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March 15, 2001
Return to Museum-School Connections in the Digital Age
Professional Development and Museums
One of the most robust collaborations between schools and museums is in the realm of professional development. With the upswing in constructivist, project-based instruction, schools have natural allies in museums, whose collections offer the perfect building blocks of cross-curricular learning. And often museums can take the lead in pushing new approaches to subjects, since they are not constrained by satisfying the broad constituency that makes up the average school district.
A case in point is the Exploratorium's Institute for Inquiry (www.exploratorium.edu/ifi/). Established to promote science education reform, the institute offers extensive professional development programs. Educators get a taste of inquiry-based learning through workshops conducted over a three-week period in San Francisco. They then take these practices home to their districts to train others. The Web site also includes resources related to inquiry-based teaching, and a "graduates only" area to support a community of practice where participants past and present can share ideas and ask questions. The Exploratorium offers additional professional growth opportunities through its Teacher Institute.
MoMA's videoconferencing professional development programs are being extended beyond the museum's walls, primarily to schools within the state of New York. Workshops can be customized to the school or district, but the core offering involves training in inquiry-based techniques to take advantage of connections between curriculum and the museum's holdings. With a collection that includes more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models, and design objects; 14,000 films; and more than 200,000 books, there is ample opportunity to use art to explore a number of topics.
"You would think that it's mostly art teachers or people looking to do cultural enrichment who participate in our training," says Victoria Lichtendorf of MoMA. "But in fact we have both elementary and secondary teachers, and their areas of specialty span the disciplines." In recent months, the museum has worked with foreign language teachers, math classes, and teachers working with incarcerated students.
The standard course takes place in two parts, each lasting about two and a half hours. "The first session is always the same," explains Lichtendorf. "We get educators oriented to the skills they'll need in order to practice longer looking with their students. We model how to promote conversation and how to support observations based on the object." The second session addresses how to use the collection to make connections within the curriculum.
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