Interactive Museum Tours - by Sharon Vatsky (Paperback)

About the Book

This easy-to-follow yet comprehensive book provides everything an educator working in a museum or school, in person or online, needs to develop experiences that encourage close looking, spark the imagination, and support the development of critical thinking skills.

Book Synopsis

This easy-to-follow yet comprehensive book provides everything an educator working in a museum or school, in person or online, needs to develop experiences that encourage close looking, spark the imagination, and support the development of critical thinking skills.

Review Quotes

For any museum educator invested in the practice of differentiated teaching, Vatsky's book provides a clear and practical instructional design model for how to do this within the enduring format of the museum tour with reflections from some of the most experienced practitioners in the country.

Sharon Vatsky and her collaborators for this vital book share insights about planning effective and meaningful museum tours, plus strategies to bring joy, humor, and lightness into the process. First-hand accounts for troubleshooting content support the book's focus on creative development. The inclusion of easy-to-use templates plus considerations for accessible practices in museum galleries and beyond positions this book as a critical resource for museum educators. This is an essential read for anyone seeking long-lasting and impactful conversations in front of art.

This book makes the process of using the museum as a classroom accessible to anyone and everyone. It brings big ideas to a practical level to open up new experiences for all students.

This thoughtful book brings into the conversation why thinking about and with cultural objects matters so much in the lives of us all by linking histories past, present and to come in all their variability, diversity and sometimes, messiness. Urging us to think beyond the experience of the single museum visitor Sharon Vatsky, longtime educator at the Guggenheim Museum, places the interactive tour at the heart of contemporary museum thinking promoting dialogical interchanges, juxtapositions and multi-model activities that open minds to new and deeper meanings. At its center the interactive tour has the capacity to nurture personal appraisals as these are energized within the larger diversity of social and cultural opinion and exchange. To accomplish this vision, Vatsky offers a refreshingly open-ended and easy to adapt tour planning template and, along with some elegant examples, shows how with imagination and sensitivity to participant needs it can be adapted in support of a wide diversity of audiences including children, adults and special populations. This is a lovely book whose author cares deeply about how educators make new knowledge exiting and how museum audiences learn to make and own their cultural histories.

About the Author

A lifelong educator, Sharon Vatsky's experience includes a decade as Curator of Education at the Queens Museum and more than twenty years at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, most recently as Director of Visitor Engagement. She has conducted workshops for teachers, and museum educators in the U.S. and internationally and taught graduate level courses in Museum Education at the City University of New York, Teachers College, Columbia University and New York University's Graduate Program in Museum Studies as well as undergraduate courses in drawing, painting, design and art history and arts education. Her first book, Museum Gallery Activities: A Handbook was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2018.