Living Legacy: The Junior Docent School Program Fosters Art Education for Over 40 Years!

Student reproduction of Cubi IV by artist David Smith.

Offered at the Museum since 1976, the Junior Docent School Program (JDSP) is a multi-year, multi-visit program for upper elementary students. Legendary Museum Educator Barbara Brown Lee developed the program along with two art-advocating Milwaukee school teachers, and it has since become a model for Museums across the nation, adding depth to art education with its intentional multi-visit design.

At MAM, the program includes ten themed, docent-guided tours, given to students over the course of three years. In the first year, students learn about the elements of art and are encouraged to investigate works using their senses. In the second year, students make personal and interpersonal connections with art by exploring Portraiture, Wisconsin Stories, and Communities and Traditions. In the third year of JDSP, students extend their understanding of art and history with an American Stories tour and an Antiquities to Contemporary tour—and eventually select a work of art for the culminating capstone graduation project.

Once a favorite work of art is selected, students learn formal presentation skills, research their artwork and artist, create a reproduction, and showcase imagination with a creative response. Some of the most memorable student responses have included dressing in costume, playing self-composed music, and performing an interpretive dance inspired by the work of art. During the final tour, which represents three years of learning, the students share their work with family, peers, teachers, and Museum staff, and officially become Junior Docents.

This year, however, MAM and the students participating in the JDSP were given the special opportunity to share their experience with a much broader audience. Beginning in August, Museum educators worked with Milwaukee PBS and ALBA School in Milwaukee to tell the story of the Junior Docent School Program as it began its 43rd year. Film crews captured the first “oohs” and “aahs” as third grade students entered our wing-topped building for the first time, and they followed a group of fifth graders on their journey to becoming Junior Docents.

5th grade JDSP students on the American Stories tour accompanied by PBS film crew.

Producer Tiffany Pua and the film crew of PBS’s The Arts Page captured hours of footage in the Museum and at school, and interviewed Museum staff, docents, teachers, and alum of JDSP. The results of this collaboration are neatly packaged into a 26-minute television special, which first aired on September 26, 2019. Before their big television debut, ALBA students were invited back to the Museum for an exclusive sneak peek of the program, complete with red carpet photo ops and plenty of refreshments. Students shared in the excitement, as they saw their friends—and themselves—appear on the big screen inside Lubar Auditorium. It was a heartwarming end to another great year of the Junior Docent School Program.