The Museum Questions blog is dedicated to pondering museums, their role in our world, and how museum and arts professionals can better meet current challenges in a thoughtful, reflective way. Interested in contributing or collaborating on a post? Please email me at rebeccashulman@museumquestions.com.
Museum Questions Consulting
I help museums and arts organizations do important work better and more thoughtfully by asking good questions and providing the thought partnership you need to build capacity and develop new resources.
Consulting includes:
Reflective Practice Workshop: Training in building, evaluating, and improving programs. This workshop introduces your team to a program planning strategy that incorporates goal-setting, program design, evaluation, and ongoing reflection and improvement.
Inquiry Workshop: Training in asking good questions, listening, and meaning making with individuals of all ages. During this workshop, educators or team leaders learn to craft provocative questions that move a conversation forward, listen to participants in a meaningful way, make connections between different ideas and responses, and facilitate meaningful exploration of objects and ideas. This workshop can be tailored to the needs of museum educators, teachers, and administrators interested in facilitating productive conversations.
Strategic Planning: Engaging stakeholders collaboratively in creating a compelling plan. Stretegic Planning can be institution-wide or focused on a specfic challenge, project or department. We will identify the questions that need to be addressed, and then do the work of addressing them in a way that will move your team and project forward.
Rebecca is an expert at drilling down, using questions to take teams to a place of clarity and impact. Through our work with Museum Questions Consulting, we were able to clarify the vision we had and craft a rubber-meets-road plan to operationalize that vision right away. – Tracy Truels, former Director of Learning and Engagement, Oklahoma City Museum of Art
Curriculum and Education Program Development. I can help you create high-quality programs and resources. This may include written resources that connect audiences with your collections and exhibitions, or other areas of learning; audience research; identifying program outcomes; program design; and/or development of evaluation tools and plans for use in-house.
Rebecca is a dynamic and insightful museum leader, with experience working in a variety of art, history and children’s museum settings. I worked with her closely when she was hired to produce an educator’s guide to accompany the Anne Frank Center’s Sapling Project. Her work on that project was exemplary, treating the sensitive topics within Anne Frank’s diary with care and compassion, while providing teachers with a rich classroom resource, containing thoughtful, well-researched content that could be taught as stand-alone lessons, or put together to form a more in-depth unit of study. As a consultant, she is communicative and engaging to work with, and provides high quality educational content. I recommend her work very highly! – Hilary Eddy Stipelman, former Director of Outreach & Exhibitions, Anne Frank Center USA
Have other projects in mind? Please reach out – I love a new challenge!
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About Rebecca Shulman
I have over 20 years of experience as a museum professional, working both within museums and as a consultant. Most recently I served as Founding Director of the Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum in Peoria, Illinois. Prior to that I worked as Head of Education at the Noguchi Museum, and Senior Manager of Learning Through Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. While at the Guggenheim Museum I wrote a book, Looking at Art in the Classroom.
Over the years, I have had the privilege to learn many things from Rebecca – from the power of asking good questions and active listening to being open to being wrong and welcoming new perspectives. Her equanimity, rigor, and thoughtfulness improve every project. I highly recommend her partnership. – Miriam Bader, former Director of Education, Lower East Side Tenement Museum
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