Last month, the Aspen Art Museum offered its second family-oriented Arte en Español. Presented entirely in Spanish, the event more than quadrupled in attendance size from its initial iteration, reaching around 300 participants. The AAM provided gallery tours in Spanish, family art-making activities, food, and a live band on the rooftop-all for free.

Following the activities and tours, parents and children moved to the roof-deck to enjoy free food and beverages while listening to a local live band. Although many of the children had attended school tours and workshops at the museum, many of the adults had never visited the year-old building.

AAM's Learning Director, Michelle Dezember, attributes the success of the event in large part to the partnership with the local Spanish-speaking radio station, La Tricolor. Both the museum and radio station promoted the event on-air, through social media, and by word of mouth. One adult attendee approached Dezember to express how much she and her children enjoyed the event, explaining in Spanish that this was her first time in the museum despite living in the area.

"It was so powerful to hear she has never engaged with the museum prior to this event, and we broke down a barrier of entry" said Dezember. "Some people wanted specific academic knowledge, some people wanted family activities, and others just wanted to come to the Aspen Art Museum, and this event seems to speak to making that a reality for those who may not have come before. It's about finding how to speak to someone in their language-whether that language is food or dance or music." 

These first-grade students created a replica of the Jule Collins Smith Museum in their school. Here, they're pictured with museum staff! Image courtesy of the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, Auburn University

The Yale Center for British Art's Summer Teacher Institute is an annual program that helps teachers incorporate visual literacy into their regular classroom practice. The four day intensive program includes lectures, discussions and workshops by university faculty and museum educators. Teachers learn skills such as facilitating object-based discussions and how to organize thoughts stimulated by an art object.

"Literacy is broad, it doesn't just mean phonics, or reading and writing, but the modes of communication that our culture has developed," says Yale Center for British Art  Associate Curator of Education Cyra Levenson. "We know from brain research that vision is one of the most dominant senses. Kids automatically draw, they don't need to be taught to represent their world visually." School curricula often prioritize text over image, and the Summer Teacher Institute aims bring the visual back to the classroom. When learning from images, Levenson says, "People get connected - they remember things they hadn't thought of, they expand their vocabulary, they come alive." By focusing on teaching these skills to teachers, the program can have a broader impact, as teachers bring these new skills to many classes of students.

The Summer Teacher Institute also wants teachers to get comfortable in the museum setting so they can impart that to their students, too. Not everyone "automatically feels comfortable in the museum, or even if they do they might not know where to start," Levenson says. "Teachers can't provide engaging learning experiences for their students in museums if they haven't had them themselves."

Learn more about the Summer Teacher Institute and other teacher programs at the Yale Center for British Art website. You can also learn more about YCBA's visual literacy initatives in this video.

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