Devorah Block

At Johns Hopkins, Devorah Block serves as a lecturer in the MA in Museum Studies program where her teaching engages museum learning, interpretation, organizational dynamics, and the position of museums within their spatial and civic contexts.

An educator, strategist, and curator whose work focuses on the relationships between place, learning, and institutional practice, Block is co-founder and Head of Learning at IF/ Design Labs. There, she develops methods and learning frameworks intended to help people describe, analyze, and work with the conditions of place with a focus on approach and method, and the contribution of practical tools that can be taken up by practitioners in cultural, educational, political, and spatial fields. She also leads the Place Literacy Campaign, a public-facing initiative that tests shared language and observational practices for engaging with place.

Block’s experience includes two decades of work in museums and cultural organizations in Australia, Europe, and North America. She has contributed to the development of learning strategies, interpretive approaches, and public programming, with an emphasis on inquiry-based and participatory learning. Her current work with museums examines how they might understand their organizational conditions, the environments they participate in, and the forms of public engagement and responsibility that follow.

Block completed her doctorate at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, where her research focused on institutional change in museums and the relationships between learning practices, organizational culture, and governance. Her ongoing areas of interest include place literacy, informal learning systems, feminist and critical pedagogies, and approaches to museum practice that are attentive to ecological and relational contexts. She teaches, writes, and works with organizations internationally.