Each year, the Center for the Humanities invites applications for its Public Humanities Fellowship, designed to provide PhD students in the humanities with experience outside of academia. By placing fellows in partner organizations around Madison including museums, hospitals, non-profits, community centers, and emerging businesses, the program facilitates the reciprocal sharing of resources and expertise, and highlights the significance of the humanities both on and off campus.
The following guest blog post, written by recent Public Humanities Fellow Tarah Connolly (PhD candidate, Curriculum and Instruction) highlights her experience as the Engagement Fellow with the Chazen Museum of Art. As a scholar, Connolly’s work is at the intersections of education research, organizational theory, and museum studies. In particular, she studies children’s museums and the many roles they play in their communities. Connolly is a lead facilitator for a statewide professional learning community of museum educators called the Wisconsin Children’s Museum Klatch, and she has partnered with museums through multiple IMLS-supported projects on organizational change, evaluation, and building communities of practice.
Engaging in Slow Museum Education at the Chazen
Early in the 2025-26 academic year, a colleague recommended “The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy,” by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber (2016). In this small but mighty volume, Berg and Seeber argue that the Slow movement, originating in food and environmental justice work, offers a tangible framework for maintaining a practice of meaningful and enriching scholarship in academia today. For them, the Slow movement provides guiding principles that push against time pressures and zero-sum logics that dominate the contemporary, corporatized university.
Ironically, I read “The Slow Professor” on my bus rides to and from the Chazen Museum of Art before and after my days as an Engagement Fellow through the UW-Madison Center for Humanities. I tried to squeeze a little more time out of the day to do the “productive” work of scholarly reading. However, reflecting on my experience at the Chazen, I’m struck by the lessons from Berg and Seeber that played out in practice over the course of my fellowship at the museum.
For Berg and Seeber, Slow professors—and perhaps Slow museum educators positioned in a university art museum—“advocate deliberation over acceleration” (p.xviii). For them, dialogue, collegiality, and the deep pursuit of knowledge represent the core purpose of the university, all of which takes a long time. Even as I commuted to and from campus with a sense of seize-the-moment urgency, Berg and Seeber’s call to “restore a sense of community and conviviality” (p. 90) through research, teaching, and collegiality had a particular resonance.
Thinking about this short volume while reflecting on my experience at the Chazen, I’ve learned a bit more about how I hope to proceed in my professional and scholarly life. As an emerging scholar, a museum educator, and as a scholar-practitioner committed to partnership and collaboration, this fellowship was an opportunity to test what it meant to put Slow into practice.
The Affordances of Being a Peripheral Participant
Upon joining the Chazen last fall, I was excited to bring my background in playful learning, maker education, and children’s museums to an art museum. As the Chazen embarked on an ambitious redesign of its main collection galleries, my prior experience was an apt fit for contributing to the design of interactive spaces across the museum.
Early in the year, I often felt uncertain or out-of-place among museum staff. As a disciplinary outsider from the Chazen’s core community of practice where the norms and knowledge of art history guide day-to-day concerns, I felt like I was asking silly questions or making comments that didn’t align with the established way of working in this particular context. I found myself positioned as a peripheral participant in a well-established community of art historians, curators, and academic museum professionals. As I recognized moments of disciplinary disconnect, my supervisor assured me that my background in child development and education was an asset, such that I could serve as a “proxy” for the museum’s audience as the curators made choices about the new gallery experience. This was easier said than done.
In the first few months, I learned about the project aims and scope, while looking for places where my understanding overlapped with the Chazen’s goals. The crossover wasn’t immediate and it took time to understand the practices and norms of an academic art museum. I forced myself to ask the silly questions, focused on preparing and receiving feedback more thoughtfully, and identified where my training as an educator needed translation to the local language of Chazen staff. From collaboratively revising gallery text to making suggestions for visitor resources, being a peripheral participant challenged me to slow down and identify where my assumptions differed from those around me.
This experience highlighted the value of putting myself into unfamiliar territory. Not only have I learned about the mechanical, behind-the-scenes work of a university art museum, I’ve learned how to express my personal commitments more clearly. I’ve also reflected on why I hold those commitments dear. As I learned the culture of the Chazen, Berg and Seeber’s reminder that “good work takes time” (p. 64) was a salve when I felt like I wasn’t moving the project forward in tangible ways. Instead, as Berg and Seeber affirm, “I was contemplating…I was conversing with…and I was in joyful pursuit…” (p.57) of understanding what was possible in this museum space.
Partnership, Dialogue, and Deliberation
As a member of the Engagement division of the Chazen, my contributions to interactive gallery spaces and an accessible, digital guide for the museum created the conditions for meaningful partnership work. While I got comfortable sharing my knowledge from the perspective of curriculum and instruction, the work also invited interdisciplinary collaboration with a growing network of colleagues and partners across campus.
Two instances of still-unfolding collaboration stand out as concrete teaching moments for me as an interdisciplinary, practitioner-scholar in museum education. First was a series of conversations with teaching faculty in the art department. We were put in touch with Emily Belknap, a lecturer in sculpture, about fabricating an interactive installation to demonstrate the process of patina on bronze monuments. The initial direction was to replicate a portion of the Abraham Lincoln statue on Bascom Hill, where the green patina is rubbed shiny in some spots. We broadened our thinking through a series of thoughtful conversations about teaching foundry fundamentals. Emily also reminded us about the problematics of how Abraham Lincoln is represented on campus and in the museum collection—a topic the Chazen confronted through re:mancipation, another deeply collaborative effort. Emily’s candor, a key value in Slow scholarship, created an opening for critique that pushed us to re-examine our teaching methods in the museum. What a gift to be slowed down in this way.
A second collaboration taught me about the serendipity of partnership and the value of local connections. Near the end of the fall semester, Chazen staff were evaluating what portion of the collection had accessible visual descriptions written. A few days later, I had an unrelated appointment in another campus building where I happened to notice a poster for a new course in the Dance Department: “Audio Description – Dance & Arts.” Immediately seeing the overlap with work at the museum, I suggested we consult with the instructor to learn more about visual description best practices.
We began corresponding with Bradford Chinn, a faculty member whose scholarship and practice focuses on access work in the arts. From this lucky noticing of a poster on campus, we are now collaborating to engage Bradford’s students in writing and revising visual descriptions that will broaden access to the museum’s collection. In turn, this collaboration is exposing museum staff to the expertise of professional access workers and adding nuance to our accessibility efforts. Coming across this poster—which inspired a vibrant and enthusiastic new partnership—reminded me that we are in a space of abundance that has the capacity to expand our work in transformative ways. If we slow down and notice these resources, we are all better for it.
My fellowship at the Chazen has been a lesson in a new mode of time management. I’m heading into the next year of my doctoral program with an appreciation for Slow scholarship, partnership, and community engagement. It takes time to become acquainted with a new community of practice, a challenge I intend to seek out more often. It takes time and attention to notice and cultivate the relationships that strengthen our collective understanding and practice. Indeed, the title “Engagement Fellow” evokes the senses of engaging the public and creating meaningful museum experiences. But reading between the lines of the job description, this work is about slowing down to engage with campus, colleagues, and my own reflective practice to pause, check, and understand my own and others’ assumptions. It is pleasurable and it is political to work in this way. As I anticipate future steps in my academic, professional, and personal lives, I am strengthened by Berg and Seeber’s invitation to Slow scholarship. They say, “we want a cure that not only will work but also feel good” (p.12). If all museum education—all scholarship—can feel like this, then I am eager to stay engaged.