Lunch & Learn with TAM & John Falk 7.7.22

Lunch & Learn Webinar with TAM

July 7, 2022 

12:00 pm on Zoom

The Value of Museums: Enhancing Societal Well-Being

with John Falk, Executive Director of the Institute for Learning Innovations
& Margaret Koch, Director of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum 

Join us for lunch, where we'll replay the TAM 2022 session "The Value of Museums: Enhancing Societal Well-Being" and offer a Q&A with presenter John Falk and TAM President Margaret Koch. 

This session will focus on how museum professionals can better understand and explain the benefits of museum experiences. Knowingly or not, the business of museums has always been to support and enhance the public’s personal, intellectual, social and physical well-being. Over the years, museums have excelled at this task, as evidenced by the almost indelible memories engendered by museum experiences. People report that museum experiences make them feel better about themselves, more informed, happier, healthier and more enriched - all outcomes directly related to enhanced well-being. Historically, benefits such as this were seen as vague and intangible, but Falk will describe how enhanced well-being, when properly conceptualized, can be defined and measured. The talk will conclude with suggestions for how these insights about well-being might be used as a strategy for helping museums better adapt to the rapidly changing and challenging times ahead.

About John Falk: Dr. John H. Falk is Executive Director of the Institute for Learning Innovation and Sea Grant Professor Emeritus of Free-Choice Learning at Oregon State University. He is internationally recognized as a leading expert on free-choice learning; the learning that occurs while visiting science centers, museums, zoos, aquariums or ecotourism sites, watching educational television or surfing the Internet for information. Dr. Falk has authored over 200 articles and chapters in the areas of learning, ecology and education, two dozen books and helped to create several nationally important out-of-school educational curricula. His most rent book is The Value of Museums: Enhancing Societal Well-Being (2021, Rowman & Littlefield) which establishes a new way to define and measure the value of cultural and educational experiences. His current research focuses on studying the reasons people engage in free-choice learning and the impacts that free-choice learning settings such as museums, national parks and science centers have on the publics that use them. He also has a keen interest in exploring new ways of thinking about, measuring and supporting science literacy and professional learning.