Integrating Student Workers Into Museum Practice

Introduction

Often when museum education is discussed within the context of museum partnerships and university students, stories and statistics of how specific classes contributed to museum content are unpacked. Alternatively, annual reports about what university museum academic interns learned during their semester-long placement with a specific department are written and presented to funders. While these approaches to partnerships and cultivating engagement are beneficial due to time constraints associated with semester-long courses and internships, they do not consistently blend student voices and perspectives into the museum’s internal staff structure. That is, they do not provide students with an in-depth understanding of daily museum operations and their long-term strategic goals; two experiences that I believe would help inform the decisions of students who are considering pursuing a career in the museum sector.

This chapter offers an examination of the successes and challenges of one university art museum that created a student position in which student workers learn about how the museum functions on a day-to-day basis. The role also incorporates student workers into the daily fabric of the museum by training them to be the primary facilitators of educational experiences and engagements for the public.

Today, university art museums, like the one discussed in this chapter, struggle with defining their values, societal roles, and visitor demographics. Internally, they compete with other campus resources, like sports teams, laboratories, and wellness centers, to demonstrate their value to their parent institution. Externally, they contend with other artistic institutions to earn public interest and support. I understand the position of the University Art Museum (UAM)¹ discussed in this chapter as an institution facing the aforementioned struggles; struggles that are amplified during the COVID-19 era due to a lack of resources. However, I also support the idea that university art museums have access to unique resources, including university students, university faculty, and labs that are conducting progressive research. These resources allow the museum to accomplish several tasks:

• 1.

  Create more intellectual risk-taking exhibitions than private and non-university art museums;

• 2.

  Engage with university students in creative and meaningful ways that have the potential to nurture life-long lovers and supporters of the arts;

• 3.

  Foster meaningful involvement of faculty across disciplines that can lead to a broader understanding and appreciation of the key importance of art and visual culture in civilizations and cultures throughout human history; and

• 4.

  Craft new ways of thinking about collections, including obtaining long-term loans from underused collections in larger museums, experimenting with new media in partnership with related university disciplines and resources, and building important collections in new areas not yet recognized by the major museums (summarized from Rorschach, 2004).

The aforementioned resources are an asset to the university as an institution and the community at large. As a museum educator and manager of a student work-study position at a university art museum, I am interested in creating meaningful ways in which university students can use the museum as a space to cultivate their interest in the arts, gain hands-on experience within the arts sector, and contribute to how the museum functions and how it serves the community.

In this chapter, I examine the successes and challenges of the student worker program at a university art museum in the southwestern United States using tenets of the museum’s strategic plan (awareness, community, experience, sustainability and innovation) as points of reference. I am presenting one perspective of this topic, from my institutional role and experience. The chapter is structured as follows: