Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

------------------------------
John Wharton
Musuem Docent &
Retired Museum Professional
Bonita Springs FL
http://linkedin.com/in/john-wharton-9629149

Original Message:
Sent: 10-19-2021 08:52 AM
From: Charles Steiner
Subject: Massive Docent Firing in Chicago

Mr. Steiner, Thank you for sharing a little bit about your interest and background as someone who led significant change in museum disability access. I wonder if you have had the opportunity to write or be interviewed about your experiences in those early days of access activism. I think they would have great interest and relevance for today's museum accessibility workers. 

You note the widespread "silence" from the field, particularly from current docent managers in art museums, on this story. I think there are important reasons for that silence and want to introduce those into the conversation here. First, it's vital to understand that almost anyone who currently works in an art museum with a large docent corps is likely to feel they don't have the freedom to speak publicly on this topic. Anything they might share about their experience with volunteer educators, pro or con, runs the risk of being interpreted and even weaponized in the institutional discussions that result, in their own institution or in the countless others these news stories spark. I am aware that many people are discussing these articles and the AIC within their staff and within their docent corps. We must recognize that anyone who publicly defends the AIC's decision is taking some degree of professional risk in doing so. Many versions of this event have happened in the past, and museum directors and staff have been savaged in some of those conversations (Phoenix Art Museum, Hirshhorn). Also, it is especially difficult to make judgments about the AIC's trajectory in particular without being privy to the internal decisions that led to the end of its docent program - decision processes that are usually lengthy, procedural, contentious and difficult and which will rarely see the light of day in the press, as institutional communications are of course more centrally controlled than those from former volunteers and their supporters.  

As I noted above, the AIC is far from alone among museums deeply rethinking and re-strategizing the delivery of their educational services. The feasibility, utility, and effectiveness of docents as program providers has been in discussion for at least fifteen years, as I can attest to from my own career, in which I led departments that included large docent corps in two major art museums and worked with (attempted) reform processes in both. Many organizations have undertaken reform efforts aimed to keep existing docent programs in place while making needed changes: expanding the diversity of the corps; providing skills training on inclusion in education; and updating training to reflect best practices in museum education including dialogue, interactive experience, incorporation of technology, visitor-led inquiry, experiential learning, and other approaches that have become standard for professional educators. I am not aware of many museums where such reform of a longtime corps has achieved more than modest success. If such programs exist, and are willing to share their demographics, evaluations from staff, students and teachers, and recruitment and training plans, that could be very helpful to others in the field. 

The docent model of education delivery is ripe for critical review. It is a model that grew out of early 20th century museum hierarchies and class, race, and gender-driven assumptions. White men were museum leaders and curators - education for the lay public and students was an afterthought. The notion of a "docent" (a bit of jargon borrowed from European university education which essentially means "lecturer") was introduced at Boston's MFA around 1908, when it seemed the masses were walking away from "free day" without having had access to high-level art-historical information. That first docent program was led by a man, hired for the position, and paid.

As museums in the Dana era worked to include more social classes among visitation, a need was felt to provide educational services for people who came to the museum without a social background that had introduced them to art history. As the model spread to other major museums, the lack of financial investment in such programs led to its becoming the province of volunteer women, often the wives of staff or board members and their social peers, mostly members of the financial and cultural upper middle class and elite. The ways female identity intersected with this role reflect archaic perceptions of women. As Mary Bronson Hartt wrote in "Docentry: A New Profession" (Outllook 1910)  "... I stand assured that it was no accident which led the directors of the Metropolitan to choose for this delicate and difficult post a woman. Physically the work makes demands which might better be met by a man. On days when every hour is spoken for, the strain on voice and muscles must be serious. But on the side of personality the woman, quick of perception, adaptable, sensitive, lightly balanced, presents ideal qualifications for such work."

Over the course of the 20th century, docentry as the province of mostly weathy White women only deepened. Through midcentury, the role drew on the time and talents of women with higher education who, by dint of social class, cultural mores, and sexist institutions, were not using their skills in the workplace or, later, had retired. The required time investment and rigid scheduling needs also precluded most working women from joining docent programs. These patterns have held despite vast social and technological change. To this day, the vast majority of the nation's docents in major art museums remain affluent White women. 

As these docent corps grew, institutions came to depend upon them to support the volume of school services and public programming they were increasingly offering. In many cases, these unpaid staff members were and are generating significant revenue in the form of educational program fees. As the field of museum education began to grow and formalize, beginning in the 1960s, it introduced new expectations for educational programming. Professional educators, with teaching degrees, training in learning theory, and often experience in the classroom and university, began to build programs that pushed beyond didactic presentations and information downloads. This was typically not the kind of education docents were trained for, experienced with delivering, or in many cases even interested in delivering. The practice of education in the museum began to diverge, with more contemporary, evidence-based practices often siloed in professionally-led programs, while docents delivered more conventional gallery tour experiences to select audiences. 

Today, museum educators and education leaders, often trained in their field at the graduate level, are bringing increasingly deep rigor to their work. In addition to transforming teaching practice, urgent movements for racial and social inclusion and further democratizing museum access have caused institutions to critically examine many of their programs and functions. In some cases, they discover structures that replicate racial and economic biases. Volunteer programs are often one of those structures. Most docent programs are not structured in a way that offers access to working people. Their racial and class homogeneity, partly a product of that structure but also a legacy of its 100-year history of exclusion, also discourages many people who might otherwise want to be part of an educational project from joining these corps. As evidence, the much greater diversity of volunteers in community-driven and culturally-specific museums puts the large art-museum docent corps into stark contrast.  

Mr. Steiner, the Met program you describe above sounds truly transformative. I appreciate that, at a time when the Met was not investing in educational services, you made an intensive effort to create museum access for thousands who would not otherwise have had it, and developed a model that pushed the field forward - a model we are still no doubt benefiting from. I regret only that the museum was not investing in this work. You stepped up because the Met was not yet prioritizing audiences and access. In general, I think that this is what dependency on docents often reflects: an unwillingness to invest in what high-quality, accessible educational experiences for visitors really costs. As you note: "my docents did things that my paid staff colleagues-- from the guards up through the executive ranks-- wouldn't, couldn't or didn't have time to do such as get wheelchairs for visitors who needed them, and then help these same visitors in and out of them, guide individual sight-impaired people through the galleries and facilitate their enjoyment of art objects that could be touched, and appropriately interpret works of art for the intellectually disabled at the visitor's individual ability level, to name but a few." Today, these activities are (or should be) considered part of basic public accommodation and visitor services for museums. The expertise and authority to put such practices in place permanently must be housed with staff who have the power to assign budgets and support outcomes to those expectations. These services are not additional enhancements that we should depend on volunteers to provide, but basic requirements of universal access to museums that should be appropriately supported in the museum budget, and led by trained and experienced staff members whose compensation is appropriate to their work and the local cost of living. 

Today, I suggest that those basic requirements include the most effective teaching practices and gallery experiences we can provide. To deliver those, we need people whose education, training, and experience are relevant to the work; who are supported in devoting the needed time and attention to study, benchmarking, and evaluation; who regularly attend professional development and stay current with the fields of learning in informal education settings. In other words, it is real work, and is done best when compensated and supported as such. The expectations of classroom educators continue to rise - they are bringing us students with a vast range of learning needs, language skills, and requirements for behavioral support. They need their field experiences to be delivered by people with cultural competency, a huge toolkit of engagement strategies, a professional educator's ability to monitor and adjust instruction, knowledge of constantly changing curricular demands, and trauma-informed practices. it's unrealistic to imagine that even a very talented volunteer could develop and maintain that kind of knowledge and expertise on a few hours a week. Often, as in some of the AIC stories, docents note that they train for several hours a week, or must undergo a multi-year initial training process. That in itself is evidence that there is more to the job than leading tours and talking about artworks. We are bumping up against a very real gap what museums can reasonably expect volunteers to master in training and what the work of teaching students appropriately actually requires.

That gap is often exacerbated by the reality that many volunteers are drawn into docent programs by the content itself - usually, the opportunity to learn about art history, in these kinds of museums. And yet, most of the practice of powerful and effective gallery teaching is not art history. Knowledge is required, but centering on, and understanding, learners and fostering their growth (regardless of whether they care about art) is the vital element. Docents often express disappointment that they are asked to spend more time learning educational practice than taking tours with curators to build their own art knowledge. This disconnect about the purpose of a docent program is a fundamental mismatch. In an ideal world, docents would love fostering human learning as much as introducing people to artworks. 

The "silence" occurs also because this conversation is personally sensitive. Regardless of the inequality of docent structures, many very fine people have given years or decades of their life to volunteering in museums. Many are also donors and supporters, and feel very close to the institutions. Some docents are truly fine educators who bring expertise, embrace change and move their practice forward continually despite the obstacles of limited time and lack of financial support. That investment is real and should be honored and recognized, even when programs are sunsetting. It's worth noting that the personal element of investment that comes with volunteering also makes critical reflection and reform inherently more difficult, as it often results in a strong sense of ownership over programs and outcomes. 

So, in short, this is complicated. It's a fraught area, tied up with race, class, institutional purpose, budgets, and the role of museum education. That complication is much of the reason for the silence. We are living in a time where museums must undergo a critical review of their past practices and critique the ways in which their work has, purposefully or inadvertently, contributed to racial inequalities and biases, ableism, economic and educational discrimination, exclusion, and White supremacy. That means reviewing structures that are not proving effective at dismantling those harmful legacies, and either rebuilding them in completely new ways, or ending them in favor of moving to new models.  Ideally, these new models will offer stable, full-time employment with benefits at a living wage, so that museums can live up to the promise of doing the very most effective educational work possible.  I believe there are many wonderful roles for volunteers in museum education, some of them yet to be developed, that can be created with inclusion, imagination, and joy at the center. I am really looking forward to imagining what those could be - lifelong learning pods? Discussion groups? Paraprofessional-like programming support roles? But we may have come to the point in the evolution of our expectations for museum education that teaching educational programs is not one of them - any more than we would expect volunteers to serve as teachers in public school. I hope the changes and experiments we see being made by the AIC and others will lead the way to more inclusive, mutually satisfying, and enriching programs for volunteers in museum work. 

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

------------------------------
John Wharton
Musuem Docent &
Retired Museum Professional
Bonita Springs FL
http://linkedin.com/in/john-wharton-9629149

Original Message:
Sent: 10-19-2021 08:52 AM
From: Charles Steiner
Subject: Massive Docent Firing in Chicago

Mr. Steiner, Thank you for sharing a little bit about your interest and background as someone who led significant change in museum disability access. I wonder if you have had the opportunity to write or be interviewed about your experiences in those early days of access activism. I think they would have great interest and relevance for today's museum accessibility workers. 

You note the widespread "silence" from the field, particularly from current docent managers in art museums, on this story. I think there are important reasons for that silence and want to introduce those into the conversation here. First, it's vital to understand that almost anyone who currently works in an art museum with a large docent corps is likely to feel they don't have the freedom to speak publicly on this topic. Anything they might share about their experience with volunteer educators, pro or con, runs the risk of being interpreted and even weaponized in the institutional discussions that result, in their own institution or in the countless others these news stories spark. I am aware that many people are discussing these articles and the AIC within their staff and within their docent corps. We must recognize that anyone who publicly defends the AIC's decision is taking some degree of professional risk in doing so. Many versions of this event have happened in the past, and museum directors and staff have been savaged in some of those conversations (Phoenix Art Museum, Hirshhorn). Also, it is especially difficult to make judgments about the AIC's trajectory in particular without being privy to the internal decisions that led to the end of its docent program - decision processes that are usually lengthy, procedural, contentious and difficult and which will rarely see the light of day in the press, as institutional communications are of course more centrally controlled than those from former volunteers and their supporters.  

As I noted above, the AIC is far from alone among museums deeply rethinking and re-strategizing the delivery of their educational services. The feasibility, utility, and effectiveness of docents as program providers has been in discussion for at least fifteen years, as I can attest to from my own career, in which I led departments that included large docent corps in two major art museums and worked with (attempted) reform processes in both. Many organizations have undertaken reform efforts aimed to keep existing docent programs in place while making needed changes: expanding the diversity of the corps; providing skills training on inclusion in education; and updating training to reflect best practices in museum education including dialogue, interactive experience, incorporation of technology, visitor-led inquiry, experiential learning, and other approaches that have become standard for professional educators. I am not aware of many museums where such reform of a longtime corps has achieved more than modest success. If such programs exist, and are willing to share their demographics, evaluations from staff, students and teachers, and recruitment and training plans, that could be very helpful to others in the field. 

The docent model of education delivery is ripe for critical review. It is a model that grew out of early 20th century museum hierarchies and class, race, and gender-driven assumptions. White men were museum leaders and curators - education for the lay public and students was an afterthought. The notion of a "docent" (a bit of jargon borrowed from European university education which essentially means "lecturer") was introduced at Boston's MFA around 1908, when it seemed the masses were walking away from "free day" without having had access to high-level art-historical information. That first docent program was led by a man, hired for the position, and paid.

As museums in the Dana era worked to include more social classes among visitation, a need was felt to provide educational services for people who came to the museum without a social background that had introduced them to art history. As the model spread to other major museums, the lack of financial investment in such programs led to its becoming the province of volunteer women, often the wives of staff or board members and their social peers, mostly members of the financial and cultural upper middle class and elite. The ways female identity intersected with this role reflect archaic perceptions of women. As Mary Bronson Hartt wrote in "Docentry: A New Profession" (Outllook 1910)  "... I stand assured that it was no accident which led the directors of the Metropolitan to choose for this delicate and difficult post a woman. Physically the work makes demands which might better be met by a man. On days when every hour is spoken for, the strain on voice and muscles must be serious. But on the side of personality the woman, quick of perception, adaptable, sensitive, lightly balanced, presents ideal qualifications for such work."

Over the course of the 20th century, docentry as the province of mostly weathy White women only deepened. Through midcentury, the role drew on the time and talents of women with higher education who, by dint of social class, cultural mores, and sexist institutions, were not using their skills in the workplace or, later, had retired. The required time investment and rigid scheduling needs also precluded most working women from joining docent programs. These patterns have held despite vast social and technological change. To this day, the vast majority of the nation's docents in major art museums remain affluent White women.

As these docent corps grew, institutions came to depend upon them to support the volume of school services and public programming they were increasingly offering. In many cases, these unpaid staff members were and are generating significant revenue in the form of educational program fees. As the field of museum education began to grow and formalize, beginning in the 1960s, it introduced new expectations for educational programming. Professional educators, with teaching degrees, training in learning theory, and often experience in the classroom and university, began to build programs that pushed beyond didactic presentations and information downloads. This was typically not the kind of education docents were trained for, experienced with delivering, or in many cases even interested in delivering. The practice of education in the museum began to diverge, with more contemporary, evidence-based practices often siloed in professionally-led programs, while docents delivered more conventional gallery tour experiences to select audiences. 

Today, museum educators and education leaders, often trained in their field at the graduate level, are bringing increasingly deep rigor to their work. In addition to transforming teaching practice, urgent movements for racial and social inclusion and further democratizing museum access have caused institutions to critically examine many of their programs and functions. In some cases, they discover structures that replicate racial and economic biases. Volunteer programs are often one of those structures. Most docent programs are not structured in a way that offers access to working people. Their racial and class homogeneity, partly a product of that structure but also a legacy of its 100-year history of exclusion, also discourages many people who might otherwise want to be part of an educational project from joining these corps. As evidence, the much greater diversity of volunteers in community-driven and culturally-specific museums puts the large art-museum docent corps into stark contrast.  

Mr. Steiner, the Met program you describe above sounds truly transformative. I appreciate that, at a time when the Met was not investing in educational services, you made an intensive effort to create museum access for thousands who would not otherwise have had it, and developed a model that pushed the field forward - a model we are still no doubt benefiting from. I regret only that the museum was not investing in this work. You stepped up because the Met was not yet prioritizing audiences and access. In general, I think that this is what dependency on docents often reflects: an unwillingness to invest in what high-quality, accessible educational experiences for visitors really costs. As you note: "my docents did things that my paid staff colleagues-- from the guards up through the executive ranks-- wouldn't, couldn't or didn't have time to do such as get wheelchairs for visitors who needed them, and then help these same visitors in and out of them, guide individual sight-impaired people through the galleries and facilitate their enjoyment of art objects that could be touched, and appropriately interpret works of art for the intellectually disabled at the visitor's individual ability level, to name but a few." Today, these activities are (or should be) considered part of basic public accommodation and visitor services for museums. The expertise and authority to put such practices in place permanently must be housed with staff who have the power to assign budgets and support outcomes to those expectations. These services are not additional enhancements that we should depend on volunteers to provide, but basic requirements of universal access to museums that should be appropriately supported in the museum budget, and led by trained and experienced staff members whose compensation is appropriate to their work and the local cost of living. 

Today, I suggest that those basic requirements include the most effective teaching practices and gallery experiences we can provide. To deliver those, we need people whose education, training, and experience are relevant to the work; who are supported in devoting the needed time and attention to study, benchmarking, and evaluation; who regularly attend professional development and stay current with the fields of learning in informal education settings. In other words, it is real work, and is done best when compensated and supported as such. The expectations of classroom educators continue to rise - they are bringing us students with a vast range of learning needs, language skills, and requirements for behavioral support. They need their field experiences to be delivered by people with cultural competency, a huge toolkit of engagement strategies, a professional educator's ability to monitor and adjust instruction, knowledge of constantly changing curricular demands, and trauma-informed practices. it's unrealistic to imagine that even a very talented volunteer could develop and maintain that kind of knowledge and expertise on a few hours a week. Often, as in some of the AIC stories, docents note that they train for several hours a week, or must undergo a multi-year initial training process. That in itself is evidence that there is more to the job than leading tours and talking about artworks. We are bumping up against a very real gap what museums can reasonably expect volunteers to master in training and what the work of teaching students appropriately actually requires.

That gap is often exacerbated by the reality that many volunteers are drawn into docent programs by the content itself - usually, the opportunity to learn about art history, in these kinds of museums. And yet, most of the practice of powerful and effective gallery teaching is not art history. Knowledge is required, but centering on, and understanding, learners and fostering their growth (regardless of whether they care about art) is the vital element. Docents often express disappointment that they are asked to spend more time learning educational practice than taking tours with curators to build their own art knowledge. This disconnect about the purpose of a docent program is a fundamental mismatch. In an ideal world, docents would love fostering human learning as much as introducing people to artworks. 

The "silence" occurs also because this conversation is personally sensitive. Regardless of the inequality of docent structures, many very fine people have given years or decades of their life to volunteering in museums. Many are also donors and supporters, and feel very close to the institutions. Some docents are truly fine educators who bring expertise, embrace change and move their practice forward continually despite the obstacles of limited time and lack of financial support. That investment is real and should be honored and recognized, even when programs are sunsetting. It's worth noting that the personal element of investment that comes with volunteering also makes critical reflection and reform inherently more difficult, as it often results in a strong sense of ownership over programs and outcomes. 

So, in short, this is complicated. It's a fraught area, tied up with race, class, institutional purpose, budgets, and the role of museum education. That complication is much of the reason for the silence. We are living in a time where museums must undergo a critical review of their past practices and critique the ways in which their work has, purposefully or inadvertently, contributed to racial inequalities and biases, ableism, economic and educational discrimination, exclusion, and White supremacy. That means reviewing structures that are not proving effective at dismantling those harmful legacies, and either rebuilding them in completely new ways, or ending them in favor of moving to new models.  Ideally, these new models will offer stable, full-time employment with benefits at a living wage, so that museums can live up to the promise of doing the very most effective educational work possible.  I believe there are many wonderful roles for volunteers in museum education, some of them yet to be developed, that can be created with inclusion, imagination, and joy at the center. I am really looking forward to imagining what those could be - lifelong learning pods? Discussion groups? Paraprofessional-like programming support roles? But we may have come to the point in the evolution of our expectations for museum education that teaching educational programs is not one of them - any more than we would expect volunteers to serve as teachers in public school. I hope the changes and experiments we see being made by the AIC and others will lead the way to more inclusive, mutually satisfying, and enriching programs for volunteers in museum work. 

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

------------------------------
John Wharton
Musuem Docent &
Retired Museum Professional
Bonita Springs FL
http://linkedin.com/in/john-wharton-9629149

Original Message:
Sent: 10-19-2021 08:52 AM
From: Charles Steiner
Subject: Massive Docent Firing in Chicago

Mr. Steiner, Thank you for sharing a little bit about your interest and background as someone who led significant change in museum disability access. I wonder if you have had the opportunity to write or be interviewed about your experiences in those early days of access activism. I think they would have great interest and relevance for today's museum accessibility workers. 

You note the widespread "silence" from the field, particularly from current docent managers in art museums, on this story. I think there are important reasons for that silence and want to introduce those into the conversation here. First, it's vital to understand that almost anyone who currently works in an art museum with a large docent corps is likely to feel they don't have the freedom to speak publicly on this topic. Anything they might share about their experience with volunteer educators, pro or con, runs the risk of being interpreted and even weaponized in the institutional discussions that result, in their own institution or in the countless others these news stories spark. I am aware that many people are discussing these articles and the AIC within their staff and within their docent corps. We must recognize that anyone who publicly defends the AIC's decision is taking some degree of professional risk in doing so. Many versions of this event have happened in the past, and museum directors and staff have been savaged in some of those conversations (Phoenix Art Museum, Hirshhorn). Also, it is especially difficult to make judgments about the AIC's trajectory in particular without being privy to the internal decisions that led to the end of its docent program - decision processes that are usually lengthy, procedural, contentious and difficult and which will rarely see the light of day in the press, as institutional communications are of course more centrally controlled than those from former volunteers and their supporters.  

As I noted above, the AIC is far from alone among museums deeply rethinking and re-strategizing the delivery of their educational services. The feasibility, utility, and effectiveness of docents as program providers has been in discussion for at least fifteen years, as I can attest to from my own career, in which I led departments that included large docent corps in two major art museums and worked with (attempted) reform processes in both. Many organizations have undertaken reform efforts aimed to keep existing docent programs in place while making needed changes: expanding the diversity of the corps; providing skills training on inclusion in education; and updating training to reflect best practices in museum education including dialogue, interactive experience, incorporation of technology, visitor-led inquiry, experiential learning, and other approaches that have become standard for professional educators. I am not aware of many museums where such reform of a longtime corps has achieved more than modest success. If such programs exist, and are willing to share their demographics, evaluations from staff, students and teachers, and recruitment and training plans, that could be very helpful to others in the field. 

The docent model of education delivery is ripe for critical review. It is a model that grew out of early 20th century museum hierarchies and class, race, and gender-driven assumptions. White men were museum leaders and curators - education for the lay public and students was an afterthought. The notion of a "docent" (a bit of jargon borrowed from European university education which essentially means "lecturer") was introduced at Boston's MFA around 1908, when it seemed the masses were walking away from "free day" without having had access to high-level art-historical information. That first docent program was led by a man, hired for the position, and paid.

As museums in the Dana era worked to include more social classes among visitation, a need was felt to provide educational services for people who came to the museum without a social background that had introduced them to art history. As the model spread to other major museums, the lack of financial investment in such programs led to its becoming the province of volunteer women, often the wives of staff or board members and their social peers, mostly members of the financial and cultural upper middle class and elite. The ways female identity intersected with this role reflect archaic perceptions of women. As Mary Bronson Hartt wrote in "Docentry: A New Profession" (Outllook 1910)  "... I stand assured that it was no accident which led the directors of the Metropolitan to choose for this delicate and difficult post a woman. Physically the work makes demands which might better be met by a man. On days when every hour is spoken for, the strain on voice and muscles must be serious. But on the side of personality the woman, quick of perception, adaptable, sensitive, lightly balanced, presents ideal qualifications for such work."

Over the course of the 20th century, docentry as the province of mostly weathy White women only deepened. Through midcentury, the role drew on the time and talents of women with higher education who, by dint of social class, cultural mores, and sexist institutions, were not using their skills in the workplace or, later, had retired. The required time investment and rigid scheduling needs also precluded most working women from joining docent programs. These patterns have held despite vast social and technological change. To this day, the vast majority of the nation's docents in major art museums remain affluent White women. 

As these docent corps grew, institutions came to depend upon them to support the volume of school services and public programming they were increasingly offering. In many cases, these unpaid staff members were and are generating significant revenue in the form of educational program fees. As the field of museum education began to grow and formalize, beginning in the 1960s, it introduced new expectations for educational programming. Professional educators, with teaching degrees, training in learning theory, and often experience in the classroom and university, began to build programs that pushed beyond didactic presentations and information downloads. This was typically not the kind of education docents were trained for, experienced with delivering, or in many cases even interested in delivering. The practice of education in the museum began to diverge, with more contemporary, evidence-based practices often siloed in professionally-led programs, while docents delivered more conventional gallery tour experiences to select audiences. 

Today, museum educators and education leaders, often trained in their field at the graduate level, are bringing increasingly deep rigor to their work. In addition to transforming teaching practice, urgent movements for racial and social inclusion and further democratizing museum access have caused institutions to critically examine many of their programs and functions. In some cases, they discover structures that replicate racial and economic biases. Volunteer programs are often one of those structures. Most docent programs are not structured in a way that offers access to working people. Their racial and class homogeneity, partly a product of that structure but also a legacy of its 100-year history of exclusion, also discourages many people who might otherwise want to be part of an educational project from joining these corps. As evidence, the much greater diversity of volunteers in community-driven and culturally-specific museums puts the large art-museum docent corps into stark contrast.  

Mr. Steiner, the Met program you describe above sounds truly transformative. I appreciate that, at a time when the Met was not investing in educational services, you made an intensive effort to create museum access for thousands who would not otherwise have had it, and developed a model that pushed the field forward - a model we are still no doubt benefiting from. I regret only that the museum was not investing in this work. You stepped up because the Met was not yet prioritizing audiences and access. In general, I think that this is what dependency on docents often reflects: an unwillingness to invest in what high-quality, accessible educational experiences for visitors really costs. As you note: "my docents did things that my paid staff colleagues-- from the guards up through the executive ranks-- wouldn't, couldn't or didn't have time to do such as get wheelchairs for visitors who needed them, and then help these same visitors in and out of them, guide individual sight-impaired people through the galleries and facilitate their enjoyment of art objects that could be touched, and appropriately interpret works of art for the intellectually disabled at the visitor's individual ability level, to name but a few." Today, these activities are (or should be) considered part of basic public accommodation and visitor services for museums. The expertise and authority to put such practices in place permanently must be housed with staff who have the power to assign budgets and support outcomes to those expectations. These services are not additional enhancements that we should depend on volunteers to provide, but basic requirements of universal access to museums that should be appropriately supported in the museum budget, and led by trained and experienced staff members whose compensation is appropriate to their work and the local cost of living. 

Today, I suggest that those basic requirements include the most effective teaching practices and gallery experiences we can provide. To deliver those, we need people whose education, training, and experience are relevant to the work; who are supported in devoting the needed time and attention to study, benchmarking, and evaluation; who regularly attend professional development and stay current with the fields of learning in informal education settings. In other words, it is real work, and is done best when compensated and supported as such. The expectations of classroom educators continue to rise - they are bringing us students with a vast range of learning needs, language skills, and requirements for behavioral support. They need their field experiences to be delivered by people with cultural competency, a huge toolkit of engagement strategies, a professional educator's ability to monitor and adjust instruction, knowledge of constantly changing curricular demands, and trauma-informed practices. it's unrealistic to imagine that even a very talented volunteer could develop and maintain that kind of knowledge and expertise on a few hours a week. Often, as in some of the AIC stories, docents note that they train for several hours a week, or must undergo a multi-year initial training process. That in itself is evidence that there is more to the job than leading tours and talking about artworks. We are bumping up against a very real gap what museums can reasonably expect volunteers to master in training and what the work of teaching students appropriately actually requires.

That gap is often exacerbated by the reality that many volunteers are drawn into docent programs by the content itself - usually, the opportunity to learn about art history, in these kinds of museums. And yet, most of the practice of powerful and effective gallery teaching is not art history. Knowledge is required, but centering on, and understanding, learners and fostering their growth (regardless of whether they care about art) is the vital element. Docents often express disappointment that they are asked to spend more time learning educational practice than taking tours with curators to build their own art knowledge. This disconnect about the purpose of a docent program is a fundamental mismatch. In an ideal world, docents would love fostering human learning as much as introducing people to artworks. 

The "silence" occurs also because this conversation is personally sensitive. Regardless of the inequality of docent structures, many very fine people have given years or decades of their life to volunteering in museums. Many are also donors and supporters, and feel very close to the institutions. Some docents are truly fine educators who bring expertise, embrace change and move their practice forward continually despite the obstacles of limited time and lack of financial support. That investment is real and should be honored and recognized, even when programs are sunsetting. It's worth noting that the personal element of investment that comes with volunteering also makes critical reflection and reform inherently more difficult, as it often results in a strong sense of ownership over programs and outcomes. 

So, in short, this is complicated. It's a fraught area, tied up with race, class, institutional purpose, budgets, and the role of museum education. That complication is much of the reason for the silence. We are living in a time where museums must undergo a critical review of their past practices and critique the ways in which their work has, purposefully or inadvertently, contributed to racial inequalities and biases, ableism, economic and educational discrimination, exclusion, and White supremacy. That means reviewing structures that are not proving effective at dismantling those harmful legacies, and either rebuilding them in completely new ways, or ending them in favor of moving to new models.  Ideally, these new models will offer stable, full-time employment with benefits at a living wage, so that museums can live up to the promise of doing the very most effective educational work possible.  I believe there are many wonderful roles for volunteers in museum education, some of them yet to be developed, that can be created with inclusion, imagination, and joy at the center. I am really looking forward to imagining what those could be - lifelong learning pods? Discussion groups? Paraprofessional-like programming support roles? But we may have come to the point in the evolution of our expectations for museum education that teaching educational programs is not one of them - any more than we would expect volunteers to serve as teachers in public school. I hope the changes and experiments we see being made by the AIC and others will lead the way to more inclusive, mutually satisfying, and enriching programs for volunteers in museum work. 

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

------------------------------
John Wharton
Musuem Docent &
Retired Museum Professional
Bonita Springs FL
http://linkedin.com/in/john-wharton-9629149

Original Message:
Sent: 10-19-2021 08:52 AM
From: Charles Steiner
Subject: Massive Docent Firing in Chicago

Mr. Steiner, Thank you for sharing a little bit about your interest and background as someone who led significant change in museum disability access. I wonder if you have had the opportunity to write or be interviewed about your experiences in those early days of access activism. I think they would have great interest and relevance for today's museum accessibility workers. 

You note the widespread "silence" from the field, particularly from current docent managers in art museums, on this story. I think there are important reasons for that silence and want to introduce those into the conversation here. First, it's vital to understand that almost anyone who currently works in an art museum with a large docent corps is likely to feel they don't have the freedom to speak publicly on this topic. Anything they might share about their experience with volunteer educators, pro or con, runs the risk of being interpreted and even weaponized in the institutional discussions that result, in their own institution or in the countless others these news stories spark. I am aware that many people are discussing these articles and the AIC within their staff and within their docent corps. We must recognize that anyone who publicly defends the AIC's decision is taking some degree of professional risk in doing so. Many versions of this event have happened in the past, and museum directors and staff have been savaged in some of those conversations (Phoenix Art Museum, Hirshhorn). Also, it is especially difficult to make judgments about the AIC's trajectory in particular without being privy to the internal decisions that led to the end of its docent program - decision processes that are usually lengthy, procedural, contentious and difficult and which will rarely see the light of day in the press, as institutional communications are of course more centrally controlled than those from former volunteers and their supporters.  

As I noted above, the AIC is far from alone among museums deeply rethinking and re-strategizing the delivery of their educational services. The feasibility, utility, and effectiveness of docents as program providers has been in discussion for at least fifteen years, as I can attest to from my own career, in which I led departments that included large docent corps in two major art museums and worked with (attempted) reform processes in both. Many organizations have undertaken reform efforts aimed to keep existing docent programs in place while making needed changes: expanding the diversity of the corps; providing skills training on inclusion in education; and updating training to reflect best practices in museum education including dialogue, interactive experience, incorporation of technology, visitor-led inquiry, experiential learning, and other approaches that have become standard for professional educators. I am not aware of many museums where such reform of a longtime corps has achieved more than modest success. If such programs exist, and are willing to share their demographics, evaluations from staff, students and teachers, and recruitment and training plans, that could be very helpful to others in the field. 

The docent model of education delivery is ripe for critical review. It is a model that grew out of early 20th century museum hierarchies and class, race, and gender-driven assumptions. White men were museum leaders and curators - education for the lay public and students was an afterthought. The notion of a "docent" (a bit of jargon borrowed from European university education which essentially means "lecturer") was introduced at Boston's MFA around 1908, when it seemed the masses were walking away from "free day" without having had access to high-level art-historical information. That first docent program was led by a man, hired for the position, and paid.

As museums in the Dana era worked to include more social classes among visitation, a need was felt to provide educational services for people who came to the museum without a social background that had introduced them to art history. As the model spread to other major museums, the lack of financial investment in such programs led to its becoming the province of volunteer women, often the wives of staff or board members and their social peers, mostly members of the financial and cultural upper middle class and elite. The ways female identity intersected with this role reflect archaic perceptions of women. As Mary Bronson Hartt wrote in "Docentry: A New Profession" (Outllook 1910)  "... I stand assured that it was no accident which led the directors of the Metropolitan to choose for this delicate and difficult post a woman. Physically the work makes demands which might better be met by a man. On days when every hour is spoken for, the strain on voice and muscles must be serious. But on the side of personality the woman, quick of perception, adaptable, sensitive, lightly balanced, presents ideal qualifications for such work."

Over the course of the 20th century, docentry as the province of mostly weathy White women only deepened. Through midcentury, the role drew on the time and talents of women with higher education who, by dint of social class, cultural mores, and sexist institutions, were not using their skills in the workplace or, later, had retired. The required time investment and rigid scheduling needs also precluded most working women from joining docent programs. These patterns have held despite vast social and technological change. To this day, the vast majority of the nation's docents in major art museums remain affluent White women.

As these docent corps grew, institutions came to depend upon them to support the volume of school services and public programming they were increasingly offering. In many cases, these unpaid staff members were and are generating significant revenue in the form of educational program fees. As the field of museum education began to grow and formalize, beginning in the 1960s, it introduced new expectations for educational programming. Professional educators, with teaching degrees, training in learning theory, and often experience in the classroom and university, began to build programs that pushed beyond didactic presentations and information downloads. This was typically not the kind of education docents were trained for, experienced with delivering, or in many cases even interested in delivering. The practice of education in the museum began to diverge, with more contemporary, evidence-based practices often siloed in professionally-led programs, while docents delivered more conventional gallery tour experiences to select audiences. 

Today, museum educators and education leaders, often trained in their field at the graduate level, are bringing increasingly deep rigor to their work. In addition to transforming teaching practice, urgent movements for racial and social inclusion and further democratizing museum access have caused institutions to critically examine many of their programs and functions. In some cases, they discover structures that replicate racial and economic biases. Volunteer programs are often one of those structures. Most docent programs are not structured in a way that offers access to working people. Their racial and class homogeneity, partly a product of that structure but also a legacy of its 100-year history of exclusion, also discourages many people who might otherwise want to be part of an educational project from joining these corps. As evidence, the much greater diversity of volunteers in community-driven and culturally-specific museums puts the large art-museum docent corps into stark contrast.  

Mr. Steiner, the Met program you describe above sounds truly transformative. I appreciate that, at a time when the Met was not investing in educational services, you made an intensive effort to create museum access for thousands who would not otherwise have had it, and developed a model that pushed the field forward - a model we are still no doubt benefiting from. I regret only that the museum was not investing in this work. You stepped up because the Met was not yet prioritizing audiences and access. In general, I think that this is what dependency on docents often reflects: an unwillingness to invest in what high-quality, accessible educational experiences for visitors really costs. As you note: "my docents did things that my paid staff colleagues-- from the guards up through the executive ranks-- wouldn't, couldn't or didn't have time to do such as get wheelchairs for visitors who needed them, and then help these same visitors in and out of them, guide individual sight-impaired people through the galleries and facilitate their enjoyment of art objects that could be touched, and appropriately interpret works of art for the intellectually disabled at the visitor's individual ability level, to name but a few." Today, these activities are (or should be) considered part of basic public accommodation and visitor services for museums. The expertise and authority to put such practices in place permanently must be housed with staff who have the power to assign budgets and support outcomes to those expectations. These services are not additional enhancements that we should depend on volunteers to provide, but basic requirements of universal access to museums that should be appropriately supported in the museum budget, and led by trained and experienced staff members whose compensation is appropriate to their work and the local cost of living. 

Today, I suggest that those basic requirements include the most effective teaching practices and gallery experiences we can provide. To deliver those, we need people whose education, training, and experience are relevant to the work; who are supported in devoting the needed time and attention to study, benchmarking, and evaluation; who regularly attend professional development and stay current with the fields of learning in informal education settings. In other words, it is real work, and is done best when compensated and supported as such. The expectations of classroom educators continue to rise - they are bringing us students with a vast range of learning needs, language skills, and requirements for behavioral support. They need their field experiences to be delivered by people with cultural competency, a huge toolkit of engagement strategies, a professional educator's ability to monitor and adjust instruction, knowledge of constantly changing curricular demands, and trauma-informed practices. it's unrealistic to imagine that even a very talented volunteer could develop and maintain that kind of knowledge and expertise on a few hours a week. Often, as in some of the AIC stories, docents note that they train for several hours a week, or must undergo a multi-year initial training process. That in itself is evidence that there is more to the job than leading tours and talking about artworks. We are bumping up against a very real gap what museums can reasonably expect volunteers to master in training and what the work of teaching students appropriately actually requires.

That gap is often exacerbated by the reality that many volunteers are drawn into docent programs by the content itself - usually, the opportunity to learn about art history, in these kinds of museums. And yet, most of the practice of powerful and effective gallery teaching is not art history. Knowledge is required, but centering on, and understanding, learners and fostering their growth (regardless of whether they care about art) is the vital element. Docents often express disappointment that they are asked to spend more time learning educational practice than taking tours with curators to build their own art knowledge. This disconnect about the purpose of a docent program is a fundamental mismatch. In an ideal world, docents would love fostering human learning as much as introducing people to artworks. 

The "silence" occurs also because this conversation is personally sensitive. Regardless of the inequality of docent structures, many very fine people have given years or decades of their life to volunteering in museums. Many are also donors and supporters, and feel very close to the institutions. Some docents are truly fine educators who bring expertise, embrace change and move their practice forward continually despite the obstacles of limited time and lack of financial support. That investment is real and should be honored and recognized, even when programs are sunsetting. It's worth noting that the personal element of investment that comes with volunteering also makes critical reflection and reform inherently more difficult, as it often results in a strong sense of ownership over programs and outcomes. 

So, in short, this is complicated. It's a fraught area, tied up with race, class, institutional purpose, budgets, and the role of museum education. That complication is much of the reason for the silence. We are living in a time where museums must undergo a critical review of their past practices and critique the ways in which their work has, purposefully or inadvertently, contributed to racial inequalities and biases, ableism, economic and educational discrimination, exclusion, and White supremacy. That means reviewing structures that are not proving effective at dismantling those harmful legacies, and either rebuilding them in completely new ways, or ending them in favor of moving to new models.  Ideally, these new models will offer stable, full-time employment with benefits at a living wage, so that museums can live up to the promise of doing the very most effective educational work possible.  I believe there are many wonderful roles for volunteers in museum education, some of them yet to be developed, that can be created with inclusion, imagination, and joy at the center. I am really looking forward to imagining what those could be - lifelong learning pods? Discussion groups? Paraprofessional-like programming support roles? But we may have come to the point in the evolution of our expectations for museum education that teaching educational programs is not one of them - any more than we would expect volunteers to serve as teachers in public school. I hope the changes and experiments we see being made by the AIC and others will lead the way to more inclusive, mutually satisfying, and enriching programs for volunteers in museum work. 

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton

------------------------------
John Wharton
Musuem Docent &
Retired Museum Professional
Bonita Springs FL
http://linkedin.com/in/john-wharton-9629149

Original Message:
Sent: 10-19-2021 08:52 AM
From: Charles Steiner
Subject: Massive Docent Firing in Chicago

Without knowing the real inside story at Art Institute of Chicago it's easy to jump to conclusions, for this story is full of appearances.

The primary appearance is that this is a case of sacrificing "expendable" volunteers, who have no real rights under Dept. of Labor laws, "to dismantle white supremacy in cultural spaces" (to quote "The White Supremacy Elephant In The Room", MUSEUM, Jan-Feb 2021).  By virtue of many volunteers being retired, economically able to contribute their time, and predominantly white, one could conclude this was one attempt to remove a vestige from the days when early museums sprang from the private collections of Europeans.  But, rather than take the advice of the above article of deploying measured steps to improve DEI, and fully change organizational culture by actually including volunteers in such efforts, Art Institute of Chicago apparently jumped straight to terminations.

Another appearance might be that the action was a result of some internal friction between paid and volunteer staff, maybe a salvo fired to address a growing trend in the museum world to use volunteers and un-paid interns in place of paid staff.  Or was it simply a case of "Boomers Gone Wild As Museums Docents" (the title of an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, 11/11/20), where managing recently retired and highly-educated volunteers "is proving to be a challenge for some institutions confronted … by docents flouting their superiors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions."

Were the docents acting like an "army of privileged old white women" (a characterization made by one education staffer of the docents at New York's MOMA, from "Museums Have A Docent Problem", American Renaissance, www.amren.com/news/2020/08/museums-have-a-docent-problem)?  Were the dismissals in fact triggered by some unsavory behavior or last-straw incident within the organization's Women's Board auxiliary?

Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the job title (and salary?) of the person who dismissed the docents - Women's Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement - is apparently underwritten by the very group with which many of the docents were associated … docents who formerly interpreted works that were largely the creation of and, some could argue, the domain of white male collectors down through the years.

Regardless of what really triggered this action at Art Institute of Chicago, it certainly seems it could have been handled better.

-John Wharton