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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 exhibitions. The commonplace that museums are venues that either reflect or foster cross-discipline research and expression helps explain why the professional literature of the social sciences, rhetoric, aesthetics, marketing, history, sociology, anthropology, and art, as well as that of museum administration per se, treats in some manner--though not usually comprehensively--of the division of labor at museums and the nature of the relationship between museum educators and museum c...

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Museum Educators and Museeum Curators. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:28, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683108.html