Best Practices Guide - theneurodiversemuseum.com

These practices for education can be adopted by any museum educator and modified as needed based on the size and type of institution. Be sure to check back periodically for updates to the guide, including those submitted by you.

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Best Practices for Creating New Programs

The best way to accommodate disabilities is to plan for them specifically.

Identify Target Audiences. Who is the target audience for the program you want to run? Elementary school children with learning disabilities? Autistic adults? Senior citizens with dementia? Be specific when identifying target audiences. There’s a difference between, for example, second and third grade students, or between senior citizens in the early stages of dementia and senior citizens with advanced dementia. Start with a specific group in mind and then modify the program for different demographics, rather than presenting the same program to different groups with different needs.
Establish Partnerships with Relevant Community Organizations. A museum educator won’t be an expert on every disability they come into contact with. That expertise does, however, likely exist in the community already. Local organizations such as schools, elder care services, and disability support services may have people willing to act as consultants, as will larger organizations such as the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN). MediaBiasFactCheck.com and CharityNavigator.org can help vet organizations based on how they use their money, who their leadership and employees are, and how credible their information is.
Identify Program Goals. What are you hoping to accomplish with your program? What information do you want program participants to learn, or what social goals do you hope to reach? Identify these goals and include them in the marketing description for your program. For example: For K-12 students, a good guideline is to align these goals with grade-level standards for the subject being taught.
Designate Program Space. Where in the museum are you going to hold your program? Is it in a program room? A gallery? Does it transition between spaces? When choosing a space for your program, try to find a space that is limited in distractions. When possible, try to find a space where program staff have a high level of control over environmental factors such as lighting, temperature, and seating as well. For places such as historic house museums and zoos, this may not be possible. Be sure to communicate ahead of time if your program will have outdoor components, lots of standing/walking, and/or portions that are difficult to navigate.
Designate Program Staff. Who will be running the program? How many staff members will be involved? When possible, try to have an extra staff member or volunteer on hand who can offer one-on-one assistance to participants as needed. If participants are coming in as a group (such as from a school), they may have an extra chaperone, but participants who come in as individuals may not have that assistance. Introducing staff and their role in the program at the beginning helps participants feel more comfortable.
Train All Staff About Disabilities. Educators may be the ones facilitating educational programs, but, depending on the museum, they may not be the only ones interacting with program participants. Front desk, security, docents, gift shop, and cafeteria staff where relevant may also interact with program participants. The MoMA has some training modules on different disabilities and how to accommodate them specifically in different areas of the museum. Make sure staff are familiar with ADA guidelines during training as well.

Best Practices for Running Programs

When it comes time to run programs, these practices are broadly applicable!

Market Directly to Stakeholder Organizations. Once a program is created, it needs to be advertised. A good way to find the right audience is to market directly to organizations that serve the target audience. Schools, libraries, elder care organizations, and other community groups in the local area are great places to connect with audiences.
Check for Accessibility Needs. When coordinating a program for a group of participants who are all coming from the same place (such as a school or care facility), double-check with your contact person before the program begins to make sure none of the participants will have unmet accommodation needs. Will they have all of the mobility aids, interpreters, hearing/visual assistance, fidgets, etc. participants need? Someone without the assistive technology they need to participate in a program will probably not find it beneficial. Universal Design for Learning can also help you figure out what the museum can do for accessibility.
Provide Participants with Clear Instructions Before Arrival. People coming to museums want to know where to park and how to find the entrance. They may also need more detailed navigational instructions, including how to find bathrooms. This information should be sent out ahead of time so that participants are prepared, and it should be given in both written and pictorial form where possible. Annotated maps alongside step-by-step instructions are helpful for those who may have difficulty navigating. Instructions can also include behavioral expectations. Is your museum a quiet space? Is it highly interactive, or strictly “no touching”? For behavioral expectations, offer a “why” to back them up. For example: “Please do not touch the artifacts in the historical house. They are very old, and the oils on our skin can damage them over time.”
Start with Social Time. Before beginning instruction during a program, allot some time for participants (and staff!) to socialize with one another. Museums are places of social learning, and by allowing some time for people to get to know each other, the space becomes more comfortable and participants more receptive to new information. The understanding that this learning environment is positive, respectful, and affirming is an important one to establish.
Quality Over Quantity of Information. It’s better to cover fewer topics in detail than it is to cover as many topics as possible, but in less detail. Four topics on average make for a balanced, quality program. At a historic house museum, this might look like discussing the kitchen, dining room, parlor, and bedroom in detail, while saving harder to connect elements like gardens, barns/stables, and school rooms for a different program/day. At an art museum, this might look like limiting discussion to the works of four artists, or four works of art.
Adapt In Real Time. Every group has different needs. Don’t stick to the same script for each program. Instead, as you’re presenting, take note of what participants are engaging with and what communication methods are working most effectively each time. For example, if a group of program participants seems more eager to see scientific demonstrations or create art projects than to socialize with one another, social time is a program component that can be skipped over with that group.
Don’t Force Participation. Similarly, don’t expect every program participant to show the same level of engagement every time. Some people, especially neurodivergent people, don’t show interest in obvious ways. Others may genuinely not be interested in the current subject. That’s not necessarily a failure of the program or educator. Museums are educational institutions, but the learning experience they offer is that of free-choice learning. Allow individual participants to participate as much (within reason!) or as little as they would like. Participants can be encouraged to push their own boundaries, but shouldn’t be forced to.
Make It Personal. Most learners want to know how the information they’re expected to learn relates to their own lives. Why is it important? Why should they care? Where applicable, find ways to relate subject matter to everyday life. Guiding questions such as “What does this remind you of?” and “Do you have anything like this in/around your home?” belong in nearly every educator’s toolkit.
“Wrong” Answers Have Their Place. Sometimes, a participant’s answers to an educator’s questions will be objectively incorrect. But shutting down an answer given in good faith with “No.” also shuts down dialogue. “Not quite, but I can see how you got that idea!” “That’s interesting! Actually, [xyz],” and “That could be. We believe [xyz] instead, but your suggestion is a possibility,” are kinder ways to counter wrong answers. An educator can also encourage a participant to explain how they got their answer, reinforcing the idea that they are engaged in a dialogue, not a lecture. Encouraging participants to explain how they got their answers also works in subjective discussions, such as interpretations of artworks. It can be intimidating for a layperson to converse on a subject with someone they perceive as an expert on that subject. Valuing the contributions of laypeople helps them engage more, which helps them learn more.
Use Handouts. What, exactly, constitutes a handout at your program will depend on the type of program, but most programs benefit from having something tangible for participants to utilize. Guided note-taking sheets with definitions of terms that may be unfamiliar, prints that show important details of artworks up close, and similar take-home handouts have been shown to help stimulate memory of programs after their conclusion. Replica artifacts, miniature models, and material samples that can be passed around during programs offer multisensory stimulation, enabling the participants handling them to better understand the topic being discussed. For example, describing the scent of spices popular on the Silk Road trade routes is one thing, but having samples participants can smell elevates the experience.
Offer Chances to Use New Knowledge. Some programs are all about putting new knowledge to use, such as studio art classes, dance classes, or historical cooking demonstrations. When possible, consider incorporating hands-on portions into other types of programs. A group tour of a historic farm with chances to feed animals or use replica machinery makes the idea that real people lived and worked there before modern machinery and tools tangible. An educator can explain how different pulley systems work, but setting up different pulley systems for participants to try lifting objects with makes the reality much more clear.
Consider Continuing the Conversation. Sometimes, there just isn’t enough time to cover everything in a program, and sometimes participants have questions that require further research, or questions that they forget the moment they go to ask them. Let participants know that if they have questions after the program ends, they are welcome to email those questions to the educators. This keeps the dialogue between the museum and program participants open and reinforces the value of participant questions and knowledge.

Additional Practices for Science Programs

STEAM for all!

Include Participants in Demonstrations. Science museums are wonderful places to demonstrate scientific concepts that classrooms may not have the facilities, resources, or specialized knowledge for. When it’s safe to do so, asking for volunteers to help with demonstrations is a tried-and-true method of engaging audiences.
Scaffold Hands-On Elements. The teaching method of “scaffolding” can be described as “I do, we do, you do.” Start by demonstrating exactly what you want participants to do. Then, work with them to do it. Finally, let them do it themselves. This method of teaching helps people whose neurodivergence makes it harder to learn new concepts. For example, if you teach a neurodivergent person how to multiply 1.5 by 2 and then leave them to solve a sheet of similar problems on their own, they may still be confused, as they learned to multiply 1.5 by 2, not how to multiply decimals. If you teach them to multiply 1.5 by 2 and then work with them to multiply 2.25 by 3, they are more likely to understand the process of multiplying decimals, rather than the correct answer to one multiplication problem involving decimals.
Offer Feedback. Once an educator has reached the independent section of a scaffolded program, they should still offer feedback to participants. Feedback should start relatively simple (“Yes, that’s it!” or “Not quite, try [xyz] instead.”), then increase in detail as a participant’s skill increases (“Great attention to detail! You remembered [x] concept!” or “You remembered [x] concept, but don’t forget that it doesn’t work unless [y] first.”). Encouraging feedback from educators helps participants know when they’re on the right track, increasing their confidence and the likelihood that they’ll remember what they’ve learned once the program is over.

Additional Practices for History Programs

History for all!

Connect the Past to the Present. Most historical artifacts have contemporary equivalents. When introducing people to time periods they haven’t lived through, try to find ways to connect past artifacts and concepts to familiar contemporary ones. For people with dementia, this can also help them remember their own pasts.
Incorporate Object Handling When Possible. There’s a good deal of research indicating the usefulness of artifact handling in historical museum programming. Use of replica objects or handling collections of authentic artifacts is a way to engage multiple senses at the same time. For people with dementia, these artifacts may be similar to objects they would have come into contact with when they were younger, and handling them again may stimulate memory. For people being introduced to unfamiliar time periods, handling an artifact can give a sense of how an artifact was used, and of material composition that increases their understanding of the materials common in that era.

Additional Practices for Art Programs

Art for all!

Keep Interpretation Open-Ended. Most of the time, art is subjective. While an artist may have had specific intentions when creating a work of art, or scholars may have a generally agreed-upon interpretation of an artwork, unusual answers can start conversations and offer new insights into a subject. Try to lead discussions using open-ended questions, such as “What do you think is happening here?” or “Why do you think the artist made this choice while making this piece?”
Experiment with Multisensory Exploration of Art. For people with visual impairments especially, multisensory exploration of a piece of art can be a way to really engage participants in the subject matter. Material samples that allow participants to feel the fabric a figure in a painting is wearing or the stone a sculpture is carved from, scents that mimic those of objects or environments in paintings, and sounds that match an activity being depicted are examples of multisensory elements you can use to help people better understand an artwork. The elements chosen to be represented by multisensory props should be ones that are integral to the artwork, and this will draw attention to those important details, helping all audiences better understand the artwork.

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This guide was originally written as part of a Masters Thesis project at Seton Hall University in 2025. You can download a PDF of the full thesis here [COMING SOON].