Located in Carlisle, a small town in south central Pennsylvania, the Trout Gallery was created in 1983 to bring together in one location art objects and artifacts donated to Dickinson College. Today, the gallery's permanent collection includes eleven thousand works dating from the Ancient Near Eastern period to the present day. Gallery spaces are housed in the Weiss Center for the Arts, where the college music program also resides. Two exhibition areas are used for a rotation of around six temporary exhibits per year; these shows are drawn from the permanent collection or feature works on loan from other institutions. The museum also has a small curricular gallery used for exhibiting faculty-requested objects.
In addition to exhibition spaces, museum class visits can take place in a small seminar room or a larger multipurpose arts classroom, the Mumper Stuart Education Center. The gallery uses the title Curator of Education to refer to the position that directs all museum educational programming, on campus and community facing. This position is one of four full-time staff at the gallery; a part-time postbaccalaureate position assists with direct teaching of community groups, including K-12 visitors.
Beginning Spanish programs represent a signature component of the Trout Gallery's education portfolio. Developing a meaningful museum visit for students enrolled in their first language classes is distinctly challenging. Typically, when college classes visit the campus art museum, they do so because the museum has objects available that relate to course content. These objects may connect to a specific class issue or theme or a time period being covered, or perhaps the mere existence of the objects and museum itself provide the connection, such as in a business class examining the art market. In all of these cases, the museum visit provides an opportunity to learn new content being taught at the college level.

Flaherty, Heather. Museum Visits for Beginning Language Learners. In Language Learning in Academic Museums: New Paradigms for Cultural Study, Language Acquisition, and Campus Engagement, edited by Heather Flaherty and Jodi Kavach, 121-139. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

Heather Flaherty is Curator of Education at The Trout Gallery, the art museum of Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Rowman and Littlefield's Website. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475869743/Language-Learning-in-Academic-Museums-New-Paradigms-for-Cultural-Study-Language-Acquisition-and-Campus-Engagement

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