“Let’s use our words to create community, to build bridges, to find the things we have in common—what we all laugh at, what we all celebrate. And let’s not use our words to divide.”
– Ann Friedman, Founder & CEO of Planet Word
I’ve always believed that words hold immense power, shaping our connections, fueling our imagination, and helping us navigate the world. But what if we could experience words in an entirely new way? That’s exactly what Ann Friedman has made possible with Planet Word Museum in Washington, D.C.
In this episode of It’s About Language, I sit down with Ann to hear how her love of language led her from working in Beirut and Jerusalem as a translator, to teaching young students, and finally, to founding a first-of-its-kind museum dedicated to words and literacy. We talk about the power of language to build communities, the importance of keeping literacy alive, and how Planet Word’s voice-activated exhibits and participatory experiences bring words to life.
This conversation is a must-listen for anyone who loves language, education, or the joy of learning.
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Transcript
0:00:07.2 Intro: Words shape our world, inspire our imagination, and connect us in ways we never expect. Before we dive into this incredible conversation, let’s take a moment to set the stage. This is Season 5, Episode 7 of It’s About Language, with your host, Norah Lulich Jones. Today, Norah sits down with Ann Friedman, visionary founder and CEO of Planet Word Museum, where language comes to life in the most playful, unexpected ways. From storytelling to innovation, Planet Word is transforming how we experience words, no matter our age. So, get ready to explore the magic of language and its power to spark curiosity, joy, and change. Now, let’s join Norah and Ann.
0:00:55.7 Norah Jones: Who is Ann Friedman? What is she about? What’s your history that has brought you to Planet Word Museum in Washington, DC?
0:01:04.1 Ann Friedman: You know, there are certain sort of seminal formative events in my life. And I’d say that one of them was living in Beirut and Jerusalem for close to a decade. And there I worked as a translator and eventually as a copy editor. But the main influence on my life there was that I lived in two cities that were divided by sectarian strife. And so I really made a commitment to myself that when we moved back to the United States that I would do something to build community. And one way that you can do that is by being a public school teacher. ’cause the public schools are one of the last institutions that exists in America that brings people from all different walks of life together. So when we moved back to the United States, I met a gifted and talented teacher in the Denver area. And she ran an after-school program that introduced kids to world cultures. And I said, “Ah, that’s what I could do.” And so I have a sort of a love of geography and travel. So I just devised a class, extracurricular class, called World Class. Kids who signed up kindergarten through second grade would learn about the food, the culture, the geography, the dance, the language, of different countries.
0:03:02.8 Ann Friedman: So for a month we would have classes once a week on, say, Japan, and I did all this research, found different arts and crafts activities that these little kids could do, different foods that we could have at the end as a snack. I just sent flyers to people at the school my children attended and friends, and it was very successful. I rented a room from the school system in Montgomery County, and I kind of had an idea that it would be successful because we live in a part of Maryland where there are a lot of people who work for international organizations, kids who travel or who are aware of other countries and cultures at an early age. Of course the biggest hit was the food at the end of the lesson. It was so popular from my first go around that I added a second class at my home, same thing, and I did that for three years and I amassed a gigantic library of books on different cultures and countries and… But all geared to young kids. So once I had done that, I thought, “You know, I really like this. I’m acting as a teacher, but maybe I should become a real teacher.” And so I applied to graduate school at American University and went back and got a master’s in elementary teaching. And that’s when I really found myself.
0:05:00.1 Ann Friedman: I wanted to be a teacher in third grade when I was eight. My friend and I used to play Go to the Head of the Class, this board game. But being a teacher wasn’t cool for much of my youth. And nobody did that. And so I tried other things. I worked in investment banking. I did these jobs overseas in translation and copy editing, but it was only when I became a teacher that I really found myself and what I should have been doing all along. And so I taught two years as a fifth grade teacher and then nine years teaching: Beginning reading and writing. And that was because it was a part-time job and it was just too difficult to be the kind of teacher I wanted to be and really involved in hands-on with the life that I lived with my husband. And, so it was the best teaching job I could ever have found. I also had just finished grad school, so I had a lot of background classes in teaching reading, reading instruction, literacy, diagnosing problems with kids who struggled to read. And so it was just like a coming together of everything important in my life. I retired from teaching. I wasn’t done with literacy though. I had found what I was really interested in, sort of teaching and educating and passing along knowledge and joy and excitement about words and language.
0:06:56.0 Ann Friedman: And then I read about the new museum in New York City called MoMath that was bringing math concepts to life using technology, no collection. And I said, “Ha! That’s what I could do. I could create a museum of words and language.” So I went up to New York and I visited with the founders of MoMath and found out what they had done, what they’d do differently if they were starting over. And I sort of talked up my idea to all sorts of people and everywhere I went I got a really positive reaction, but I didn’t know anything about running a museum. I’ve been a museum goer, mostly art museums and… And then I said, “Well, I think it’s a great idea, but what would young people think?” Because my target was young kids who were at risk for stopping reading. And so I did two focus groups with 10 to 12 year-old boys and 10 to 12 year-old girls and their parents. And they loved the idea of a word museum. Even the kids who said, “I hate reading,” when we suggested the kinds of activities that could happen there, they came around and really supported the idea. And I read a book called: The Participatory Museum, by Nina Simon. And it really opened my eyes to the different kind of museums that were now possible.
0:08:56.1 Ann Friedman: So, my experience had mostly been passive, where you go to a museum, you look, you read labels, things like that. I realized, “No, no, there’s a lot more going on in the museum world.” And it involved activity and people doing things and being part of their learning. And that fit with how I was as a teacher. And so I decided that Planet Word was going to be a participatory museum. And it also needed to use technology like MoMath because we know teachers and parents are not the answer to getting kids to read. Even adults aren’t reading as much as they used to. Young adults read maybe a book a year for pleasure, according to surveys. So I had to find a new way to interest people in reading and books and literacy.
0:10:11.0 Norah Jones: What a fascinating journey. And for those of us for whom the words and language in general just bring a sense of delight, but we don’t necessarily figure out how to embody it. The delight that keeps coming to my mind when I look at the website, when I see the events that you have, the resources, when I read the backgrounds, I see your collections that you yourself have done so much to make sure exist right in the museum itself, the delight just grows and grows and grows. So here you are with this vision of something interactive, language is communication, but still, rather than passively receiving language, you’re interconnected with it. So this is a phenomenal background on this. And now you have… You obtained this building, it’s a National Historical Site, and then you opened it in potentially not the most fortuitous time, 2020. Can you talk about then getting the museum open? What kinds of things happened as people began to interact with your vision becoming reality in front of them?
0:11:36.0 Ann Friedman: So, it took seven years of planning from back then when I read about MoMath to when we opened our doors. And in that time, I found this National Historic Landmark building, the Franklin School, that needed renovation. And so I got city council approval for leasing this building for 99 years for $10 a year, which sounds like a fantastic deal. But it was in return for restoring and rehabilitating a building that had been abandoned for 10 years. And over the course of its long life, it was built in 1869, it had been really mistreated and neglected at lots of points. So I did that on one side with a architect and contractor. And so that was going on. And on the other side, I created this 501c3 that was for the museum for Planet Word to be inside this building and did a lot of fundraising. And that went to the design, fabrication and installation of the galleries. And really, the important thing that happened was that I started working with local projects, the experience design firm in New York City. And they were known for incorporating technology into their museum design. And so they got it right away.
0:13:35.7 Ann Friedman: They took my list of about 200 subjects, topics, that could be in a museum about words and fit those into the spaces that we had in the building, space for basically 10 galleries. And then did prototypes and presented ideas to me. And by now my team of mostly board members, a couple employees, including a very experienced executive director, and said, “What do you think about this?” Or, “What do you think about that?” And through iteration and discussion and trial and error, we came up with these wonderful participatory galleries and experiences. But another thing that they suggested that I never would have thought of was making the museum voice-activated so that you are using your words as you discover and experience this world of words. So you’re talking to the museum. And it’s responding back to you in many, many different cases. And so that was just genius.
0:15:06.7 Norah Jones: That’s genius is right. That’s genius is right. Your website has the phrase, as a matter of fact, “Our exhibits speak for themselves.” It made me laugh out loud when I saw that. Tell us more about that if you don’t mind taking that trail for just a moment because that is bound to be an extraordinarily exciting way to engage all that visit the museum.
0:15:31.0 Ann Friedman: First of all, really important to know that we developed six core values for the museum. And everything that we tried to do, the galleries, programming, everything has to align with those core values. And two of them are to be fun and playful. So even when we have a topic that’s really serious, like hate speech or words that wound is what we call it, we make sure that there’s something that makes you smile. When you first start your tour, you are in a gallery that we call First Words. And it’s children demonstrating in home videos, the different milestones of early childhood language acquisition. And immediately, visitors smile, they have a smile of recognition, they’ve seen that, they’ve experienced it, and the videos of these little kids are of every race and color and background and language background. So right away, you see another one of our core values, inclusivity. We have… Everything in the museum is accessible by the deaf. So everything spoken is either captioned or signed throughout the museum.
0:17:20.7 Ann Friedman: So it’s for everybody. Everybody can participate. But you asked about the voice recognition. So in our first major gallery called: Where Do Words Come From? It’s a gigantic word wall built of three-dimensional letters and words, a thousand words, and sort of a sound and light show about the etymology of words in English, and we chose the narrator whose voice you hear very carefully, we listen to different tapes of voice actors and he has a fun playfulness in his voice. And he asks visitors questions. And it’s scripted, but it’s a non-linear experience. In other words, what the visitors say into the microphones, it determines where that exhibit goes and takes you next. So, your experience there won’t be identical each time you visit. Depends on who’s there with you and whose voice is heard by the voice recognition technology. So you might choose to hear about the etymology of a word originally from Spanish, or you might want to hear about onomatopoeia. So it’s all driven by the visitor’s interests and their voices.
0:19:26.8 Norah Jones: That’s phenomenal. And the participation continues throughout. There’s… One of the items that caught my eye on your website and is featured in several wonderful photographs is the Speaking Willow, for example. What is it that you find is especially evocative of the delight about language, but also going back to what you said at the very beginning about your own experience of coming back to the United States after your time in the Middle East and feeling like you wanted to make sure that building community, how do what the people are experiencing both delight and also help to reflect that vision of the community of mankind?
0:20:27.5 Ann Friedman: So our museum is really social and a lot of people together participate. So, it’s not just one person or one family. You’re in a room with lots of people and we have our karaoke-style songwriting gallery. We have five working mics in there. And people get up and they sing along and other people are sitting on the benches in the room and everyone starts clapping for everybody else. And so the whole idea is that, let’s use our words to create community, to build bridges, to find the things we have in common, what we all laugh at. And let’s not use our words to divide.
0:21:31.2 Ann Friedman: And if you leave the museum thinking anything or remembering one message, that’s it. That words matter and that you have a choice of how to use your words. And so we have interactive exhibits on taboo language, words that wound, forensic linguistics, these topics where you really find out, you know, if you’re thinking about language as a community-building tool. We have one interactive that’s a video screen, but you can respond with your voice or by tapping two different questions that the narrator poses, and one is on dialect. And so, each one of these interactive screens has a, what we call an attract question. So they pose a question that attracts visitors to come over and dive deeper and learn more. So, for the dialect beacon, it’s like, “Do you have a dialect?” And then it leads you through to understanding that we all speak with an accent and, you know? So.
0:22:55.3 Norah Jones: And dialects are what we call languages if you just go ahead and you find out you’re speaking them, indeed. One of your six core values is unexpected. And I’m wondering if there are stories of participants, especially young participants, one of your key focus areas where there’s young people that came and they did experience something, well, unexpected or motivational. It’s another one of your core values, that you just delight in telling the story.
0:23:30.3 Ann Friedman: Well, I definitely had people tell me, “Oh, my kids don’t like to read. They won’t want to come to Planet Word. I had to twist their arms.” And then they’ve been back four times. So one thing we don’t do is have a lot of signage that tells people what to do. But we do have our word associates. They’re our part-time staff who work in the galleries who might give someone a little hint, but we are hoping also that visitors will look around them and see what other people are doing. So in our magic library, we have a lot of things that are unexpected and that are surprises. So I’m giving it away. But we have a poetry nook that’s camouflaged behind a door. And you might not know that it’s there unless I show you or you see somebody coming out of a wall. You know, our book collection comes to life using projection technology. And so we have now about 79 books that come to life. We’re going to have 100 by the end of next year.
0:24:56.0 Ann Friedman: And you take a book off the shelf and you place it in a special holder and let it flop open. And all of a sudden it triggers a sort of like a mini trailer, a bespoke custom-made trailer about that book that’s designed to make you want to read it. It’s sort of like a first grade book report, you know, like, and if you want to know what happens, you’ll have to read the book [chuckle] So that is a surprise. Each one of those 79 books is treated differently artistically, sound-wise, so you just want to keep looking at book after book because they’re so beautiful and you don’t know what the treatment will be. And then we have dioramas that are hidden behind gold frames set into the bookshelves in the library, unless you read the plaque that’s on the frame and your voice triggers the diorama behind this frame to light up and complete the phrase that you’ve been reading, which is a phrase from the book itself. And then we have drawers that pull out and light up with the actual book inside with a little explanation of why we chose that book to become a diorama. And so we have nine dioramas all done by different artists and very different styles. And who knew?
0:26:48.1 Norah Jones: The imagination, the care with which the folks that are imaginative that you have continued to tap on, including yourself and board members and the community and everything else, that’s very, very exciting. And that leads me to say you have come from that, congratulations by the way, finding your calling in the teaching field, and you’ve come from knowing the importance of exposure in education to, and the importance of literacy, the role of literacy in society that you speak of so eloquently in the blogs that you write on the website, in the web information itself. So we have… You’ve said several times now the fact that young people not recognizing that reading is made out of words and words are the exciting part. And so reading can be an exciting part and you’re connecting the dots. When you have this kind of excitement in the museum and then you take a look at how it is that educators would love to, and are working at, making reading or helping students to discover better that reading is exciting and fundamental to their understanding as humans. What kind of ways do you encourage educators that do not have a magic wall or a poetry nook, the secret poetry nook? And by the way, thanks for revealing that. And we’ll make sure that people come and pretend that they’ve never heard it from here.
0:28:21.6 Ann Friedman: You know, we don’t teach reading at Planet Word, but we do want to disseminate best practices. So we do have a journalist in residence, Emily Hanford, who is very well known in education because of her podcast called: Sold a Story, which really revealed how the curricula that most schools were using to teach beginning reading was failing, that such a high percentage of American children, even from families with every advantage, were not learning to read. And her exposé has led to a sort of a revolution with school systems adopting now the science of reading as an approach. It’s not a method, it’s not a curriculum itself, but it’s an approach that’s phonics-based. And so we’ve, Emily, through her series that we call “Eyes on Reading” at Planet Word, has brought some of the world’s leading experts on reading instruction and how the brain works and the neuroscience and neurobiology of reading to speak at the museum. And we have usually close to sold out crowds of educators most often, or parents of dyslexic kids who are just at wit’s end about what to do, where to turn.
0:30:19.5 Ann Friedman: We also have a partnership with the Reading League of DC that does similar programs with expert educators and researchers on the science of reading. We also have field trips and those are very interactive. They’re tied to our gallery subjects, but they’re taught by museum educators. And they’re very interactive lessons, not paper and pencil, especially. So we do that. And we have lesson plans free available on our website for teachers.
0:31:08.7 Norah Jones: When you take a look at nationally, I mean, this is a physical museum based in Washington, DC You also have this outreach through the website with all of its richness. What kinds of reactions are you receiving from educators, parents, community members nationally that say you’ve hit a nerve here and you are providing a vision?
0:31:36.4 Ann Friedman: We’ve had teachers cry at the museum, which makes me want to cry. Because there was never a place for English language arts teachers to take their students for field trips. You know, there’s science museums and history museums and art museums, but never before was there a museum dedicated to words and language. So that’s very rewarding to me. But also another thing that I really didn’t mention is that the content throughout the museum, poetry, books, jokes, songs, has all been chosen specifically to reach everyone. Not each work, not each book, not each poem, but we have a range. So that there’s something that you’ll react to when you come to Planet Word. So that was very, you know, we thought about that a lot. There’s nothing random about the books and the content that we have. But also we just… I get requests all the time from people in other parts of the country, “Can’t you start a Planet Word here?” Or… [chuckle] I wish I could. And maybe someday we’ll have something like a traveling exhibit or something. But it’s a lot harder than that. And I think a lot of our success has been the fact that we are in the the Franklin School.
0:33:37.7 Ann Friedman: In this old school that has a beauty of its own inside, ornate cast iron trim and marble landings and people often comment on the juxtaposition between the ultra modern gallery experiences and this old school building, and they love that. And so, I sort of like having Planet Word be a destination. And it’s important too, like here we are, in the nation’s capital, and there was no museum that spotlighted language. We live in a country with a written constitution, if we can keep it [chuckle] We live in a country that history is based on words. The city is full of monuments and memorials with words etched into them. And so Planet Word needed to be here, I think. Language use in our country, it has made Planet Word more relevant since its opening day, since before its opening day, when we started to see some challenges to normal English usage. The idea that there were alternative facts. The idea that people would debate the definition of a hero, or of a riot. There are so many ideas and topics coming up in the news day after day. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t find an article that I need to cut out for thinking about a future program or a blog post or whatever. So I feel like Planet Word has more of a mission than it ever did to protect the integrity of our language and to be on guard for Orwellian tendencies [laughter]
0:36:15.2 Norah Jones: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And one specific blog, for the moment anyway, that I would love to ask you a little bit more about. Back in November of 2024, you have a blog that you wrote titled: What Tackling Complexity Requires. And one of the concepts that was in there was the idea of lateral reading and the idea of going wide and checking on one’s understanding of what words and information can mean. Can you, especially as a person who has a reading specialty and has brought all of this opportunity to young people, can you talk to us a little bit more about how we tackle complexity through such things as, say, lateral reading?
0:37:13.5 Ann Friedman: First, you have to start out with the material that speaks to the reader. They have to care about what they’re reading and be interested in that first. And then, you know, then you might have the energy to try to figure out what the author meant and to really take the time to understand the reference to that kind of deep reading that’s necessary. Because when I first started talking about the importance of literacy, people would argue back to me like, “Well, Hitler was literate. He knew how to read.” So I had to really think about what do I mean by literacy, and it’s much a wider concept that incorporates empathy, and the more you read… More you’re going to read about people who maybe aren’t like you or don’t talk like you or don’t see the world like you do. And so my idea of literacy is much broader than just being able to read the words on a page.
0:38:31.9 Norah Jones: That’s very, very important. Thank you. One of the things I would love to ask you, Ann, is as you think about my audience here and you’re like, “I’d like to reiterate something that I’ve spoken about,” or, “There’s something that Norah didn’t ask me about that I would want to make sure that any conversation that she’s having with me, everybody would have heard,” what would you like as we close our podcast today to make sure that you have shared with my audience and with the world?
0:39:08.1 Ann Friedman: Well, I just, I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I’m not an academic linguist. I have no training in that. This museum is really for the general public and it’s to kind of intrigue people, raise their curiosity, get them excited. We’re not going to solve the problem. We’re not going to teach Americans to read, but we’re creating this positive disposition about words and language. So if you have fun here, maybe you’ll go away and read a book that you saw at Planet Word or different volumes in a series of books that are by the same author you saw at Planet Word. Or maybe you’re a teacher and you attended one of our programs and you go back to your class and you try some of the techniques that you heard about from real experts. So I just always want to explain that we don’t consider ourselves experts. We don’t have curators even like a normal museum would have. We are just a convening place. We’re bringing experts together and we have a large advisory board in every field that uses words that we can turn to for their expertise and for their opinions on things. And so that, I think, is one thing I just I feel it’s sort of that imposter syndrome. I’m not saying that I’m a linguist and… Woe is me if anyone comes away with that wrong idea.
0:41:16.3 Norah Jones: Well, I think from the very beginning, the delight in words and the joy of inviting everyone in to delight in words has definitely been the whole ambiance here today. I do confess, I’m going to break my promise that that was the last thing. I have one more question. What’s your happy place when you go into Planet Word? What’s Ann Friedman’s favorite spot?
0:41:43.3 Ann Friedman: Oh, gosh. Well, our library is beautiful. And so you’ll see when you come to visit, it’s a beautiful space that was created to display these books and really makes books come alive. But to tell you the truth, what I enjoy is our songwriting gallery and our human writing gallery because there I see people coming together and having so much fun and laughing and singing and that makes me happy and… You remember how you opened this conversation by talking about our opening during the pandemic in 2020? And it was just so rewarding to start a place that was bringing joy to people in a very bleak time. And so that continues to bring me a lot of happiness is seeing the visitors just having fun together intergenerationally, especially grandparents and grandchildren and young people on dates that they choose to come here for date night. I love it. It makes me so happy.
0:43:24.8 Norah Jones: That’s so cool. That’s so cool. Bringing people together over words. That’s phenomenal. What a wonderful experience. I know you’re very pleased with everything that you’ve been able to accomplish with so so many talents in the background and such nice drive. So that’s great. Phenomenal. Do you feel like you’ve had a chance to say what you wanted to say today and explain what you wanted to explain?
0:43:51.4 Ann Friedman: I really do feel like you asked the most important questions and I don’t think anything’s been left out, but I do want to leave something for people when they come to Planet Word so they’re excited and surprised and they have the experience of the unexpected.
0:44:10.6 Norah Jones: There you go. That’s exactly it. The experience of the unexpected, which is what communication is all about anyway, along with pulling people together. Thank you. Thank you for your time today. And I’m looking forward to being there and at least enjoying and experiencing that. Well, again, thank you and best wishes to you in all of your work. Thank you for the very straightforward writing that you do on your blog. You’re inspiring me because the reason why I’m doing this podcast will be to do exactly what you’re doing, which is to try to make sure that people understand that we’re all in this together.
0:44:46.1 Ann Friedman: Words matter.
0:44:47.0 Norah Jones: They sure do. I sure enjoyed this conversation with Ann Friedman, and I hope that you did too. Check out Planet Word online at planetwordmuseum.org. That’s planetwordmuseum.org. You can find out what kind of events are going on, what resources there are, and do some virtual touring. Even better, when you get to Washington, DC, tour for real. It’s fun and meaningful, and that’s exactly what language and words are all about. So, thanks for joining me. Find out more on my website, fluency.consulting, and until next time.
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