Marjorie Hurley, the education and student engagement manager at the Wellin Museum of Art, co-authored an article that was recently published in the journal Museum Management and Curatorship.
In “The Museum Education Job Taxonomy: How Our Job Titles Affect Our Work and Our Value,” Hurley and fellow researcher Amanda Tobin Ripley of The Ohio State University examine the findings of their 2023 fieldwide survey of museum educators in order to assess “the status of the field of museum education in the United States.”
They said the results of the survey, which asked about job titles in relation to respondents’ actual roles and responsibilities, “have implications for the ways that we characterize our jobs as museum educators and our roles in relation to other museum colleagues.”
In their analysis, Hurley and Ripley looked at “the diversity of titles within the museum education sector, identifying consequences on the material practices and experiences of museum educators.”
The findings suggest “little widespread consensus on best practices for job titles, with implications for career advancement and compensation, necessitating a critical reflection on the purposes, consequences, and possibilities of the language used to describe museum education work,” they said.
Posted June 17, 2025
