Museum Educators and Museeum Curators

The Relationship Between Museum Educators and Museum Curators

The development of museum education departments as the point of contact between the museum institution and the public has occurred in the context of museum mission statements that declare education to be the essence of the museum experience. Accreditation by the American Association of Museums entails the presumption of education as the core mission of (nonprofit) member institutions of any size and of all kinds. Internet sites for museums in the United States and the United Kingdom routinely articulate education as the essential guiding institutional principle. Typically, the respective roles of curators and educators as articulated in mission statements are collapsed into the educational objectives of the museum, even though the AAM distinguishes between curators as those who write and research for exhibits and select objects for display, and museum educators as those who help people learn by functioning as interpretive specialists and/or docents (AAM, 2001).

As a practical matter, these roles overlap and converge, although historically curators have been characterized as more or less working behind the scenes, having responsibility for searching for, acquiring, cataloguing, restoring, exhibiting, maintaining, and storing collections (Gartaganis, 1985). Museum educators have historically been associated with public outreach of museums, and strong academic skills are implicated in effective

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es such as Colonial Williamsburg, for example, omitted any mention of the 50% population of black slaves. Such creations as Disneyland's Main Street, meanwhile, is almost entirely a fictional re-creation of the past and celebration of capitalism. Falsification of reality in this way, argues Wallace, makes museums "instruments of class dominance" (1996, p. 25), which is antithetical to the educational project. Accusations of elitism and Eurocentrism among museum professionals are another aspect of realigned approaches to interpretation. Klein uses the term "embattled curator" to explain calls from the public for multicultural diversity in displays and staffing, also explaining that "curators are being asked to cede control to exhibition teams staffed by designers and educators pushing 'visitor friendly' shows" (Klein, 2001, p. 38). Curators may be obliged to respond to a variety of constituencies, as Klein's (2000) account of the development of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., demonstrates: "Telling the complicated story of Indians in America--not just a triumph of survival or a tale of destruction and lingering despair, but both--will be hard to do. To manage it without deeply affronting either the

Category: Arts - M