One Way or Another: A Profile of Rachelle Doorley

Ed.M. AIE '04

After her final week as the 2004-05 Education Fellow at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in the woodsy Boston suburb of Lincoln, Rachelle Doorley, AIE'04, was starting to say goodbye to people she'd known since moving to her husband's territory in 2003. It was July 2005, and she and that husband of hers, Boston native Scott Doorley, would be moving within a few weeks, back to Rachelle's home state of California, where Scott would enter a graduate program in Learning, Design and Technology at Stanford and Rachelle would build on the museum-education career she'd already started — eventually landing a lovely job as Manager of School Audiences at the San Jose Museum of Art. After two years here in the Northeast, she seemed relieved to be heading back to the other coast, but at the same time rather reluctant to leave New England, where, grimacing more at the summertime humidity than she had at the wintertime frigidity, she had generated some momentum as an arts educator. Her fellowship had just ended, and her future, as they say in the movies, was just beginning.

“The fellowship at the DeCordova was a great experience and opportunity,” she said. “It was nice to work with such interesting, committed, and considerate people who really know what they were doing and work hard at improving their practice. Susan Diachisin, for example,” she added, in reference to the 1997 graduate of the HGSE Arts in Education Program who works as the DeCordova's manager of Interpretive Programs. “I learned a great deal from her mindful and serious approach to content development and program design, and there was the added bonus of sharing an AIE-inspired vocabulary and philosophy of museum education.”

Rachelle is the most recent in a series of AIE graduates who've been awarded education fellowships at the DeCordova. As such, she organized and developed “looking and making activities” for Family Programs, coordinated the Artist Talk series, and contributed content and design to the Process Gallery that supplements each of the Museum's exhibitions. During Rachelle's year, the process gallery featured, for example, profiles of the work of five or six of the artists who'd contributed to the group show called Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art. Each artist was represented by a sort of station at which you could learn, through video, photography, audio, text, and objects, about the inspiration and hard work that had gone into the artist's “pretty sweet” contribution. Given license to use their own imaginations and senses of humor in putting the process gallery together, Rachelle and Susan created a funny Mood-o-Meter. You could move the multiple hands of the Mood-o-Meter's dial to the discrete and sometimes contradictory adjectives on the meter's face that represented most accurately your complex of responses to a given image from the stack of exhibition photos before you. For example, you had the option of feeling indignant, inspired, and amused all at the same time.

In a sense, the process gallery is like a bridge you can cross from the finished art in the gallery to the artist in the studio. It humanizes the sometimes shrouded mystique of the artiste. At one station, for example, you could watch artist Amy Podmore vigorously at work—gutting the stuffing from dolls, filling them with plaster, removing the fur like a taxidermist, in preparation to suspend them by airplane cables from the ceiling in an installation you could see through the tall window from the parking lot near the museum entrance. At another, you could look at snapshots of the Islesboro, Maine, summer shack where Candace Walters and Brenda Atwood Pinardi collected an explosive variety of found objects (natural and synthetic) for enshrinement in a small replica of their cabin that the DeCordova actually installed in a gallery.

“I had a hand in the creation of the Process Gallery, yes,” said Rachelle. “I also had the opportunity to do some grant writing, which I'm so grateful for. I credit Jessica [founding former AIE director Davis] and our S-301 grant-proposal for prepping me for the real world! We were very fortunate to be awarded an NEA grant to host a summer teacher institute, ‘Kinetic Sculpture and the Art of Wind Dynamics,' for which I developed a course reader and led the institute's art history component. Also at DeCordova, I worked for a wonderful education director, Lisa Silagyi, who encouraged me to develop Evenings for Educators, a professional development program for teachers. Our inaugural event attracted elementary and high school educators, grad students, and even a couple of college professors. Our hope was to generate enthusiasm for upcoming exhibitions, provide arts-integration resources to teachers, and offer educators a chance to meet DeCordova staff and socialize with one another in an unbeatable setting.”

Before Rachelle came to Cambridge to study at HGSE, she'd earned a B.A. in theatrical design from UCLA and had designed costumes for three years “under the sparkly lights of the film industry,” she says. Then, “mysteriously drawn into an internship at a contemporary art gallery,” she worked her way into jobs as artist-in-residence at various Los Angeles schools and cultural institutions, led teacher-training sessions in the visual arts, ran community-based art workshops, “attempted,” she jokes, “to create order from chaos in my art studio,” and co-founded the Silver Lake Art Collective.

This last flurry of education-related activities gave her a greater and greater urge “to promote the integration of the arts into every child's education,” and to find her way into courses at HGSE where she could focus on arts education policy, community/school partnerships, teacher training, and museum education. With those courses under her belt—including current AIE director Steve Seidel's course on the “close examination of student work” (now being taught by Tina Blythe), former founding director Jessica Davis's core courses on the “arts in education,” Roger Dell's course on “artists, educators, and museums” (now known as “object-based learning”), Catherine Elgin's course on “art and understanding,” and David Perkins's course on “cognition and the art of instruction” — Rachelle found herself able to juggle five or six projects at a time at the DeCordova, including projects related to the research, design, preparation, and installation of the process gallery as well as those related to the museum's busy schedule of family programs.

She notes that Steve Seidel taught her to look more seriously and deeply into children's art works, and that Jessica Davis taught her to ask questions before acting, in order to get perspective on a project and approach it wisely, with the best interests of the audience in mind.

“Jessica's strategies came in especially handy at the DeCordova,” she says. “Her emphasis on being able to criticize even your own questions affected my work on the creation of the process gallery, the design of the family program curriculum, and the development of content for museum wall text and outreach materials. At the DeCordova, I always started by formulating questions. I found that really useful. Jessica's Generic Game is a good example. You know how it challenges viewers of a visual art work to answer a progressively challenging series of questions? I made use of that exercise, and have been further inspired to cultivate an inquiry-based approach to learning in my work as a museum educator. For example, the twelve lessons in DeCordova's Sculpture on Site curriculum are infused with questions intended to scaffold the learners' understanding of the artworks, and hopefully foster critical thinking skills along the way.”

As she prepared to move to the Bay Area, Rachelle had tentatively optimistic feelings about her prospects for relevant work in what she freely admits is an underpaying, under-respected, and—yes—unnervingly tight job market for arts educators. Indeed, it did take her a year or so to find her footing in the field on the West Coast. For the first year, Rachelle worked at the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation in the Bay Area—KIPP being, according to its website, a system “of free open-enrollment college-preparatory public schools in under-resourced communities” throughout the United States. “I worked on a curriculum-gathering database project,” she notes. “We collected teacher lesson plans in a central repository so that teachers could easily access the group's knowledge.

“On the arts end of things, I facilitated inquiry-based tours, based on the VTS [Visual Thinking Strategies] model, at the new deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. Related to this work, I also volunteered as a VTS Facilitator at SFUSD's Sanchez Elementary School, through the Community ArtReach Program. A lot of fun, and very AIE-related! I was also very lucky to have been ‘adopted' by the Palo Alto Unified School District's art coordinator, Sharon Ferguson, who brought me on to help develop interactive interpretive gallery stations for PAUSD's district-wide art show.”

In August of 2006, as a culmination of (if not a reward for) these multiple activities, Rachelle was hired as Manager of School Audiences at the San Jose Museum of Art.

“I feel fortunate to be working in this field and doubly fortunate to be working with this museum,” she says with confidence. “The museum is community-oriented and has a strong educational focus. I'm designing field trip experiences, creating lessons based on extraordinary works of modern and contemporary art, and working closely with teachers to meet their curricular goals. My motivation is to bring the arts to youth one way or another, and my new job at SJMA is very connected to this objective.”