The Madison Children’s Museum, after receiving a local grant for accessibility improvements, undertook a deep collaboration resulting in a toolkit for self-evaluation that can provide a model for other cultural institutions, according to VSA.

Through a coalition of stakeholders facilitated within the ASD community, UW-Madison’s Ausderau and her team became involved in this project. Ausderau is an assistant professor with the School of Education’s Department of Kinesiology. She heads the Karla Ausderau Research Lab, housed in UW-Madison’s Waisman Center.

Ausderau reveals to VSA that, in a process that lasted about a year, her team worked with the hopes, aspirations, and challenges of the museum’s stakeholders in terms of experiences to assess components of the museum experience for families with children with ASD. From their assessment, Ausderau and her team developed and piloted assessment tools, editing and reassessing until they arrived at the current version of the toolkit.

The toolkit will help institutions evaluate existing programming, find areas of improvement not previously considered, and assist with the implementation of changes through evidenced intentionality. According to VSA, over 100 institutions have used the self-evaluation toolkit.

Ausderau tells VSA that this work has embodied the Wisconsin Idea, saying “it helps academic institutions get out of their silos to benefit the community, while also educating the next generation of practitioners.”

Read VSA’s full story here.