Museums, Communities and Engagement for Social Change
UMCA/University Museum of Contemporary Art. University of Massachusetts Amherst December 2015. Students from Springfield Conservatory of the Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts.
Cultural institutions such as museums play a pivotal role in advancing cultural rights in communities. I have had the privilege of working with several museums and cultural institutions to invigorate community engagement and advance the voices of youth and their families; teachers and their schools; professors of teacher educators and their undergrad and graduate students. In May of 2016 I delivered a keynote address to Mueums10 , which is a "collaborative of 10 museums that inspire, engage and enrich their communities through shared experiences of art, literature, history and the natural world." My keynote talk focused on museum life as a civil right and was titled: "Museums, Engagement and Creating Social Change." In March 2017, I expanded on that keynote when I presented a session at NAEA titled, "Cultural rights: Changing engagement among museums, art educators and youth communities." Here is a downloadable PDF of the slides of the NAEA power point which provides an overview of a forthcoming article. That article, and this PDF synthesize several case studies of engagement projects which focus on three questions: 1) Sense of purpose: What is the museum for? 2) Sense of belonging: Who belongs here? 3) Sense of participation: How do I fit in? What is my role in museum life and what is the museum's role in my life?
