The museum blogosphere in the past few weeks has been filled with postings related to the work of museum educators and the role of museums as educational institutions. Rebecca Herz has posted a number of articles and interviews with teachers and museum educators on her blog Museum Questions. Rebecca is examining from many angles the…
For some months now museum educator, consultant, and blogger Rebecca Herz and I have been exchanging thoughts on the roles and future of museum educators, mostly by email. But we’ve also been talking about making our conversations more public. Rebecca’s recent thoughtful post, What Does a Museum Educator Do? (And Do We Need Them?) offers, I…
I’ve written a guest post on museums and the unaccompanied children at the border for AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums. Below is the introduction. The theme of the Alliance 2015 conference is Museums and Social Value. Leading up to that meeting in Atlanta, CFM will be hosting a number of guest bloggers addressing various aspects of…
A small but enthusiastic group met on May 20 in “The Unconference Room” at the American Alliance of Museum’s 2014 meeting in Seattle to continue discussions on The Empathetic Museum that began at AAM’s meeting in Baltimore in 2013: Janeen Bryant VP for Education at the Levine Museum of the New South; Karen Hasselflet, Cultural…
In the wake of the terrible bombings at the Boston Marathon last year on April 15, and as part of my series of posts on the Empathetic Museum, I wrote with admiration about the ways in which Boston museums had rallied for their community. A week or so later I posted again , this time focusing on the…
As a follow-up to #Museum Blogger day on Twitter (March 19), co-organizers Jamie Glavic and Jenni Fuchs have created a kind of bloggers round robin to keep up the momentum. Various bloggers answer 11 questions about themselves and their blogs and then tap others to do the same. Uncatalogued Museum author Linda Norris has asked me…
Dear readers, I’m beginning the New Year on a new site, and I hope you have all made the transition successfully. I thank you for your thoughts and observations about the blog throughout the year–in conversations, in the comments section, in emails and on Twitter and other social media. I truly appreciate your interest and your…
Last week I used my 10 euro week-long pass to visit the museums involved in the city of Nice’s celebration of the artist Henri Matisse. “Nice 2013: A Summer for Matisse” features eight exhibitions in as many museums, each focusing on some aspect of the painter’s enormous oeuvre. My husband and I made it to…
Following up on June 7 and June 29 posts on empathy in museums, six museum colleagues from a variety of areas in the field are proposing a session called “The Empathetic Museum” for the May 2014 American Alliance of Museums Conference in Seattle, WA. I’m one of the panelists, so this is a shameless plea for…
In my first two posts regarding what’s next for museum educators (September 17 and October 1) I promised to take a look at some of the skills educators should be cultivating so that they can contribute more effectively to the museum’s role as an informal space for learning and engagement. It happens that I’ve been talking with Allison Wickens, an energetic…