Students returned to classrooms Monday, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s education programming is also shifting back into school mode at its learning and engagement center, which opened last year.
PMA’s goal is to welcome Philadelphia’s residents to the museum. A recent success was a popular free busing program for students that PMA introduced last November. The museum has revealed it will be back for the entire 2025-26 school year.
The busing is in support of educational sessions, which began last year with tours and guided discussions of an exhibition of Black and African diasporic artists on the museum’s closed weekdays. The popularity of the program led to it being expanded to include general collections and extra days until the end of the school year.
In all, the museum welcomed 36 buses carrying 443 students, 12% more than its own internal forecasts.
“How can we go back to charging for buses, because of the demand that we’ve seen,” Audrey Hudson, the PMA’s deputy director for learning and engagement, joked while the busing program was in its early stages.
The museum spent the summer making the system more seamless for educators to book trips, with the goal to welcome even more students this year.
Long-term vision
While there is temporary space now to welcome and host students at the museum, the long-term vision for the learning and engagement center is a 20,000-square-foot space that will take up the entire north wing of the museum, designed to expand the PMA’s capacity to serve learners of all ages and walks of life.
“We want to outfit it so that it is the living room of the city, so that it serves Philadelphians, but also the world,” Hudson said.
The physical space is still in its planning stages, with multiyear renovations slated to begin in fall 2026. The exact timeline and opening date for the completed center hasn’t been set yet.
What’s currently in place is “the hub,” a space in the wing that was previously used for retail. It now serves as a classroom, lunch hall and gallery for student artwork.
The goal of the PMA’s education programming is to build lifelong learners, young people who return to the museum into adulthood with their families — and to art shows and museums in general.
To do that, the teaching is “framed around the student,” portraying the artworks in a relevant way the students can relate to. Hudson said this is done through asking questions, with the staff of six educators getting students to look closely at the artwork and even trying their own hand at drawing. The average person spends 19 seconds in front of an artwork, Hudson said. The program aims for students to spend one or two minutes doing that.
“It’s really giving them the cultural capacity to actually enter into a space that may not have always been welcoming,” she said, “giving them the confidence to actually speak about a work of art or know how to come into a museum and really just own the space like it’s theirs — because it is.”
A study from the American Psychological Association’s “Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts” journal recommended that educators make art classes more available to middle school students, along with practices that actively bring in students less likely to take art classes, citing that age range as “a pivotal point in students’ long-term relationship with the arts.” The benefits of exposure to arts electives in middle school, the study said, were subsequently “significantly higher GPAs and math and reading scores, and decreased odds of school suspension.”
Art students are probably the easiest target for the PMA’s programming, but Hudson said the center also aims to draw in learners from all walks of life. The goal is a STEAM education program — one that inserts “arts” learning into the “science, technology, engineering and mathematics” of STEM. The art also crosses over into teaching on history and geography. December’s round of tours included students from the Philadelphia Military Academy
The program has a feedback loop in place to help it develop based on the experiences of those who visit to check it out. Teachers take exit surveys to better advise how students could be better engaged, and how the curriculum can be supplemented.
“I always think of it as, ‘How can we better serve you?’ You are our public, you’re our audience. So, what are we doing [well], what are we not doing that we could be doing better,” Hudson said of the surveys, adding that having the students try drawing themselves during the guided tours came from such feedback.
The PMA also invited teachers in for an Educators Appreciation Day last September, to highlight the upcoming year’s upcoming education programming. This year’s will be on Saturday, Sept. 13, with a focus on the upcoming exhibitions and resources related to upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States.
“Hopefully, they’ll come back”
For kids, museums can be stuffy places full of unrelatable work and a bunch of people telling them they can’t stand too close to anything. The PMA’s education efforts try to eliminate that barrier by giving students of various backgrounds and interests a sense of ownership in the space, lowering the feeling of restriction or uptightness.
“We’re thinking about how people come in, the access points, but then when they come in, hopefully they come back,” Hudson said. “It’s almost like you learn how to be in a museum. It’s not natural, not to touch anything.”
Hudson said the staff do this by seeing the students, honoring the lived experiences of the individuals, meeting them wherever they are and then expanding on the artwork they experience together.
“It’s not that we expect everyone to be an artist — although everyone is an artist, in their own way — but you’re just looking and observing,” Hudson said. “So learning to observe, learning to look closely, and learning to put that paper to pencil, if you will.”
Editor’s Note: This story is part of a series that explores the impact of creativity on student learning and success. WHYY and this series are supported by the Marrazzo Family Foundation, a foundation focused on fostering creativity in Philadelphia youth, which is led by Ellie and Jeff Marrazzo. WHYY News produces independent, fact-based news content for audiences in Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey.
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