How Can Museum Exhibits Enhance Earthquake and Tsunami Hazard Resiliency?

Abstract:

Creating a natural disaster-ready community requires interoperating scientific, technical, and social systems. In addition to the technical elements that need to be in place, communities and individuals need to be prepared to react when a natural hazard event occurs. Natural hazard awareness and preparedness training and education often takes place through informal learning at science centers and formal k-12 education programs as well as through awareness raising via strategically placed informational tsunami warning signs and placards. Museums and science centers are influential in raising science literacy within a community, however can science centers enhance earthquake and tsunami resiliency by providing hazard science content and preparedness exhibits?

Museum docents and informal educators are uniquely situated within the community. They are transmitters and translators of science information to broad audiences. Through interaction with the public, docents are well positioned to be informants of the knowledge beliefs, and feelings of science center visitors. They themselves are life-long learners, both constantly learning from the museum content around them and sharing this content with visitors. They are also members of a community where they live. In-depth interviews with museum informal educators and docents were conducted at a science center in coastal Pacific Northwest. This region has a potential to be struck by a great 9+ Mw earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

During the interviews, docents described how they applied learning from natural hazard exhibits at a science visitor center to their daily lives. During the individual interviews, the museum docents described their awareness (knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors) of natural hazards where they live and work, the feelings evoked as they learned about their hazard vulnerability, the extent to which they applied this learning and awareness to their lives, such as creating an evacuation plan, whether their behaviors changed as a result of learning about earthquakes and tsunamis, and other related questions.

In this presentation, results from this qualitative study will be shared along with future research this is planned to explore the issue of community and individual resiliency further.