ICOM – CECA President’s report 2012 – 2013
1. Introduction
2013 is a very important year for CECA because of the new elections. In Rio the old and the new Board are going to meet and discuss how to ensure continuity.
First of all, I want to express my gratitude to all the elected and coopted members of the previous Board for their extraordinary engagement and intelligent support: Pino Monaco, Daniel Castro, Umebe Onyejekwe, Stella Chrissoulaki, Marie-Clarté O’Neill, Jenni Fuchs, Colette Dufresne-Tassé, Sonia Guarita do Amaral, Arja van Veldhuizen, Nicole Gesché Koning, Ayumu Ota, Silvia Ciriello.
I take this opportunity to warmly thank Josée Duhaime, CECA secretary from 2010 to 2013, for her valuable work and the professional competence she showed in managing the delicate phase of CECA bank account transfer from Pointe à Callière to Paris.
I am therefore very proud to say that, thanks to the Board commitment, ICOM Headquarters consider CECA one of the most active and creative international committees.
In Rio we are also going to welcome the new elected Board members – Margarita Laraignée, Ani Avagyan, Zeljka Zelavic, Arja van Veldhuizen, Ayumu Ota and Pino Monaco – and the new secretary Cinzia Angelini. I wish them all a very fruitful and exciting experience.
In all the activities I am going to report here, my constant effort was to guarantee transparency, innovation and usefulness, in particular for CECA members who cannot attend the annual conference. In this respect my ambition is to enlarge as much as possible the participation of all members and to consider the General Assembly as a paramount tool for CECA governance.
2. Annual conference 2012
In 2012 the annual conference took place in Yerevan from the 19th to the 25th of October on the theme Written communication in museums. Tradition and innovation. There were 148 participants (among whom 21 non ICOM members) and 164 live streaming followers. The conference was supported by three ICOM national committees: Armenia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. ICOM President, doctor Hans- Martin Hinz did us the honour of opening and closing it. He was also invited to take part in the Board meeting, where he was favourably impressed by the level and contents of the discussion.
3. Regional conference 2012
A very important event took place in Chiba (Japan), where Ayumu Ota organised a regional Asia and Pacific conference (November 30th – December 1st).
4. Publications
All CECA publications are now available on CECA website and can be downloaded by all members in PDF format (http://ceca.icom.museum/node/30)
However, we still publish a certain number of hard copies to send to libraries (ICOM’s in the first place) and to use for dissemination purposes.
Two issues of CECA World Newsletter were published in June and December 2012.
Icom Education 23 was regularily published under the title “Museum Education and New Media”, edited by Stella Chrissoulaki, Alexandra Bounia and Despina Andriopoulou and presented last year at the Yerevan Conference. We expect to have ICOM Education 24 in Rio, under the title “ Museum Education and the Cultural Heritage in Threatened Countries”.
From the first edition of the CECA Best Practice Award stemmed a publication that was launched during the annual conference in Yerevan. Here is its complete bibliographical reference: CECA Best Practice 1. A tool to improve museum education internationally, edited by Emma Nardi, Roma, Nuova Cultura, ISBN 978886 1348868.
A second volume of the Best Practice Award is ready to be presented in Rio. Here is its complete bibliographical reference: CECA Best Practice 2. A tool to improve museum education internationally, edited by Emma Nardi and Cinzia Angelini, Roma, Nuova Cultura, ISBN 9788868121082.
5. Professional development
I consider professional development a precise responsibility of the Committee and, once again, I underline the need to organise activities that can involve an always larger number of members. CECA Board is working on this topic in three different ways: preconference workshops, seminars organised in countries where it is more difficult to find resources for travelling, development of a CECA Distance School.
Preconference workshops
Arja van Veldhuizen is taking care of the organisation of preconference workshops, open to all members, that take place the day before the opening of the conference.
In 2012 two pre-conference workshops were included in the Yerevan Conference programme, both held on October 20th, 2012. Gundula Klein from the Stift ung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Berlin (Germany) run the workshop “Writing Text Labels in Museums”; Theodorus Meereboer from the E30 Foundation in Hilversum (Netherlands) run the workshop “Writing Text for Digital Media”. Due to the high number of participants, both workshops were replicated. 80 members, divided into groups of 20, took part in them.
At the Rio Conference, there will be the following pre-conference workshops:
Inclusive educational projects in museums, by Gabriela Aidar, from Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paolo, Brazil. The workshop will discuss ideas and experiences connected with social inclusion and education in museums. In order to encourage reflection on the potential of, and the challenges facing socially inclusive projects in museums, some concepts will be presented alongside examples coming from both the workshop leader and its participants of educational projects conducted with community organizations and socially vulnerable groups.
Ideas factory: education, experience and conversation, by Ricardo Rubiales, from Mexico, advisor for planning of exhibits and related workshops in Latin America and experienced in working with children in art museums. This is a workshop for museum educators and visitor experience leaders, designed to foster creativity and peer-to-peer exchange of ideas by presenting new tendencies and innovative ways to include visitors in the design process of educational programs. How to involve the audience from the very beginning? The workshop explores the planning and design of educational projects to achieve maximum impact on museum visitors and their experiences in our exhibitions.
Training courses
Two training courses were organised, one in Nigeria and one in Argentina.
A workshop run by Gabriela Aidar, an expert Brazilian museum educator, was addressed to 40 Nigerian Ceca members in April 20th - 29th, 2012. The activity was developed under the responsibility of Sonia Guarita do Amaral, Milene Chiovatto and Umebe Onyejekwe.
A course was organised in Argentina addressed to museum educators willing to learn how to develop research activities. The course took place in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in April 25th -27th, 2012. It was open to about 50 Latin-American educators under the leadership of Colette Dufresne-Tassé, CECA former president and researcher with an outstanding international reputation.
Distance School
The idea of a CECA Distance School opened to all members was launched in Yerevan and approved by the General Assembly, under the name of CECAeWorld. In this regard, the main problems CECA Board has to cope with are as follows:
§ decide the contents, beginning with the Best Practice that is a very strong point of our activity of the past two years;
§ decide the responsibilities related to the previous point;
§ nominate a responsible for each segment of the proposal (texts, videos, evaluation etc.);
§ draw a sustainability scenario to make sure that CECA Distance School will last for a reasonable period. From this point of view I hope that my trip to China can give us hope. The generous in-kind offer from my Department, that will allow us to use its innovative Orbis Dictus learning environment, is paramount to start with, because a proper distance system is very expensive to implement and, at the moment, CECA could hardly afford it.
6. CECA involvement in ICOM activity
As CECA President I had the honour of being invited at the launch of ICOM International Training Centre for Museum Studies, that took place in Beijing July 7th.
I have just been nominated member of the group in charge of the evaluation of ICOM strategic plan.
7. Conclusions
I would like to conclude my report referring to some thoughts that came to my mind when I wrote CECA annual report to ICOM. I am going to present my conclusions using the SWOT scheme.
Strengths
The new website has been successfully implemented. A big effort was made to provide members with the opportunity to download relevant publications. The new website also allows connection with CECA through the most popular social networks (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn). The live streaming of annual conferences is also downloadable for members who cannot personally attend the event.
CECA has constantly been working on standards in museum education to meet the need expressed by most members to discuss a common structure for a good educational programme. However we do not consider the resulting document – Best Practice - as a reference defined document, but as a work in progress tool that can be continually modified and integrated by all members. This is a first step towards building a common language among professionals working in very different cultures and situations.
The first and second edition of the Best Practice Award proved to be successful and will be hopefully repeated in 2014.
Many CECA publications are regularly produced every year.
All the accountability is now successfully transferred to CECA bank account at HBSN. In 2012 CECA spent 24,000 euros. We have to keep in mind that expenditure is considered as a proof of good governance and hard work.
In 2012 CECA got 5,000 euros from an external body, thus showing our potentiality in fund raising. The amount may seem quite modest, but it is about 50% of the regular financial support allotted by ICOM.
Weaknesses
It must always be reminded that all the work developed by CECA is made by volunteers, each of whom has another heavy and demanding job. Therefore as activities are developed, it becomes more and more difficult to cope with them. Besides in 2013 CECA website was moved to the ICOM general website. The advantage is to rely on ICOM support to manage it but, in the change, we lost an important feature – the Experience Exchange database – that must now be reorganised inside ICOMMUNITY.
Opportunities
Education is one of the core interests of many important bodies, like Unesco and OCDE. Therefore ICOM relies on CECA expertise in many different fields. In particular, if the CECAeWORLD Project is successfully implemented, it will allow several chances for other International Committees and for countries who ask ICOM to be aided in the development of their museum systems.
Threats
The most important threat is the possible lack of money in the middle of a challenging project, like CECAeWORLD. CECA Board must be very careful in organising the budget and implementing a high-sustainability system for the future.