Writing for Museums and Public Galleries

John Hicks is a lecturer in Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature. He is co-editor of The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025). Other formats:  PDF, EPUB, Paperback (9781606069332).

John spoke to WAC Assistant Director Jessa Wood about his assignment. His responses have been summarized below.

Check Out John's Assignment

Please describe your assignment in a few paragraphs.

The assignment is from a course called Movements and Manifestos. Students produce a museum gallery exhibition as their final project. The exhibition features a set number of art objects, represented through pictures, quotes from texts, or display items on the wall, accompanied by the types of interpretive labels that museums provide.

The writing for the assignment is broken down into three categories: (1) a wall text paragraph that explains the overall grouping; (2) factual information about the objects (referred to in museums as "tombstones"); and (3) label text, which provides more interpretive discussion. This kind of writing comes out of my experience working as an in-house editor at a museum. I’ve tried to transfer as much of that real-world process and its steps directly into the assignment.

During either the final class or the designated exam date, students meet in the lecture hall with their working groups to install their exhibitions. We then host an exhibition opening where students give a curator's talk about their piece, allowing attendees to circulate and ask questions. The assignment encompasses the complete process: producing the work, describing it, and contextualizing it.

How does the assignment work in your class? What learning does it support?

This project serves as the major assignment for the course, covering the final two-thirds of the term. While students complete reflective writing, discussion posts, and a factual midterm exam, almost all other writing in the class is geared toward this final project. The core pedagogical principle I have is that students should not be asked to write in genres they are not actively consuming. So, it begins with a simple preparatory task where students visit a museum, such as the Weisman Art Museum, to conduct a rhetorical evaluation of the existing exhibits. They analyze what the labels communicate, who their intended audience is, and what prior knowledge is assumed.

Students adopt the position of curators and participate in framing the assignment. They establish group norms and reflect on what a successful exhibition should look, sound, and feel like. They brainstorm various criteria for organizing objects, such as by artist, decade, color, mood, or location. For the initial stage, each student drafts five to seven labels. Rather than working in assigned teams, students bring their initial drafts to class, circulate among their peers, and form groups based on shared interests and themes.

Once they are formed into working groups, students combine their initial collections, which total around 25 to 35 items (about 5 per student), and collaborate to select and refine the strongest pieces for display. The whole process emphasizes synthesis. Groups write their exhibit text together, participate in cross-group peer review in class, and complete a formal copyediting stage to ensure that their concise, 75-to-150-word museum labels are polished and error-free.

Are there specific learning outcomes that this project supports?

The project supports learning to write within a specific genre by requiring students to navigate audience expectations, format constraints, and the balance between presenting objective fact and interpretive analysis. It fosters synthetic thinking about course materials and gives students practice in artifact analysis and cultural analysis, allowing them to directly apply core concepts to a practical, real-world project.

The assignment promotes student agency and inquiry. Rather than limiting students to the texts and objects already covered in the class, it encourages them to seek out new objects that personally interest them. The project deepens audience awareness while connecting directly to the course themes of movements and manifestos. I treat the classroom as a shared discussion space. Students have to reflect on what they know in order to write for their peers.

How did you develop it initially?

I developed the assignment initially while I was enrolled in a teacher preparation program doing intense student teaching. When the opportunity to teach the course came up, I couldn't say no. So the first time through, I was largely building it as I went along with what I could put together. However, the structure was deeply rooted in my own professional experience, drawing directly from a real-world process I had participated in many times throughout my job in museums.

My approach was to translate everything I knew about how exhibitions are actually developed behind the scenes, such as how curators collaborate with staff members like editors, peer reviewers, and budget committees who critique and refine ideas before an exhibition happens. I wanted to surface these collaborative scenarios for students, moving beyond an abstract group model to show how people with defined roles and specialized expertise ask specific questions based on their responsibilities, whether that involves writing press releases, building display cases, framing artwork, or digitizing fragile objects.

What advice would you give to other instructors who would like to develop a similar assignment?

First, think about actual real-world group projects adjacent to your course content that you have personally been involved in, and design a sequence of assignments that mirrors those authentic interactions. While a museum exhibition paired with a presentation is a great, repeatable format, the broader key is structuring collaborative student work around genuine professional processes.

Second, explicitly schedule dedicated time into the syllabus for fine-tooth editing and polish. In typical term papers or essay sequences, students rarely reach the level of polish required for work intended for public consumption, where a typo would be embarrassing. Integrating structured editing steps ensures students learn to treat writing as an iterative process rather than rushing a final draft to the finish line.

Finally, guide students through a revision process where the scale of changes progressively narrows. Early on, revisions should focus on big-picture structural ideas, such as moving entire paragraphs or sections. During copyediting, the focus shifts to refining individual sentences, and during final proofreading, it becomes a character-by-character check. Providing feedback questions that align with each specific stage helps students give and receive the right type of critique at the right time.

Because this is such a significant final group project, how do you support the collaborative process, and how do you assess it?

We spend a lot of time on establishing and reviewing norms. During weekly sessions, as the class transitions from content and discussion into group project work, these norms are displayed on screen as a constant reminder to reinforce how students agreed to collaborate.

Assessment is driven primarily through self-assessment and reflection. Students complete a detailed reflection survey containing prompts about group dynamics and individual contributions. This allows students to evaluate how effectively they worked within their groups and judge whether the final project was successful according to their own standards.

What do students say about the assignment? How have they found it valuable? Any final thoughts you’d like to share?

Students seem to really like the self-directed nature of forming their own subgroups around shared interests and chosen artifacts, rather than simply being placed into groups via a sign-up sheet. Having that degree of choice and voluntary alignment helps the groups function much more smoothly. Even when challenges arise (such as a student missing a peer-review session) it provides a learning opportunity, prompting students to reflect on what is lost when they forego an extra set of eyes and a round of constructive feedback.

More broadly, this assignment exists directly because of my real-world work in museums and publishing, which has provided the structure and steps needed to organize the project effectively. I avoid assigning formats that I haven't personally worked with, such as asking students to make a podcast or a digital-storytelling video. My professional experience is in books and exhibitions, and while many of those have digital components that I feel knowledgeable enough to assign, there are lots of multimodal formats where I’m probably not the right person to be teaching that. I try to lean into my strengths and background when it comes to assignment formats. The true value of working with non-classroom genres out in the wild is that they are grounded in real-world practices. This offers students a meaningful and realistic collaborative experience.

What We Like about John’s Assignment

The assignment uses and clarifies field-specific vocabulary. The assignment carefully reviews key vocabulary used in the assignment and the field of museum exhibitions. Clarifying the terms creates greater assignment transparency for students, and it underscores the specific rhetorical situation students will be working with.

The assignment foregrounds the social role of writing. When writers know their work will be published, exhibited, or experienced by an audience, the assignment's rhetorical situation is authentic.

The assignment overview provides style guidelines and genre expectations.

Individual work and collaborative roles are clearly laid out. Group projects can easily become confusing and potentially inequitable in terms of labor when students are only aware of the final product. The assignment specifies ways that each student will contribute to the final assignment.

The assignment uses inclusive language. The core work is detailed yet open to negotiation. Phrases such as "we will likely work," "work together to come up with some kind of" and "let's talk about" signal the collaborative and constructivist approach the assignment fosters. In this spotlight page, John talks about how self-selection is a crucial feature of the assignment. Students are more apt to be intrinsically motivated when they are given agency throughout the assignment.

The final project builds incrementally over the semester. The stages of the assignment are presented as a scaffolded timeline, noting the specific tasks that will be worked on in class. The timeline underscores the collaborative and interdependent nature of the assignment.

Check Out John's Assignment

AI acknowledgement: Zoom AI and Gemini were used to produce a clean transcription of Jessa and John’s conversation.