Inside Out: Starting Social Justice Within
Anne Kindseth, School Programs Manager, Crow Collection of Asian Art; Carolyn Armbruster, Educator Programs Manager, Crow Collection of Asian Art; Amelia M. Kraehe, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of North Texas
Over the last few years, conversations about racial injustice, other forms of social inequity, and remaking the art museum into a more inclusive institution have filled our social media feeds. For us, Anne and Carolyn, counter-narratives by Visitors of Color, discussions from the Incluseum and Museum Hue, and videos of Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole’s 2015 American Alliance of Museums keynote address and Mike Murawski’s 2016 MuseumNext address were calls to action. These conversations inspired (and continue to inspire) us to create collaborative reflection within our museum. For the past year, we’ve sought to empower all staff members to recognize and respond to inequities and worked to make our museum a more inclusive environment for visitors as well as staff.
Initial (Mis)steps towards Inclusion
The Crow Collection of Asian Art is located in the multicultural urban arts district of Dallas, Texas. The museum’s permanent collection features works of art from countries including China, India, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Cambodia. The museum staff is relatively diverse when compared to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s 2015 Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey. We are comprised of approximately 61% non-Hispanic whites (v. 72% in the Mellon survey), 14.6% Asians, 12.2% Hispanics, 7.3% Blacks, and 4.9% people of two or more races (meaning 39% minority versus 28% in the Mellon survey).
As museum educators, we value teaching with a collection that gives prominence to arts and cultures that are not as recognized and are often misunderstood in this country. At the same time, we recognize a certain tension between the works of art we teach and our personal identities. Being white, we wonder about being entrusted with educating others about art from cultures to which we do not belong. This generative kind of wondering opens a space in which we intentionally investigate how we can better understand issues of race, elitism, power, and privilege embedded in relationships between us, the museum visitors, and the artworks in a museum of Asian art.
In early 2016, we began to tackle these tensions by flying two consultants to Dallas. They provided multiculturalism training to the education staff, both program managers and paid Gallery Educators. Additionally, we decided to add an all-staff training while these experts were in town. Our inexperience in this arena paired with resource limitations led us to schedule this training for only one hour. This short duration proved to be both a misstep and an opportunity. Attempting to tackle the topics of privilege, race, oppression, and appropriation with approximately forty staff members through a lightning session ignited misunderstandings, hurt, and tension. This misstep, however, opened a staff-wide conversation that the museum could simply not leave unfinished. We realized that, in spite of our strong desire as museum educators to focus our work on social change within the community, our most pressing work was actually internal.
Before any museum can engage in outward-facing social justice work, it must be mindful of how its current practices may or may not reinforce social inequity. To accomplish this, museum staff first need the education necessary to understand their own privileges and biases. To affect change outside the museum, one must begin within the museum.
Following our first training, the staff created an interdepartmental Multiculturalism, Inclusion, and Compassion Committee. The work of this committee builds upon a museum-wide initiative to make the Crow Collection a compassionate workplace. Working on compassion helped us start to better understand each other’s circumstances and experiences, laying the foundation for a productive study of tougher subjects such as privilege and bias.
Guided by a belief that any museum interested in inclusion and equity must first begin with internal self-examination, the Committee successfully advocated for funds to be allocated for additional staff training. The committee then slowly and deliberately determined the best direction for future training. We concluded that the success of this sensitive work at the Crow Collection: 1) depended on the trainer’s ability to build trust with our staff, which for us necessitated a multiple session format, 2) relied on the trainer understanding the local context in which our institution operates, and 3) required that the trainer create an environment in which staff felt as safe as possible while exploring content that often challenged their very identity. For the Crow Collection, Dr. Amelia (Amy) Kraehe, Assistant Professor of Art Education at the nearby University of North Texas, was the ideal fit.
Sustaining Difficult Dialogues
A “one-size-fits-all” approach to professional development often fails to have a lasting impact because it is too abstract and removed from the local setting. Something different was needed here. So before I, Amy, developed any content for the four-part staff training, I learned about the people and the culture of this particular museum and the communities it served. What had brought about this recent interest in multiculturalism and inclusion? What kinds of supports would enable staff to sustain difficult dialogues and transform their practices? I had to answer these questions in order to design learning opportunities that are internally persuasive and culturally relevant to this staff.
To do so, I made several site visits before and between sessions. Anne and Carolyn educated me about the history of the Crow Collection, its education department, and the working environment within the museum. I attended one of Carolyn’s teacher workshops and spent time chatting with Gallery Educators, the visitor services staff, and personnel who run the museum store. These “frontline” staff talked to me about their responsibilities and shared stories about racialized encounters that they felt unprepared to navigate. They showed me how visitor data are collected, including the awkward task of ascribing demographic categories to museum guests while greeting them. To bring everyone’s concerns into full view, Carolyn, Anne, and I regularly solicited questions and input from the staff (see Figure 2). This collaborative approach enabled me to do site-specific planning for the series.
The primary goal for this series was to grow the professional capacities of the Crow Collection staff so that the museum would be able to sustain its efforts at multiculturalism and inclusion. Since they had already launched a museum-wide initiative around compassion, this provided a natural point of entry for more critical reflective dialogues. Recognizing and honoring participants’ knowledge and experiences are fundamental principles of my pedagogic practice. By moving from compassion to social justice, I hoped everyone would be able to enter into unfamiliar discourses with greater ease and with less resistance to new knowledge that challenged their preconceptions. After reading the Dalai Lama’s teaching on compassion (see also Lampert, 2005), interdepartmental groups were asked to draw their vision for compassion-oriented conversations, focusing on what such interactions would look and feel like (see Figure 3a & 3b). This visual reflection became the basis of our guiding framework for difficult dialogues. It was my hope that an internally generated framework would garner greater personal investment from everyone and be more durable because of its resonance with existing institutional mores.
The four sessions were designed to build from compassion to equity by providing key concepts and vocabulary, illustrative real-world case studies, and opportunities for authentic dialogue. In the first two sessions, we defined and discussed implicit bias, cognitive dissonance, microaggression, privilege, oppression, equality, equity, and inclusion (Adams & Bell, 2016; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012; Sue, 2010). But we also covered terrain that was more specific to this particular context. For instance, we discussed the meanings imbued in the term Asian, and we watched videos that centered Asian and Asian American voices, such as #thisis2016, a visual counter-narrative in which Asian Americans confront racial microaggression and oppression. The series culminated in an equity audit exercise where each department assessed its record of inclusion based on how their internal and external practices corresponded with six different lenses for equity. These lenses are depicted in Figure 4. Colleagues from other departments then offered questions and strategies, and many participants took notes on possible next steps (see Figure 5).
Looking back, one of the greatest challenges in the series was addressing the concerns of staff with widely varying roles, responsibilities, and educational backgrounds: from visitor services to development and marketing, education to curatorial, leadership to retail. It seems that even after four two-hour sessions we still could have used additional time to map out priorities for inclusion in a systematic manner. With more time, I would also distinguish between issues of inclusion within the workplace and inclusion with respect to diverse museum visitors. Although related, these are distinct concerns that pose different kinds of challenges that require their own solutions. But such is the nature of both learning and change — the work is never done.
Effects on Teaching
Over a year ago, we, Anne and Carolyn, decided to tackle the tensions we felt in our teaching, and now, thanks in large part to Amy’s trainings, we’re starting to see results. After spending eight hours in Dr. Kraehe’s all-staff trainings, our paid Gallery Educators are now reporting being more aware of their own privilege and how it affects their interactions with students. We are beginning to see simple but significant shifts in our educators’ language and tone. Additionally, educators are thinking more deeply about how object selection and information shared can reinforce or combat privilege and bias on tours. One educator said,
I am more careful to recognize that artworks have meaning that isn’t just attached to the museum, but also embedded in the race and class structures that exist outside. I have found myself using more empathy exercises, encouraging students to better understand who is creating the artwork and how these people may feel they belong in the world.
Gallery Educator Shoshana McIntosh reflected that Amy’s teaching itself inspired her to bring conversations about cultural difference into her gallery teaching:
Amy’s teaching style helped me consider the ways in which I can respond to comments that bring to light the students’ ignorance of cultures not their own. Amy never declared anyone right or wrong, but rather asked carefully crafted questions to help us explore not only answers and responses to our wonderings but also our stories behind our comments and questions.
The trainings also empowered educators newer to gallery teaching such as Kiara Hearn:
When we began this journey, I certainly had some apprehensions. As a woman of color from a very humble background, I often felt (and sometimes still do feel) that the museum world is not a place where I belong. I was able to experience firsthand just how encouraging it is to find a face similar to my own in the museum education world with Dr. Kraehe. I have taken away from this experience a newfound awareness of the fact that I serve as a bridge for many of our underserved students into this new world of Asian Art. I stand taller and more confident with this new sense of belonging and do my best to do my part in easing that burden of belonging for my students.
At the programmatic level, the education team is also standing taller, with a newfound fervor for access and equity. Following these staff-wide trainings, we find ourselves equipped with a deeper understanding of how we can affect change in the community and better positioned to do so with the increased support from staff members across all departments.
Museum-Wide Shifts
“We need to be more inclusive through our language, our marketing materials, and at events. We need to be accessible to more — to mothers with young children, to the elderly, to those who speak other languages.” — Development Team
In Fall 2015, we, Anne and Carolyn, set out to explore a tension we felt in teaching works of art from cultures to which we do not belong. A little over a year later, we find ourselves working at an institution where people across departments are more mindful of the importance of equity and inclusion in their own work at the museum. Post-training surveys revealed that most of our colleagues are reporting shifts in their approach to their work, to each other, and to the work of the museum as a whole.
Changes to how staff approach their work cuts across all departments. One Visitor Services representative entered the trainings wondering why all museum staff needed to have these conversations. Now she is readily providing examples of microaggression in the galleries and seeking advice on how to combat them. A Development staff member shared that, “In my daily work, I pay close attention to the language I use in communications to our members. I ask: Are we being inclusive?” and a member of Curatorial talked about how the theories he learned will improve his work.
Though this journey began with the education department, it ended up being something the whole staff went through together. A staff member from the museum store shared, “[These trainings] helped me understand the people I work with, and in some cases really appreciate how they do what they do.” Shared experience and increased awareness of what colleagues do has made us a stronger staff, better equipped to make the changes necessary to make the most inclusive, equitable Crow Collection possible.
Emboldened by these shared trainings, staff members are now more freely identifying areas of improvement outside their own department. An Operations team member shared an idea for improvement that would typically come from the Curatorial or Education Departments: “include different languages so that people can read info regarding art better.” A Collections staff member now feels, “more mindful when looking at the audience visiting the museum,” and a staff member in Development now believes that, “every aspect of our work should be evaluated through the multiculturalism lens. We can be leaders in this area.”
While we are thrilled about the progression of these conversations, we are not wearing rose-colored glasses. Moments of triumph are often punctuated by those of frustration. Several managers were not able to attend all the trainings, one staff member said this affected their work “not at all,” we still hear whispers from people who think these trainings weren’t worth their time, and the educators still play the primary role in advocating for continued training. There is still work to do. We remain committed, and we persist.
A member of our operations team said, “knowledge without application is useless.” As a team, we’ve already started to apply what we’ve learned to our work. We’ve opened important interdepartmental conversations about issues big and small(er) — mission, audience, languages in the galleries, and appropriate museum partners. This spring, Amy will provide additional trainings for our Gallery Educators and Visitor Services Representatives, and the Multiculturalism, Inclusion, and Compassion Committee will continue to determine how to apply our new knowledge and sustain the conversation.
Given the current social and political situation in the United States, we believe that issues of difference, inclusion, and equity can no longer go unaddressed by museums. Museums are poised to be leaders in the charge towards more socially just communities, but the work must first begin within. And sometimes, museum educators must be the ones to get the ball rolling.
Anne Kindseth
Anne Kindseth is the School Programs Manager at the Crow Collection of Asian Art, where she oversees project-based school partnerships and programs that connect students with practicing artists, and enjoys working in a department that encourages dreamers to dream. She has worked in museums across the country, holds a MA in museum studies and art history from the University of Southern California, and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Carolyn Armbruster
Carolyn Armbruster is the Educator Programs Manager at the Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas. She has a Masters in Teaching in Museum Education from The George Washington University and worked at several different DC museums. She currently oversees educator professional development and gallery teaching at the Crow Collection.
Amelia Kraehe
Amelia (Amy) Kraehe, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on arts equity, justice-oriented professional development, and urban art education. She has published numerous articles in national and international journals and is the Associate Editor of the journal Art Education. She is co-editor of two forthcoming books: The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education and Pedagogies in the Flesh: Case Studies on the Embodiment of Sociocultural Differences in Education (Palgrave-Macmillan).
Cited References
Adams, M., & Bell, L. A. (Eds.). (2016). Teaching for diversity and social justice: A sourcebook (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Lampert, K. (2005). Traditions of compassion: From religious duty to social activism. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sensoy, O., & DiAngelo, R. (2012). Is everyone really equal? An introduction to key concepts in social justice education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggression in everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual orientation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Further Reading
Acuff, J. B., & Evans, L. (Eds.). (2014). Multiculturalism in art museums today. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Sandell, R., & Nightingale, E. (Eds.). (2012). Museums, equality, and social justice. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
