This paper reports on "Young Gallery Guides", a pilot program of child-led guided tours undertaken by the HOTA (Home of the Arts) Gallery on the Gold Coast, Australia. The program, which ran from July to November 2024, included nine children aged between 7 and 12. It culminated in offering some scheduled activities to the general public,…

Museums operate and communicate ethically, professionally, and with the participation of their constituents, offering varied experiences for edutaintment and knowledge sharing. Today's museums ensure relevance in national and universal development by considering, first and foremost, educational functions. Museums work in harmony with people in…

As with many Volunteer Programs, volunteerism at Filoli began in support of a fledgling organization in 1975. Initially a separate nonprofit, Friends of Filoli was created with the purpose of fundraising and other support, but was dissolved in 1989 as it was not self-sufficient. The leadership structure, however, remained and later merged with the…

For the past seven years, we -- a museum educator and an academic radiologist -- have co-taught Seeing in Art and Medical Imaging, a first-of-its-kind medical humanities curriculum for residents in nuclear medicine and radiology based at the Harvard Art Museums. The program aims to foster residents' close looking and clinical skills,…

Museum-based settings such as zoos provide a unique opportunity to engage educators in professional development opportunities. For instance, zoo settings can provide professional development opportunities focused on facilitating learning through a lens of conservation action to promote sustained action by teachers and their students. In this…

Building anti-ableist museum education practices into our toolboxes of educational skills is an important way to ensure that museum educators are dismantling the ableism at work in museum interpretation. This paper offers practical strategies for building anti-ableist museum education practices, which we model using one artwork, Enrique Martínez…

Australian Holocaust museums are at a crossroads regarding their exhibitions and educational programming. Originally survivor driven initiatives, they now face the dual challenge of negotiating the loss of the survivor generation and interpreting the goals of Holocaust education in light of their absence. To do so, they must confront the question…

Museum educators are well versed in employing multiple techniques for engaging museum visitors. Many use these skills and approaches to support marginalized and vulnerable populations, such as families with an incarcerated adult, families with food insecurity, or unhoused families. Determining how to carry out these beneficial intentions, however,…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, informal learning environments (ILEs) were forced to move programming online for the safety of staff and visitors. The Big Astronomy Project responded to the pandemic by releasing a planetarium show as a virtual YouTube 360 stream. This project was also utilized in the late stages of the pandemic in-person at…

The 9/11 Memorial Museum's docent program offers visitors artifact-based entry-points into a difficult, emotional history. The program's launch raised a host of questions, many centered on how to balance and convey strongly held, often traumatic, and sometimes conflicting experiences with a newly constructed institutional narrative. This article…

This paper explores the development of Civic Wellness programs at the Art Institute of Chicago, with an emphasis on how Civic Wellness teaching, partnerships, and strategy are informed by social justice-oriented values. These include equity practice, antiracism, strength in community, and democratic justice-oriented andragogy. The paper lays out…

Interventions by creative practitioners play an increasingly important part within museum education. This produces a series of questions and tensions around the relationship between creativity and authenticity in terms of the role and limits of evidence, where room for creativity lies, and what it looks like. We explore these questions in the…

The "Curator's Curiosities" program was launched at Fort Henry National Historic Site in the summer of 2017 as an object-based interpretive program. In addition to learning the history of an artifact from the collection, participants were taught how to properly handle and catalogue the artifact, under the supervision of trained museum…

This article analyzes an educational initiative between Kew Gardens, Royal Holloway, University of London, and two London primary schools. The schools, located in areas of high ethnic diversity, worked with the members of the Mobile Museum project team -- including the Learning Department at Kew and researchers at both institutions -- to create…

The literary museum tradition in Norway is dominated by a historical-biographical and site-specific approach to museum education. The Centre for Norwegian Language and Litterature, with its three museum departements, has choosen a different approach. By narrowing literature to patterns, ideas, and emotions and addressing current cultural…