Hello,
As someone who worked on the Getty's Language Through Art program (unfortunately, since eliminated--hi Greg!), and having worked with English Language Learners for over a decade, I wanted to pass along some of my thoughts on a subject near and dear to my heart, as an ELL student myself! Given the changing demographics in this country, I think what you are experiencing with the number of ELLs coming to your musueum is going to be the norm. Therefore I am glad that you are thinking about and being so proactive in trying to make visits for this audience to your museum as positive an experience as possible.
From my research and what I have encountered, there seems to be two different programs/approaches to working with English Language Learners in museums. The Getty, CALTA21, and the program at the Harvard Art Museums deal/t with using the museum for English acquisition for adult English Language Learners. It is well-known that using visuals for language acquisition is vital; and the benefit of using objects and artworks from participants' native cultures is hugely beneficial for immigrant audiences. These programs usually involve multi-visits, mulit-level of engagement with participants.
The other approach is training our staff of educators and docents techniques and strategies for working with ELLs during the typical, one-hour tour. Obviously, with a very limited time we cannot use our collections to develop English acquisition. However, I have been training docents at the Getty and LACMA on quick forms of assessment of student's level, and strategies and techniques that they can use to make ELLs on their tours feel included and welcomed. Often, because many students we encounter are not regular museum goers and thus may be unfamiliar with the "academic" vocabulary of a museum, the strategies (like sentence frames and word banks) benefit all students on the tour--ELL or not!
In the end, Anthony, it would depend on what you want to accomplish, and the structure of your programs. As you know, I would be happy to help in any way that I can.
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Veronica Alvarez
Director of School & Teacher Programs
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles CA
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Original Message:
Sent: 04-02-2015 03:45 PM
From: Lesa Griffith
Subject: English language learners and museum education
Honolulu has many ELL students, and our Art School has developed a relationship with the nearby Queen Ka'ahumanu Elementary School. Every Wednesday museum staff walks students from the school to our art school for a studio class that helps develop English language skills through an art project.
DOE teachers have seen what we've done and are now contacting us for more programs like this. The ELL program is constantly growing.
If you are interested in details, contact Justin Davies, associate director of outreach programs, at jdavies@honolulumuseum.org.
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Lesa Griffith
Director of Communications
Honolulu Museum of Art
Honolulu HI
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Original Message:
Sent: 04-01-2015 03:09 PM
From: Anthony Pennay
Subject: English language learners and museum education
Hi everyone,
Our education team has formed a professional learning community, a space where we can explore issues and ideas that help us become better professionals, more impactful educators, and ensure that we are achieving our goals with each and every one of the students who visits our institution.
Our topic of exploration for our next session is English Language Learners. As an institution in Southern California, we know that roughly a quarter of our students are English Language Learners, and that roughly 73% of those students are in the elementary grades that constitute a large portion of our student visitors. So here's our challenge, we suspect that we are not doing a very good job of serving this population.
There is no shortage of strategies and best practices for the classroom (where the approach to meeting the needs of English Language Learners is often a long term approach.) We want to develop and implement a set of best practices, but are having trouble finding the right resources to support us in this desire. We have a couple of ideas:
1) Put together a list of best practices based on the experience of our educators as well as research and proven methods of instruction.
2) Work with a local school district or English Language Learner consultant who can really understand our program and help make adaptations where necessary.
As we address this issue, I would love to learn about how other museums approach meeting the needs of language learning students. Thanks in advance for sharing your ideas, thoughts, and methods!
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Anthony Pennay
Director, Annenberg Learning Center
Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation
Simi Valley CA
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