Museum Visions: A Blog Space

What does moonlighting mean to you? Dictionaries define it as a second job after a main job’s hours, sometimes to earn extra income, sometimes to sharpen skills, sometimes to rebuild enthusiasm by learning something new. For me, I’ve called my five years on the Museum Education Roundtable’s Board of Directors “moonlighting” because during those years MER helped me expand my … Read More

My cell phone has been prompting me daily now for a couple of weeks (or longer?) to update it to the newest version of its operating system. Each time, I tell it to remind me later. When I stop and ask myself why I keep putting it off, there are a couple of reasons: running the update takes time away … Read More

With the hustle and bustle of the holidays behind us, I love the beginning of the New Year because it offers us an opportunity to take a step back from our work, to reflect on what has happened throughout the past year, and to look ahead to things we’d like to accomplish in the year ahead. I finally have the … Read More

Last December, while Santa was in the North Pole making his list and checking it twice, we were busy tinkering with a project of our own. 2015 would mark the publication of the 40th volume of the Journal of Museum Education (JME). It was an anniversary worth marking—but how? Last December, while Santa was in the North Pole making his … Read More

At MER, we love when an issue of the Journal of Museum Education (JME) lends its voice to a juicy conversation at the national level. And JME Vol. 40, No. 3, Common Goals, Common Core: Museums and Schools Work Together, did just that. The issue hit mailboxes in October, 2015. In November, 2015, Massachusetts opted to keep the Common Core … Read More

Deciding what to write about for this post that wouldn’t recycle much of what has already been said about the Common Core, I kept circling back to something my professor Roberta Altman told me in a graduate course at Bank Street College, circa 2001. She said something like, “Design a creative, lively lesson with all of your best teaching strategies … Read More

Part of the fun of taking on our JME40 blog project has been the necessity of diving deep into the Journal of Museum Education (JME) archives. These explorations have yielded insight into the early years of the journal and the field, the evolution of the topics and trends that have shaped our work, and the personalities that lent their time … Read More

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” Winston Churchill Every August, as summer vacations wind down and autumn routines begin to wind up, the Museum Education Roundtable’s Board of Directors convenes for an annual retreat. As a national organization, this is the one time of year … Read More