{"id":15407,"date":"2021-04-22T16:54:45","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T16:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=15407"},"modified":"2021-04-22T16:54:48","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T16:54:48","slug":"holding-space-a-roundtable-conversation-on-trauma-and-teaching-in-the-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=15407","title":{"rendered":"Holding Space: A Roundtable Conversation on Trauma and Teaching in the Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Editors\u2019 Note<\/strong>

This conversation continues the series titled \u201cHard Lessons: Trauma, Teaching, Art History.\u201d<\/strong><\/a> Crafted in a moment of extraordinary collective trauma, \u201cHard Lessons\u201d brings together contributions from art historians, practicing artists, and museum educators to explore the multivalent ways arts educators make space for learning through varied\u2014and often intersecting\u2014experiences of personal and collective traumas. We hope that the space \u201cHard Lessons\u201d carves out for critical reflection, coupled with the tools and actionable advice offered by our contributors, will provide support for educators not just during this period of collective trauma, but beyond: we aim to foster an extended conversation, one that continues to build trauma-informed pedagogies explicitly tied to the teaching of visual materials as we return to in-person teaching and open museum doors.

\u2014Jenevieve DeLosSantos and Kathleen Pierce, Series Guest Editors<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Museums are formidable educational resources. Through their collections and programs, they enable myriad communities to access powerful cultural objects and narratives in immersive ways that are distinct from classroom pedagogies. Museums can reach a multitude of audiences and cultivate connections both in their own neighborhoods and on national and international scales. As facilitators of multivalent dialogues and designers of far-ranging programs, museum educators do crucial work for their institutions and the broader public. Now more than ever these educators are working to extend their organizations\u2019 influence beyond their buildings\u2019 walls and the scope of their collections. They are working to help museums serve as agents of social change as these institutions increasingly address issues of representation, repatriation, equity, and inclusion, in relation to both the objects museums keep and the operating procedures they pursue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When many museums closed their doors for the safety of their communities in early 2020, museum educators reached out with new digital programming that not only furthered the mission of museum education, but also expanded it. \u201cHolding Space: A Roundtable Conversation on Trauma and Teaching in the Museum\u201d illuminates this power of museum education to create spaces of community, connection, healing, and social change. Our contributors, four museum educators working across distinctive collections, explore how museums and their educational programs have engaged with the collective trauma of the present moment while acknowledging the difficult, sometimes painful histories and origins their institutions\u2019 objects might hold. Our speakers share their experiences working to bring communities together not only in the exploration of their institutions\u2019 artworks, but also in rich and complex dialogues around loss, vulnerability, histories of gendered, racial, and imperial violence, systemic racism and sexism, and even personal reflection amid the ongoing collective trauma of COVID-19.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together Key Jo Lee<\/strong>, director of academic affairs and associate curator of special projects at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA); Gabriela Mart\u00ednez<\/strong>, director of education at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, California; Damon Reaves<\/strong>, interim senior curator of education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and incoming head of education at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in June 2021; and Dalila Scruggs<\/strong>, coordinator of the Museum Education Fellowship Program at the Brooklyn Museum (BKM), share some of their working methods, their strategies for confronting potentially triggering content with their audiences, and ways they have generated collaborative programs such as Art and Empathy: Community Care through Art <\/a>at the BKM, Community Conversations Initiatives at the PMA, I Learn (Storyshare)<\/a> at MOLAA, and Close Looking at a Distance<\/a> <\/em>at the CMA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What follows is a three-part roundtable that candidly and fluidly explores the intersection of museum education and trauma, which we recorded on January 29, 2021, and edited for clarity. The editors of this series hope that the experiences shared here will not only celebrate the incredible work museum educators do for their communities but also model trauma-informed practices that are applicable to a variety of classroom settings, both within and outside of museum spaces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cHolding Space\u201d: Approaching Difficult Content in the Museum <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In part 1 of the conversation, the panelists address how they engage with topics that could potentially elicit a traumatic response in audience members. Noting the challenge\u2014and potential danger\u2014of too readily defining \u201cdifficult content,\u201d particularly as one works with varied and unknown audiences both remotely and in the physical gallery space, the speakers discuss the need to thoughtfully construct supportive spaces that allow for vulnerability and personal reflection. Dalila Scruggs speaks to the collaborative ways she crafted these spaces with licensed art therapist Sarah Pousty and social work graduate student Lula Zeray for the program Art and Empathy<\/a> <\/em>at the BKM. This collaboration carved out room for the supported exploration of topics like loss and grief around art objects such as LaToya Ruby Frazier\u2019s photograph Grandma Ruby<\/em> and Me<\/em><\/a>. Moreover, the speakers examine how museum education encourages teaching as an act of facilitation that creates a kind of \u201cshared authority,\u201d or as Damon Reaves puts it, \u201c[the educator] has a certain knowledge and skill set to bring to the conversation, but so does everyone else in that room.\u201d The panelists emphasize the significance of transparency and vulnerability as foundational tools for building trust, supporting community connections, and holding space for audience members to process, think, and feel. This section of the discussion closes with a consideration of the museum\u2019s responsibility to address how its narratives, as well as particular collections, evoke pasts\u2014and presents\u2014of institutionalized racism, gender- or race-based violence, and colonialism and imperialism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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