At 10:10 AM 1/27/99 -0800, you wrote:
>Hi, Does anyone have information about or opinions of the relative merits
>of Distance Education programs in Museum Studies? I have worked in a small
>museum for 9 years and am thinking of going back for a second MA (my first
>was in American history) but cannot relocate. There are no Museum Studies
>programs in the Chicago area

I'm sure there is a university in the Chicago area that has a graduate
general education program.  Granted it will be for classroom teachers but
you can probably get out of the M.Ed. without student teaching if you
explain to the dean that you are a museum person.  And even if you do have
to student teach, it's good experience to be on "the other side of the
desk" for a time.

The educational theory will all be the same and the extra work in the
classrooms is emensely beneficial because you will have to work with kids
in a school classroom and deal with the limitations of the classroom as a
museum educator.  This is critical information to know and understand when
working in a museum ed program.  I've seen far too many good museum ed
programs that are almost completely useless because the museum educators
who prepared them did not understand what the needs and abilties of a
classroom teacher are.  Most of it was due to the follow-up activities that
were either over the teacher's heads in subject matter and thus they
couldn't explain the lessons to their students, required materials and
activities that were not available or feasible in a classroom or just took
too long to do.  Nature lessons that need a field or patch of woods are no
good in a city.         Art activties that require lots of clean-up and set-up or
special materials are impossible to do in a school with no extra rooms to
use or art teacher to order special supplies.

A traditional ed grad program will also help you understand how state
curriculums work and what pressures teachers are to teach these
curriculums.  Any outside info that teachers can use with minimal effort on
their part are always greatly appreciated.  If you know what the teachers
have to teach and how they have to teach it, you can look at your museum
program and create curriculum that teachers can use.  A unit on modern art
for 5th graders is useless to a teacher who has to teach Renaissance
history.  A unit on how lifestyles and social attitudes are reflected
through art in the Renaissance for 5th graders would be perfect.

Lastly, a general ed program will give you experience and knoweldge of how
to teach all subjects, not just the one your museum is about.  Curriculums
these days are "multi-disciplinary", meaing that lessons generally don't
focus on one subject but incorporate several subjects.  The book "Island of
the Blue Dolphins" can be used not only for reading/language arts but for
science math and history.  Learning how to incorporate more than one
subject area in a lesson is a valuable skill because the more SOLs a
teacher can cover in a lesson, the easier her job is.

Good luck!

Deb



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