EDUCATION

Education at The Ringling engages and inspires learners of all ages and abilities. Our goal is to make meaningful connections between our audiences and The Ringling’s expansive collections. We achieve this by creating welcoming environments, fostering dialogue and collaboration, and providing relevant and accurate information to our visitors in creative ways.

12,560 FAMILY PROGRAMS PARTICIPANTS

2,000 HOMESCHOOLED CHILDREN SERVED 50 TITLE 1 SCHOOLS ATTENDED PROGRAMS

$10,000+ IN SCHOOL BUS SCHOLARSHIP FUNDS EXPENDED

9,126 DOCENT TOURS

81,917 VISITORS SERVED ON DOCENT TOURS

Our diverse array of family programs served 12,560 participants over the course of the year, a 13.6% increase from the previous year. Families enjoyed programming for all ages, including our stroller tours for infants and caregivers, our early reading program for toddlers, and our art-making programs for children and their adults. Families have been raving about the opportunities offered to them, describing the programs as “accessible, interesting, and collaborative.” Writes one participant, “Amazing! I have loved the conversation and imagination that this program has sparked in my children!” In January, an exciting ticketing change was introduced, making all family programs completely free of charge. This policy allows the museum to be more inclusive of all families, including those with diverse family structures and those from low-income households. Education staff presented on The Ringling’s youth programs at the annual conferences of the Florida Association of Museums and the American Alliance of Museums. The Homeschool program continues to thrive, with nearly 2,000 people having taken part in this unique learning opportunity over the course of the year.

Students from pre-K through college took advantage of the Ringling’s school programs this year, with over 10,000 students making on-site visits to the museum. Over 50 Title 1 schools came to The Ringling this year. Among them were 215 incoming kindergartners, who embarked on their first ever field trip as part of the Summer Learning Academy, which helps prepare them for the upcoming school year. School tours are always free of charge; in addition, the museum distributed $10,000 in bus scholarship funds to make field trips possible for all. We expanded tour options this year to include the first floor of the Ca’ d’Zan, tying The Ringling’s legacy into the Florida history curriculum. We were honored to participate in the inaugural year of Wild for Literacy, a Sarasota County Schools program designed to promote literacy among kindergarten and first grade students. We offered several professional development training opportunities for teachers to support arts integration and arts education, partnering with local organizations such as Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, Booker Middle School VPA Creative Writing, Any Given Child, Embracing Our Differences, Van Wezel Performing Arts Center, and the School District of Manatee County.

Our docent program, which is one of the most active in the country, provides museum visitors special insight to the stories told by our collections. In the past year, Ringling docents gave 9,126 tours to 81,917 visitors across four museum venues: over 400 tours in the Circus Museum, over 6,500 tours of the Ca’ d’Zan, and more than 2,000 tours in the Museum of Art. We began stationing docents in the Museum of Art on free Mondays to provide engagement for our visitors on that venue’s busiest day of the week. In the summer of 2018, Ca’ d’Zan docents participated in a refresher course to ensure the continued high caliber of the tours we offer. We also recruited 20 new Ca’ d’Zan docents who underwent three months of intensive training. Each docent candidate put in many hours of work studying the history of the Ringlings and the Ca’ d’Zan and practicing visitor engagement techniques. We look forward to having this new group of docents join our enthusiastic team of dedicated volunteers helping share the legacy of the Ringlings.

We continued to serve our adult audiences of lifelong learners through our Gallery Walk and Talk tours, Collecting Recollections oral histories, Conversation programs, Viewpoint lectures, Art and a Movie screenings, and Grounds & Gardens workshops. Notable guest speakers this year included artists Jill Sigman, Coco Fusco, Teo Gonzalez, and Natasha Mazurka; scholars Melissa Hyde, Dirk Breiding, and Shige Suzuki, and critic Mark Lamster. We also introduced a new program model called Meet Ups, which provided space for discourse about the Coco Fusco: Twilight exhibition. Meet Ups served as forums for museum visitors to exchange ideas with one another and share personal insights spurred by the exhibition. Additional Coco Fusco: Twilight programming was made available by the generosity of the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, which provided the funds to bring Fusco and three Cuban artists to The Ringling for a day-long discussion of poetry, film, freedom of expression, and politics in contemporary Cuba, available to participants at no charge.

No matter the format, audience, or topic, Education programs at The Ringling provide accessible entry points into the collection and promote a love of learning for all.