From Field Trip to Career Path: The Taubman Museum’s School Partnerships

Most museums measure their relationship with schools in hours. A visit, a tour, a workshop — then the bus pulls away. The Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia, has been trying something far more ambitious: a sustained, four-year programme that brings high school students into the museum not as visitors, but as participants.

The Museum Studies programme at the Taubman has been running since 2009, and it has grown considerably since then. What began with seven students in a single senior class now attracts roughly a hundred applicants each year competing for 25 available spots. The waitlist, in its own way, tells you something important: there is genuine appetite among young people for this kind of experience, when it is offered.

At the Museums & Schools Summit 2026, Katrina King-Singh, Deputy Director of Community Engagement at the Taubman, joined art teacher Natalie Strum and museum educator Mary Novick to explain how the programme works, why it works, and what it has meant — for students, for the museum, and for the broader community.

Built Into the School Day

The programme is available to students in 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, and crucially, it is embedded into the regular school day rather than offered as an optional extra. That decision shapes everything. It means the museum is accessible to students who couldn’t otherwise get there — public school buses provide transport — and it means participation doesn’t depend on a family’s ability to give up evenings or weekends.

For one month each school year, students have class at the museum rather than in their regular classroom. Natalie Strum, who has been teaching the programme for thirteen years, is matter-of-fact about what that does: “It’s like being on a field trip for a whole month.” But she’s also clear about what makes it more than that. The difference between a field trip and this kind of sustained presence, she argues, is the difference between being shown something and actually inhabiting it.

“Coming to a museum and taking a tour and observing artwork for an hour is very different from sitting with it and being surrounded by it and hearing about it and thinking about it and knowing how it was hung,” she said. “They start to be able to critically think about how a museum actually functions.”

The Behind-the-Scenes Principle

If there is one thing that consistently lands with students, according to everyone who spoke, it is access to the people who make the museum work — and an honest account of what that work actually involves.

Every year, Mary Novick, who has taught the programme for three years, ensures that staff from across the museum come in to speak directly with students: not just curators, but people handling finance, logistics, facilities, and front-of-house operations. The conversations that tend to stick, she and Strum agree, are the ones where professionals are candid about the realities of their careers — the zigzag routes, the unexpected challenges, the daily decisions that never make it into a job description.

“The more honest the professional is about the challenges that come up, the more interest that they have,” Strum observed. Students have asked Barbara at the security desk about the strangest things she’s ever witnessed in the museum. They have spoken to registrars about how artworks are stored and handled. In their senior years, they have sat with curators who designed specific gallery spaces and been shown the software used to plan exhibition layouts before a single object is moved.

King-Singh noted that this breadth of exposure is itself one of the programme’s core aims. Students who come in imagining that museum work means being a curator often leave with a far more complete picture. “There are so many different roles within the museum field,” she said — from facilities management to fundraising to educational programming — “and maybe they begin to see themselves in the museum role, which is very exciting for us.”

A Curriculum That Deepens Over Four Years

The programme is not the same experience repeated annually. It develops intentionally as students move through it, and so does the level of engagement expected of them.

In the earlier years, students are introduced to the museum’s exhibitions, meet staff, and begin exploring the question of which roles might interest them. By 11th and 12th grade, the conversation shifts. Rather than asking what sounds appealing, students are being asked: if this were your problem to solve, how would you approach it? They research specific artworks, work through art history and criticism, present to each other, and develop the habits — analytical thinking, professional communication, sustained inquiry — that transfer well beyond the arts.

For Strum, whose school runs an adjudicated art-making programme, the museum studies component fills a gap that the classroom simply cannot. “In an art museum, it’s built in,” she said of art history. “The people that talk about the art know all about the history and the context it comes from. And being able to see it in person — I can’t say enough about it.”

What Sticks

The students who spoke as part of the session — some current participants, some past interns — described the programme in terms of what it opened up for them. One spoke about learning the importance of communication between every part of a museum. Another talked about discovering a genuine interest in community engagement, and the particular significance of being a Roanoke local contributing to the place where she grew up.

There were also the memories that Strum returned to unprompted: the immersive art experiences — a Mucha show, a Titian to Monet exhibition — where students walked into rooms filled with projected colour and music, and the response on their faces was something she described simply as awe. And a large-scale collaborative mural, made by students and printed by the city of Roanoke, that still stands in a visible public spot today.

“I was so proud of it, the kids were so proud of it,” she said. “It has longevity.”

A Model Worth Replicating

The programme exists because of a sustained funding commitment: Roanoke County Administration sponsors a grant that covers both the school and the museum, supporting not only Museum Studies but a professional development series for teachers and tours for younger students. That external support has been essential. But the pedagogical choices — the on-site immersion, the four-year arc, the honest engagement with professionals across every department — are replicable wherever the will exists.

King-Singh’s closing message to the summit was direct. The Taubman is proud of what it has built, but the point was never to keep it to themselves. “We hope that we’ve inspired you to do the same,” she said.

For institutions wondering whether a deeper relationship with schools is worth the investment, the Taubman’s evidence is fairly straightforward: students who come through this programme become museum patrons, museum advocates, and sometimes museum staff. They bring their own communities with them. They return.

That is not a field trip. That is something else entirely.

Katrina King-Singh, Natalie Strum, and Mary Novick presented this session at the Museums & Schools Summit 2026. The Taubman Museum of Art is located in Roanoke, Virginia.