Welcome to the course

Welcome to this course on building and strengthening inclusive museums. We are excited to have you on this learning journey with us.

In this course we will, through diverse and exciting case studies, practical application and brief but powerful readings and interviews, encourage you to reflect on your own practice, engage and implement processes for building inclusive museums. The subject matter is quite challenging. It may trigger memories or experiences which you have had in the past. It may trigger a sense of discomfort. All of these are valuable places to start developing inclusive, non-discriminatory practices for museums. It begins with us. We therefore encourage you to stay the course, set aside enough time for thinking through the concepts and how you react or respond to what is being said.

Over the next four weeks this course will address concepts and terms related to inclusive practice, collaborative methodologies at a strategic and leadership level, collaborative methodologies in practice and examining social inclusive practices already tried and tested across the world.

We invite you to maintain a journal for the duration of the course. Through regular free writing, word wheels, brainstorming, sketches or other creative means, self-reflexivity will help you to deepen your insights, generate ideas.

Finally, we would like to say that, ironically, this course is not 100% inclusive. We want to improve it by including other languages and other resources to make it more accessible. If your institution is interested in partnering with ICOM to enhance the impact of this initiative, please let us know!