Museum Practice in Folklore Studies (a.k.a. Museum Methods): Spring 2024

There are too many things needing to be written about. Many of them are grim. Here I want to begin the work week with positivity.

This past semester, I taught one wholly new graduate course and one substantively new undergraduate course. I do not yet have confirmation from course evaluations, but I think that they both turned out well. I will discuss the graduate course separately. The undergraduate course, which covered material that is very familiar to me, was FOLK-F 406 Museum Practice in Folklore Studies (a.k.a. ANTH-A 405 Museum Methods). ANTH-A 405 has been on the books for decades but has been very rarely offered. The parallel course in FOLK was created by me prior to the pandemic, but it was only this semester that I could offer first it. This course was thus substantively new, although I drew in presenting it on past museums courses that I have taught.

As I taught these two courses jointly, I was very pleased that the two sections (ANTH and FOLK) attracted equal numbers of students. Many the participants were major or minor students in both departments, thus they—like me—have a foot in both fields and an interest in their points of intersection. Museum ethnography is one of those points of intersection. This class met no general education requirements. Students were there because they wanted to learn the material and that made for a wonderful course. In twenty years on the Indiana University faculty, I have never taught a course that was comprised mainly of majors or minors in my fields. What a joy that was! Even the students distracted by the end of their senior year and their rapidly approaching graduation, were a pleasure to engage with each week. It is gratifying that a significant proportion of the students in the course were already gaining museum experiences in concurrent museum practicum and that many are now moving on to further work in museums or in museums-related graduate programs.

As I got acquainted with the students and rose to their level, the course changed as it went. As planned, the course included museum work basics and independent research with museum collections objects, but the final course session on critical practices in museum work and museum studies shifted considerably. The topics planned remained the same, but my method moved from lecture and lecture-discussion to freer discussion of key news stories about important or exemplary developments in the present-day museum work. Many of these came from the New York Times, which has been doing particularly good work related to museums in recent months. These were in areas such as repatriation and restoration, digital practices, heritage politics, museum censorship, the finances of museums, community consultation, museum audiences/visitorship, and museums and social change. It was a pleasure to discuss and debate the big issues with these students. They arrived in the course ready and able to engage and were nearly all eager to do so. I am proud of them and thankful for the opportunity to study and learn with them. I wish all of them well and I congratulate the graduating seniors among them.