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).

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