The most recent biannual National Docents Symposium (NDS) took place October 24-27 in Washington DC. This week attendee Bev Biderman describes her experience.

Two themes that stuck out for me were empathy and VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies).   On empathy, multiple speakers mentioned that there is an “empathy deficit” in the world today.  (No kidding!) There is now a Centre for Empathy and the Visual Arts at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.   And there also exists a touring Empathy Museum.   I plan to develop my own Empathy theme tour covering works of art that may be especially effective at evoking empathy in a viewer.  

VTS was treated as the gold standard of museum touring strategies, and to my amazement there were presentations on many museums’ collaborations with medical schools to teach medical students the art of close looking.  In addition, police officers are working with art museums to learn close looking through VTS.   [You can read more about VTS in the previous post by Barb Keilhauer.]

A third interesting theme was “tackling difficult subjects” in museums — which generally meant tactfully touring politically fraught exhibits on race, specifically exhibits related to African Americans.  The lessons were there for us too in dealing with Indigenous issues: lots of collaboration with the community, and extra sensitivity training of docents.  

–Bev Biderman

You can read the previous post about NDS by Barb Keilhauer here.