Welcome to our new Education blog at the Rubin Museum of Art! The goal of this blog is to share what the members of the Education Department at the Rubin Museum are doing and thinking about in and beyond the museum’s galleries. On this blog you will be hearing regularly from Education staff members behind the scenes details about our programs, ideas we are thinking about, conferences we have attended and interesting articles we have read, as well as questions and challenges we are grappling with related to education and museums.
As a museum educator, I’ve been inspired by other institutions’ blogs, such as the Brooklyn Museum’s (where I used to work and blog), as well as blogs related to the museum education and museums in general, like Museum 2.0. Blogs such as these have been immensely helpful to me as I think through what visitors want, need and hope for when they visit a museum or interact with a museum’s presence online.
While I’ve been blogging for museums and on my own for almost ten years now, I came to blogs from zines, which are small, self-published magazines. As a teenager in the pre-internet days zines were a vital tool for me to connect with other teens about issues I cared about. Zines, much like blogs, are based on the idea that everyone has a voice and important story to tell and puts the means of production into the hands of the authors. It was through teaching teenagers about how to make a zine that I came to realize I wanted to make a career out of being an arts educator. Blogs, though more technologically advanced, come from a similar spirit and both formats invite readers to participate and respond as a equals.
In the lead up to our blog days, members of the Rubin Museum of Art’s education staff even made a zine about some of the projects we were working on in early 2010. You can read it here:
I hope that you will as a reader will join us and use this blog as a forum to participate in discussions, ask us questions and share your experiences related to museums, education and Himalayan art. We hope this blog will serve as an inspiration and a resource to engage with our Education Department’s guiding principles, to look deeply, think deeply and feel deeply.