Week 1 Intro to the Museum
Week 2 Gallery/Topic Exploration: Reading ART
Week 3 Gallery/ Topic Exploration: looking through a Social Studies lens
Week 4 Gallery/ Topic Exploration: looking through a S.T.E.M. lens
Week 5 Gallery/ Topic Exploration: Experiencing with Performing Arts
Week 6 Review and culmination exercises
MONDAY: September 14, 2020
For most of us museums are for visiting on vacation. Taking a trip to the museum is what you do when your grandparents are in town, or when you take that big family trip to Europe. Maybe your idea of a museum has something to do with where Indiana Jones or Lara Croft drop off their priceless artifacts, or places where cat-burglars and high-stakes criminals fly down in their repelling gear to collect jewels for evil villains to use as decorations in their underground lairs! So, what are museums actually for?
To get all that museums have to offer, it’s important to understand where museums come from, why we historically have had them, how we can use them now, and what they can be in the future. As we determined in our class this week, Museums are spaces that tell stories of people, places and things using objects and images. Sometimes those stories are about the artists or the artifacts and sometimes the stories are about the visitors themselves.
As my 4th grade student shared this week with me, “I LOVE that the guy from the Greatest Showman, started his circus as a museum! And, I didn’t know that the first museum was made by a princess! That’s awesome!”
(HERE’s a link to the TedEd video we watched)
Why are we starting this program with the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
- Because it’s the Met! duh! (Okay, I guess there are actually some good reasons):
- The Metropolitan Museum has an incredible, masterfully built platform in it’s #metkids page that provides accessible entry points for children and families into their enormous, encyclopedic collection.
- Exposure to museums like the Met build a greater appreciation for our local and regional museums. I know, it may seem the opposite, but that spark that starts with exposure is a reciprocal spirit that just keeps going. When you know how to dig deeply and appreciate the collections of great museums, you can dig deeper and better appreciate those collections nearer to you.
This crazy, Fall of 2020, we will be exploring a brave new world of museum education. Virtual everything can be overwhelming.
After a few days perusing through the internet, I learned that many virtual museum “tours” offered to teachers and educators focus on the traditional art-history entry points or just lists of links to online collection pages. This course is different. It’s actually not only about the art. It’s about HOW you interact with the art, artifacts, space and content of whatever museum you visit be it in person or online. What connecting threads of interest can we follow through the museum? Mondays @ the Museum’s goal is to build life long, transferable skills of close observation, critical thinking, insightful questioning, and just enough knowledge to make you always want to know more.
Thank you for taking this journey with me! I can’t wait to share what we learn in our next class.
The arts, it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world.
Maxine Green
#zerotohero #artseducation #museumeducation #museums #virtuallearning #mondaysatthemuseum
