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School’s in Session…in the Museum: A Four-Day Immersion in Museum-Based Learning

By Leslie Hayes

The New York Historical offers New York City sixth graders four full days of museum-based learning. If you visit my place of work between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on a weekday, you are likely to hear some remarkable sounds: restrained …
Achieving the Unforgettable: Engaging the Senses with Whole-Body Learning

By Tedi Asher, Matthew McNerney, and Sarah Cole

“Hey!! They just made the ruler larger!” It had been more than a month since my (Matthew McNerney’s) 5-year-old son visited the Field Museum’s iconic “Underground Adventure,” a worm’s-eye journey into the soil where children meet the …
Meeting the Moment: Creative Aging Programs for Older Adults

By Marjorie Schwarzer

“It’s promising and comforting to know that the very things in our lives that we find so pleasurable, like the arts, also have short- and long-term benefits for health.” —Daisy Fancourt, author of Art Cure: The Science of How …
Entering the Vault: Making Collections Storage Visible

By Nancy Bateman

The National Building Museum has given visitors access to a trove of previously uncatalogued artifacts through its “Visible Vault.” The National Building Museum, located in Washington, DC, in the historic Pension Building, …
Learning from the Next Generation: Transforming Museums with Youth-Driven Storytelling

By Paul Best and Rorujorona Ferrell

Youth-driven storytelling, like that at Penn Museum, can transform museums into spaces where identity, belonging, and community voice are actively shaped. “Did you know Mali dropped French as their official language?” Samantha …
From the President: It’s About Time

By Marilyn Jackson

On the eve of the American Revolution in 1773, the Charleston Library Society founded what is widely recognized as America’s first museum. Originally focused on regional flora and fauna, the Charleston Museum has since evolved into a …
Make No Little Plans and Other Bad Advice

By Nick Nelson

The Springfield Art Museum is in the middle of a major renovation. It’s been complicated. One of the best pieces of advice I received early in the Springfield Art Museum’s construction project was to get my own hard hat. Bring it on …
Small Space, Big Impact

By Katie Lee-Koven

The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art has invested in high impact design of its space to enable 21st-century learning. The museum experience of 40 years ago is easy to imagine—a friendly front desk, a map of current exhibitions, and …
Right-Sized Futures

By Casey Gallagher

An architect offers advice for museums of all sizes on master planning. As an architect and planner who has spent many years working with museums of all types and sizes, I’ve heard it all when it comes to master planning. “We’ve done …
Surviving Your Museum Renovation

By Cameron L. Saffell

The Museum at Texas Tech underwent a major renovation and an addition and lived to tell the tale. Construction and renovation are not things most museum professionals normally deal with. Odds are most of us will not be constructing a new …