Creating Meaning in Museums: Conversational Strategies for Guided Tours

This practical handbook is a proposal for transforming museum tours. The target audience is museum guides, docents and interpreters who are interested in facilitating conversations about seen and unseen meanings in artworks, objects, and artifacts. The goal is to engage visitors in meaning-oriented inquiry which involves "doing" and not just "viewing" creative work.

Grounded in whole to part learning theory and best teaching practices, each chapter includes a tour "vignette" written as a "you are there" experience. The vignettes--from different types of museums--show guides and docents using diverse strategies that invite readers to assume the role of guide and guest. Meaningful Museum Conversations: Strategies for Guiding Tours also offers an extensive Museum Guide Toolkit that aligns with inquiry thinking, and features recurring chapter sections that include Advice from Museum Guides and Adapting for Differences.

Claudia Cornett has been a docent for over twenty years and is currently a museum guide and historic interpreter at two museums. After earning a PhD in curriculum and instruction and community education from Miami University, she joined the faculty of Wittenberg University and taught courses on arts integration and arts-based communication for over two decades. Two of her previous textbooks are: Creating Meaning through Literature and the Arts, 5e (Pearson), and Comprehension First: Inquiry into Big Ideas using Important Questions (Routledge). She's also written other professional books and articles and does creative writing. During a wide-ranging consulting career, Claudia has presented hundreds of keynotes and professional development programs for school districts and arts organizations throughout the United States and Europe, and in Canada and Mexico. Her interest in applying creative approaches to museum guide work is rooted in a commitment to helping people create their own meanings and experience the joy of insight.