Markers, Construction Paper and Glitter Glue
Welcome to the new podcast made specifically for museum educators! Listen or watch at the links below.
In this episode, I explain why I'm so passionate about museum education, my personal definition of museum education, and why I think programming for children should be every museum's top priority.
Scroll down for a full transcript.
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Episode 1 Transcript
Hi, I am Rachel, a resource expert and career coach for museum educators who are stretched thin, but long to fall in love with their world-changing work. After over 15 years with my own hands in the glitter, I know how it feels when your Board thinks your work is childish because you work with children.
I know how hard it is to lead a tour on a difficult subject, and I know the frustration of waiting on a school bus that is 20 minutes late or worse, 10 minutes early as I'm heading towards the second half of my career. I find myself with a passion to help my fellow educators reverse the chronic state of being overworked and underappreciated so that they can reclaim their creativity and emotional energy.
Join me and my museum buddies as we share our best tips, tricks, and techniques for modern museum education.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to this debut episode of the Modern Museum Education podcast. I am so incredibly excited to be bringing this resource to you. And I hope that this will become a long and engaging journey together. If we haven't met yet, my name is Rachel, and I am so incredibly passionate about museum education. I deeply believe that museums can change the world. And I know for a fact that education is the conduit to that change.
But I also know from experience that museum education often gets the short end of the stick when it comes to things like funding and staffing and resources and space in our institutions. So I created modern museum education as a space to support museum educators by curating practical real-world tips and techniques and the latest research on pedagogy and best practices, and putting all of those resources together in an, in an accessible way. So that museum education can be easier, simpler, less stressful.
So I think the best place to actually get started is to define what I mean, when I say museum education and sort of lay out who is this podcast for?
I've been a paid museum educator for over 16 years. And if you count my unpaid volunteer and internship work, then I've been doing museum education for over 20 years now. And over the last couple of decades, I've seen some big shifts in how we think about museum education. When I was first entering the field, for example, we talked a lot about experiential learning. That was like the only thing we ever talked about. Experiential learning, experiential learning.
And while that's super important, of course, I'm really happy to see that as a profession, we now take experiences as a given and we have kind of shifted our energy. We've moved beyond that, just talking about experiences, to asking questions about the quality of those experiences. Are they diverse, are they authentic, you know, who has the authority in this situation? We're talking about questions of empathy and belonging.
And I'm really happy to see that sort of progression.
So when I think back on myself, you know, 15 years ago, I think what would I have wanted? What or what, what could have made my journey in museum education easier?
And it was this right here. Something like a podcast that would have given me quick tidbits of actionable information, something that I could have taken and immediately applied to my work to make what I was doing easier.
So that's what I'm setting out to do here. And I thought to start this very first episode, I would share with you my kind of hot takes on what I think museum education is, and why it's important.
Okay. So I recognize that museum education can include adult programming. But when I say education in museums, I'm normally thinking about student audiences. And I think that that is true for most museums and most museum educators. Our primary focus often is on children's programming. That's not to say that we won't include information in this podcast about adult education.
Um, I actually know some people who do adult education programming really well, and I'd like to bring them on as guests and talk about adult education. But primarily my background is in mostly working with children in the museum. And what I have found is that working with children in a museum is not only the most rewarding, but also probably the most misunderstood
museum work out there. So. I always, I always kind of cringe a little bit when people ask me what it is that I do. Because when you say, oh, I'm a museum educator, they just look at you like, like you have two heads, like "what, what is a museum educator?" That, the concept of that, um, for some reason it alludes people. And I actually, in my next episode, I'm going to talk more about sort of the history of the profession of museum education, because I think it is utterly fascinating.
So when people ask me, you know, what is it that you do? I kind of cringe a little bit because answering "museum education" just leads to more questions. People just can't quite seem to wrap their brains around what a museum educator is. Even people, I find, in the museum field can't quite seem to wrap their brains around what exactly museum educators do.
So I have taken to answering that question with a question. And this is what I say. When people say, "what is that you do?" And I say, "well, I'm a museum educator". And they say, "well, what is that?" I say, "oh, well, have you ever seen The Lego Movie?" Which sounds like an odd answer to the question, but go with me here.
Um, when The Lego Movie came out, my, I have two children, two boys, and they are now in upper elementary and middle school. But at the time that The Lego Movie came out, they were toddlers. Um, well my oldest was like in preschool, and he was just transitioning from Duplos, you know, the big, chunky Legos, into real Lego's. My littlest one was still very much in Duplo territory, but my oldest one, he was kind of moving into real Lego territory.
It also, it didn't hurt that his name is Emmett and the main character of the movie, his name is also Emmet. So anyways, when the movie came out, we were watching it as a family. We were watching it on TV at home. We were streaming it, of course. And so my husband and I are sitting on the couch and the boys are sitting on the floor, watching this, you know, we're watching this movie together. And if you, you know, so, if you didn't have children, when The Lego Movie came out, then, you know, maybe you, it might not have been in your Netflix queue. So I'll sort of recap it for you, basically the premise is that it all takes place in this, you sort of like make believe Lego world. And there's of course disaster is coming and the main character,
Emmet, he discovers that he has the power to change the world. And so he, you know, has this little ragtag group of heroes and it's towards the end of the movie, the drama is amping up and it's time for them to sort of make a plan to save the world. And the main character, Emmet, he says, "somebody get me some markers, some construction paper.
And some glitter glue!" And the second that I heard that, I like, slapped my husband on the shoulder, you know, like popped him. And I was like, that is my job. That is what I do every day. I save the world. With markers and construction paper and you know, on a good day, glitter glue.
The point is that the work that we do in museum education can seem frivolous, if you aren't looking at it from the right perspective. And the perspective is that children in museums matter, they matter so much.
Children who visit museums, grow up to be adults who visit museums, and adults who visit museums fund museums. So if you aren't inviting children into your museum space and making programming that feels inclusive and exciting for them, then you are just shooting yourself in the foot 20 years later, because those children are going to grow up and think "museums have nothing for me."
Creating programming specifically for children is not frivolous. It is the very future of museums. And I believe the future of our actual country and our culture depends on children having equitable access to quality narrative and seeing inclusive art and good science and well-crafted history. This is so incredibly important.
And bringing children into the museum is the hill that I will die on. Professionally speaking, it is the hill that I almost died on more than once at my old job. I will, I will just shout this from the rooftops until I'm blue in the face. If you are not welcoming children into your museum, you were doing it wrong.
Now. The point here is not that museum education is the only, you know, way to do museum work well. We have to, of course, work holistically with our entire institution. Curators are also doing world changing work, I guess, I don't know, with maybe their Past Perfect software and their little white gloves. I don't, I don't know because I'm not a curator, please don't ask me questions about curation or registration or preservation, because that is not my lane. That is not my zone of genius.
It does not ring my bell. I literally don't care. I'm glad someone else cares. And I'm glad someone else is taking care of the actual artifacts. And I'm glad someone else is doing a lot of the research. I don't mind research. I'm pretty good at it, but it's not my favorite thing. I would much rather talk about programming and that's become my zone of genius, if you will. That's become the thing that I do
and I know the best. But the point is I can't do that without the other departments. So I am no, in no way, disparaging the other museum work.
But I think that because museum education is often associated with children and things like toys and blocks and puppets and construction paper and markers and glitter and glitter glue, it is often seen as childish. And what I want to say is that museum education is not childish because we work with children. Museum education is highly professional. And I am on a mission to help museum educators do their work more professionally, with less stress. I want to give you the resources that you need to make a better case for your education programming so that you don't get the short end of the stick when it comes to divvying up resources. I want to help raise the bar not only in terms of the quality of music education, but also in terms of the respect that museum education gets in our museum community at large.
So I hope that you will join me on this journey. I hope that you'll tune back in for the next episode, where, like I said, I'm going to be talking more about the history of museum education. And maybe, kind of, unpacking that will help us understand a little bit better why we're in the boat that we're in and how we can then go forward and sort of continue to refine the um, image of museum education. So I hope that you will join me on this. I would absolutely love it if you would go to my website modern museum education.com. You can join my email list. I have all kinds of free resources for you that are available on the website and I am adding more all the time and I also have a whole lot of really big exciting things kind of planned that I'm working towards um, building a more intentional community of museum educators. So if you want to know all about that, make sure you'd get on my email list so that you can be the very first to know when all of those things happen.
Lastly I would greatly appreciate it if you would share this episode with your friends, like it, subscribe to it, leave a review, you know send me an email and let me know what you liked, what you'd like to hear more about um I really want that, I really want this podcast to become something that is reflective of our profession in general. I want it to be supportive and filled with information and something that that really makes a huge actionable difference in your everyday work life. So thank you so much for joining us and I'll see you back next time and in the meantime please remember that your work is not childish just because you work with children.