Museum Questions Blogger Rebecca Herz and I agreed awhile back to have an open and continuing blog conversation about education and learning in museums. Rebecca has upheld her end of the agreement much better than I. Over the past several months she has posted an interesting question almost every week–on the value of field trips, 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…
In a series of posts over the past year on next steps for museum educators, I’ve expressed disappointment at the over-identification of museum learning resources and experiences with the methods of formal education – too many lesson plans, tests and reading assignments–all of which are fine in themselves but not our forte. One promising trend in …
My first post on this topic promised to examine some of the reasons for museum education’s over-identification with formal education. A number of folks have offered thoughtful comments, both on this blog site and on various museum educator groups on LinkedIn. I took away three sets of ideas from these comments. · Some writers feel…
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…
The museum social media networks have been buzzing lately with discussions about the nature and role of museums in the 21st century. Inspired by tweets and posts by Nina Simon and Robert Stein among others, museum folks on social media have been contributing to substantive conversations about the key questions museums should be asking and the…