“Change, resilience, adaptability and creativity.” These are the ideas expressed in the geometrically elegant ideogram called nkyinkyin, originating from the Akhan people of sub-Saharan Africa, according to the University of Michigan Museum Studies Program website. The symbol depicts a meandering line that winds horizontally toward the icon’s top edge, then suddenly splits into five short lines that beg to expand like tributaries past the character’s boundaries.

Generally translated to mean “twistings,” the nkyinkyin marking has traveled from Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire to Ann Arbor via Professor of Art History and Afroamerican and African Studies Ray Silverman, who has worked with the Akhan people for 30 years.

Silverman, who is also the director of the University of Michigan Museum Studies Program, chose nkyinkyin for the UMMSP’s logo because he believes the Akhan ideogram embodies the philosophy of the program, which includes the Rackham School of Graduate Studies certificate program in Museum Studies and the brand new undergraduate minor.

“We don’t want to create a discipline of Museum Studies," Silverman said. "We want to create an open space where a lot of different disciplines can meet to discuss a whole range of issues related to museums, but also issues that have relevance to other cultural contexts.”

Making of the minor

The Museum Studies Minor, launched last semester, is a direct result of the graduate certificate program’s success. Since its creation in 2003, the graduate certificate program has garnered great interest among undergraduates.

“It was largely the result of a lot of undergraduates coming to me and saying, ‘Hey it’s really nice that you have a graduate program in Museum Studies, but what about us?’ ” Silverman said.

“(Silverman) and I would each be approached by undergraduate students over the course of a term who would want to know where the (museum) courses were for undergraduates, and we could point them to courses in different departments, but there wasn’t any one structured curriculum in place for undergrad,” added Associate Director of UMMSP Brad Taylor.

Like the graduate certificate program, the new minor consists of 18 credits, and it's structured around the same general curriculum, including a focus on museums as institutions, the objects and collections within museums and how museums interact with society. Both programs are intended to promote museum literacy and complement other fields of study, not to act as a vocational track for those interested in a museum career.

“It’s not that we’re preparing students for a career in museums, it’s that we’re preparing students to think critically about museums, about their role in society, about how they work, how they function,” Silverman said.

“We don’t offer classes on how to become a curator or how to organize collections,” Taylor added. “For those students who want that training, it’s available out there, but we’ve made an intentional decision to offer something different. And while it’s really too early to tell in the undergraduate program, the graduate program has really set itself apart from other programs in the field by taking that approach.”

Out of the 70 students who took the minor’s introductory course last semester, 30 have already declared the minor. Of these students, Silverman said he thinks “most are interested in pursuing museum careers.”

However, according to Rackham student Jolande Henrike Florusbosch and graduate student instructor for Museums 301, there was a lot of diversity among the minor’s first crop of students.

“There were students who had always known that they wanted to work in museums (and) people that really didn’t know that there was really a course on museums,” she said.