ICOM – CECA PRESIDENT’S REPORT 2012 – 2013
1. Introduction
2013 is a very important year for CECA because of the new elections. In Rio the old and the new Board
are going to meet and discuss how to ensure continuity.
First of all, I want to express my gratitude to all the elected and coopted members of the previous Board
for their extraordinary engagement and intelligent support: Pino Monaco, Daniel Castro, Umebe
Onyejekwe, Stella Chrissoulaki, Marie-Clarté O’Neill, Jenni Fuchs, Colette Dufresne-Tassé, Sonia Guarita do
Amaral, Arja van Veldhuizen, Nicole Gesché Koning, Ayumu Ota, Silvia Ciriello.
I take this opportunity to warmly thank Josée Duhaime, CECA secretary from 2010 to 2013, for her
valuable work and the professional competence she showed in managing the delicate phase of CECA
bank account transfer from Pointe à Callière to Paris.
I am therefore very proud to say that, thanks to the Board commitment, ICOM Headquarters consider
CECA one of the most active and creative international committees.
In Rio we are also going to welcome the new elected Board members – Margarita Laraignée, Ani
Avagyan, Zeljka Zelavic, Arja van Veldhuizen, Ayumu Ota and Pino Monaco – and the new secretary
Cinzia Angelini. I wish them all a very fruitful and exciting experience.
In all the activities I am going to report here, my constant effort was to guarantee transparency,
innovation and usefulness, in particular for CECA members who cannot attend the annual conference. In
this respect my ambition is to enlarge as much as possible the participation of all members and to
consider the General Assembly as a paramount tool for CECA governance.
2. Annual conference 2012
In 2012 the annual conference took place in Yerevan
from the 19th to the 25th of October on the theme
Written communication in museums. Tradition and
innovation. There were 148 participants (among whom
21 non ICOM members) and 164 live streaming
followers. The conference was supported by three
ICOM national committees: Armenia, Georgia and
Kyrgyzstan. ICOM President, doctor Hans- Martin Hinz
did us the honour of opening and closing it. He was
also invited to take part in the Board meeting, where
he was favourably impressed by the level and contents
of the discussion.
bibliographical reference: CECA Best Practice 1. A
tool to improve museum education internationally,
edited by Emma Nardi, Roma, Nuova Cultura, ISBN
978886 1348868.
3. Regional conference 2012
I consider professional development a precise
responsibility of the Committee and, once again, I
underline the need to organise activities that can
involve an always larger number of members. CECA
Board is working on this topic in three different ways:
preconference workshops, seminars organised in
countries where it is more difficult to find resources for
travelling, development of a CECA Distance School.
A very important event took place in Chiba (Japan),
where Ayumu Ota organised a regional Asia and Pacific
conference (November 30th – December 1st).
4. Publications
All CECA publications are now available on CECA
website and can be downloaded by all members in
PDF format (http://ceca.icom.museum/node/30)
However, we still publish a certain number of hard
copies to send to libraries (ICOM’s in the first place)
and to use for dissemination purposes.
Two issues of CECA World Newsletter were
published in June and December 2012.
Icom Education 23 was regularily published under
the title “Museum Education and New Media”, edited
by Stella Chrissoulaki, Alexandra Bounia and Despina
Andriopoulou and presented last year at the Yerevan
Conference. We expect to have ICOM Education 24
in Rio, under the title “ Museum Education and the
Cultural Heritage in Threatened Countries”.
From the first edition of the CECA Best Practice Award
stemmed a publication that was launched during the
annual conference in Yerevan. Here is its complete
A second volume of the Best Practice Award is ready to
be presented in Rio. Here is its complete
bibliographical reference: CECA Best Practice 2. A
tool to improve museum education internationally,
edited by Emma Nardi and Cinzia Angelini, Roma,
Nuova Cultura, ISBN 9788868121082.
5. Professional development
Preconference workshops
Arja van Veldhuizen is taking care of the organisation
of preconference workshops, open to all members, that
take place the day before the opening of the
conference.
In 2012 two pre-conference workshops were included
in the Yerevan Conference programme, both held on
October 20th, 2012. Gundula Klein from the Stift ung
Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
in Berlin (Germany) run the workshop “Writing Text
Labels in Museums”; Theodorus Meereboer from the
E30 Foundation in Hilversum (Netherlands) run the
workshop “Writing Text for Digital Media”. Due to the
high number of participants, both workshops were
replicated. 80 members, divided into groups of 20, took
part in them.
At the Rio Conference, there will be the following preconference workshops:
Inclusive educational projects in museums, by Gabriela
Aidar, from Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paolo, Brazil. The
workshop will discuss ideas and experiences connected
with social inclusion and education in museums. In
order to encourage reflection on the potential of, and
the challenges facing socially inclusive projects in
museums, some concepts will be presented alongside
examples coming from both the workshop leader and
its participants of educational projects conducted with
community organizations and socially vulnerable
groups.
Ideas factory: education, experience and conversation,
by Ricardo Rubiales, from Mexico, advisor for planning
of exhibits and related workshops in Latin America and
experienced in working with children in art museums.
This is a workshop for museum educators and visitor
experience leaders, designed to foster creativity and
peer-to-peer exchange of ideas by presenting new
tendencies and innovative ways to include visitors in
the design process of educational programs. How to
involve the audience from the very beginning? The
workshop explores the planning and design of
educational projects to achieve maximum impact on
museum visitors and their experiences in our
exhibitions.
Training courses
Two training courses were organised, one in Nigeria
and one in Argentina.
A workshop run by Gabriela Aidar, an expert Brazilian
museum educator, was addressed to 40 Nigerian Ceca
members in April 20th - 29th, 2012. The activity was
developed under the responsibility of Sonia Guarita do
Amaral, Milene Chiovatto and Umebe Onyejekwe.
A course was organised in Argentina addressed to
museum educators willing to learn how to develop
research activities. The course took place in Buenos
Aires (Argentina) in April 25th -27th, 2012. It was open
to about 50 Latin-American educators under the
leadership of Colette Dufresne-Tassé, CECA former
president and researcher with an outstanding
international reputation.
Distance School
The idea of a CECA Distance School opened to all
members was launched in Yerevan and approved by
the General Assembly, under the name of CECAeWorld.
In this regard, the main problems CECA Board has to
cope with are as follows:
 decide the contents, beginning with the Best
Practice that is a very strong point of our
activity of the past two years;
 decide the responsibilities related to the
previous point;
 nominate a responsible for each segment of the
proposal (texts, videos, evaluation etc.);
 draw a sustainability scenario to make sure that
CECA Distance School will last for a reasonable
period. From this point of view I hope that my
trip to China can give us hope. The generous
in-kind offer from my Department, that will
allow us to use its innovative Orbis Dictus
learning environment, is paramount to start
with, because a proper distance system is very
expensive to implement and, at the moment,
CECA could hardly afford it.
6. CECA involvement in ICOM activity
As CECA President I had the honour of being invited at
the launch of ICOM International Training Centre for
Museum Studies, that took place in Beijing July 7th.
I have just been nominated member of the group in
charge of the evaluation of ICOM strategic plan.
7. Conclusions
I would like to conclude my report referring to some
thoughts that came to my mind when I wrote CECA
annual report to ICOM. I am going to present my
conclusions using the SWOT scheme.
Strengths
The new website has been successfully implemented. A
big effort was made to provide members with the
opportunity to download relevant publications. The
new website also allows connection with CECA through
the most popular social networks (Twitter, Flickr,
Facebook, LinkedIn). The live streaming of annual
conferences is also downloadable for members who
cannot personally attend the event.
CECA has constantly been working on standards in
museum education to meet the need expressed by
most members to discuss a common structure for a
good educational programme. However we do not
consider the resulting document – Best Practice - as a
reference defined document, but as a work in progress
tool that can be continually modified and integrated by
all members. This is a first step towards building a
common language among professionals working in
very different cultures and situations.
The first and second edition of the Best Practice Award
proved to be successful and will be hopefully repeated
in 2014.
Many CECA publications are regularly produced every
year.
All the accountability is now successfully transferred to
CECA bank account at HBSN. In 2012 CECA spent
24,000 euros. We have to keep in mind that
expenditure is considered as a proof of good
governance and hard work.
In 2012 CECA got 5,000 euros from an external body,
thus showing our potentiality in fund raising. The
amount may seem quite modest, but it is about 50% of
the regular financial support allotted by ICOM.
Weaknesses
It must always be reminded that all the work
developed by CECA is made by volunteers, each of
whom has another heavy and demanding job.
Therefore as activities are developed, it becomes more
and more difficult to cope with them. Besides in 2013
CECA website was moved to the ICOM general website.
The advantage is to rely on ICOM support to manage it
but, in the change, we lost an important feature – the
Experience Exchange database – that must now be
reorganised inside ICOMMUNITY.
Opportunities
Education is one of the core interests of many
important bodies, like Unesco and OCDE. Therefore
ICOM relies on CECA expertise in many different fields.
In particular, if the CECAeWORLD Project is successfully
implemented, it will allow several chances for other
International Committees and for countries who ask
ICOM to be aided in the development of their museum
systems.
Threats
The most important threat is the possible lack of
money in the middle of a challenging project, like
CECAeWORLD. CECA Board must be very careful in
organising the budget and implementing a highsustainability system for the future.