Points of Departure

Abstract

A critical responsibility of campus-based museums is to educate faculty as the first line of defense in creating a more literate museum-going student public. This education, often a re-education, might include curriculum topics such as Reading Objects, Reading Images, and Reading the Museum (as both object and context). Success would depend on repeated engagement, and on constructivist methods for learning, allowing for multiple meanings and no one right answer. Today, two key obstacles to university faculty use of museums in their teaching are content and methodology. We all hear familiar statements such as “Your exhibition is about mid-century Latin American art and I don’t teach that. You can’t help me.” Claims such as “I teach biblical archaeology and that is the focus of your collection, so I brought my class to your museum, but beyond telling my students to look at all the pretty things, I didn’t know what to DO there” also echo through the halls of academia. This paper speaks to both content and methodology, the “what” and the “how” of faculty and student engagement. I encourage readers to create action plans to employ in their home institutions. I am delighted to be part of this important volume that brings together the university community, academic faculty, and museum professionals, as a group committed to reinterpret our institutions for our primary constituents, college faculty and students. A short introduction frames the need for faculty outreach and the “missing link” between many current faculty and further engagement in our museums. Installation artist Fred Wilson asserts: “All college students should be able to read a museum before they graduate.”1 This reading, as one might expect, is predicated on some form of literacy. Because few faculty members have learned the tools for reading a museum, they cannot be expected to educate their students in this capacity.