Education & Interpretation

How Can We Make Volunteer Programs More Inclusive and Accessible?

By American Alliance of Museums

Last year, AAM released a popular toolkit on structuring, developing, and supporting volunteer programs—whether starting from scratch or reimagining an existing program. Since the release of Designing a Museum Volunteer Program, many …
Curiosity: A Primer

By Susie Wilkening

In the museum field, we sometimes talk about how we are in the “curiosity business.” Yet even still, it often feels that our field perceives nurturing curiosity as “nice” work, rather than “necessary” …
Don’t Be Surprised, Be an Ally: Better Security Planning for Virtual Programs

By Kenneth Cohen

It was my ninth virtual program of the COVID era that prompted this essay. The first eight had gone relatively well. After some low numbers and awkward silences early on, later events exceeded attendance and engagement expectations. The …
Earning Income from Education Programs during COVID-19

By Daryl Jorgenson and Kate Jackson

In this series of posts, EdCom’s Trends Committee is taking a deeper look at emerging phenomena identified in the 2020 edition of TrendsWatch from the Center for the Future of Museums. In this post, they turn their attention to the …
Building True, Lasting Collaborations with Source Communities

By Meredith Schweitzer

It’s well-documented by this point: museums are changing. No longer solely repositories of information and keepers of culturally important artifacts, museums today are taking on new roles and shaping revised definitions of …
Children’s Museology and the COVID-19 Crisis

By Monica Eileen Patterson

While physical museums are facing an uncertain future, virtual museum visitorship is booming. The Louvre’s web traffic has increased tenfold to four hundred thousand visits a day, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art reports an …
Never Waste the Walls: What PK-12 Schools Can Learn from Museum Design

By Mike Corb, AIA and Troy Hoggard, AIA, EDAC

Generally speaking, children are much more enthusiastic about heading to a children’s museum than school, even though learning occurs in both places. Visit a children’s museum any day of the year and you can literally see their excitement …
“My Primary School is at the Museum…During the Pandemic”

By Elizabeth Merritt

One challenge facing communities around the globe is providing safe spaces where children can continue their education as normally as possible during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the UK, Labour party leader Keir Starmer recently called for …
Pandemic-Friendly Ideas for Welcoming Immigrants and Refugees to Your Community

By Joseph O'Neill

Welcoming Week is an annual event from Welcoming America that seeks to unite recent immigrants and refugees with longer residents in communities. Along with other organizations of all stripes, museums have been involved for years, hosting …
Outside > Inside: Outdoor Exhibitions in the Era of COVID and Black Lives Matter

By Michael Epstein

A doctor friend recently shared a social media post listing a five-point coronavirus plan: Masks Close bars Socially distance Test & isolate Outside > inside Like her, it was matter-of-fact, succinct, and assured. But the “Outside …