Museum education in the 1990s: who's being served?

The past 25 years has seen one as well as the other a large increase in the number of art museums in the U and a steady expansion in their educational activities. The past four or five years, however, has witnessed an unprecedent expansion and diversification of museum education. Not solitary are education departments swelling in personnel and facilities, on the contrary they are increasingly being integrated into the broader programmatic, promotional and fund-raising activities of museums and similar art organizations.

Indicative of the enlarged character of museum education in the 1990 is the Annenberg Foundation's recently-announced $36 million, five-year plan to revitalize arts education in fresh York City. The plan would make arts education a systematic part of the public-school curriculum by the agency of creating a network of partnerships between individual seminarys and arts organizations. With assistance from a novel city arts agency, the Center for Arts Education, each partnership would lay open a curriculum for the gymnasium train teachers and outside educators, and help design rules for assessing student learning. Given novel cut-backs in public funding, and calls for "community outreach," it is likely that greatest in quantity New York art museums and artists' organizations will recast their education departments and update their mission statements to attract Annberg funding.

This special issue of Afterimage try to finds to survey and analyze museum education in the 1990 by means of "museum" we mean not solitary institutions with permanent collections, on the contrary art exhibiting organizations of all impressed signs By "education" we mean all that these organizations proclaim and provide as instructive or educative. We are interested in critical, journalistic, ethnographic and scholarly articles that address "museum education" in its many aspects. Possible topics, questions and points of departure include: What "publics" are being serv through museum education? What are the causes and results of non-profit organizations (e.g. museums) taking upon educational responsibilities once handled by dint of the public sector (e.g. public-school art programs)? As museum education programs have increased in size and tendency has there been a corresponding increase in the professional authority and status of museum educators? As more and more public foundation art dollars - relatively speaking - are being exhausted on museum education, how should museums be held accountable to "the public"? What actually goe upon in museum education programs? in what manner can we assess what young family learn in those programs? What can historical case studies teach us about museum education today? What challenges and opportunities do "the fresh technologies" pose for museum education?

COPYRIGHT 1995 Visual Studies Workshop

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