Volunteerism and Expertise

If we truly value the museum education profession, why should it be expected to be volunteer work?

Louvre Museum, Paris, 1954; copyright Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos

I have a modest proposal for all art museums: considering the great budgetary challenges faced today by all art institutions, you should create a volunteer program for the curatorial department. Volunteer curators will receive a rigorous art historical training and learn about the most up-to-date methods of curating and will be expected to engage with the most complex political, social and racial issues currently at the center of the contemporary art discourse.

We all, I suspect, can anticipate that the response to this proposal would look something like this: curators can’t be volunteers because they bring expertise that can’t be taught through an evening seminar or on-the-job training. It takes years of research and practice to become a professional curator. Further, the institution should be held to the highest standards of this practice and aspire to be the leading force in the field; and this is impossible to accomplish when the person who undertakes this task has no formal training and is doing it on a volunteer basis. Moreover,  curatorial departments are enriched by the diversity of voices that comprise them, with individuals who might come from different racial or ethnic backgrounds and might help provide fresh and critical perspectives of canonical narratives. A volunteer curatorial program in contrast would largely have to include those who do not need to work for a living, which would greatly reduce the diversity of the available pool of candidates. And if the volunteer in question is also a major donor or a museum trustee, whose family or person wields power in the organization and influence in editorial boards of newspapers,  and their commitment or expertise is lacking, it would make it very difficult for anyone to correct their behavior, let alone dismiss them if it ever came to that situation.

I would fully subscribe to the above response. The question I have is:  why should the response be different when it comes to museum educators? why is museum education often seen in contrast as a practice that can be done on a volunteer basis by those who have little to no prior formal pedagogical, studio, or art historical training? What does that say about the assumptions about this profession, let alone the educational mission of a museum? If education is something that can be easily done by volunteers, shouldn’t all schools and universities follow the same model and having all its professors just teach for free?

I would also like to ask you: how would you feel if you learned that your profession from now on will no longer be remunerated but only expected as volunteer work, under the assumption that one doesn’t need that much knowledge or experience (nor does one need to get paid) to do what you do?

Over the last few days, the Art Institute of Chicago (incidentally, my alma mater and the place where I started my museum career) has been receiving a great deal of criticism for dissolving its volunteer docent program, which, it has to be openly acknowledged, is comprised largely of older white women (as usually is the case of most volunteer docent programs in museums in the U.S.).  The museum has been accused of ageism and unfair treatment of those individuals who have given so much of their time and efforts to the museum.  While ageism should be confronted and strongly condemned in every respect,  I would nonetheless like to ask the following questions to the critics of this action by the Art Institute:  first, how would  you address the questions about expertise and volunteerism I have posed above? Why has the curatorial side of the museum (or conservation, registrar, editorial, exhibition design, and so on) traditionally exempt from this volunteer approach? Is it that education work requires less experience or knowledge? Secondly: how come there was no similar widespread outrage when a certain major art museum (that shall remain unnamed) abruptly ended the contracts of its paid museum educators (mostly women of color) last year? And third, also relatedly:  I wonder if it is striking to you, as it is to me, that the subject of ending a volunteer docent program has received ample and immediate coverage by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal while the dismissal of those paid, women of color, contract educators who depended of those jobs and were severely affected by that decision during the worst health crisis of our lifetime was ignored by these and most mainstream publications. Might that fact say something perhaps about white privilege?

Lastly, what is exactly the financial rationale for making museum education volunteer work? If it is important and necessary work, like the work of curators or exhibition designers, shouldn’t it be paid work? There are many professional educators with many years of experience who are available and willing to teach. They only need, and deserve, to get paid for their work.

These are hard words for me to write. Over my three decades of working in education departments in museums I have overseen several gallery educator programs, worked with countless individuals, including volunteer docents, women and men (but overwhelmingly women) who are  generous, dedicated, and committed to the task of serving the museum visitors in the process of learning about art.  Small museums do depend on volunteer labor (not only in education) simply because their finances do not allow them to sustain a full-time staff. This is the case, for example, of many historic house museums: their shoestring budgets barely allow them to function by keeping their doors open and operating tiny gift shops, and the little funding they sometimes receive largely must go toward repairs of the aging structures of their museum.

In some ways, the volunteer docent programs in American museums represent some of the best aspects of the American tradition of communitarianism— something that likely finds its historical roots in religious life. Following this tradition, you join a group that fulfills you socially and sometimes spiritually, that gives you a sense of purpose and meaning in your life. It allows you to feel and know that you are working for something that is larger than yourself. Art museums provide a secular version of that spirit.

However, the volunteer model of museum arts education in medium to large-size institutions is inherently flawed and has been on its way out for decades. Its defects were already crystal-clear in the 90s when I started working in the field. The problems with these programs were multi-fold, but first it is important to understand how art museum education has evolved over the years.

Historically, museums followed the conventional format of the gallery lecture, a largely performative practice that depended on forms of storytelling in front of an artwork (and unfortunately some museums still follow this format to this day). As the field evolved toward more active forms of engagement that proved to be more effective pedagogically, many educators were resistant to change and instead continued to practice this form of lecturing which felt safer, less challenging, and, to many, a more satisfying form of communication (in fairness to volunteer docents, many paid educators with academic backgrounds also favored the straightforward lecture style, so the reluctance had a deeper cultural complexity).

Added to the changes in pedagogical approaches, there was the problem that these volunteers, some of which were members of the museum’s board and/or closely connected to it through family, business or friendship ties at the highest levels of the institution, would make them difficult, if not impossible, to supervise in the traditional way one supervises an employee.

Lastly, volunteer museum programs justify its existence with the implication that without them museums would not be able to do education. However, that rationale is bogus at best, considering that the actual cost of an entire paid educator gallery program is proportionally tiny compared to the budget allocated toward exhibitions or executive pay. And education programs are one of the primary reasons why museums receive foundation and government support.

For these and many other reasons, forward-looking museum education directors (almost without exception all women, and all experienced leaders and innovative thinkers —some of which I have been privileged to work for) were already doing away with these programs two decades ago and replacing them with paid teams of educators who were professionally trained and skilled at generating dialogue, reflection, and critical understanding, and who would have to (due to being employed) faithfully follow the pedagogic vision of their director of education. The decisions of those departments over the years of course created conflict, and what we are seeing today at the Art Institute is not but a belated acknowledgment  of that course correction that the field took years ago.

Yet one more problem became even more visible over the last few years, and likely made the need for change absolutely urgent for those museums that had not changed yet.

The events of 2020, including the pandemic, the deteriorating political climate, and the national reckoning around race after the death of George Floyd made the educational role of many museums more important than ever, and I believe that the Art Institute as well as all other museums realized not only how crucial their role as educational institutions was to the moment, and quite honestly, to the survival of their credibility as art organizations. More importantly, and this is something that me and my colleagues debated at the time, museums found themselves in a situation where they needed to really show leadership in the brokering of difficult conversations about race and privilege, and showing how art authentically provides a platform where to have that discussion. This takes very skilled educators. The problem is: how can you have those tough conversations when the person leading those discussions about race is a white, privileged individual with no prior training on dealing with matters of race undertaking this task on a volunteer basis? To expect that volunteer educator to address those issues was not just unrealistic, but also unfair and even stressful to the educator.

Last but not least, what kind of message is sent when an august institution with a past of supporting white supremacy in the Western canon, and trying to work toward correcting its past history, has as its frontline representative a privileged white person brokering a discussion about those topics?  There have been recent studies that have shown that students of color learn better when they work with teachers who are also of color — a fact that has generally been agreed upon from experience: when we are young, we instinctively look up to those adults who look like us as role models of what we want to be. For this and other reasons it is not surprising that the full-time staff of education departments have traditionally been some of the most diverse in relation to other museum departments. It is also true that  education programs also service adults and seniors, but these programs also require great skill and expertise in areas of accessibility. Thankfully, there are many museum educators of all ages and diverse backgrounds who are professionally trained and highly skilled at working with these audiences, and yet who are not independently wealthy and can’t afford to donate their time to educate.

We all need to be aware of our privilege, our talents and shortcomings, and based on our sincere beliefs we can find a meaningful place for ourselves to contribute to society and culture. This process should also include recognizing the need and value of expertise, whenever it is required, as well as the acknowledgment that every profession, if it is to be treated fairly, should also be remunerated.