By Laura Donnelly-Smith
When GW alumna Emily Perreault, M.Ed.’10, learned in mid-July that she had received the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Kress Interpretive Fellowship, she had to take a moment to stop and exhale. She had been home in Washington, D.C., from a project at the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya for only a few weeks, and had been concerned that she might not find any positions in her field. And now she was being offered a chance to work at the Met.
“I was ecstatic,” she said. “I was really impressed by the staff who interviewed me, and the opportunity to work with them and with the collection at the Met—which is so diverse—is unparalleled. I’m really excited.”
The Kress Fellowship focuses on collaboration between curatorial and education departments at the museum. It’s awarded to young professionals in the museum education field, and involves developing tours, curriculum, docent trainings and online material for the museum’s younger visitors, including teenagers.
The news that she’d received the Kress Fellowship marked the end of several years of study, practical experience and collaborative projects that took Ms. Perreault from D.C. to Baltimore to Nairobi and back. But she hopes it’s only the beginning of a long career in museum education.
Museums for Everyone
After completing a bachelor’s degree in English literature and composition at the University of Florida, Ms. Perreault developed her interests in art and working with young people as an arts program director at Imagine Hope Community Public Charter School in D.C., and as a gallery educator at the National Portrait Gallery. When she was ready for graduate school, she considered only two options—GW’s Museum Education Program (MEP), in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and the Bank Street College of Education’s museum education program in New York. Ultimately, the decision to come to GW was easy, she said.
“GW has one of the oldest museum education programs in the country, with an unparalleled network,” Ms. Perreault explained. “It’s a cohort program and draws a really diverse set of people and skills.”
The GW program’s focus on museum accessibility and audience appealed to her too. “When I was directing an arts-based afterschool program, I saw how many of the kids had never been to a museum, even though D.C. has such a wealth of resources in that area. It was clear that the connection [between children and museums] needed to happen.”
“Accessibility,” in the museum world, means much more than simple physical access to buildings, explained Carol Stapp, who founded GW’s MEP in 1974. “When we talk about accessibility, it’s a bit broader than the term is generally understood. It’s beyond physical accessibility to emotional and psychological accessibility.”
In other words, accessibility means making people feel comfortable, welcome and eager to visit museums. And a focus on audience means that sometimes visitors and their needs must be considered before museum objects, rather than the other way around. “People aren’t always comfortable with collections or resources, so the museum educator is the voice for people in the museum,” Dr. Stapp said.
Ms. Perreault started GW’s Museum Education Program in summer 2009, as part of a cohort of about 15 students. In addition to their core courses, the students each participated in experiential placements at schools and museums in the D.C. area.
In one such placement, at Alice Deal Middle School in Friendship Heights, Ms. Perreault worked with a group of seventh graders in an ancient civilizations class. The students were part of a pilot group testing whether IB classes—International Baccalaureate, an educational program for motivated students—were feasible for middle-schoolers.
“These kids were high achievers, focused on getting the A,” Ms. Perreault explained. “But I wanted them to appreciate the process of learning, not just the product. We wanted them to look at objects in the museum and increase their comfort in talking about art. The ancient Egyptians were preparing for the afterlife—that’s their purpose in their art. I wanted the kids to make that connection: What are you preparing for in your life? What objects represent you?’”
While the Alice Deal students exceeded Ms. Perreault’s expectations in their ability to understand Egyptian art, they were still 12- and 13-year-olds, and engaging all 100 of them during a field trip to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore was no small feat. So she called on her GW classmates for help in acting as facilitators. Her classmates’ willingness to help out was one of the hallmarks of the GW MEP program, she said.
Lotte Lent, assistant director of the MEP, said the cohort system used in the program mimics the way students will work once they have museum positions. “The students get to know each other as students, and then as museum professionals, they collaborate all the time. This isn’t about competition or grades; it’s about collaboration to make collections accessible.”
Facing the Unknown
By the time Ms. Perreault graduated from the MEP in summer 2010, she was ready to go global. Her husband, Will, a program transitions specialist at DAI, an international development firm, had the opportunity to spend a year in Nairobi, Kenya, working on a USAID contract to build peace among various community groups and tribes after post-election violence rocked the country in late 2007 and early 2008. But working out the details of the move took time, and initially Ms. Perreault wasn’t sure it would happen at all.
“It was pretty challenging for me because we didn’t know until two weeks before that we were actually going,” she said. So while they waited in limbo for the move, Ms. Perreault started researching arts-based organizations and museums in Nairobi. A few weeks later, their plane touched down in Kenya and she hit the pavement, seeking a museum job.
“I went to a modern art museum first, and it turned out that it was closing,” she remembered. “Then I went to the National Museums of Kenya, which is a network kind of like the Smithsonian. I went to the public programs department, explained my history and the projects I’d done, and said I’m interested in learning about museum education here. They were actually looking for someone to work on arts and public programs at the anthropological museum.”
Though she was thrilled by her good luck, Ms. Perreault expected challenges—and she found them. While English and Swahili are both official languages in Kenya, most people speak primarily their local dialect—of which there are more than 40. And the Nairobi National Museum, which is government run, isn’t allowed to pay a salary to a non-Kenyan like Ms. Perreault; the jobs are reserved for citizens. So again she got creative.
The project she proposed to the museum would involve increasing local high school students’ access to art using the museum’s collections as the jumping-off point. “There is no arts education in primary schools in Kenya, and it’s only in a few select secondary schools,” she said. “So I wanted to work on increasing arts education access—that’s always my interest.”
By networking, she was able to find a private donor in Britain involved in the arts who was willing to provide initial funding for materials for the project, dubbed “Art Club.” Later, Ms. Perreault applied for and received a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) grant to cover the program.
As for the language barrier, Ms. Perreault studied Swahili on her own, and colleagues at the museum worked with her almost every afternoon during tea time to improve her language comprehension. Colleagues also often spoke in English when she was around—a gesture that touched Ms. Perreault deeply. “I learned so much there about the education system, the arts and the value of the arts, and I learned it all from Kenyans—I wasn’t working with expatriates,” she said.
The Art Club curriculum she developed covered 14 sessions, taught jointly by Ms. Perreault and artists from Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts, Nairobi’s only college-level fine arts training school. “We connected kids to Kenyan contemporary artists who have access to the museum,” she explained. “They developed their art skills, and we connected it to social issues in Kenya—corruption, entrepreneurship, design and innovation—and talked about how art can be productive, in fields like infrastructure and architecture.”
Many of Kenya’s art-related challenges exist in the United States too, she noted. “There are a lot of traditional views among parents—they don’t encourage the arts because they want their kids to go into medicine and engineering.”
Putting the Audience First
The project in Kenya also provided Ms. Perreault with useful lessons in collaboration that will benefit the work she’ll do at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall, she said. Working in a different culture forced her to slow down and focus on her colleagues’ and students’ experiences over her own.
“In Kenya, there’s not a culture of work speediness. That’s not a criticism; it’s just how they work. I had to adjust my own expectations, but that’s one of the beautiful things about living in a different cultural setting. It’s not about you or how you grew up—it’s about them.”
This attitude will serve Ms. Perreault well at the Met, Dr. Stapp said. “Museums have a lot of people who understand collections and research, and we need them. But we also need people who understand the audience.”
Ms. Lent said the Met is lucky to have Ms. Perreault. “She’s got the rigor, but also has the heart. The MEP is focused not so much on content as on people who are going to make a difference. I see Emily as someone who can continue that legacy of museum education.”
The Kress Fellowship starts in September and lasts one year; after that, Ms. Perreault hopes to work in a museum committed to community engagement and to increasing access for underserved audiences. Ultimately, she wants to open her own gallery space where the public can help develop the collections and children and teenagers can come to learn about art, history and the gallery business.
“I’ve learned how significant informal learning can be for kids,” she said. “It gives you freedom to meet them where they are.”