Experiences that provide for the professional and personal growth of teachers play an increasingly vital role in museums’ efforts to connect with educational reform. Faced with the complex demands of teaching and learning in the 21st century, museums across the country are rethinking the ways they interact with teachers.  At the recent 2012 National Art Education Association conference in New York, I was fortunate enough to lead a session with William Crow (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Rachel Bernstein (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) that examined how art museums are collaborating with teachers to develop a “co-expertise” approach that allows for co-creating resources, co-delivering programs, and developing dedicated spaces for a shared exchange of ideas.

As we described through our own work, this “co-expertise” model can afford museums a new way to build meaningful exchanges with teachers and to develop new partnerships with teacher professional learning communities. One central question (of many) that guided our thinking was:

• In what ways might a “co-expertise” approach catalyze a shift in what learning looks like in a museum, and allow for new ways in which teachers and schools access those types of informal learning?

Since teacher voices are essential to this approach, I spent some time interviewing teachers that I work with through the Saint Louis Art Museum and the CoLab.  The teachers I spoke with had all directly experienced various programs shaped by the co-expertise model, from summer institutes to school partnerships (learn more about the CoLab’s recent work by clicking here, here, and here). I asked each teacher what “co-expertise” means to them, in their own words — how would they describe their shared learning experience with the art museum and with other teachers, and what key things make this approach successful to them and their students?  Here is a short video compilation of these teacher voices, gathering insights from teachers across grade levels, subject areas, and even coming from 3 different states:

To me, these teachers’ perspectives (among many others) have been so inspiring, focusing in on some of the essentials of the co-learning experience.  In my own work with teachers and conversations with colleagues (including William Crow and Rachel Bernstein), a few aspects of the “co-expertise” model have bubbled to the surface for me:

• Letting go. By this, I mean museums letting go of their ‘authority’ over knowledge and meaning-making, and instead empowering teachers to collaborate with museums as we work together to explore ways to learn from collections.  This model of co-creating learning experiences WITH museums — as opposed to passively receiving content FROM the museum authorities, whether that be text panels, audio guides, curators, or even educators — is so central to rethinking the way teachers interact with museums. It may be one of the most daunting aspects, too, since it requires many museums to broaden their approach to learning.
• Recognizing teachers as experts. Part of achieving this “letting go” is simply valuing teachers’ voices and recognizing teachers as creators of content, knowledge, and meaning in relation to museums. Professional development workshops can be re-envisioned with more of an emphasis on developing communities of practice where we learn from each other no matter what our “home” educational setting might be (school classroom, university, museum, etc.).
• Shared growth and experimentation. This sense of creating a community of practice then builds toward a shared, reflective process that leads to professional growth on the side of both teachers and museum educators. Through an open process of thinking ‘outside the box’ and taking risks, we can all move forward in our practice as teachers and learners.

Through this work that I have been engaged with thus far, I feel that the art museum has begun to make a shift in what it has the potential to become: a dynamic cultural landscape where authentic, learner-driven experiences are developed and enacted by teachers and their students. These experiences are empowering teachers to chart their own pathways in unpredictable ways and inviting parallel exploration, risk-taking, and fresh discovery on the part of their students.  And isn’t rethinking the way museums work with teachers ultimately about envisioning a new way to engage students in museum learning?

Reposted through the National Writing Project’s Digital Is website.