Week 5

This week was all about writing my impressions of the training and how the method of training shapes the way the docents interact with the public as well as how the exhibits educate. It seems to me that a good museum exhibit should be able to stand alone and be interesting and educational for the visitors but what I have seen while working with the docents is how incredibly vital they are to the educational experience. I must admit before this project I was one of those people who never went on tours and wanted to learn from the exhibit on my own but now I see how much I was missing out on by not utilizing the docents. Some docents like to facilitate, which is when they simply stand in the exhibit and make themselves available for questions, the best ones that I have observed find unobtrusive ways to share their knowledge, they more or less strike up a casual conversation that doesn't make the visitor feel as if they are listening to a rehearsed speech or that the docent is trying to reach some sort of "quota." The training I was able to observe helped me see how these docents learned to interact with visitors in this manner, I think the style of training the Field conducts is vital to the docent experience and I look forward to doing more writing about this and hopefully observing more trainings.