Dear List administrator,

Can you please distribute this job announcement to the list?  Thank you!

K Palich

Spring 2014 Part-Time Education Position

Sandy Spring Museum

17901 Bentley Road

Sandy Spring, Maryland 20860

(301) 774-0022

http://www.sandyspringmuseum.org

Museum Education and Public Programming Staff

Positions available: 2

Duration: January 15, 2014-June 2014

Stipend: $1,500 stipend

Hours: 15-20 hours a week; days and hours vary

Supervisor: Kelly Palich, Education and Outreach Coordinator

About Sandy Spring Museum:

“The Sandy Spring Museum provides a place where people can develop meaningful connections by exploring community history through the visual, literary and performing arts.”

Sandy Spring Museum, founded in 1980, is a community-based history museum interpreting a unique rural Maryland community.  Founded by Quakers in the 1720s, Sandy Spring became the center of a network of rural farming villages.  Originally slave owners and tobacco planters, Sandy Spring Quakers embraced abolition in the late 18^th century, freed enslaved people between 1780 and 1815, and broke up the plantations into family farms, many of which went to newly-free African-Americans.  

The turn away from slavery and tobacco spurred innovations in agricultural methods, commerce, civic life, and business, and a thriving, progressive, bi-racial community of farmers and rural villages that lasted into the second half of the 20^th century.  Since 1970, the community has become a suburban bedroom settlement serving both Baltimore and Washington, DC, but a great deal remains of the rural past, both in the built environment and in living memory.  Resources of oral history and material artifacts, working farms, and the continuing multi-racial community, remain to anchor and support both of these projects.  Research resources are also plentiful in the Museum archives and existing exhibits and displays.

The museum’s new strategic vision entails opening its historic collection to interpretation by cultural artists – visual, literary and performing – who will use the collection in the creation of new works of art; and addressing the rapidly diversifying community by broadening its concept of history to include the stories of all of the people who live in the Sandy Spring neighborhood, those whose ancestry dates back generations and those who have moved to the area more recently

Job Description:

Museum education staff will be responsible for the following:

1)      Museum Exploration Days: Staff will collaborate with the Education Coordinator to help plan and run three museum exploration days: January 20, February 17 and March 28, 2014.  These days are open to children grades K-8 on days off of school.  Pre-program tasks will include researching new games, crafts, activities and helping to create a schedule, preparing supplies and learning the history of the Sandy spring area.  During the program, staff will work one-on-one with campers and have the opportunity to run activities and games.  The programs will run from 8:30-4:30pm on scheduled days.

2)      Spring Break Camps: The staff will collaborate with the Education Director to help plan the Museum’s Hands-on-History Camp (March 24-28; April 14-18 2014).  Pre-camp tasks include researching new games/crafts/activities, helping create a schedule, preparing supplies, and learning the history of the area.  Staff will help create marketing materials for camps and distribute and recruit registrants.

3)      School Programs and Outreach: Staff will work with the Education Coordinator to help run scheduled field trips during the month of January.  Staff will help launch new program, Reinventing the Wheel, which incorporates both History and STEM Common Core practices.  Fieldtrips include both on-site museum tours and in-classroom outreach programs.  Staff will also help Education Coordinator recruit and train education volunteers at a Saturday Training Workshop.

4)      Social Media/Blogging: Staff will brainstorm unique ways to expand our museum audiences through social media – how do we educate digitally?  Staff will research our collections, programming and events and develop creative ways to spread the word through facebook, twitter, tumblr and blogging.

Product: As a final product, part time staff will produce a portfolio for each program/camp they develop, containing written descriptions of each program, including clear curriculum goals (if applicable), lesson/activity plans, and specific museum collections items appropriate to the programs. In addition, all documents should be saved and organized electronically.  Staff should also include a weekly journal or log recording completed tasks, lessons learned, challenges faced, and reflection on museum education in a community setting.

Please submit resume and cover letter to:

Kelly Palich

Education and Outreach Coordinator

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Kelly M. Palich

Education Outreach Coordinator

Sandy Spring Museum

17901 Bentley Road

Sandy Spring, MD 20860

(301) 774-0022 ext. 107

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