Week 2

This week my task was to consider a few questions that Keith sent me about my experience with the docents and write responses, some examples are:

"Did you see differences in the tours of docents with education backgrounds and those without and how did they compare in their ability to convey information?"

"Differences between the tours given by docents who had previous interest in Egypt and those who were assigned randomly to Egypt."

"How did the information given on the tours vary and do you think the docents were effective in teaching the subject?"

Considering these questions was  interesting and really got me thinking about museums as a source of education and how these docents may be the only link a person has to a certain subject and/ or inspire them to learn more. The overall impression I had was that docents are extremely important resources for the museum and that docents who aren't given a script (the Field does not give them a script) and don't create one for themselves tend to be more interesting because they keep the tour fresh and have more flexibility. I will continue working on questions this week and have just been told that Keith and I have been invited to participate in training for the new exhibit coming to the museum called "Opening the Vault: Mummies. February 17 - April 22, 2012 so we can observe what docents go through in order to become docents.