Developing a new educational vision for Montreal’s Musée McCord

Musée McCord, Montreal’s social history museum, wanted a change. In 2017 and 2018 I worked with 15 staff members across museum departments to explore the museum’s audiences, collections, programming, and identity and how those elements compared to other city museums around the world. We considered the museum’s “bright spots” and what we could learn from them. We worked together to develop staff capacity for idea generation and we created a decision-making rubric to help guide new projects.

Through this process, the idea of openness emerged as the touchstone and heart of a new educational vision for the museum. Musée McCord now sees its role as nurturing openness for its public audiences—open-mindedness as well as openness to each other, to the city, and to the world.

With further coaching from me, the staff developed a strategy screen, an educational framework, and a new slate of programming based on this vision, and retrained museum guides to encourage and support openness in visitors.

Read about openness and the new educational vision on Musée McCord website.