Attending to Each Other: Centering Neurodivergent Museum Professionals in Attentive Facilitation

Abstract

This article introduces neurodivergent museum educators and their neurotypical allies to ways we can build supportive, inclusive environments, develop interpersonal engagement skill sets, and deconstruct ableist notions of learning by imagining museum education experiences centered on the concept of attentive facilitation. In this approach, we infuse the practice of compassionate facilitation with attentiveness – the ability to “allow” what arises in the experience to be expressed. Attentive facilitation is constructed through the values of social interaction, allowing for authenticity and building capacity for interaction. Attentive facilitation has positive impacts on all involved: museum learners can connect more deeply not just to learning itself but with facilitators; neurodivergent museum educators can build soft skills that can carry over into internal staff interactions and personal life, and neurotypical museum educators can deepen their understanding of and support for neurodivergent staff and museum visitors. This set of values prioritizes neurodivergent museum educators through the cultivation of staff experiences. This article shares the roots of our initial conceptualization of attentive facilitation, to be expanded on in the future as we continue to develop, transform, and reassemble our knowledge of our museum education in practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.