Cary Patterson makes her way to one of the galleries in the Art Museum on a Thursday afternoon, but she is not going to just browse around. She is getting ready to attend a meeting held just for docents.
Some students at Ball State are unaware of the art docent program offered at the museum and may not even know what a docent is.
"A docent is effectively a volunteer teacher or tour leader. In fact, if you look at the origin of the word, docent, it means ‘to teach,'" Tania Said, the curator of education at the Ball State Museum of Art, said.
Docents are responsible for leading tours, whether it be for outside groups coming in to visit the museum or groups from the university. At Ball State, the docent program allows students and residents of the community to volunteer their time to lead tours at the museum. Before becoming a docent, students and community members must first participate in training and attend weekly meetings held every Thursday with Said.
According to Said, docents also need to complete at least one tour a month to be considered an active docent, and they must observe three tours a semester.
"That's so they can develop their own style and understand what works better based on the content and the person's knowledge and expertise," she said.
One of the things Said appreciates about the student docents is that they're not all just art majors or art history majors.
Patterson, a junior theater major, volunteers her time at the art museum as a docent, despite not being involved with the art program. She then attended an informational meeting for docents where she met with Said.
"[Said] taught us basically how sharing your knowledge of art with the people coming in is an exciting way to share your passion for art and for art history," Patterson said.
After attending meetings and participating in training, she was ready to lead her own tour. Patterson said there many ways people can prepare for a tour and everyone is different. For the tours you need to pick a central theme and from there you can go to the docent files and look through information and articles that has been saved on that one specific topic.
Patterson enjoys sharing her knowledge and enjoys it when people feel comfortable enough to share their opinions about an art piece.
"A lot of times art museums in general seem very stuffy or very restrained, and I like to start that dialogue with people," she said. "It's always more fun for a docent when you speak up on a tour because then everyone learns something new," she said.
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