NEELY MCNULTY
Hood Foundation Curator of Education
Since the Hood Museum's doors opened in 1985, volunteer docents have worked with thousands of schoolchildren, families, and adults from our community. At any given time, docents need a working knowledge of every exhibition on view as well as familiarity with a range of engagement strategies. In the following interview excerpt, Calli Guion testifies to the docents' impact upon our practice. She first joined the docent team in 2012 following a career as an educator.
Neely McNulty [NM]: How would you describe the role of a docent?
Calli Guion [CG]: The ongoing job is drawing people out and getting them to look at the art. That's it. That is the hardest part to me. Some people are intimidated by the questions we ask—the pressure to be right—and I think that will continue with so many young people doing everything two dimensionally on screens. They aren't learning to scan across the whole; they go right to the center of the screen and block out the periphery.
NM: How is looking at art an antidote to that tendency?
CG: These are my thoughts about observation: what I think is exciting is that we're getting them to imagine things, to respond to a gesture, or a material, or a color. They can see how materials are manipulated or go into depth about an artist's life, how they depict ideas or build an argument. There is nuance to this experience as opposed to sitting passively in front of a TV program that is geared to charge our senses.
NM: Do you have any particularly memorable teaching moments?
CG: I don't have specific memories but over the years I have seen kids charged up by something or making a connection and then I know their persona or their personality is vibrating. They are really awake and not stuck in the school doldrums. It's electric when a kid sees anything they think is cool.
NM: How do you promote learning in a group?
CG: You build the group by encouraging people to express themselves in the way that they like. They see differences and similarities between one another. Then we move to the second part of our experience, and everyone knows whose cards are on the table. They aren't in trouble for having the wrong answer, and now we are hopefully a more cohesive group.
NM: What about the role of listening to each other?
CG: Students get to hear different opinions and realize people have different stories of their own that resonate with what they're looking at. People don't share stories the way they used to. There is more shame in our culture that has made us more close-mouthed and reticent to share. We literally saw during COVID that talking to one another in person can be unsafe.
NM: We can never presume that our audiences want to share, though that is a primary objective.
CG: It's important to acknowledge that students get to speak or stand back and think and listen. Both are equally important. Some of our students feel that when they enter the museum spaces, they don't belong here. For some, entering the galleries is a release into what they long to be.
Every aspect of how we facilitate conversations with visual art is about what it means to be human. How our minds work. How our environment shaped us and our experiences. Every work of art we look at gives us some of those instances to reflect on, to connect to, and to wonder about.
This work is very rewarding.