Teaching Empathy: From Me to We
The global pandemic and subsequent shifts in teaching modalities have illuminated the importance of social and emotional learning (SEL) as an integral part of education and human development. According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), SEL involves five core competencies that can be applied in the classroom, at home, and within children’s communities. These five competencies are: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. The development of empathy is a central SEL outcome, which may prompt some to ask, “What is empathy and how can it be taught?”
TrendsWatch: Museums as Community Infrastructure
This year's report from AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums makes the case that museums are vital public infrastructure by virtue of their contributions to five pillars of community strength and resilience. Use it as a source of inspiration to help shape conversations within your museums and with your stakeholders, and to look outward as our field aims to spur increasing public support of museums.
Forecasting 2022, Part 3: Build Your Own Adventure
Scenario one (A Third Year of Waves) explores a depressing but entirely possible future in which the US copes with repeated waves of COVID-19 infections caused by new variants. Scenario two (The Long-awaited Tail) tries hard for optimism, but the best I could arrive at was the “least bad” prospect for the coming year in which omicron proves to be the last wave of the pandemic but inflicts significant damage on its way out. …I’d like to offer an optimistic story, but I can’t come up with a plausible scenario that is more hopeful than the Long-awaited Tail. So instead, I decided to take a sideways leap and publish a guide to creating your own scenario of 2022. At its best, foresight can help us confront our fears, as well as cultivating hope. I hope this exercise will help you manage anxieties you may have about the coming year and foster a sense of agency at a time when so much lies outside our control.
Lost Jobs, Found Voices: A Documentary Theatre Project of Shared Vulnerability
Creating space and connecting with fellow GLAM workers in this time of upheaval has strengthened the position that we learn and heal together in community; that nothing worth doing is done entirely alone. To foster that, we are using documentary theatre as a format to address the many structural issues that isolate us in our workplaces. In solidarity with the alternative (sometimes ephemeral) collectives we have seen sprout up in the last few years, we hope that this project offers a model for creative catharsis in a deeply troubling, confusing time.
Why a Hiring Freeze Isn’t Always the Answer
How does it make sense to have a multitude of tasks that need filling, but say you’re in a hiring freeze, and yet it’s the addition of those same tasks that cause current staff to look for work elsewhere, putting the entire HR picture into a kind of death spiral? Where’s the logic in not being able to hire for work that needs to be done, but allowing that to put you in a position where you loose staff with training, institutional history, and talent precisely because you’ve overloaded them?
Remote Technology in the Pandemic: Rebalancing Toward Equity and Access
The abrupt move to digital communication technologies and social media likely widened the equity gap associated with access. As we move back to in-person volunteering, we can be strategic about rebalancing our reliance on remote technology and rethinking the ways in which we reach the most unreachable people.
Have Cultural Entities Grown More Welcoming? Here’s What the Public Thinks (DATA)
Attitude affinities matter because most cultural entities aim to be community assets that are viewed as welcoming to as many people as possible, regardless of age, race, gender, family makeup, physical ability or disability, or anything else. The greater the attitude affinities associated with an organization, the less of a barrier welcoming perceptions are to engagement. And, in turn, the more people the organization stands to successfully serve.
"We'd Be Silly Not to Connect There": Why Akron Art Museum Launched Itself On TikTok | Jing Culture and Commerce
“Audiences who didn’t know they could like museums are now on TikTok. The museums field won’t survive if we don’t continue to bring in new audiences. TikTok is sharing so much knowledge, even if the cadence is very different than traditional education. As a field, we’d be silly not to connect there.”
Re-writing our own curriculum to enact change: Decolonizing museums for professional development and post-graduate programs
This article discusses strategies to promote decolonizing mindsets in white Euro-descended settlers like myself, working within museums in so-called North America, and other countries whose recent histories include the ongoing violence of European colonization. The hard work of decolonizing museum spaces is in its infancy as far as applying decolonizing principles in practice, through self-reflection by individuals and institutions, as we move towards understandings of how these spaces can be transformed. This process starts with educating/re-educating the existing white settler museum workforce, many of whom may unwittingly be promoting white supremacist and/or colonial-centered views in our work and in our daily lives as we learn to recognize the extent that the Enlightenment era inheritance continues to shape museology.
How Civic Season Can Help History Organizations Serve the Next Generation
As new voters, taxpayers, activists, and consumers, young people have an extraordinary influence on our democracy, and they need support from history organizations to make an informed impact. As the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University has found, young people have the potential to determine this year’s congressional elections. But civic engagement extends beyond voting – it can include everything from helping a neighbor to recycling to advocating for a cause – and young people are engaging in these other ways too.
Reframing History
Amid ongoing national controversy, it is more important than ever for the history community to be able to clearly explain what history is, how we come to understand the past, and why it matters to society. Reframing History provides the field with a new set of evidence-backed recommendations for communicating about history. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and carried out in partnership with the FrameWorks Institute, National Council on Public History, and Organization of American Historians, Reframing History is the result of a two-year, deep-dive research effort to understand how Americans think about history and how our field can more effectively explain history’s value. The recommendations from this project are designed to help historians, educators, museum professionals, and history advocates to be able to more cohesively and convincingly communicate about history to build a wider understanding of what inclusive history looks like and why it is important for all of us. Reframing History—through a report, toolkit, and forthcoming training resources—provides specific, flexible strategies for achieving that shift, overcoming major communication challenges, and building a more widely shared understanding of the importance of learning from the past.
Gender Discrimination and Sexual Harassment in History Organizations
The National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) released a report on the prevalence of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in history organizations in the United States. Findings include 76% of respondents reporting experiencing gender discrimination and/or sexual harassment personally and 61% reporting they know someone who had. Download the report here.
Stop Telling Employees to Be Resilient
Resilience, or the ability to withstand hardship and bounce back from difficult events, is useful when it comes to work. But, too often, it’s presented in a way that overlooks structural issues and instead encourages employees to grin and bear whatever tough stuff comes their way—and to do so on their own, without disturbing their colleagues. The truth is, it’s much, much easier to be resilient in an environment that makes it easy. There’s a difference between demanding that everyone be mentally tough and actually helping them take care of their mental health.