Hello! My name is Jocelyn Yang and I am an art educator currently teaching for Rubin Museum of Art’s PS 11 after school program.
After years of working for art fairs and galleries, where I was serving mostly the top five percent of the population, I decided to change my career to become a museum educator because I believe art is for everyone. However, when I was working for family and teen programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an intern, I noticed that a great in-house program still had difficulty attracting everyone due to geographic, time and financial constraints. For some popular programs like the Toddler Storytime, participants often had to show up an hour earlier to ensure a spot, making it more likely to attract the people living nearby.
As a museum educator, I constantly think about how we can better serve the communities underserved in art education, especially during the time of widening gaps in the public education system. Considering the factors that influence museum attendance previously mentioned, I thought of my experiences helping with Math and Mandalas Program at the Rubin Museum of Art. In one partnership that I helped with in 2016, a high schooler who began the session with low self-confidence in art making for the lack of art classes in her school finally took pride in her finished mandala. “I thought I was going to mess up but it actually turned out fine- I guess it’s just like life,” she said.
Her reflection left a deep impression on me as it clearly addressed how empowering arts education can be. I also realized that by bringing resources to where people are museums could learn about their needs and concerns directly. In other words, museum-school partnerships at least enable exposure to arts education at schools that do not offer any or regular art classes. A multi-session residency program like Math and Mandalas is possible to reach out to more underserved communities with its short time frame. However, little is found about multi-session residency programs, while many studies showed positive impact of project-based and semester-long residency programs. So I want to explore what participants, including students and school teachers, learned from their participation in Math and Mandalas. I hope this study will offer a deeper understanding about their needs to help museum educators design a school partnership program that can make art accessible to a wider audience, particularly the underserved communities.
