Museum Pedagogy in the Classroom
Thursday, February 22
6:30-8:30 PM
Room 9205

Over the past generation, museums have undergone an enormous transition. No longer simply repositories of artifacts and authority, they are now, as the Smithsonian’s Stephen E. Weil once described, “a place for somebody.” As museums have moved toward a visitor-centered approach, their education departments have professionalized and developed a series of techniques designed to engage visitors, spur interaction, and spark retention.

Over the past four months, supported by the Teaching and Learning Center, museum educators and classroom instructors have worked together in an interdisciplinary Focused Inquiry Group to develop best practices and lesson plans, and to explore how we might adapt museum educators’ tools and tricks for the college classroom.

Join us on Thursday, February 22 in Room 9205 at 6:30-8:30 PM to learn how the museum education toolkit can enliven your classroom lessons and take-home assignments. We’ll dive into several model activities that use museum pedagogies to foster active, student-centered, and creative undergraduate experiences. We will also take a look at the theoretical underpinnings of these strategies, and provide examples of how we have used them in our own teaching in several different disciplines. In the last portion of the workshop, we’ll invite you to think about how you might apply museum pedagogy in your own courses. With that in mind, you are encouraged to bring a lesson plan that you would like to workshop!

Please RSVP through this link: https://goo.gl/forms/dVxD1QThS7Y7STlI3

Interested but can’t make it? Stay tuned: As an extension of this workshop, we are developing a digital resource that will offer CUNY instructors tools and models to integrate museum pedagogy into their courses.

This event is co-sponsored by the CUNY Public History Collective.