A Day in the Life of a Museum Educator: Christine Cassidy Itta on Anchorage Museum Life, Culturally Competent Curriculum, and Moving to Rural Alaska
Christine Cassidy Itta is a museum educator at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska, and she wears more hats in a week than most people wear in a year. Field-trip guide, early-childhood program lead, maker-space facilitator, curriculum writer: the job changes shape depending on the day.
Here is the surprising part. She did not grow up in Alaska. She grew up in South Carolina, went to college there, and started her career as a classroom teacher. Then she moved to one of the most remote places in the United States, a village she reached by eight-seater plane, roughly sixty miles south of the northernmost town in the country. She met her husband Tony there, learned to eat whale as a regular meal, and traded a red-pen classroom for a museum floor she now helps run.
This is the full picture: what a museum educator actually does, the winding path that got her there, and the Alaska life that reshaped everything around the work.
What a museum educator actually does all day
The Anchorage Museum covers art, history, science, and culture, which means Christine’s days rarely repeat. During the school year, much of her time goes to school-group field trips, walking students through the galleries with inquiry-based methods that let the kids lead as much as possible. Rather than lecture at them, she hands the looking back to them: what do you notice about this object, this artwork, this culture?
She also runs Blink, the museum’s programming for children five and under. For her master’s thesis in museum education, she rewrote the entire early-childhood curriculum for that program. Part of every week she spends on the floor in Co Lab, the museum’s hands-on making and invention space. It runs like a maker space with a craft heart: embroidery, bookbinding, weaving, paper flowers, all skills visitors can try on the spot.
Then there is the writing. Christine develops curriculum for the museum’s free public resource hub and partners with outside groups like the Anchorage School District on specific curriculum needs. Shaping resources so a stranger can pick them up and use them is its own craft, one that shares a little DNA with the work of a published author building something a reader can carry away.
Alaska has a surprising number of museums, most of them small, some run by only a couple of people. The Anchorage Museum is the largest in the state, which is part of why her role stretches across so many functions at once. No two days look alike, and she likes it that way.
How Christine became a museum educator
Christine trained as a teacher and spent time in a real classroom before the museum. Leaving the classroom had nothing to do with disliking the work. She loved working with people, testing new activities, and digging into different ways of learning. What drained her was behavior management and grading.
It’s all the things that I loved to do without any of the negatives.
Christine Cassidy Itta
Museum education gave her the parts of teaching she cared about most and left behind the parts that wore her down. When school groups visit, the classroom teachers handle most of the behavior management, which frees Christine to focus on discovery. Her path echoes other educators who found a way to teach outside a standard track, like a music educator who builds a career around a specific love. For Christine, that love was culturally relevant curriculum, and it became the thread she followed all the way to a master’s degree and her own programs.
How to become a museum educator
Christine’s route was not a straight line, and that is worth saying plainly for anyone eyeing this field. She started with a teaching background and classroom experience, which gave her the instincts for how learning happens with a group of kids. From there, a master’s in museum education deepened the specialty and let her lead her own programs.
A few things stand out from her path as practical guidance:
– Get teaching reps first. Real experience with learners gives you a feel for pacing, questions, and what lands in a room.
– Follow your specific interest. Christine’s passion for culturally relevant curriculum became her professional niche, not a side project.
– Expect to wear many hats. Especially at smaller museums, one educator may run programs, write curriculum, facilitate activities, and cover the floor.
– Say yes to the free public work. Building resources for a museum’s public hub sharpens your craft and reaches people who never walk through the doors.
The field is also hiring, which makes the honest career picture worth a closer look further down.
What culturally competent curriculum actually takes
This is the part of the job Christine cares about most, and it is careful, ongoing work. She keeps up with the conversations happening nationally and across Alaska, attends professional development, and treats staying current as her own responsibility rather than someone else’s. That disciplined research habit will feel familiar to anyone who has followed a scholarly path, like a PhD student chasing sources to the ground.
The research standard is high. She looks for reliable sources and stays wary of older anthropology texts, some of which carry inaccurate outsider perspectives or share sacred knowledge that was never meant for a general audience. Deciding what to teach means deciding what to leave out, too.
Her guiding principle is to center the source culture. When she built a cultural-arts curriculum for the Anchorage School District’s middle-school art classes, she filled it with videos of Indigenous people and Indigenous speakers so students would hear directly from the source.
Those are the voices that students are hearing, and not my voice, because I’m not the expert. I’m kind of like a vehicle for helping put what resources are out there into an easily usable curriculum for teachers.
Christine Cassidy Itta
She also treats curriculum as a living document. Lesson plans go through internal review by a museum curator, then out to elders and culture bearers before they ever reach a school district. Once a lesson meets real students, it often changes again, because a plan on paper and a plan in a classroom are two different animals. Christine keeps revising rather than clinging to a first draft.
The best and hardest parts of the job
Ask her what she likes most and the answer comes fast.
I like that there’s something new to do every day. And also that our interests are really what guides the path that the education department is taking.
Christine Cassidy Itta
That flexibility lets her spend real time on culturally relevant curriculum development, the work she finds most meaningful, alongside everything else on her plate.
The harder parts are the ones every job carries and a few specific to museums. Cleaning exhibits after closing and other management tasks rank low next to a day spent with visitors learning to sew or talking through science and culture. The deeper challenge is institutional. Museums hold a history of colonization, and many acquired the objects in their care through unethical means. That leaves live questions inside the field: whether to repatriate objects, how to keep caretaking responsibly, and how to bring Indigenous voices into the exhibitions and programs built around their own cultures. Christine sees that work as worth the occasional red tape it involves, because the payoff is a museum where more people feel welcomed and see themselves reflected.
Is museum education a good career? Christine’s honest take
The honest answer is that the field is growing and has room in it. Christine points out that museum education is the newest part of museum culture, so it does not always get the recognition that curatorial work does. That is shifting. More people are starting to value the education side, even if it has not fully caught up.
The pandemic made the stakes visible. When museums cut staff, education and front-of-house teams were among the first affected, since they are the public face of the institution. Christine’s own department held together, with a few reduced hours that later returned to full time. As museums reopened and rehired, museum-education jobs started getting posted in large numbers.
Her own role shifted a great deal in that stretch. Before the shutdown, she spent most of her time on the floor. When everything closed, she moved to full-time curriculum development, building free resources for the museum’s public hub: step-by-step guides for embroidery, weaving, and paper flowers, plus a weekly at-home version of her Blink program that she released for more than a year. Members emailed in requests, which gave her a direct line to the families she serves. For someone whose passion is curriculum, it turned into a season of real growth.
The life around the work
Alaska reshaped almost everything for Christine, starting with the food on her plate. Her husband Tony is Inupiaq, and she now eats the cultural foods he grew up with, whale included. She has picked up the local vocabulary, too. Alaskans call the continental US the lower 48. A snowmobile is a snow machine. An ulu, the roundish Inupiaq knife, lives in her kitchen for cutting fish and, on pizza night, slicing the pizza. The Arctic entryway that keeps cold air from rushing into the house has its own name she reaches for before the English one comes to mind.
The move north began in a village she could reach only by small plane, where the single store carried no fresh fruit or vegetables and snow could fall in June. Families there supplement store-bought and shipped-in groceries with hunting, fishing, and gathering, the way people have fed themselves on that land for centuries. Christine chose that first teaching job on purpose, drawn by a school district that embedded its curriculum in the Inupiaq language. For a second-year teacher, it was a rare opportunity, and it set the direction for everything that followed.
Alaska also taught her a different model of family. She has helped care for Tony’s younger sister Francis, who was adopted into the family, and the experience opened up how kinship works in many Indigenous cultures. Extended family, aunties, cousins, and uncles often share in raising a child, sometimes through a formal open adoption and sometimes by a child spending a season with a relative.
It’s not the nuclear family of mom, dad, kids. It’s all of your aunties and your cousins and your uncles, and some of them you might not technically be related to, but they helped raise you, so they’re family.
Christine Cassidy Itta
These days Christine lives in Anchorage with Tony and their Corgi, Winston, in the first house she has owned. When she talks about visiting Alaska, her enthusiasm is easy to catch: summer for hiking, fishing, the train, and Denali, the great mountain now officially known by one of its Indigenous names; winter for the Northern Lights, skiing, and ice-sculpture competitions. She recommends the Anchorage Museum, of course, and points anyone curious about Alaska Native cultures toward the Alaska Native Heritage Center.
FAQ
A few of the questions people ask most about museum education, answered from Christine’s own experience.
What does a museum educator do?
They design and lead learning outside a traditional classroom: guiding school field trips with inquiry-based methods, running programs for specific age groups, facilitating hands-on activities, and writing curriculum for both in-museum use and free public resources. At smaller museums, one educator often covers all of it.
How do you become a museum educator?
A teaching background helps, because classroom experience builds real instincts for how groups learn. From there, a master’s in museum education deepens the specialty and opens the door to leading programs and writing curriculum.
Is museum education a good career right now?
It is a growing field. Museum education is the newest part of museum culture and does not yet get the same recognition as curatorial work, but that is changing, and many institutions have been actively hiring educators.
What makes curriculum culturally competent?
Centering the source culture, using reliable resources, uplifting Indigenous voices and speakers directly instead of speaking for them, running lesson plans past elders and culture bearers, and treating the curriculum as a living document that keeps evolving.
What is the best time to visit Alaska?
It depends on what you want. Summer brings hiking, fishing, the train, and Denali. Winter brings the Northern Lights, skiing, and ice-sculpture competitions, for anyone who does not mind the cold.
Final thoughts
The thread running through Christine’s story is that she followed the work that meant the most to her, even when it carried her thousands of miles from where she started and into a life she never could have predicted. She built a career around one specific passion, culturally competent curriculum, and let it lead her through a classroom, a remote village, a master’s thesis, and a museum floor she now helps shape. She also models something worth carrying: that sharing what you learn creates a ripple, reaching people you will never meet.
If you followed the single subject you find most meaningful all the way to its edge, where might it take you, and who might you become on the way?
