Today’s guest blogger is Kasey Harrington, a student in Cultural Resources Management at Vancouver Island University in Canada, who brought her curiosity, excitement for cultural learning, and museums to ASM’s education office for a winter internship. Her thoughts below, make me ask, “When was the last time you visited a museum? Has your child’s class gone on a museum fieldtrip recently?”

Times, they are a-changin’ and budget woes and other tightening measures often have unintended implications on K-12 education and informal learning opportunities. Unfortunately, in the roiling cauldron of cultural education debate, fieldtrips to museums and cultural programming get put on the backburner… if not thrown into the fire, to brighten the flame for standardized testing.

In doing so, museum educators are challenged to change their ingredients to logically satisfy this debatable recipe. Infusing a little chemistry here and superimposing some math there may placate some, but the programs richness and depth can become diminished.  Furthermore, this lackluster soup, if left unattended, could quickly boil dry.  With an emphasis on STEM subjects and cutting of education budgets, K-12 museum visits to cultural museums are at an all-time low. Some schools do access museum’s digital resources, but these can never substitute the wonder of the original and a facilitated museum experience.

What deserves a repeat visit?

Standardized testing experience (sharing a few appetizers)

Storytelling through objects (feast of authentic cultural experiences)

So, if you can’t bring a classroom to the Mogollon, then why can’t you bring the Mogollon to the classroom?  With a little creativity, you can! This year, Arizona State Museum began offering a ‘two for one’ taster. We take programs to school classrooms as the appetizer and hope they will come to the museum for the entreé. Sometimes, although sated with delight from our outreach program, they still can’t make it to the museum. But overall, it has been an incredibly effective and rewarding enterprise that I have been glad to be a part of.

The key, I believe, is for museums to keep their eyes and ears open and ask the right questions!  Relying too heavily on past success, clinging to outdated methods of delivery, and assuming that things will work themselves out is the real poison in the pot.  Museums that can grow and evolve with a sense of what visitors are hungry for have discovered the secret ingredient:  Faithful stirring, with innovative methods!  By this, I mean methods of presenting materials to make visits both stimulating and habit-forming. With this recipe, museum visits can become a mainstay for education, entertainment and inspired thinking…long after the testing is over.

Blog Editor’s Note: The Muse2You outreach program is made possible through a Community Connections grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Arizona and through support from the Donald Pitt Family Foundation.