The book Guiding is a Profession: The museum guide in art and history museums, resulting from a research project involving the University of Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Van Gogh Museum, supported by Fund 21 and the Mondriaan Fund, has recently been published.

The book gives tools that museum educators and museum guides can use to design tours, an overview of the required competences and ways to further professionalise as a guide and educator. It summarises the results of the research project Museum guide: a profession in its own right.

Background

The research project focused on the professionalisation of museum guides in art museums and history museums. The first study resulted in two lists of potential learning outcomes of an educational tour in art museums and historical museums. The second study resulted in a list of competencies. The competencies are organised into four main areas of competence:

• Handling the group within the museum environment
• Communication skills
• Knowledge and pedagogy
• Professionalism

An article about this study, entitled "Competent museum guides: defining competencies for use in art and history museums", by Mark Schep, Carla van Boxtel and Julia Noordegraaf, was published in Museum Management and Curatorship and can be downloaded here. Based on the list of competencies, two tools were developed: a self-evaluation form for museum guides, and an observation form for museum educators. The third study examined how museum guides and educators perceive a post-observation conversation, using the self-evaluation of the guide as a starting point. This compared to conversations in which the observations of the educators are the starting point. Analysis of the interviews with all the participants showed that by using the self-evaluation as the starting point, the museum guide experienced more ownership during the conversation and the conversation became more equally balanced. In addition, the list of competencies served as a common language and helped to facilitate the discussion about the profession.

Further information

The book Guiding is a Profession and a range of the tools produced in the context of the research project are available at http://www.lkca.nl/artikelen/guiding-is-a-profession