Evaluating audiences’ experiences in a museum program, exhibition, or initiative, like most things, requires thoughtfulness and planning to be useful. But, when things get busy and deadlines loom, sometimes the last thing you want to do is slow down and consider why you are doing something.

This article, co-written by three art museum educators and Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) coaches, explores VTS’ potential as an anti-racist teaching tool.

It’s been about a year since the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and Wilkening Consulting published “Museums and Trust 2021.” The report states that museums continue to be regarded as “highly trustworthy.” This statement made me uncomfortable last year and continues to bother me now.

When do you feel seen?

What a difference it makes when we feel seen for who we are, when we feel like someone is looking out for us and our needs, or when something we encounter resonates in a deeply personal way. This month, we invite you to take a moment to think about the ways that museums do or do not “see” you.

When visiting the Met earlier this year, I was especially interested in the Islamic art exhibitions. As I wandered through, trailing from South Asia to Ottoman Anatolia to Damascus, I was on the one hand in awe of how the Met had such a wide variety of items from these places, but on the other hand, distraught and angered by the objects on display.

It’s an unusually busy fall at Kera Collective. With postponed projects restarting and intersecting with newer ones already in full swing, it’s been tough to find a moment to just…breathe. Gratitude and connection are helping us through these frenzied times. We’re thankful for the amazing opportunities that have come our way and know we’re likely not the only ones experiencing some overwhelm as the seasons change. So, deep breaths everyone—we’re in this together! 

The fight for the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA) was long, hard, and demanding. Thanks to the incredibly taxing work of disabled activists for decades leading up to the eventual passing of the ADA in 1990, Americans with disabilities have more protections than ever before.

Observations have always been one of my favorite ways to collect data. Watching how people move about and behave in a space is inherently addictive—there is so much you can discover if you pay close attention to what is happening around you, and it feels a bit like going undercover as a spy.

We love to ask questions. Questions help us find clarity, push us to reconsider our assumptions, and open up the possibility for something new to emerge. This month all of our coffee break picks start with a question.  Coincidence? We think not.

In light of recent posts about museum workers leaving the field (like this one from Seema Rao and this one from Paul Bowers), I’ve been inspired to write about my own recent career transition from museum education to research and consulting. My hope is that these ideas resonate with any museum educator, or really anybody considering work in another field, who feels uncertain about articulating how their skills can transfer to another profession.

While there is often a bias toward quantitative data, numbers aren’t everything. I love the complexity and nuance revealed through qualitative data. Because qualitative data is open-ended, it helps you understand peoples’ thoughts and experiences in their own words–this can reveal interesting, profound, funny, and unexpected insights that would be lost in quantitative methods.

With summer comes travel and adventure. Take a breather with us and see what we have been reading and doing!

There is a beauty in seeing history that is actively lived in, structures that are actively used rather than sitting behind a glass wall in a museum, tethered away from the lands where they were constructed.

Too often, I see that exhibitions are developed in a way that assumes visitors will experience them like a book. However, results from hundreds of summative exhibition evaluations tells me that visiting an exhibition is more analogous to taking a hike than reading a book. Here are four ways museum visitors experience exhibitions like hikes rather than like books.

Hi everyone! We are grateful to have you here. This kicks off our first-ever "coffee break" newsletter, where we'll share with you what our staff is reading and pondering each month, with a few "surprise & delights" along the way. Thank you for joining us! Grab your favorite mug, and dive on in.

Over the last two years, we galvanized around a refreshed approach and believed this should be reflected by a new name and look. We worked with the talented and inspiring women at Wild Awake Creative to develop the Kera Collective identity so that it reflects who we have come to be and what we see for our future.

As we begin 2022, nearly two years since the pandemic began, what I’m most struck by is that the world I operate in is a fundamentally changed one.

As we look toward 2022 and beyond, many museums are working to implement their new or existing missions, values, and initiatives that embrace and foreground diversity and inclusion.

As we exit 2021, I’m reflecting back on where I began the year, when I noted that “in 2020, the museum field as a whole showed itself to be out of step with society. . . [and] irrelevant.” At that time, I had begun having regular conversations with Emlyn Koster, a thought leader with three decades of experience as a nature and science museum CEO.

In her new Centering the Museum anthology, Elaine Gurian recalls our joint 2003 article that began: “Consider a world in which every museum, as either an extension of its mission or as its raison d’être, is geared to respond to contemporary events and issues” Imagining the future of museums has never been a more pressing need.