Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The Minneapolis Institute of Art will merge its existing docent and guide programs and implement a new training program for volunteer guides that supports audience-specific learning needs, enhances guides’ cultural fluency skills, and implements new tour topics. The museum aims to diversify the makeup of its guides and include more diversity, equity, accessibility, inclusion, and belonging resources in its programs and services. Informed by a programmatic pivot to virtual learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new guide program will serve pre-K through 12th-grade students and adult, university, and multigenerational audiences through in-person or virtual tours. The new training will help guides incorporate greater cultural fluency and responsiveness into their touring using an anti-racist lens. By teacher request, the museum will also introduce new tour topics for school audiences when in-person tours reopen in 2022, including social-emotional learning, identity, empathy, and social activism.