Appendix C

Report on
International Conference on Museum Education
Jane Safer, Country Director for Hungary
Budapest
October 25-27, 1999

This landmark conference brought together 200 museum educators and teachers from all over Hungary. The Fund was pleased to have been instrumental in its organization.

Traditionally in Europe, museums have been perceived primarily as academic institutions, temples of high art for the initiated. In Central and Eastern Europe, there was the additional burden of the heavy hand of Soviet propaganda that had been applied to museum education. The concept of museums as centers of public education - is relatively new and had not been embraced by most of the leadership of museums in Hungary, nor by Ministries of Culture or Education.

The Fund has, since 1994, worked with museum leaders who saw education of the public as central to the role of museums. Among these are members of The Fund’s Hungarian Advisory Board: Péter Deme, head of Public Affairs for the National Museum and Vice-President of the Hungarian Museum Association; and Geza Buzinkay, former Director of the Budapest History Museum. The Fund has consistently represented these views to the Ministry of Culture, has brought consultants to work with individual museums and has encouraged sharing of experience among museum educators.

It was, therefore, with pleasure that The Fund accepted the invitation to be co-organizer of this conference, with the Pulsky Association of Hungarian Museums and the Hungarian Environmental Education Association. Co-directors in Hungary, Amy Módly and Linda Vadász served on the steering committee that planned and implemented the conference. It is particularly significant that the principal funders of the conference were the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage and the Ministry of Education, neither of which had ever recognized museum education as a field, much less encouraged it. The Fund sponsored four of the six international guests at the conference.

The overall mission of the conference was to begin to establish the perspective of public education as an integral part of the museum: for museum professionals, schoolteachers, training institutions, the Ministries of Culture and of Education, and the museum-going public.

Within this mission, objectives included:

  • assessing the current state of museum education and the relationship between museums and schools;
  • surveying museum education practices from abroad that might be worthy of emulation;
  • bringing together museum educators and school-teachers to present their experiences and develop recommendations for the future.

    Three Fund consultants gave presentations about current museum practices in the United States.

  • Honee Hess, Director of Education for the Worcester Art Museum spoke about Best Practices in Museum Education. This talk focused on innovative partnerships between the museum and local public school classes.
  • Deborah Ziska, Press and Public Information Officer, National Gallery (Washington, D.C.) spoke about how American museums build community: It is More than What is on the Walls. She reported on a recent survey showing the extraordinary increase of attendance at American museums and detailed the varied strategies museums use to draw visitors, with numerous examples from the National Gallery.
    • Paxton Barnes, Exhibition Developer, the Bronx Zoo (New York) spoke about Planning Exhibits to Meet Educational Goals. This talk looked at the development of Congo, a groundbreaking exhibit recently opened at the Bronx Zoo. The presentation detailed how educational objectives were integrated into every stage of the planning and implementation of this complex and innovative exhibit.

    The opening session of the conference addressed general issues of the importance of education in museums and the relationship between schools and museums. It was gratifying to see senior representatives from the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Education, the U.S. Embassy and the education community and directors of museums at this session. Fund Country Director for Hungary, Jane Safer, spoke at this session about Lessons for a New Century: Recent Findings about the Impact of Arts Education. This talk focused on a just-published report with in-depth research decisively documenting the impact of arts education, especially on at-risk children. Péter Deme, Fund Advisor, spoke about Museums and Society Today.

    Amy Módly, Co-Director in Hungary, was moderator for the session Museum Education in Europe and the United States, in which the three Fund consultants spoke, as well as Johanna Berg of the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs and Wim Van de Weiden, Director of the Museum of Natural History, Leiden (The Netherlands).

    Two half-day workshops followed, one entitled: Museum Exhibitions and the School Curriculum and the second devoted to workshops focusing on different age groups in the museum.

    The Fund consultants were impressed by the level of expertise and innovation of many of the Hungarian museum education programs. This was the first time that schoolteachers and museum educators had met together and we were impressed by the genuine depth of interest that they showed in continuing to work together. It was clear that the participants would be implementing many of the ideas that were presented and that the dialogue between museum educators and schoolteachers would continue. Recommendations for future activities were concrete and practical, and plans are already underway for future museum education conferences focusing on targeted subjects.