Justification for Assignment #2

Assignment #2 is designed to guide the students through a critique of their institution. It prioritizes critical reading skills, but adds to this the concept of multivocality. Zoos tend to look at their visitors as a homogeneous group centered around nuclear families; examining their own website will point this out to the attendees, and push them to reconsider whether this path of least common denominator is appropriate in light of what they have learned the first days about digital acuity and wide access. It is also a process of self-reflection—the website is that staffer’s public image, too, and often it is not what keepers consider to be truthful or accurate about themselves and their institution. This will be the place we apply Liu’s ideas of web friendships—what’s cool versus simply cold (76). An animal-based web page centers on living beings, but visitors have a hard time imagining the body at the other end of the email, never mind the living species dying in waves in our oceans and rainforests. Because institution employees have a connected relationship with the subject of the web pages, they can investigate where the information might build a “Gee, that’s cool” response in a visitor, and equally notice where information becomes static and cold, distancing the reader from the animals as valuable entities.

After participants have wrestled with their own institution’s presentation, we ask them to dig deeper into both their home page and those of others. First, we want to encourage communication between institutions, without fear of retribution for “being critical.” Group study encourages productive discussion, so that a staffer questioning their own zoo’s decisions can do so in a learning environment, improving their skills in constructive criticism. Second, good critique requires an examination of the attitudes, motivations, and goals of the producer, an approach rarely used in the zoo field. This is the central practice for participants to adopt (hopefully); a critical stance that remains open to other considerations in order to advance the discussion. This critical literacy will provide a tool through which participants can be heard in their home institutions, not as animal staff (a very packed definition) but as advocates for animal and visitor well-being. Once participants can show that they’ve considered their recommendation for a new exhibit graphic through the eyes of several types of visitors, they are more likely to be heard. We also hope they will be able to relate to cool technologies, thus enabling them to generate “Gee, that’s cool,” from visitors.