TRAINING THE NEXT GENERATION OF MUSEUM PROFESSIONALS
I teach a graduate course at GWU’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design focused on helping students develop their evaluative thinking and research skill sets.
My course has around 20 students each semester, mostly from the Museum Studies and Exhibition Design masters programs. The academic-sounding description of the course is that we “cover the theory and practice of museum evaluation as it relates to the design and improvement of exhibitions, programs, and other museum offerings.”
But I like to say that students in my course learn how to do a few things really well:
Understand that everything is “data”
Ask “why is that?” and “can you tell me more?” over and over and over
Think beyond surveys
My syllabus is a blend of practical research exercises and more theoretical discussion prompts, with a healthy dose of fun guest speakers thrown in there, too (Want to visit my class? Get in touch!).
Gratitude moment
This is a new adventure for me as of Fall 2023. The fun thing about teaching is that as much as you prepare, you never quite know how it’s going to go until you’re doing it, and I don’t always get it right. I consider it an honor and a privilege to be trusted with this work and am committed to evolving my teaching practice as I learn alongside my students each year.
As an instructor, I pride myself on meeting my students where they are in their professional journeys and in recognizing that as much as I would love it if they all dropped everything to become an evaluator/researcher, this stuff isn’t always everyone’s thing. At the end of the day, I care most about doing what I can to deepen their appreciation of what research and evaluation brings to the experience design process, how research design is as much a creative act as a technical one, and how yes, synthesizing trends for a research report probably will take you more than 5 minutes…
That way, whether they end up working as an exhibition designer, curator, educator, or CEO, they will know how to think like a user experience researcher and bring that mentality to their future work designing museum experiences that people actually find meaningful.
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I look forward to my future design career, whether I find myself in museums or not, and truly hope to run into at least one evaluator in the field. Thank you, Cathy, for your hard work and dedication! As a first year graduate student, this class has shaped me for the better and made me realize that designers can get stuck in their own realm, brushing off anything else that is not design related. I feel now that design is so large and so multidisciplinary that many fields can fit into it... At the core of it all is to create experiences for people that mean something and make them feel good.
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—Shatha Abushaikha, Exhibition Design Masters Student at The George Washington University