Fourteenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

In 2021, following a year of protests sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the docent corps at the Orlando Museum of Art (OMA) engaged in a 7-week study group focused on the role of US museums in the fight for equity and social justice. While museum scholars like Porchia Moore have written about the need to retrain docents to address DEAI, materials specific to training these visitor-facing volunteers remain decentralized, elusive, and in need of continual updating to reflect relevant community-specific concerns. This paper reflects on the lessons learned from this study group and offer tools that may be implemented by other institutions like OMA, an art museum with a limited operating budget that serves one of the nation’s most ethnically diverse mid-size, urban communities. Recognizing the positionality of our mostly white, female, and older docents, OMA education staff envisioned this training as an opportunity to build cultural competency and foster empathy. While the pandemic stalled OMA’s robust program of onsite school learning trips, it also presented the opportunity to critically reflect on our praxis, ultimately leading to more inclusive museum education initiatives. Though solution-oriented, this paper resists positivism by foregrounding the shortcomings of this study group, pitfalls that other practitioners may heed.