Museum learning

Our doctoral research aims to take into account the interpretive reasoning of children via their overall visit experience, taking into consideration all dimensions that affect them. It is thus interesting to examine the relationship that the young visitors establish with the exhibit (the objects, activities, spaces, and even the institution) through an empirical methodological process based on an ethnographic approach. We have designed a methodological communicational device based on mediation : “the simulation of the role of the guide” for the researcher. The analysis of the children’s accounts enabled us to work out frameworks of children’s interpretation and point out four “children-interpreters” figures depending on their appropriation method.

Abstract
This chapter examines the performative and embodied nature of the museum visit and in doing so mounts a challenge to the dominance of the idea that the museum visit is, or should be, about learning. Rather, the argument advanced is that visitors use museums in a wide range of ways and that the learning paradigm restricts the ability of researchers and museum professionals to recognize this diversity.  Understanding the visit as an embodied performance reveals the means by which visitors emotionally engage with museum exhibitions and thus identifies the ways in which visitors undertake their own ‘heritage making’ and the production and reinforcement of their own meanings and cultural and political values. Interviews with visitors to museums and other sites of heritage in England, Australia and the USA are used to illustrate and support the argument.

This work has been structured to be divided in two parts: the first section is focused on the epistemological basis with many references at theories and specific studies, instead, the second one, that is the real core of the elaborate, refers to a projectual proposal that embrace a new way to experience and perceive the children’s art museum.
Before the work on the project has begun a previous analysis on the concept of “children’s art” has been made. The main feature of this concept has been enucleated following an aesthetical and a psychological approach.
To consider children as artist is furthermore necessary for building new didactical paths intended to enhance children’s products.
The idea for this museum was born from the willing to realize a place in which children can recognize themselves and their own art. A very special environment that allow them to feel conscious about their creative and artistic power, to feel comfortable with their culture and
works.
A place that might become a bridge between the territory, the scholastic institution and the museum.
The school and the territory, at this point, are ready to configure as a network system that is capable to give new life to artistic education and children’s art.
Every actor of this system has been taken into exam to show its connection with children’s art and art’s education.
At the end of this analysis it has been definitively shown how a children’s museum like this is supposed to be and act with this aims in mind.

This thesis examines the notion of productive multisensory experiences in museums of modern and contemporary art, as well as the pedagogy of current olfactory curatorial strategies and fruitful conceptual tools for such future strategies in art museums. It sets out to develop a theoretical framework for understanding immersive, multisensory art museum experiences as meaningful and educative. The sense of smell functions exemplary in this for it is an exceptional multisensory sensation in itself that requires thorough reconceptualization since it has long been repressed in Western epistemology.

This paper explores the potential of tangible and embodied interaction for encouraging a multisensory engagement with museum objects and artefacts on display, by means of focusing on the subtleties of devising and planning for evaluation and audience research. Measuring the impact of new technologies is one of the main challenges identified in the 2015 NMC Horizon report (Museum Edition). The challenge is even greater for emerging concepts, technologies, and approaches, such as the use of tangible and embodied interaction in museums and other Cultural Heritage settings. Taking as an example two case-studies from the EU meSch project, from Museon and Allard Pierson Museum in the Netherlands, we discuss our plan for devising and carrying out audience research so as to " document, " analyse, and interpret the impact of digitally enhanced, tangible, embodied, and multisensory museum visiting experiences. Our intention is to provide an honest account of the different strengths and weaknesses encountered for all evaluation methodologies that were used, namely observations, interviews, video data, questionnaires, meaning maps, and post-visit interviews. We also share and discuss lessons learned, insights and best practices that could be of benefit for museum and audience research professionals.

In this introduction to the Focus Section “Learning as a Geographical Process,” I provide a context for the four articles that follow, by means of (1) making explicit the threefold rationale for this initiative; (2) relating this initiative with previous geographical scholarship on the problematic of learning; (3) highlighting the significance of the self-referential character of our work; (4) providing a brief outline of the articles that follow; and (5) pointing out the important fact that both “learning” and “geographical process” constitute semantically rich categories and that relating the two involves a many-to-many type of logical mapping.

This chapter, from the edited book, ‘Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums’, examines the community consultation process that occurred at seven museums in England during the lead up to the development of exhibitions marking the British bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Museums, at this time, were faced with the opportunity of engaging with a range of community groups over how exhibitions should be framed, and the messages and meanings they should portray. Through interview material with curators and community activists and representatives, the chapter documents the issues that arose, highlighting in particular tensions between the expectations of both museum professionals and community groups.

Museums are complex, dynamic, and empowering learning environments that have great potential for informal and lifelong learning. Museum educators make museums more relevant for visitors. However, the museum’s educational function is a contested arena and the museum educator’s profession is in constant flux. In this article, I review literature spanning 35 years in relation to the contested educational function of museums and argue that as a profession, museum education faces serious practical and theoretical challenges within the organizational structures of museums, leaving museum educators in a precarious position. I ask what conditions and qualities contribute to sustainable and pedagogically successful museum education. I contend that museum education practices need to shift focus and to situate the profession within a broader theoretical context. Discussing the findings through three lenses – looking back, looking at, and looking toward – I propose sustainable museum education practices that require supportive organizational structures and the adoption of museum learning theories, and that encourage empowerment of museum educators as change agents.

This thesis , or final dissertation , was made to unveil the secret and unwritten history of the art  collection made in XIX century by the engraver Joseph Maria Longhi  ( 1768 - 1831 ) , of his passion of collector and how was possible that his  great array get dispersed in less than hundred years. Here there is the result of a research started in 2002 and finally ended with a great investigation held between 2009 and 2012 and the  challenging writing of the final dissertation. This work has an European, or best,  international  perspective and tries to deal with matters not only connected to the Museology, but also with the Iconography . In the first volume is reported all the history of the Longhi family and of the  artworks collection starting from the XV century till the 7th decade of the  XX century.  The text is fully written in Italian.

A visit to an art institution is expected to require visitors displaying certain etiquette and adopting certain social conventions. For example, the architecture of the building and the physical context of the galleries as well as the spatial arrangement and the gilded framing of the exhibits seem to raise certain expectations while informing and shaping visitors' decorum. Nevertheless, visiting a museum is also a social event with the majority of visitors arriving as part of a group. Following Goffman's dramaturgy and frame analysis theory, this article draws upon videotaped fragments of visitors at least in dyads at the Courtauld Gallery, London, UK, in order to explore their embodied visiting and viewing practices. By focusing on the ways visitors connect with the collection as well as socially share parts of their experience with each other, this article aims at challenging the notion of the visitor being static and the museum experience being ocular centric.

For the first time not only a precisely dated work of a great ancient Russian icon-painter Andrey Rublev but also a miniature of doubtless Rublev’s work is introduced into science. It is really providential that a scientific discovery fell on the 575th year from the death of a reverend icon painter, who departed in God on October 17, 1428.

Науковий вісник Національного музею історії України. Зб. наук. пр. Випуск 2 / Відп. ред. Б.К. Патриляк. – К.: Левада, 2017. – 480 с. – ISBN 978-617-7527-12-0.

Збірка наукових праць матеріалів щорічної науково-практичної конференції Національного музею історії України у 2016 р.
Розрахована на фахівців у галузі музеєзнавства, музейних працівників, викладачів, аспірантів, студентів вищих навчальних закладів гуманітарного профілю.

Emptiness acts as a method of communication in itself; an unorthodox approach to the relaying of narrative, even by contemporary standards. The spaces entirely represent the history of Jews in Europe: ruptured, dark, disorienting, but ultimately continuing.

EN: Museums have always been virtual places - so why do these institutions find it so difficult to use digital media? And what does a museum have to offer to a knowledge-based society whose act of remembering increasingly takes place in the digital domain?

DE: Museen sind stets auch virtuelle Räume: Als Einrichtungen des gemeinsamen Erinnerns schlagen sie Brücken zwischen dem An- und Abwesenden, der Materialität ihrer Exponate und einer Vergangenheit, die nur in ihren Hinterlassenschaften ihr Wirklichsein zu behaupten vermag. Dennoch sind in einer Gesellschaft, für die Virtualität Normalität geworden ist, die Institution Museum und ihr Umgang mit den längst nicht mehr ›neuen‹ Medien nach wie vor Austragungsorte erhitzter Debatten über das ›Echte‹, das ›Authentische‹ und die Erfahrbarkeit des Wirklichen. Dennis Niewerth geht der Frage nach, worin die »Virtualisierung des Musealen« besteht. Und er zeigt, was das Museum als Bollwerk der Kulturpädagogik im Sinne einer »Musealisierung des Virtuellen« einer Gesellschaft anzubieten hat, die unter der Fülle ihrer Erinnerungen begraben zu werden droht.

Advocates of object-based learning (OBL) in museums point to its benefits in motivating student inquiry and developing transferable skills. As a mode of experiential learning, however, such practices may be seen as empowering students to speak for other people’s cultures, posing a conflict for anthropology museums actively seeking to disrupt such relationships of authority. Asking what object-based learning does in the anthropology museum, this paper suggests a distinction between OBL as a means of supporting traditional university curricula, and OBL as a means of learning from objects, attending to the perspectives of creator communities in the construction of knowledge.

Using two case studies under the Christian-conservative Orbán government, this essay explores how ‘future memories’ are being constructed and sustained by revisionist history writing about the history of communism, especially in instrumentalist memories using pedagogical instruments: the secondary literature curriculum and the Museum of Trianon. It argues that canonization revised by counter canonization is necessarily opening space for revisionism.

KEYWORDS: Revisionist history writing, ‘future memories’, Hungary, far-right politics, memory politics

The museum visit is an important part of elementary school science teaching. However, a divide exists between teachers, who require curricular accountability, and museums, who emphasize free-choice exploration. Can a carefully constructed worksheet bridge this divide by providing free-choice exploration of curricular topics during the museum visit? In the present study, a theoretical framework was constructed to inform the design of worksheets as free-choice learning devices. This framework was used to analyze the design of an existing museum worksheet. Subsequently, curriculum-related conversations among school groups visiting a museum were monitored in groups supplied with the worksheet and in control groups without. Overall, the worksheet complied well with design criteria synthesized from the free-choice learning literature. Furthermore, the use of the worksheet increased the number and diversity of curriculum-related conversations among school groups during the visit. This study documents that the use of carefully designed worksheets may increase students' exposure to curriculum during a museum visit, and thus may help build better bridges between teacher needs and museum free-choice identities.

Art museums offer unique aesthetic, contextual, and social settings for exploration and human understanding (Levent & Pasqual-Leone, 2014; Ritchhart, 2007). Seeking to build field-wide knowledge about the potential of art museums as places where learning and discovery happen, the National Art Education Association (NAEA), in partnership with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), undertook this review of the literature as a step toward conducting the first major national study in the United States on the impact of single-visit art museum programs on K-12 students. Focusing on children in grades 4-6 and on experiences that take place during single-visit programs, our investigation seeks to explore a central question: What are the benefits to students of engaging with original works of art within the distinctive
physical setting of art museums when students are guided in their experiences by means of inquiry-based pedagogies? The literature review is one of several activities conducted during the planning year for the larger study, all of which were possible through the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, with the intention:
● to surface research directly related to our investigation;
● to help us assess the relevance of a national study;
● to guide and inform the design of a major empirical study;
● to situate a future national study within the larger context of research related to constructivist and inquiry-based pedagogies, engagement with original works of art, and aspects of learning in museum environments; and finally,
● to provide the field with a resource that, in turn, stimulates further research.