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How do we train professionals for 21st century museums
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Norris, Linda |
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Abstract | What is a museum worker? There has never been a clear consensus on the best way to train museum professionals nor even a clear definition of what a museum worker is or how we define the term, here in Ukraine or elsewhere. Some believe a subject specialty – archaeology, biology, art history – is more important than a museum studies degree. And for most Ukrainian museum workers, that has been the path to their jobs. Others, both inside and outside of museums, insist that on-the-job training is the only instruction that matters. Still others think that non-profit management – budgeting, strategic planning, donor cultivation for instance, – is as crucial as nuts-and-bolts museum skills. In recent years, museum professional development has begun to emerge in Ukraine. The MATRA project from the Netherlands, almost a decade ago, trained educators and directors, and in the education realm, at least, continues to pay results. Programs supported by the United States and Europe provide additional opportunities for professional learning. But the question still remains – here and elsewhere – what is needed to work in a museum? In my book, Creativity with Museum Practice, (Left Coast Press, 2013) co-authored with Rainey Tisdale, we make a passionate case for the value of creative practice in the museum field and identified a number of ways that museum studies programs could enhance their students’ creative practice. Teaching students to think creatively – defined for us as problemsoolving–will enable them to tackle a host of challenges when working in museums and help them adapt to a continuously changing cultural landscape in Ukraine. From our book, here are just a few ways in which Museum studies programs could expand their creative focus into the existing curriculum: • Adopt a more imaginative approach to course design and assignments to model creativity to students (museum studies professors: you should have a creative practice of your own). This requires moving beyond the traditional classroom techniques of Ukrainian universities. • Encourage open-ended, divergent thinking, not one right answer including the development of a learning environment where students actively participate in developing a class’s creative culture. • Set an expectation that students will debrief, evaluate, and reflect on their own work as well as other students’ work. Make that debrief and evaluation a part of an iterative process of work and study. • Ensure that students leave with a toolkit of creative practices that they can put to use in any museum setting. Over the past year, my thinking about museum studies programs has continued to deepen, raising as many questions as answers. In spring, 2015 I taught an online course, Museums and Community Engagement for Johns Hopkins Museum Studies Program; last fall I participated in a standing-room-only session at the New England Museum Associations conference about the value of museum studies programs, and for the past month, I’ve been working here at L’viv Polytechnical University considering what a museum studies program in Ukraine needs to train new museum professionals who can look forward to work in museums of the 21 century – not just in Ukraine, but in Europe and around the world. But we must first consider – what will those jobs look like? In 2013, Elizabeth Merritt of the Center for the Future of Museums of the American Alliance of Museums, wrote about museum jobs that didn’t exist ten years before: Director of Web and New Media; Director of Community Engagement; Director of Audience and Civic Engagement; Chief Curiosity Officer, Manager of Digital Strategies, Director of Citizen Science. (“Museum Jobs that Didn’t Exist in 2003,” Center for the Future of Museums Blog, accessed May 31, 2015 http://futureofmuseums. blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/museum-jobs-that-didnt-exist-in2003.html) Those director-level jobs all have staff with similar job titles reporting to them. Today in Ukraine there are also now jobs that are not new to the United States, but new to Ukraine: Director of External Affairs, |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://ena.lp.edu.ua:8080/bitstream/ntb/32800/1/02-1-2.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
