Education & Interpretation

Delivering Difficult, Human Stories of Incarceration

By American Alliance of Museums

This is a recorded session from the 2025 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. The Old Idaho Penitentiary (OIP), a prison that operated from 1872–1973, holds difficult stories and controversial subjects. Navigating these topics requires …
Three Core Values That Will Boost Your Museum Writing

By Trey Whitted

Writing well is essential for communicating information in any field, especially in educational institutions like museums. However, with the wide range of roles museum professionals fill, it can be difficult to define what writing well …
Discovering Community Through Augmented Reality

By Lisa Falk

The Arizona State Museum (ASM) recently led an exciting project that transcends traditional boundaries—curatorial, geographical, and technological. Discovering Community in the Borderlands (DCB) is an innovative endeavor that invites …
Art Crawl: Designing a Museum Program for Infants

By Paris Baker, Nicole Cromartie, Sara Klein, and Emily Stuart Thomas

Some readers of this blog may remember “Wait, What? Toddlers in an Art Museum?,” a post from January 2023 about the Clyfford Still Museum’s (CSM) journey to become more inclusive for families. That post discussed Clyfford Still, Art, and …
Creating Inclusive Tours: Five Strategies for Engaging English Learning Visitors in Museums

By Yuna Dranichnikova

If working at a big art museum taught me one thing, it is how unexpectedly diverse visitor groups can be, both culturally and linguistically. As a museum educator with a thick accent myself, I prefer to get ahead of the questions and ask …
What Can Museums Learn from the Connected Learning Framework?

By Joseph O'Neill

How would you try to convince a naysayer of the value of arts education? Maybe you would plead for the value of these subjects in their own right, citing the mind-expanding powers of self-expression, technical exploration, and human …
Reframing the Collection: How a Literary Catalog Experiment Brought New Voices to Interpretation

By Derek (DK) Nnuro

The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art (Stanley) is part of the arts ecosystem at the country’s premier university for the study of creative writing. As a curatorial team, we have long been aware of the unique position this puts us …
Guiding Light: How Values Exercises Can Help You Present Challenging Content

By Ashley Witherspoon

When a visitor enters a museum, they arrive with more than just their belongings. They bring their entire cognitive framework to interpret and store knowledge, including their complex understanding of how significant events throughout …
How Book Bans Might Impact Museums: A Q&A with PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman

By Adam Rozan

This series of Q&As by the author are conducted as independent work and not part of his professional activities. If you follow the news, you’ve likely seen a surge in headlines about censorship and book-banning, with libraries and …
Point of View: The Museum and the Mind

By Susan Magsamen

The field of neuroarts is documenting how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the body, brain, and behavior. This article originally appeared in Museum magazine’s May/June 2024 issue, a benefit of AAM membership. The mind, …