Museums and Teacher Resources

Traveling Trunk from the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame

“Museums increasingly recognize the potential that innovative technology has for helping their institutions meet the educational aspects of their missions.” - Kris Wetterlund

Whether or not a trip to the physical museum is in the works, museums provide teachers with a wide variety of resources utilizing the museum’s content and collection for use outside of the museum. Teachers taking advantage of the museum’s teacher resources before or after a trip to the museum can be used to solidify lessons learned in the exhibits. In Flipping the Field Trip, Wetterlund argues that online resources are not replacing museum visits, but augment visits in many cases. 

When a trip to the museum is not possible, a teacher may still take advantage of a museum’s collection and educational opportunities in his or her classroom. Museums provide materials and resources for teachers to use at will and on their own time. By making lesson plans, kits or trunks available to borrow, online activities, and media available online, teachers can utilize the museum’s resources conveniently from their classrooms. Below is just a sampling of some of the teacher resources available from museums. 

Lesson Plans:

• The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies offers a database of lesson plans where teachers can search by topic, grade level, subject, and individual state standards. http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/
• The Philadelphia Museum of Art offers lesson plans working with their collection that connect art to other disciplines. http://www.philamuseum.org/education/lesson_plans.html
• The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Art-To-Go lessons are short monthly lessons about a single piece that give teachers brief background information and suggest a challenge activity for students. http://www.artbma.org/educators/atg/index.html

Kits and Trunks:

• The Phillips Collection offers three teaching kits about works in their collection. The kits may include lesson plans, teacher’s guide, CD-ROM of images, DVDs, posters, and student worksheets. http://www.phillipscollection.org/education/teaching_kits/index.aspx
• The Baltimore Museum of Art has a number of teacher resources for loan, most of which consist of image reproductions in various formats and extensive background information. They also have an Art for English Language Learners resource box available for loan. http://www.artbma.org/educators/documents/Teacherpackets2011.pdf
• The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame lends out Traveling Trunks of cowgirl and cowboy artifacts, teacher’s guide, and books for various reading levels. http://www.cowgirl.net/home/home/education/school-services/traveling-trunks/

Time-Based Media:

• The National Gallery of Art offers children’s video tours of several pieces in their collection. This tour is also available for free in the museum on digital audio players. http://www.nga.gov/education/timetravel/index.shtm
• Art Babble is a website that many different museums and art organizations publish high quality videos about art. There are channels about abstract art to conservation science to origami. www.artbabble.org
• iTunesU is a great resource for accessing multimedia resources from many academic, but also cultural institutions for free. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History offers many videos from the Human Film Studies Archives to Ocean Science. MoMA offers podcasts from visual description for visually impaired audiences to teen audio guides. The National Archives and Records offers archival footage of historic events. iTunesU can be accessed through the iTunes Store. Teachers could take advantage of this free and readily available media and incorporate them into their lessons. 

References:

 Wetterlund, K. 2008. Flipping the Field Trip: Bringing the Art Museum to the Classroom. Theory Into Practice 47: 110-117.