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.
At Dickinson College, Spanish classes use a common syllabus for the language sequence (the first four semesters of language classes). As part of a new curricular design for the sequence, two visits to the campus art museum are included each semester. The foundation for this curricular choice is multidimensional with four stakeholders: the faculty, the campus museum, the college, and the students.

Diaz, Erin McNulty. Student Benefits of Museum Visits as Part of the Foreign-Language Curriculum. In Language Learning in Academic Museums: New Paradigms for Cultural Study, Language Acquisition, and Campus Engagement, edited by Heather Flaherty and Jodi Kovach, 7-24. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

Erin McNulty Diaz is a professor of Spanish at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Rowman and Littlefield's Website. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475869729/Language-Learning-in-Academic-Museums-New-Paradigms-for-Cultural-Study-Language-Acquisition-and-Campus-Engagement

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