The Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre (TAEC) is an independent, non-profit museum dedicated to promoting the appreciation and preservation of cultural diversity in Lao PDR. Like most museums, TAEC maintains a collection of artefacts, curates exhibitions, and promotes scholarship and learning through research and outreach activities. However, TAEC is also a museum representing living cultures in a developing country context, and as such faces a unique set of challenges for which it has developed specific approaches. In a country with low education levels and a lack of museum and non-traditional learning opportunities, simply drawing in Lao visitors and creating a meaningful experience for them requires creativity and active visitor management. TAEC has developed a range of activities for children visiting the museum and also conducts sessions in schools to broaden its reach. Attracting adults has remained more elusive. To facilitate the building of further cultural heritage resources in Laos, TAEC conducts capacity-building activities for government staff of museums, NGO workers, and tourism professionals. TAEC’s most challenging but meaningful objective is to promote cultural pride and revitalisation within ethnic minority communities themselves. TAEC has explored approaches including an ethnic minority intern programme, collaborative exhibition development with villages, and an ethnic cultural festival. Recognising that rural ethnic communities are amongst Laos’ poorest populations, TAEC also runs a handicrafts development programme, generating income for over 600 artisans in 11 provinces of the country. TAEC views all these approaches (and others) as part of its education and advocacy programmes, and crucial to the sustainability of the organisation, its mission, and cultural heritage management itself. The challenge is how to progress from simply educating local populations to understand and value the idea of cultural diversity, to adopting the task of fostering cultural diversity, and finally, to taking leadership in their own communities to tackle their specific cultural heritage issues through home-grown approaches.

1. Traditional Arts and
Ethnology Centre
Museum Education as a Sustainable
Approach to Community-Driven
Heritage Management
Alicia Akins, Programmes Director

2. Contents
• Background of TAEC
– Mission
– Areas of Activity
• Challenges of Developing Country Context
• Education as a Sustainability Approach
• Enduring Questions & Possibilities

3. Traditional Arts and
Ethnology Centre
• Private, non-profit museum
• Started in November 2005 by an American anthropologist
and a Lao museum professional
• Start-up funding from private donors and foundations
• Opened in July 2007 in heritage building in Luang Prabang
• Dearth of accessible, accurate and engaging information
on Laos’ ethnology
• Dedicated to the understanding and preservation of ethnic
diversity in Laos

4. Mission & Objectives
To facilitate pride and investment in Laos’
ethnic diversity and cultural resources by
helping visitors and locals to understand and
value the changing lifestyles of Laos’ many
ethnic groups, and providing an outlet for the
development and selling of their handicrafts.

5. Operational vs. Missional
• Operationally functional: financially
sustainable
• Missionally sustainable: local investment
in mission beyond our organization
• Both necessary for long term success

6. Activities
• Collections
• Exhibitions
• Research
• Advocacy and Livelihoods
• Education and Outreach

7. Challenges of a Developing
Country
• Education levels &
systems
• Physical and intellectual
access to resources
• Different local priorities
• No precedent for
museum  community
engagement

8. Education and Outreach as
Sustainability Strategy
TAEC’s most challenging but
meaningful objective is to
promote cultural pride and
revitalisation within ethnic
minority communities
themselves.

9. Limits of traditional museum
activity areas
Exhibits, research, and collection are
based on a model that assumes:
• comfort with self-guided discovery and
reflection
• an ability to engage with large
quantities of information at higher
cognitive levels

10. Community Integrated Education:
A Sustainability Opportunity
• Moves beyond more static education
approaches to more community-led,
dynamic ways of sustaining heritage
• Meets people in their communities
with learning opportunities based on
their needs

11. Our Approach
UNDERSTANDING ADOPTING PROPELLING
TAEC’s mission TAEC’s mission TAEC’s mission
“I understand.” “What can I do?” “Here are my plans,
“Interesting.” would you like to
partner with me?”
students participants leaders

12. School Programs
• 2-member education outreach team that visits
schools in surrounding areas
• Collaboration with other educationally-focused
local non-profits on book and literacy projects,
knowledge fairs, and ethnology curriculum for
school use

13. Staff Training
• Recruiting ethnic minorities
• Taking TAEC staff to conferences abroad related
to heritage management
• Research projects where staff can explore
ethnological topics based on their own interests
and share final report with staff team
• External guide training

14. Capacity building with regional
museum professionals
• TAEC engaged to provide support to
government and project staff in five
provinces.
– Training on community
research, cataloguing, devel
oping displays, and visitor
management
– Study tours
– Exhibition development

15. Ethnic Minority Interns
In 2009 TAEC hosted four ethnic youth
interns for a month
– Oral history projects
– Introduction to heritage
management
– Local cultural tour
– Accompanied by local
knowledge resource
persons

16. Ethnic Cultural Festival
• Held in 2010
• 156 ethnic participants from 11 different villages
representing 7 ethnic groups participated
• High turn-out for local Lao visitors attending
• Cultural performances, learning activities and
handicraft stalls

17. Training artisan communities
• Took Yao Mien artisan to participate in
Santa Fe International Folk Art Market
• Helping artisans set up distribution
channels

18. Enduring Questions & Possibilities
• How else could we encourage greater
engagement and ownership of preservation of
traditions and informed adoption of new ones?
• How can we use the challenges of our context to
help shape a locally sustainable model of
museums?
• What can and does our experience add to the
broader discussion of the relevance of
museums?

19. Enduring Questions & Possibilities
• Given the correlation between rise in education
levels and decline in practice of traditional arts,
how can we integrate traditional arts within
schools so attendance does not lead to decline
but to a flourishing, “reimagining”, and fresh
appreciation of traditional skills?

20. THANK YOU
taeclaos.org