Lifelong learning in Museums: A European Handbook - Network of European Museum Organisations, 2006
This handbook grows out of Lifelong Museum Learning (LLML), a two year project funded by the European Commission between October 2004 and December 2006 within the framework of the Socrates Grundtvig programme.
Who is this handbook for?
This handbook is designed to support museum and gallery staff, especially those who have responsibility for education, interpretation or access, ensuring that learning opportunities, exhibitions, and resources are genuinely open to all. It is also for those educators who are more familiar with methodologies and practice relating to schoolchildren and would like to expand education activities to include adults. The publication is aimed at a broad European audience, with a variety of specialist training, expertise, experience, and status within their organisations. Some sections will be more relevant than others, depending on individual situations and needs. In the same way, some suggestions for good practice will be easier to implement than others.
This publication assumes that readers would like to see equal opportunities placed at the heart of museum provision, to open up access and to invite wider participation, and offers some suggestions and examples for how to achieve this. These include a more proactive approach to visitor research and outreach initiatives, a commitment to understanding how adults learn and what they wish to achieve from learning within the museum environment, and a willingness to identify and remove institutional barriers that may hinder non-traditional visitors from making use of the learning opportunities and resources a museum can offer.
We hope this handbook will be used as a tool to help programme planning and delivery as well as longer-term strategic planning. We also envisage its use within training contexts, as we acknowledge the value of targeted, relevant training and also of sharing practice with colleagues, both in one’s own country and internationally, through continuing professional development and informal networking. We welcome readers’ views on this handbook, as well as on future sector training needs. Contacts can be made to the leading partner or to any of the project’s partners.
Full text: PDF (3.5 MB)
Teaching Science in Museums: The Pedagogy and Goals of Museum Educators - Lynn Uyen Tran - Science Education, Volume 91, Issue 2, Nov. 2006
ABSTRACT: Museum educators have a longstanding presence in museums and play a significant role in the institutions’ educational agenda. However, research on field trips to science museums has predominantly explored teachers’ and students’ perspectives with little acknowledgment of the museum educatorswho develop and implement the educational programs the students experience. This study sought to describe instruction undertaken in, and goals driving, science museums’ lessons through observations of museum educators followed by conversations with them immediately afterwards. Findings showed the ways in which educators adapted their preplanned lessons to the students’ interests, needs, and understanding by manipulating the sequence and timing. The data revealed that, contrary to depictions in the research literature of teaching in museums as didactic and lecture oriented, there was creativity, complexity, and skills involved in teaching science in museums. Finally, the educators’ teaching actions were predominantly influenced by their affective goals to nurture interests in science and learning. Although their lessons were ephemeral experiences, these educators operated from a perspective, which regarded a school field trip to the science museum, not as a one-time event, but as part of a continuum of visiting such institutions well beyond school and childhood. These findings have implications for the pedagogical practices employed by museum educators, and the relationship between teachers and educators during school field trips, which are discussed.
Full text: PDF
The museum education mix: students, teachers and museum educators - Janette Griffin - Understanding Museums: Australian museums and museology, Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien (eds), National Museum of Australia, 2011
Introduction: While some school classes may still sit in a classroom, talked at by education officers, or be met at the museum’s schools entrance and provided with rules and worksheets, there are now many innovative and interactive programs available in museums. Learning opportunities that include emotional, aesthetic and interactive experiences have replaced ‘teaching’. Students spend more time immersed in the galleries, participating in drama, role play, online and hands-on interaction. Changes have been influenced by recent research into school students’ learning in museums. Numerous people, especially in the US and the UK, have contributed to these changes. [1] Many Australian educators and researchers have also expanded our knowledge of students’ learning in museums through practice and/or research. Some examples of their work will be described in this chapter. [2]
Museums have always positioned themselves as educational institutions, and yet the role of education staff has developed erratically and variably. In school-level programs there has been a trend to smaller groups working with a museum educator: from up to 60 in the 1970s to smaller groups now. Less time is spent in classrooms and more time in exhibition areas complemented by hands-on experiences. Programs are considerably more learning- and student-oriented and less object-driven. If worksheets are provided at all, they now seek thought-provoking investigations rather than simply ‘fill in the blanks’. Opportunity for communication with teachers and students has expanded dramatically through web-based information, materials and activities. In this chapter I will explore these changes for the museum educators,[3] the students, the teachers [4] and the museums as a whole. An interesting question that remains as yet unanswered is the amount of influence that students exert on cultural institutions, especially considering how large, diverse and measurable the group is.
Full text: http://www.nma.gov.au
Schooling the Museum: Pedagogy and Display in the Information Age - William Tyler - The Sixth Basil Bernstein Symposium, Griffith University, Brisbane
June 29th – July 3rd, 2010
Abstract: The public museum in the second half of the 20th Century has taken a departure from the classical “collection” model of specialized research and exhibition towards webbased access, community outreach and touristic promotion. By locating this transformation within the socio-semiotics of the information age (Tyler, 2004) and Bernstein’s (2000) modeling of pedagogic identities in the ‘re-centred state’, the paper traces the pedagogy of classical museum from one of a relatively autonomous and insulated textual space to one now defined by market positioning and audience extension through the interactive and visual possibilities of the new media. This account is then formalised in an evolutionary typology of museum’s position within the field of social and cultural reproduction that draws on: (a) a critical reading of Fyfe’s historical typology of museum display (b) Casey’s (2003) Lacanian analysis of the evolution of museum practices and (c) Tyler’s (2004;2010) formulation of the socio-semiotic field of pedagogic discourse in the information age. It is argued that pedagogic discourse in this environment exerts an unrecognised (“invisible/ unvoiced”) mediation between the “culture of distinction” and the visual “culture of distraction” (Prior, 2005).
Full text: PDF
Assessing learning in museum environment: A practical guide for museum evaluators - Ben Gammon - Head of Learning & Audience Development Science Museum, London, November 2003
Background: To answer the question “are visitors learning in museums?” requires complex and lengthy longitudinal studies lasting months or even years. Such studies are invaluable for museum professionals in planning and developing new exhibitions, events etc but are nearly always beyond the means of most institutions. Most museum projects are run over much shorter periods of time and require data on visitors’ learning far more quickly than can be provided by academic research.
The aim of this paper is to provide a practical guide to quickly but reliably assessing the educational value of an exhibit, exhibition, event, web-based resources etc within the constraints of time, money and staff faced by most museums. Rather than trying to assess learning we focus upon the process of learning. In other words rather than asking, “Has learning taken place?” we ask “Is learning taking place?” Or more specifically:
- Is there a potential for visitors to have learnt from this experience?
- What barriers are there to visitors’ learning?
The objectives of this paper are to define:
- what we mean by ‘learning in museums’
- indicators that learning is taking place and how they would be assessed
- indicators that barriers to learning are present and how these would be identified
To put it another way:
- What should we hear and see if visitors are having a learning experience?
- What would we hear and see if visitors are experiencing a barrier to learning?
These experiences do not, of course, encompass all of the possible outcomes of a museum visit. Other cultural and social outcomes exist and are just as valid (see appendix 1). However, the aim of this system is specifically to address the question of whether the educational outcomes of an exhibition have been met.
Full text: PDF