I’m passionate about designing engaging professional development for teachers, and I was missing having the opportunity to engage in some of my own professional development after shifting to my role at SVMA about a year ago. Just previous to my current role, after some time working in museums, I worked as a coach supporting teachers and administrators implementing new skills and mindsets in integrating the arts into their teaching and school sites. I remember many planning sessions and conversations designing professional development sessions when our mantra was, “always keep students at the center.” We spoke of our students as our north star, keeping us grounded in why we do what we do.
What would it look like to shift that to “always keep visitors at the center” while navigating new and shifting external conditions in the museum landscape? I approached the WMA conference with these highly challenging changes in mind: the new US administration; reduced support for the arts, museums, and education; and the general sense of an uptick in navigating divisions and tensions in public spaces.
The changes the museum community is facing spurred me to apply for the Chin scholarship and I’m grateful to have been able to attend due to being a recipient.
I came away with some new skills and felt renewed and inspired. Going in to the conference, I was anticipating conversations about navigating external conditions and finding ways to stay inspired, creative, and grounded over the coming years. WMA set up some vibrant conversations about just that.
My main takeaways validated approaches I and the team at SVMA are already taking to put visitors at the center, as well as inspired new layers to that work. I learned that collecting data about visitors can be simple to do and lead to actionable insights, and that a wide range of museums can share and benefit from powerful frameworks and mindsets that carry beautifully across disciplines. I was reminded that it’s okay that partnerships take time, which allows them to ultimately lead to powerful and expansive experiences for visitors; that museums are sites for building empathy and empowering action; and thanks to Peggy Monahan, being good at what we do is even more important in challenging times.
Since returning from the conference, I’ve used insights from Oakland Museum of California’s stellar workshop on collecting and analyzing visitor data to engage our marketing team and teen interns in really digging into how to learn from visitors to our Family Days. We looked at our existing visitor surveys and whose voice is missing, and then reached out to our new community partner, La Luz Center, to collaborate with them in collecting visitor data for our visitor families that overlap with their clients. We’re excited to launch this first collaborative visitor survey for families at our Fall Family Day. Our teen interns will be orienting families to using it during the day, and visitors will receive a small prize for completing the survey. I cannot wait to see the results and use new tools to analyze them with both our community partner and our marketing team.
I was inspired to not only save our talkback interactive cards from visitors, but to begin analyzing them and sharing the results with our team. We’ve begun doing this already with some of our interactive tour written talkback strategies, and completing that circle is helping us understand those visitor engagement strategies better than before. These new skills and practices are bringing to life the notion of “keeping visitors at the center” of what we do in ever more vibrant ways. Thank you, WMA 2025!
Harvey is an arts educator and artist passionate about achieving educational equity through the arts. Currently the Education and Community Engagement Manager at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in the past, she has served as Curator of Education at the University Art Museum at CSU Long Beach, Family Programs designer at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and as a manager and coach with arts education nonprofits serving K-12 schools. She holds an MFA from CSU Long Beach and a CTE Credential in Art, Media, and Entertainment. An interdisciplinary artist, her work envisions liberatory interspecies futures. She has shown her textiles and sculptures in museums and galleries in California, New York, and Italy.
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