Art museum docents

Since we were just at the Art Institute last week and with the recent docent brouhaha, I'd though I'd chime in here with some of my thoughts. They might shed a little light in what it turning out to be a contentions argument.

I have gone to my fair share of field trips led by docents over the years at the Art Institute (and other museums for that matter... I have something to compare with). Field trips where we (other families as well as ours) registered as a homeschooling group and where our demographics were less than typical due to age and ethnicity. Large, adoptive, homeschooling families don't fit neatly into very many boxes. The H-S family mom was usually in charge of organizing these field trips which usually coordinated with whatever period of history we were studying. We had a very narrow niche of art that we were usually interested in. (And without the H-S family mom, the P. family mom and I realized that we are not terribly good at organizing things for ourselves.) 

We quickly learned that getting the name of a good docent was key to the success of our field trip. Before we learned this little bit of information we had some... not spectacular... docents. The not spectacular ones were completely stymied by all of our non-conformity and it was clear in the way they spoke to our children (and sometimes to the adults) that they did not believe our children could know anything. A fact which some of our older children were pretty darn quick to pick up on and the adults had to head off outright mutiny more than once. This baffled me because I think our families did a pretty darn good job of preparing our children for a field trip ahead of time so they could appreciate what they were seeing. Maybe we did too good of a job because it was clear that some of the docents, when they happened to share incorrect information, didn't appreciate being corrected. Sometimes the main memory of a field trip was the incompetence/rudeness of the docent, which was not really why we went to the art museum in the first place.

When we did hit on a docent who could manage to set aside her preconceptions about homeschooling, it was a good thing and we (okay, the H-S Family mom) got her name so we could request her specifically the next time we came. This didn't always work, but it helped considerably. 

So when the announcement about ending the docent program was announced, I'll admit my first thought was, "Thank goodness!" I always wondered how many of the docents managed to navigate classrooms of children if those docents had difficulty with just our families. If my older children were annoyed and irritated by how they were treated, what would it be like for a child who didn't come from a background similar to the docents? I never felt comfortable with it all. Sure there were a few good ones who could speak to our children as if they had brains, but they were rare. It became a thing among us moms to wonder what we were going to be dealing with this time when we visited the museum. If it was a thing for white moms with mostly white children who were all well-prepared and (mostly) met preconceived norms, then it doesn't take much imagination to imagine it being a bigger thing for those who weren't. 

I'm not sad about the program's demise. I think a wider variety of people with a wider variety of experiences who can share the joys of discovering art with a wide variety of children is actually a good thing.