Museum Study is Pleased that Shannyn Palmer is Joining our Distinguished Faculty

Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, researcher and writer living and working on the Ancestral lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples in the place now known as Canberra, Australia. She has a PhD in History from the Australian National University and recently published her first book with Melbourne University Press, Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, which traces a history of colonisation in Central Australia from the perspective of Anangu who lived there.

She has over a decade of experience working in community engagement, facilitation and research with First Nations peoples and communities, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse communities and government and non-government organisations in the arts, cultural and cultural heritage sectors. Through this experience she has developed a rigorous approach to developing meaningful relationships and authentic engagement — the principles of deep engagement, genuine partnership, self-determination, two-way learning, co-creation and cultural safety underpin her practice.

Shannyn currently works as a consultant, helping cultural institutions to achieve best practice in community engagement and create meaningful collaborations. She is committed to the development of community-engaged practice as a pathway to enabling museums to connect with communities in ethical, meaningful, and empowering ways.

Shannyn will be leading the new course Foundations of Community Engagement: Building relationships for meaningful connection and collaboration which will run in April 2023.

2023 Schedule at Museum Study

Another year is concluding and we are grateful for the amazing Cultural professionals we got to spend it with from Australia, Barbados, Canada, England, Iran, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, Scotland, Switzerland, and the United States. Through the years we have had the pleasure of meeting cultural professionals from more than 30 countries who have brought their own perspective and experience to our professional development courses. Our preliminary 2023 schedule is now available with 19 courses so far and more to come. Contact us with any questions you have about our courses.

We are excited to be debuting a new course in April Foundations of Community Engagement: Building relationships for meaningful connection and collaboration. This course is designed to prompt thinking about why community engagement is important and to begin to develop a practical understanding of how to engage with people and communities in ethical, meaningful, and empowering ways. It draws from leading thought in community engaged practice to provide the necessary concepts, information, and practical tools to begin developing an approach to effective and meaningful community engagement. Foundations of Community Engagement will be led by Shannyn Palmer.

Those of you who have participated in our Decolonizing Museums in Practice course may want to consider taking Foundations of Community Engagement to continue the progress you have begun. If you plan to take Creating Exhibitions Through the Collective: Insight into Community Co-Curation course you might want to take Foundations of Community Engagement first.

First participants earn Completion of Introduction to the Agents of Deterioration

In July 2022 Museum Study debuted a new free self-paced course that you can start and finish any time you want, Introduction to the Agents of Deterioration. This course will help you understand the factors that can cause damage to collections and then inform the next step to develop strategies to preserve collections.

More than 150 people have accessed the course and we just had our first participants earn the electronic badge of completion, demonstrating their success at understanding what can damage our collections. Congratulations to them in their efforts to preserve heritage collections.

Free Webinars Coming in 2023

July 2022 we held our first free webinar Overview of Interpretive Exhibit Evaluation. The interest was greater than we expected so we have decided to offer more free webinars in 2023. Initially our webinars will be on topics related to the courses we offer and be presented by our instructors. They may be an introduction to a course topic, or a deep dive in to one of many topics covered in our courses. The webinars will give you a taste of what our courses are about and an opportunity to ask questions.

The first will be in February by Saul Sopoci Drake related to Traveling Exhibitions. The second will also be in February by Helen Wong Smith on Cultural Competency. There will be more information about these and other webinars coming soon on our website. Watch for an announcement. If you are interested in joining one of our webinars email us at Webinar@MuseumStudy.com and let us know which webinar you would like to attend.

Looking for New instructors and New Courses

We are always looking for new instructors and new course ideas. If you have a subject you think would work well as an online course, please let us know by emailing us at Contact@MuseumStudy.com

Here are some topics we are looking to find instructors to lead:

 Emergency Management
Rights & Reproductions
Rematriation
Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Public Relations
Virtual Exhibits 
Collecting Oral Histories
DEAI
Strategic Planning
Governance
Care and Management of Archives
Collection Management
Deaccessioning
Audience Insight