Training New Docents, Honing Old Skills

This entry was written by full time guide, Laura Browarny and her recent experience training new docents for the museum.

The Rubin Museum of art is in the midst of an exhaustive and exciting orientation for a new batch of fifteen volunteer docents. As a museum whose mission strongly emphasizes access and engagement for visitors, it is not difficult to understand why the Rubin’s education department is going to such great lengths to ensure that the new docents are primed and ready to provide interactive and enlightening gallery experiences for adult and student visitors alike. As a full time guide here at the museum, I had the opportunity to lead a session on different types of tour techniques and tour troubleshooting. While a bit nerve-racking at first, the act of teaching others how to teach proved to be an excellent exercise in museum education.

Laura Browarny

Museum educators are expected to follow curricula, adhere to best practices in museum education, and stick to prescribed techniques while leading gallery experiences. But even abiding by all of these guidelines does not necessarily guarantee a successful museum program. There are innumerable variables that occur in every gallery experience that even the best trained educator cannot always be prepared for. So how can museum educators be taught to deal with these spontaneous issues? This is the question that plagued me while I was preparing my training session on tour techniques, knowing that the docents-in-training would most definitely hit me with questions and scenarios for which there are no easy answers.

My solution? “Don’t tell, show.” It seemed nearly impossible to simply tell the docents how to be good educators, so instead I treated them like children, so to speak. Prior to leading the training, I refreshed myself on all of the techniques that I use while teaching in the galleries and how they are best executed. Then, during the training, I simply led the docents in a gallery experience exactly as I might lead a public or school tour. I made sure that I adhered to the guidelines that were set forth for all guides, but, as I anticipated, the docents organically strayed from the topics that I was discussing, got confused, asked difficult questions, and did many of the things that any museum visitor would do on a docent-led tour. After my sample experience, I gave the new docents a chance to exercise their knowledge or tour techniques to describe how I used each during my presentation. We then extended the discussion to include other unexpected issues that occurred during the sample tour and how similar issues might arise during one of their gallery programs. The docents, who had previously been so nervous about how to handle the public, very quickly realized that they seemed to already know instinctively how they could handle these issues themselves, using our sample program as a reference.

Training the Docents

I have discovered over the years that there are some aspects of museum education that simply cannot be taught. They have to be learned by watching and doing. The knowledge that I gained during my many years at school was, of course, invaluable to me as an educator. But the majority of my true training and inspiration has come from watching and learning from my colleagues at the various institutions in which I have worked. Leading this training for the docents allowed me the opportunity to teach, and also to really hone in on the techniques and skills that I use in all of my gallery programs. Now that the new Rubin docents are nearing the end of their orientation, I am seeing them spending more and more time in the galleries, tagging along on tours, and sitting in on school programs, and I am confident that the Rubin staff will provide more than enough inspiration for these future educators.

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