At a recent American Alliance for Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) conference I attended, many presenters expressed a lack of interest by their Education Departments to engage with the museum.  I hope this course demonstrates the benefits of having students from across disciplines, including ones in teacher preparation programs learn in museum settings.  Theories on how people learn need to cross contexts for students to best understand how place influences learning.  Students across all fields of study metacognate on their own learning processes when confronted with theory that’s applied to a real world setting and asked to reflect on how the course content relates to them as learners.  Shouldn’t students have a chance to better understand the complexities of real-world community settings, while at the same time maintaining a responsibility to contribute to a community partner’s need.  What better way to work toward social change than to engage in mutually beneficial collaborations.

Students in the ED210 course completed several tangible outcomes that fulfill needs of both community partners in this CBL course: the elementary school and the FAC Museum.

Course contributions to the Elementary classroom:

• Flooding the writer’s workshop time with adults to work one on one with students to improve their writing.
• Creating tours at the museum that linked to the students’ classrooms through common vocabulary and skill building.
• Free transportation and a free field trip for all involved to the museum, which normally would have cost the three classes over $450.
• Free passes for up to four adults (children under 12 are always free) so that students could bring their families and friends back to see their videos in the museum.

Course contributions to the Museum:

• Five auras developed by CC students as they explored how to use the technology to teach the elements and principles of art to visitors.
• Elementary student auras that connect to works often on display in the museum.
• Two auras connected to iconic works of art in the museum, one for John Sanger Sargent’s Elsie Palmer portrait, and one for Alan Houser’s Sacred Rain Arrow sculpture.
• Education opportunity for docents to think through specific educational theories and how they relate to the museum context.
• Possible assessment tool to adapt to future tours with similar goals
• Five interactive lessons for tours that would each take approximately 25 minutes and could be combined with other lessons to create longer tours.
• Additional projects that present possible education tools for the museum to develop in the future, such as sketchbooks for visitors to use, which can be done without writing tools by using technology.

Statements from course evaluations:

• Strengths of the class include “meaningful community engagement, significant final products, overall learning through doing.”
• “We got to use the things we were learning about in class in the real world, which cemented my understanding of the material.”
• “CBL courses are the best. This is the third CBL I’ve taken and they’ve been my three favorite classes.  Getting to interact with the community and make a significant contribution to the city we live in makes learning so much more engaging and meaningful.”