The terms project in the ANTH 518 course (Museum Method) involved the construction of a Teachers Resource Guide (TRG) the Karagöz and Hacivat puppet collection which were on display as part of the Shadows, Strings and Other Things exhibition hosted by the Museum of Anthropology (MOA). The guide's intended purpose is to provide teachers at school and parents at home with the opportunity and resources necessary to explore the traditional Turkish shadow puppet theatre of Karagöz and Hacivat. The resource guide is designed to enable its targeted audience to understand the Karagöz and Hacivat shadow puppets and the theatre it is part of, the manipulation techniques it adopts, the characters and plot it includes, together with its historic and cultural context. The guide is intended to serve its purpose regardless of whether it is being used with or without having direct access to the actual Karagöz and Hacivat shadow puppets collection housed at the UBC Museum of Anthropology (MOA) physically through its space or mobile kits, or remotely through its online virtual exhibits, or even entirely independently from MOA’s collection.
The resource guide relies on text, visuals aids including photographs and maps, activities, reflections, and discussions to enable children learn about the history, content, and cultural context of Karagöz and Hacivat puppet tradition, including gaining a better understanding of the Ottoman history and its associated multi-ethnic multi-faith dimension, in addition to the Turkish culture that continues to date.
Through the resource guide, the children should be able to:
- Learn about Turkish culture through its traditional shadow theatre
- Understand the manifestation of cultural Heritage in the day-to-day life details
- Experiment with improvised storytelling to explore the Karagöz and Hacivat Shadow theatre core themes and perspectives.
Conducting Research
Research has been conducted in multiple channels to support the quest to create the different components of the Karagöz and Hacivat puppets teachers resource guide. Three main research efforts were conducted to fulfil three different information needs. The first being the exploration of teachers’ resource guides created in museums to support specific collections.
Conducting the second research channel has been to better understand the educational role of museums and how tools such as teachers’ resource guides serve museums in fulfilling its educational responsibility. At least as far as the past two decades we have witnessed a revolutionizing shift in museum sciences literature and practical focus which has been shifting from collections and preservation to a more outward focus on education and visitors and eventually investing much effort to describe the role of the museum educator. Among many things, the educators were at the forefront of these efforts establishing scores of special programs to address the needs of those who were considered "non-traditional" or "hard-to-reach" audiences. At similar times such as ours now, a time of self-isolation and pandemic lock-down, museums have an obligation to utilize digitization and display technologies to facilitate access to the collections as well as to mobilize educational interaction with the collection in a creative, stimulating and inconvenient manner.
Moreover, literature about the role of museums in the life of people and community at times of crisis and in facing society challenges. 2 During a time where nationalist-driven hostility against immigrants, racial-inspired hate, and Islamophobia continues to be global challenges, I figured a teachers’ resource guide that explores a form of story-telling arts that originates from the Islamic world and that relates to this Islamic culture on many levels could eventually find an opportunity to shed the light on aspects of this culture and the arts and stories that come with it, namely the significance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The third channel or set of channels has been conducted to fulfill the information need for every section of the resource guide being constructed. This includes building a structure (or a table of content), and conducting research in information resources such as encyclopedias, journals, fact books, newspapers, blogs, video footages, photo sharing websites etc. to be able to gather all needed information and resources necessary to deliver the informative component of this teachers’ resource guide.
Apart from the theoretical backbone describing the scope, purpose and objectives of the resource guide, four main sections were identified that were determined to help accomplish the mission behind this guide and enable the targeted audience fulfill their goal in exploring the Karagöz and Hacivat puppets theater in the manner planned and designed as per the guide in hand. The main sections of the guide are:
- Introduction
Includes a brief description of the Karagöz and Hacivat puppets theater together with a historic and cultural background to allow for a profound contextual understanding of this art form and the characters it presents. To further serve the contextualization, the introduction also includes a brief geographic/historic explanation of the origins of the Karagöz and Hacivat puppets theater in terms of both the wide territorial span of the Ottoman Empire and the modern-day Turkish state. Additionally, the introduction also elaborates on the cultural context of the puppet theater and the seasonal nature of its performance in the original context by presenting information about the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, its religious and festive significance and how it differs across the Islamic world. - Design and Materiality
Introduces the physical attributes of the puppets in terms of materiality, construction, artisanal attributes, origins of craftsmanship, size of characters and the reason why puppets can come in different sizes based on the characters’ significance, among other characteristics. - Manipulation
Describes the specificity of manipulation technique for the Karagöz and Hacivat puppets and how the puppeteers handle and generate movements and sounds to create a theatrical performance. This section also introduces the physical parts the make up the puppets, the theater, and the puppets motion anatomy. - Characters & Plot
Introduced the wide array of characters that make up the Karagöz and Hacivat puppets theater and allows the target audience to get a grasp of the diversity that comes with those multiple characters and the origins of such ethnic and racial richness and how that links to the historic context of the Ottoman empire (which is where the Karagöz and Hacivat puppets theater originated).
The types of information resources that have been consulted during the course of creating this teachers’ resource guide has been very diverse. References such as the world encyclopedia of puppetry arts and the CIA’s factbook were consulted for background information about the Karagöz and Hacivat puppets and on the country profile of modern-day Tukey respectively.
A local multilingual blog created by a Turkish Karagöz artist has also proved to be a very rich resource for information about the different characters of this puppet theater and linking it to the local oral history and traditions.
Other secondary resources such as newspaper articles and scholarly journal articles were also consulted especially to better understand the changing educational role of museums and the shift of priorities from collection acquisition and preservation to service provision.
Museum online websites were another rich resource that served in providing examples for similar resources directed to the same targeted audiences of parents and teachers. The UBC Museum of Anthropology’s (MOA) teachers’ resource guides associated to the Shadows, Strings and Other Things: The Enchanting Theatre Art of Puppets exhibition together with other similar guides from the same museum and other museum institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Smithsonian Museums in Washington, DC. Museum websites were particularly useful in getting an inspiration on the design and formatting of the guide, the essential elements that should be included, and how they are incorporated in the guide (such as images, maps, etc.). Many ideas to boost the engaging feature of the guide was also inspired from the many teachers’ resources and guides offered by other museums whether those guide were directly related to puppet collections or other art or artifact collection. When it comes to multimedia, and to avoid copyright complexity, most images were gathered from MOA’s Reciprocal Research Network (RNN) and Wikimedia where more relaxed copyright licenses, such as Creative Commons (CC), are adopted. Video footages showing the manipulation of puppets on the other hand were found on YouTube’s video collection shared using CC licenses.
Formatting and Design
In designing the guide, I was keen to include a healthy balance of text, visuals aids such as photographs and maps, and action nodes, which may include interactive activities, or calls for reflection or discussion. This mix of contents was presented in a non-linear form with the sake of ensuring the contents remains both interesting and engaging throughout its browsing experience.
The guide adopts a color scheme that is inspired from the color palette adopted in the Karagöz and Hacivat cover image of the guide. Being designed as an educational resource for children, the aesthetic use of color was essential. Color is either present in the text formatting or the page layouts or textboxes. What I would like to call action nodes, are formatted differently (in a bordered textbox and in another catchy font style and color) to grab attention and associated to the main sections making up the guide, and thus scattered throughout the guide instead of being listed separately at the very end of the guide or in a separate annex.
Challenges
Some of the challenges managed while creating this resource guide were:
- Resisting the temptation to include too much textual information and maintain a healthy balance of text and multimedia.
- Selecting themes and topics for the action nodes was tricky given the young age group targeted by the intended audiences of this guide. At one point, the issue of cultural diversity was seriously considered being directly inspired from the practice of vocalization by the puppeteers and their adoption of different accents that would reflect their ethnic or geographic origins within the once geographically scattered Ottoman empire. While re-visiting this idea, it was later avoided out of fear from misinterpretation or misuse that may eventually incite racist remarks or have a hurtful impact on racial minority groups engaging with this guide.
- Locating representative pictures that would fulfill the criteria of being high-quality images that were also shared using more liberal copyright licenses was among the most difficult tasks.
- Citing images was another area of ambiguity, where it was rather unclear if citing images and multimedia resources at their proper locations within the guide was sufficient or if a list of cited images should be annexed to the guide as well. There does not seem to be a consensus on presenting this information across the different museum teachers’ guides I managed to consult.
References:
Munley, Mary Ellen and Randy Roberts. "Are Museum Educators Still Necessary?" Journal of Museum Education: Museums and Relevancy 31, no. 1 (2006): 29-39.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The World Factbook, s.v. “Turkey.” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tu.html (accessed March 24, 2020)
Nicolas, M. The World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts, s.v. “Karagoz.” 2012 https://wepa.unima.org/en/karagoz/ (accessed March 24, 2020)
The Museum of Anthropology. Reciprocal Research Network (RRN). https://www.rrncommunity.org/ (accessed April 10, 2020)
Semerkand Production [Semerkand Yapım]. (2017, September 21). Karagöz - Hacivat (English Subtitle). [Video file]. https://youtu.be/8DbB81qguGc (accessed April 15, 2020)
Senyer, E. Karagoz and Hacivat. https://www.karagoz.net/english (accessed April 15, 2020)
Travel Atelier. Turkey’s National Shadow Theater: Hacivat and Karagöz. https://travelatelier.com/blog/turkey-national-shadow-theater-hacivat-karagoz/ (accessed April 15, 2020)
Learning Significance