An Underused Resource on What We Know about Museum Learning

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…

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 II The Need for Internal Transformation

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…

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…