people to think about what you're thinking about. Yeah.

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But I think the sense that it's always based on their own experiences and part of what's always so interesting to me when I facilitate arcs of dialogue, often in trainings. And then I ask people how they feel after. And whether it's with the people I, who you work at an institution with, or whether it's broader, people often are like, Oh, I just feel closer to these people than I ever imagined.

I learned something I didn't know about my colleagues. I thought about work in a different way. Sometimes people are like, Oh, I volunteered things that I never would have said. But because there's this process, this arc, I'm You're not asking people the hardest questions to start, you're providing, I don't know if warm is the right word, but you're providing a supportive environment with the understanding, and that's your job as a facilitator, in that we're all here to learn together.

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No matter what you do. So it's very much a two way street, you want to be asking great questions and formulating these questions in the right way. And as you said, that takes time and effort, brainstorming and working and reworking your questions. And it's not easy. And on the other hand, you also want to spend a great deal of time creating the right conditions for these conversations to take place.

How does someone become a great facilitator of these dialogic conversations?

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One person talks for a full minute, That's it. And the next, and their pair talks for the next full minute, because we're inclined to like interrupt or be thinking about what we're going to say next. And part of what you really want to do as a facilitator is to Think a little bit ahead, but always be really present in the conversation and what people are saying.

I think another really important part of this is understanding our own kind of intersectionality, where we fit in the room. It's, I am of a certain age, I'm white, I'm an American, I'm in a woman. That means all different things in all different contexts. Sometimes I'm facilitating in some parts of the world where the fact that I have gray hair makes me a better authority figure.

In other places, or sometimes so in same places, the fact that I'm a woman gives me less facilitating power. So I think you always need to understand your own identity. And be aware of other people's identities, but understanding your own is, I think, where it's really important to start. That's particularly important for,

people who are not people of color to understand what the impact of their identity is in a facilitation process.

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There's an awful lot of training that happens in museums that is around content, that is around, let's prepare people for the next exhibition, for whatever's happening in the museum, but around these very important skills, there's very little, isn't there?

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And that's a hard thing, not an easy thing.

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That can be quite upsetting and surprising for us as educators too. I imagine with the members of the coalition, you must do a lot of work around strong emotions as well, and how you handle conflicts. Perhaps you could give us the benefit of your wisdom on how we might best handle conflict.

Because I know from my work that this is becoming more and more the day to day practice for educators in museums.

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But everyone gets it's like, Oh, but. Didn't they treat their slaves well? That kind of, or I don't believe it, or whatever. It's just now, I think everywhere, a more polarized environment, the challenges are more.

A couple suggestions. One is to always listen. Two, to think about what causes people to be confrontational in that, if it's confrontation, right?

Or if it's some other evidence. What has caused those people to really have that thing happen so emotionally? And they're not going to tell you necessarily, but when, for instance, you're talking about the separation of enslaved families through sale in this country, for instance, that may resonate with someone who's been separated from their family now for entirely different reasons.

Right? When we talk about conflict and war in the past, There's conflict and war everywhere. There are refugees. so one is always understanding that people are bringing, as we started with and talking about this, people bringing their own identities to the conversation and having some compassion for that.

It's often useful to set some ground rules. We use the phrase, share the air, so that everyone has space. We think about, it's really rare in my experience. And I think in a lot of our members experience that they've had to ask someone to leave. Because that's the last choice. But you have to know, and I think the other important thing, increasingly we see museums in the US and Canada, and I have to think about if I see them in Europe as well, with codes of conduct for visitors.

That's far more than just don't touch the art. It's, we expect you to respect other people, all those kinds of things. And understanding that visitors, you have expectations for visitors, and that front facing staff know that they'll be supported. by whosoever their supervisors about dealing with difficult situations.

They, there should be a way that they can contact someone else, that they could step out of the situation. And that organizational support is a really critical part of it, I think.

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Yeah.

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But I think it's also really important to say a lot of people are really nervous. Oh, but what if people push back on these dialogic questions? What are we going to do then? The vast majority vast majority of people are really grateful for the opportunity to engage. Most people are not horrible, right?

Most people are not horrible. And so that you might get a visitor who pushes back at you. But what we hear is, That is far less common than the fear of it often seems to be.

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So it it's almost worth having a little notebook and just writing down all the good experiences and the things so we can go back to them. when we need to take care of ourselves and look at those good experiences.

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And that's a really important part of our work. And that's partly what also makes the network work because sometimes we have You know, members who come to us saying, this happened, and then we're in our little mental Rolodex. I don't even think Rolodexes exist anymore in our mental, whatever, contact list.

Be like, who can help you understand, who's had a similar problem? And so that's a big part of being a member of the coalition is that we connect with people who are trying to learn different things.

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And that brings me on to creativity because I didn't want to let this conversation go without mentioning your book, which before we were on air, I was talking about Creativity in Museum Practice is one of my favourite books and is well thumbed with lots of sticky notes in it from places that I've marked.

So a shout out to my co author on that book, Always, Rainey Tisdale. And I think it's actually 10 years since it came out, which seems astonishing. I think creativity can be in, I believe, that's why Rainy and I wrote the book, that it should be in every part of museum work.

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One of our members, Cantos Cautivos, is an online collection of songs sung in Chilean prisons during the dictatorships. Another member is the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, working in exile, of course, creating artworks about posters, all kinds of things about the Syrian revolution in the online database.

So there are those things that people resist in creative ways and they make new futures in creative ways. But I also think creativity is about how do we work together? What do we, we worked on a project last year where, The exhibition was going to be about an artist and his muse, a 19th century artist and his model.

And we came to the decision that part of what would be great in this quite traditional organization was the focus group was models, artist models today, because there's lots of them. And for the first time ever, their words about being a model appeared on the walls in this exhibition about a 19th century painter.

And that's a creative process that's saying, oh, this could be different. I always think creativity is partly about, like, how can we make it a little different? How can we change it up? And that's always this work, and that's part of what's so great about the members everywhere. Because, if we have 370 organizations, we have 370 different ways of approaching work. And some of our members are governmental museums, and they're work within one framework. Others are what I call kitchen table NGOs, that they're little tiny startups. We have something to learn from all of them. And I think part of creativity is casting a big net.

About your own learning, about my learning and our team's learning.

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So I think that we are very lucky to have the jobs we do. We get to travel and work with a variety of organizations. So what's next for you? Where are you off to?

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But they're now shifting to be more about exhibitions in general, which is a great and such a fruitful kind of way. I had the opportunity to be one of the keynoters at their conference last year in Columbia. This year, we're a co sponsor. And the conference, called Momentum, is about memory and the future.

A number of our ICSC members will be speaking. There's some other fabulous sessions, and it will be at, that I've not been to yet, but everyone says it's amazing, the Estonian National Museum. That's my next thing that I've been spending some time on, in addition to bits and pieces of other things.

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[00:34:53] Linda Norris: Really easy. Sitesofconscience. org is the Coalition's website. You can find me, you can find links in our open resource center to all kinds of things, including information about dialogue.

And so yeah, I love to hear from people. So please reach out.

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Go to the show notes to find out more about Linda's work. That just about wraps up this episode. Thank you for tuning in. See you next time. Bye.

You've been listening to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown. For more resources and inspiration, go to thinkingmuseum. com and follow me on social media at Thinking Museum for regular insights and practical tips on the art of engagement in museums. If you've enjoyed the show, please share it with others and follow the podcast so you never miss an episode.

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