Museum Educators’ Unrealized Potential

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…

The Changing Role of Museum Educators: A Conversation

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…

Museum Educators-What’s Next? Part I

The Summer 2012 issue of the Journal of Museum Education contains a variety of interesting articles that assess recent practice in museum education and explore potential directions for the field.  This in a context that  is both worrying and exciting: an uncertain economy; a shifting cultural landscape; debates about museum authority; the explosion of digital…