Discussion Questions for Getting Down to Business: Funding Museum Education for the Future

Johnson, et al. Chapter 11 “Financing Museum Education Programs”
1) What is "Internal Funding"
2) What should the Museum Educator do during the planning and budget process?
3) Please list and briefly describe the different aspects of "External Funding" (Grants, individual support, sponsorship and corporate funding, and donations and volunteers)

Falk and Sheppard Chapter 2 “Creating a New Business Model”
1. What are some components of the business model? Should a business model be static or dynamic? What do you think is the most important aspect of a business model?
2. What are the four questions a business should ask itself? How are all of these important to the success of a museum?
3. How has the business of running a museum changed? Do you think that this is for the better or worse of the museum? Explain.

Class Discussion Questions May 4th

Arianna Galluzzo
May 3rd, 2010
Three Questions for my presentation (5/4/10) on engaging the community to come into museums/keeping them engaged:

1.) Whether or not you read the chapters for today, we’ve talked a lot over the course of the semester about how to keep visitors and the community engaged. What do you think is the best way to bring people into the museum and keep them there? Share personal experiences if you can think of any museums that got you to stay for an extended period of time.

2.) When you go into a museum what kind of experience(s) do you usually feel/want and why?
Black mentioned 4 possible experiences:
Object experience—seeing the real thing that is rare and valuable
Cognitive experience—gaining understanding, enrichment and knowledge
Introspective experience—reflecting on the meaning, time, place of the object, reflecting memories or feeling connected to the object spiritually
Social experience—spending time with family and friends, watching family (and yourself) learn new things in the process of a museum visit

3.) In Black Chapter 10 one of the quotes said—“Museums have to change or die”—how do you feel about this statement? Do museums have an obligation to keep up with “the times”, technology, to evaluate themselves as an institution and the interest of people in the community? Is the pressure to be “hip and relevant” outweighing a connection with the community/museum goers? Any happy medium here?

Tenement Museum

Be sure to visit the Tenement Museum's website and check out the programs Sarah mentioned:

Education Information

Event Wrap Up

Feedback:

• Event was fun
• Program was on budget (need to verify actual costs)- If under budget, what could have been added?
• Had more people than expected (over 90 visitors)
• Program did have value

Areas for improvement:

• Short film or introduction
• Improve signage/graphics
• More activities (if had more people)
• PR needed improvement for community outreach (for future, get information to communications 2 weeks in advance)
• Engage admissions more (put word out about program during Junior Day)
• Program can benefit by offering during these type of events
• Deadlines for planning
• Communication between groups (needed to be better)- depending on each other- each group should have had a point person (ideas for future)
• Communication between groups
• Communication for activity sign offs and implementation (who has authority to approve deliverables)
• Incorporate info into Evaluation about Facebook page
• Advertise/market other events during program

Education Goals:

• Were they met? (scavenger hunt was a good way to see engagement)- Difficult to truly measure
• What was average time spent at each station? (may want to measure that in the future)
• Research- needed more info for activities
• Team members- all needed to have same understanding and same message

Visitors:

• Interaction with visitors- how prepared were you when questions asked? (good to have resources available there- pictures/illustrations/examples)

Discussion Questions for Museum Movement Techniques

Sydney's Questions:
Having been inspired by the chapter I was to create questions for, Chapter One, I am not going to ask questions in the textbook style way – sitting down, around a table –I am going to have the class move around the museum.

The things I might like my classmates to know is:

Favorite type of MMT
The positive effects of the MMTs.
And the negative effects of the MMTS, or the constraints of the techniques.

**These questions do not really come from the book, but is instead more interpretive.**

Martina's Questions:
1. In what ways do you think the Yager museum and or our public program might benefit from utilizing movement techniques?
2. Why do you think it is important for museum educators to use movement techniques?
3. Do you think movement techniques such as these could work in all museums or just a select few? Why or why not?

Multiple Intelligence Resource

Here is a great resource from our discussion: http://www.museumofplay.org/education_programs/multi_intel.html

The New Guard of Curators Steps Up

The NY Times featured this article of interest about the "new" curators in the museum field:

THE mouth of a giant monster, its razor-sharp teeth glaring overhead and its tongue forming a long red carpet, ushers visitors into the Tim Burton retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Although the intentionally lighthearted chronicle of the filmmaker’s work received only mixed reviews when it opened in November, Mr. Burton’s fans don’t seem to care. More than 450,000 people have already attended the show, and by the time it closes on April 26, attendance is expected to exceed that of recent blockbusters like the museum’s “Van Gogh: The Colors of the Night” last year and “Dali: Painting and Film,” in 2008.

Visitors to the show are relatively young, somewhere in their 30s on average, which makes them a decade younger than usual for MoMA, recent surveys showed. And a surprising one-third of this audience had never stepped foot in the museum before.

“We’d never done anything like this,” said Rajendra Roy, the museum’s chief curator of film, who was one of the show’s organizers. “There’s always a learning curve. Would I have done things differently? I don’t think so.”

For a 37-year-old curator, Mr. Roy seems pretty cool about it all, considering that only a few years ago he started his professional life selling tickets at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Yet as museum directors have come to realize, younger minds attract younger audiences. And Mr. Roy is just one of a growing group of rising curatorial stars cutting quite a different figure from the age-old image of museum curator as a fusty academic. Read more here.

Discussion Questions for March 18th

Stephanie Cadwell’s questions
1. What are the 8 Intelligences and name an activity that people do that go along with each.

2. What do you think some of the benefits of using Multiple Intelligence Theory are?

Katherine Miller’s questions
3. Identify some of your intelligences from strongest to weakest. How can your personal strengths be utilized for the public event? Please give examples.

4. What were some of the activities used to explain Teaching MI Theory? Can any of these activities be integrated or adapted into our program?


Kelly Holman’s questions
5. Why is it important to use a wide range of teaching techniques when working with students?

6. What are five teaching strategies for musical intelligence? For linguistic intelligence?

7. What form of learning do you think appeals the most to you? Which form of learning appeals the least? Is it different from the other students in the class?

Objects-Based Learning Questions for Class Discussion

Rachel Schwartzman & Molly Sloan
Museums Education
Objects-Based Learning Questions

PART I- MOLLY
1.) What are the goals for families when visiting a museum?

2.) What does object-based learning give visitors that simple text and classroom education do not?

3.) Does evaluation have a role in object-based learning?

4.) What was the Naïve Knowledge Research Study?

5.) Who are the people that are learning the most, and attending museums the most?

PART II- RACHEL
1.) What is the PISEC and what is their purpose?

2.) What are the 3 phases’ questions? What was done?

Class Discussion Questions: Evaluation and Benchmarking in Museum Education and Museum Programs

Here the discussion questions for Tuesday provided by Margaret and Danielle:


1. Q:What is evaluation in the museum environment?

2. Q: What are the four stages of evaluation and define them?

3. Q:Why is evaluation so important?


Be sure you've completed the readings and be prepared to discuss these questions.