Where Lions Roam
This article originally appeared in the Spring/Summer 2026 Issue of St. Mark's Magazine.
Through Lions Roam 2026, students explored Sweden's museums, history, and cultural narratives, and learned how museums shape the stories we tell.
What does it mean to truly experience history? And what does it mean to help others experience it? For students in St. Mark's 2026 Lions Roam course, Surfacing the Past: Museum Design Through Artifacts, the answer was not found just in the pages of a book or in classroom discussions. Through this fully endowed program combining academic study with immersive international travel, students investigated how museums shape our understanding of the past, in preparation for traveling abroad to put those lessons into practice.
Unlike many educational travel experiences, the program did not rely on a tour company for constructing their itinerary, as Griffin and Spalletta organized every aspect via their own research and experience. Students navigated trains, airplanes, ferries, buses, and city streets, learning independence and self-reliance while engaging deeply with Swedish culture. These logistics became part of their education.
“By relying on public transportation and moving through the city ourselves, students experienced immersion in a more authentic way,” Spalletta reflects. “We wanted them to learn how to operate as young professionals, not tourists.”
That sense of ownership continued and transformed the experience. Students were never passive observers moving from landmark to landmark. They were researchers, designers, critics, and collaborators learning directly on-site.
In the classroom at St. Mark’s, students studied museums, exhibition design, Swedish history, and the ethics of curation. They also explored how curators shape visitor understanding through selection, organization, multisensory design, and narrative framing.
Once in Sweden, those concepts became a reality.
At the Vasa Museum, home to a 17th-century warship recovered from Stockholm harbor after 333 years underwater, students encountered an institution that blends history, science, engineering, anthropology, and storytelling into a single immersive experience. Over the course of a full day of focused study, purposeful framing, and artistic engagement by the students, the museum became a classroom and a site of discovery.
Griffin and Spalletta intentionally shifted the course’s capstone project to the students’ time in Sweden. They challenged students to apply everything they had learned both in the classroom and in all the museums and conversations with museum professionals, such as Petter Ljunggren, they had while abroad. Working individually, but constantly providing feedback for one another, students designed original exhibition proposals for the Vasa Museum itself. They created visuals, dioramas, models, and slideshows, and delivered four-minute professional pitches directly to Vasa Museum curator Sofia Törnqvist.
While completing a capstone presentation in a different country presented unusual challenges, the project was built into the course from the beginning. Being able to work in direct dialogue with the museum and the culture that the students had spent months studying gave students real accountability, real risk, and the opportunity to build confidence and skill. They were able to move from navigating within the city to navigating within the cultural institutions of the city.
Through all their work, the students realized that strong exhibit design is not simply about displaying information. It is about understanding audiences and cultural context, communicating through many senses with clarity, and engaging people through storytelling.
“The skills students developed are incredibly portable,” Spalletta notes. “What they learned will apply to nearly everything they’ll do in the future.”
For many students, the experience also sharpened their awareness of representation and cultural perspective. As they explored museums across Sweden, students began noticing absences as much as artifacts.
After reflecting on many visits to museums in Stockholm and Uppsala, Griffin and Spalletta decided to fly the class 90 miles above the Arctic Circle to visit with the Sámi people, the Indigenous population of northern Scandinavia. In their time in the far north, students began to understand how museums represent or fail to represent Indigenous voices and experiences. After two museum visits with Lena Rydström in Kiruna and time spent with Sámi guides at the Markanbáiki open-air museum in Jukkasjärvi, students came to understand more about the rich history of the Sámi and the ways museums can silence history and culture through omission.
“One of the most important questions students learned to ask was not just ‘What is here?’” Griffin explains. “It was ‘What’s missing?’”
That question became an important guiding lens throughout the course. Students considered who creates exhibits, whose perspectives are prioritized, and how cultural institutions shape public understanding. They drew connections between Sámi history and Indigenous cultures around the world, recognizing common themes of tradition, destruction, resilience, and representation.
The course’s emphasis on reflection remained constant throughout the experience. Students maintained sketchbooks and journals, documenting observations, questions, and visual studies as they moved through museums and cultural sites. Those sketchbooks became records not only of places visited, but of intellectual growth.
The result of the course design, the intense studies and capstone in Sweden, and student work and reflection was an educational program that opened a window from the classroom to the world. The course’s central lesson remained clear: Museums are not neutral spaces. They are conversations across time, shaped by choices about whose stories are told, how they are framed, and what future audiences will carry forward. The students in Lions Roam now know that their voices are necessary in shaping the stories about the past that will shape the future.