Rethinking the Museum Tour

Isamu Noguchi, Core (Cored Sculpture)

This month, I've been participating in a tour training program at the Noguchi Museum under the auspices of Rebecca Herz, head of education for the museum and formerly the senior education manager of Learning Through Art at the Guggenheim.

So far, the focus has been on conducting meaningful tours for adults, a challenging and thought-provoking endeavor. 

During our conversations the majority of the participants, including me, copped to the fact that we generally avoid museum tours when we visit our peer institutions.  Most of us, as artists and art historians familiar with the process of critical analysis, prefer not to be spoon-fed the information that stereotypically constitutes such an encounter.  Our collective goal in the training, therefore, was to explore what a tour informed by current best practices would look like.  In a nutshell, the aim is an open-ended discussion in which the tour guide serves more as a fellow learner and conduit for visitor experiences than as a teacher.

To this end, we've observed tours by expert educators Georgia Krantz at the Guggenheim and Rika Burnham at the Frick Collection, as well as reading articles on the subject by leading voices in the field, including Burnham, George Hein, and Cheryl Mezaros.  Today we had the opportunity to field-test some of our new techniques, albeit for an audience of fellow museum educators.

Personally, I found it tough to break out of "instruction mode," especially after working with children for so long, but I'm confident that practicing these techniques will be worthwhile.