Posts
Education & Interpretation
How Can We Make Volunteer Programs More Inclusive and Accessible?
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 …
Curiosity: A Primer
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 …
Don’t Be Surprised, Be an Ally: Better Security Planning for Virtual Programs
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 …
Earning Income from Education Programs during COVID-19
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 …
Building True, Lasting Collaborations with Source Communities
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 …
Children’s Museology and the COVID-19 Crisis
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 …
Never Waste the Walls: What PK-12 Schools Can Learn from Museum Design
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 …
“My Primary School is at the Museum…During the Pandemic”
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, …
Pandemic-Friendly Ideas for Welcoming Immigrants and Refugees to Your Community
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 …
Outside > Inside: Outdoor Exhibitions in the Era of COVID and Black Lives Matter
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 …
Museums Have a Docent Problem: Inside the struggle to train a mostly white, unpaid tour guide corps to talk about race.
The volunteer interpretive corps at museums skews largely white, older, and female. How can museums better train these volunteers to talk about race? Should museums rely on volunteers as …
Open-Air Exhibit Features Hopeful Stories for Trying Times
The New-York Historical Society has opened “Hope Wanted: New York City Under Quarantine” in its courtyard, where an open-air story booth invites visitors to contribute their own …