Vancouver Aquarium Visit Summary

Today one of the gallery curators and I went to the Vancouver Aquarium to get a look at their Wet Lab facilities that they use for educative purposes with students from K-12.  We arrived around 9 AM and met up with one of the lead educators, Colin, and then took a quick tour of their space.

Right now they have three large spaces to house students and provide them with materials and things, and they’re in renovations to create a fourth space to have a more young-age appropriate space for students from the K-7 range to interact with what the aquarium has to offer.

Their main space, the Wet Lab, is a large classroom space with lots of shelving and storage along the walls with displays and visuals and other touchable pieces to help facilitate learning.  In the center of the room are several large tables with seats all around them, and on top of the table are tanks filled with an array of creatures.  One specific thing to note is that the aquarium organizes these tables according to the specific taxonomy of the animals in the tanks.  So one table would be invertebrates, another has vertebrates, yet another mollusks, and so on.  This is a great way to organize the information, as it usually fits within the BC Curriculum standards for science classes.  What’s also great about each table is that for the aquarium they will have one volunteer per table (or teacher) to facilitate students learning, which helps because then that volunteer can become experts on their specific table.  Colin, our guide, also made a point to show us a helpful booklet that volunteers, teachers, and even students can use that lists all of the animals that are displayed, their latin name, a few specifics about them, and a colour high def photo of them.  Also another book was available that had a whole lot of simple information with diagrams, visuals, and other information that could be picked up and studied pretty easily by new volunteers, teachers, or students.  A big thing for their lab is that all the information is orally delivered, and then investigated by the students.  There are no handouts, or sheets than need filling in (as they end up either getting wet or destroyed, or too much time is spent filling them out by students than interacting with the specimens).  However, the aquarium does provide handouts and notes packages online for teachers who wish to use them before coming to the aquarium, after visiting, or for use when they go an explore the aquarium outside of the Wet Lab.  One final thing Colin showed up while we were in the Wet Lab was a box of props they use to show students the weight, feel, and texture of things without needing to use a live animal.  So they had abalone shells, mollusk shells, and other touchable things that were not living.

We moved on to the room next to the Wet Lab, another smaller classroom that was being set up for a elementary school group coming in later in the morning.  What was neat that they had there was the organization system.  The class that was coming in was dealing with frogs, so they rolled in several tanks with live specimens, but they also had a lot of bins with non-living examples of what was being learned about.  There were four colored tables around the corners of the room, as well as large pieces of colored cloth on the floor (To sit on, but also to move students around “Group 2 now goes to the Orange mat”).  At each table a volunteer or staff member would be there to instruct on what was being shown at that table, and students would sit in front, and have a chance to touch all the props that they had at each station.  They also had puppets, which we felt was a great thing the gallery could do to engage younger audiences with material in the gallery.

We also visited their rotating exhibit space to see how things work in that context.  Simply put, the educator team comes up with a 10-20 minute presentation that is content and activity (right now it’s Deep Sea Monsters so they talk about how artists drew the things they saw in the middle ages, how it influenced opinions, and then they have students draw their own creatures before going into the exhibit to see the real “monsters”)

Suggestions that were made by Colin were to have stations that could be put onto carts and taken into the gallery to have more tangible things for students to touch while they’re experiencing the visuals of the exhibits.  So for Bill Reid’s context you could have cedar bark pieces ,wooden carving tools, woven pieces, or things from the cedar tree that are used by indigenous people to make goods.  That way students have something to touch, while it is explained to them how masks are carved, why they use cedar to carve, etc.  Other suggestions were for storage needs, you can make the storage space a display that open up to the pieces you want to show.  For the aquarium this meant having a wall with boxes inside, than when you open up a door inside would be whatever it is you want people to interact with.  For the gallery it could be half of a tree that can be opened to see the inside maybe?  And have one or some of the objects we want students to be able to touch and see.

For a quick summary, here are some point form notes I took:

• Lab tables organized by species type
• Labs about interaction, not about note taking
• Curriculum options for lessons (not just socials concentration)
• Need props and touchable things
• Activity sheets available, but not given out by the gallery (teacher discretion)
• Have stations that can go into the gallery and relate to exhibit
• Display Storage (able to show information, then pull things out of display)
• Puppets (good for younger students, especially for story telling moments)
• Connections between spaces (gallery should be an extension of the learning space)
• Online information to be available for teachers
• Storytelling very important
• General public space? Will the Cedar Room be solely educational for students?
• Touchable components that give connection between objects and information
• Connect with Homeschooling programs, and summer camps to visit
• Figure out age range issues, ability of students, their height, and numbers for groups
• Volunteers need training in how to move groups of people through spaces like the gallery