At Hospitality's Threshold: From Social Inclusion to Exilic Education

Abstract Describing actual museum‐wide events developed for the culturally charged arena of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, this article explores the philosophical and pedagogical double binds that have brought multiculturalism to a political impasse. Museums have strived to be valued resources in an increasingly diverse society. In aspiring to broaden their audience base, their work has shifted from developing educational policies that are “object‐centered” to those that are “community‐centered” — a change of strategy affecting everything from programs to exhibit design. Children's museums — distinct (if not marginalized) from the serious work of the traditional art or ethnographic or natural history museum — know and indeed say in their very name — “children's museum” — that they are for the sake of someone and not about something. They have always already been attuned to the visitor at the threshold.     

Play and Children's Museums: A Path Forward or a Point of Tension?

Play is a central, defining concept for children's museums, yet it's become a hot button issue which is problematic if play is what makes children's museums uniquely valuable. In this article, members of the Children's Museum Research Network share findings from their first research study, focused on elucidating the problem of play in children's museums. Results suggest that children's museums may not have shared definitions and conceptualizations of play.     

博物馆儿童研究中“道”与“器”的思考——来自《儿童博物馆建设运营之道》一书中的启示

美国儿童博物馆协会编著的论文集《儿童博物馆建设运营之道》,既是一部启发思路的成果汇编,又堪称是一本指导实践的实用手册。该书不仅专注于显性意义上形而下的器,还重视隐性意义上形而上的道。本文对该论文集中各位学者的真知灼见和核心观点进行归纳和述评,并在此基础上反思该书在当代博物馆儿童研究中的地位和价值。同时主张在面对与日俱增的儿童现象及材料时,不应仅止步于追求“求实”“致用”的经验,还要探寻隐匿于经验之中的本质及其关联,以“求真”实现“道器并重”。     

儿童博物馆核心教育理念

儿童博物馆在过去二十年间由于种种原因,并没有在中国发展起来。一些相关的基本问题:“什么是儿童博物馆？儿童博物馆展示什么？为什么需要儿童博物馆？”在中国并不为大众熟悉,也没有受到太多博物馆专业领域人士的关注。本文将从影响儿童博物馆的理论及研究,儿童博物馆与其它场馆的区别,儿童博物馆的教育内容等几个方面来介绍儿童博物馆的核心教育理念。以期通过本文能够把儿童博物馆的精髓呈现出来,让更多的人了解并关注儿童博物馆,为中国儿童教育方式的发展提供一些参考。     

Play For All at Chicago Children's Museum: A History and Overview

In 2004, Chicago Children's Museum founded the Play For All initiative, which creates a community where play and learning connect for visitors of all abilities. The Play For All team discovered that families with children with disabilities were looking for an opportunity to explore and enjoy the museum without limitations and the fear of being judged. CCM also learned that being ADA compliant was not enough; being accessible and inclusive meant going above and beyond the ADA. Children's museums are a rare treat where almost everything should be interactive and ready to be played with. The Play For All team has made significant changes to the exhibits, staff training, and programming at Chicago Children's Museum by working with local families with disabilities and partner organizations. A culture shift has taken place within CCM. Play For All is now a top priority when decisions are being made.     

将博物馆展览策划做成一项文化创意活动 ——《博物馆展览策划:理念与实务》书评

展览是博物馆的核心工作之一,也是博物馆服务社会最普遍和最直接的途径。《博物馆展览策划:理念与实务》一书作者结合多年的博物馆理论研究和博物馆展览策划实践经验,直击当下我国博物馆展览策划的核心问题,对现代博物馆陈列展览策划所应遵循的理念、工作流程和工作规范进行了详细阐述,为当前及未来一段时期内我国博物馆的展览策划工作提出了极为具象的实践指南。     

From Period Rooms to Public Trust: The Authority Debate and Art Museum Leadership in America

A recent lecture series at the Harvard University Art Museums titled “Art Museums and the Public Trust” marked the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard's famed Museum Course. A graduate seminar begun in 1921 by the Fogg Art Museum's associate director, Paul J. Sachs, the Museum Course became the primary training ground for art museum leadership in the first half of the twentieth century. The 2001 commemorative lecture series was intended to foster a healthy debate on the place of the art museum in Anglo‐American culture. Instead, the speakers, veteran directors of America's and England's most prestigious art museums, invariably returned to one concern: authority—theirs and that of the art museum itself in contemporary society. Authority was at the heart of the Museum Course decades earlier, tellingly explored in annual debates around two significant topics. The first debate involved the pros and cons of including period rooms in American museums. In the second, students argued about whether America's established art institutions should collect the work of living artists. Questions of how museums should respond to the interests of audiences and communities, their responsibility to contemporary artists, and the meaning of a public trust trouble America's museum leadership now as then. This article explores the common ground between the Museum Course debates of the 1930s and Harvard's recent commemorative “debates” by America's contemporary museum leaders and comments on its significance for today's museums.     

建构主义对博物馆儿童教育的构建探讨——《让孩子爱上博物馆》读后感

《让孩子爱上博物馆》一书着重分析了建构主义理论在博物馆儿童教育中的应用,并针对博物馆儿童观众的研究成果分析做了深入阐述,对于全面指导博物馆儿童早期教育项目的设计与执行具有现实意义。受该书启发,本文最后以系统学视角,对教师、家长、博物馆从业者等不同主体促进孩子爱上博物馆提出了相关建议。     

Competing Agendas: Young Children's Museum Field Trips

Abstract Visitors to museum settings have agendas that encompass a wide variety of missions. Agendas are known to directly influence visitor behavior and learning. Numerous agendas are at play during a visit to a museum. We suggest that in a museum‐based learning experience, children's agendas are often overlooked, and are at times in competition with the accompanying adult's agendas. This paper describes and qualitatively analyzes three episodes of competing agendas that occurred on young children's field trips to museums in Brisbane, Australia. The aim is to elucidate the kinds of tensions over agendas that can arise in the experience of young museum‐goers. Additionally, we hope to alert museum practitioners to the importance of considering children's agendas, with the aim of improving their museum experience. Suggestions are also made for ways in which educators can address children's agendas during museum visits in order to maximize learning outcomes.     

An Advocate for Everything: Exploring Exhibit Development Models

Abstract This article presents six models, from within and outside the museum profession, useful to consider when creating exhibition teams. The focus is on five roles—client, content specialist, designer, content interpreter, and project manager—and the authority and responsibility assigned to these roles in the different models. The author examines the pros and cons of the models and provides examples from museums in which they were instituted. The developer model was created at The Field Museum of Natural History to replace the team approach model. Both of these models replaced the curatorial model. The broker model was developed at The Children's Museum in Boston. From outside the museum field, the author presents the architectural model and the theatrical model. Each of the models, in differing ways, defines a process, a point of view about the expected outcomes, and assigns specific authorities and responsibilities to staff members in each of the five roles. The author argues that it is not so important which of the models is chosen for any given exhibition project, but emphasizes that the importance lies in being certain that a model be chosen and rigorously implemented. The appendix also includes a sample exhibit process document from one museum.     

“Think With Me:” David Carr's Enduring Invitation

David Wildon Carr (1945–2016) was recognized in the international cultural community as a scholar and instigator whose critical thinking challenged museum practitioners to reflect on the purpose and responsibility of their work. In his recent papers and lectures, he argued that those discussing museum experiences are late to enter into a dialogue already in progress—a dialogue which carefully considers the whole person in a community, and wherein thinking with a museum is an enterprise embedded in the learner's experience. This forum, written by three museum professionals in response to his recent untimely death, is intended to capture personal impressions of Carr's contribution to the continuing work of museums. Each author quotes from Carr's writings, since his words have such enduring strength—a strength that will continue to resonate long into the future. Each also offers readers some personal background on his work as a teacher.     

A Blurring of the Boundaries

Our certainty about the definition of museums is disappearing and with it goes our assurance about where we are and what we are becoming. Observing visitors' use of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum could cause us to change our understanding about how people use and act in museums. Further boundaries are blurring as the native communities worldwide ask museum personnel to change their methods of collections care and alter rules of accessioned objects' use. Without acknowledging it, museum personnel are becoming more comfortable with reproductions and purposebuilt material. Technology is making us a “paperless” society. Our need for and understanding of “authenticity” is changing, and we no longer rely purely on our objects to define our work. Are we destroying museums, changing with the times, or creating some new and potentially more vibrant and useful institutions? Can a new realignment and new definition of our institutions help us to create a more civil society? Do we wish to continue on this road?     

Cueing the Visitor: The Museum Theater and the Visitor Performance

There are an estimated 17,500 museums in the United States. If people think these institutions are pretty much the same once you get inside or that the differences between them are unimportant, it might be hard to persuade them that all 17,500 are needed. Exhibitions can have great transformational power; why don’t they exercise that power more often? Have museums not fully understood exhibitions as a medium? Have we not devoted enough attention to the full repertoire of visitor feelings? Have visitors been telling us this and we have failed to listen? For many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for most others few or none. How can this be? “Museum‐adept” visitors seem to prize museums as theaters in which their own emotional and spiritual journeys can be staged, but what about the non‐museum‐adept? Can the museum‐adept teach us how to realize our medium’s full potential?     

基于趣味性情境的“三位一体”博物馆教育——对儿童讲解辅导中兴趣与情境的重新认识与提升

面向儿童群体讲解自然科普展览是许多博物馆开展教育活动的重要方式。然而,传统讲解无法激发儿童兴趣,难以进行学习迁移和延伸。本文以云南省博物馆“远古云南”展厅为例,从三因素情境性兴趣模型出发,运用“情境认知与学习理论”和“情境教学法”对兴趣和情境进行深度分析,提出“情境化讲解辅导设计三步法”。通过实践,实现多样化情境和趣味性紧密结合,形成融合趣味性、教学内容、教学方法的“三位一体”博物馆讲解辅导,鼓励儿童把学习变为实践,逐步建立起自我与自然的联系。     

博物馆学习视角下的展览环境效果评估——以展线与照明设计对观众注意力的影响研究为例

博物馆学习的研究成果表明,展览除了可以通过自身的内容来对观众施加影响之外,环境设计也同样会对观众的参观效果产生影响。因此,合理评估展览环境的效果、并针对性地发现环境设计中的不足之处,将有助于展览提升总体的教育效果和观众的参观体验。本文以2017—2018年间在山东博物馆所进行的一系列博物馆学习相关研究与展览评估实践为基础,从观众的注意力水平入手,计算展厅中各个区域的“吸引力”,进而实现对展览环境效果的评估。此外,在这一过程中发现,展厅环境中的“展线”与“照明”设计,对观众的学习效果有潜在影响,值得引起博物馆在环境设计时的关注。     

Designing an “Architecture of Information”— The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

For the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum the design approach was minimal and transparent, and the designers were in dialogue only with the story — not with the history of design or the conventions governing most museum presentations. We reached for a sense of immersion by trying to erase the seams between exhibits and architecture. Display strategies included the removal of conventional barriers of certain glass-encased vitrines: some objects can be touched, and reactions sought are as visceral as they are intellectual. We tried above all to see that people leave the museum not profoundly dejected but with some other feeling evoking the resilience of life and hope. The design intended to make the environment so united with its subject that memory of the museum experience and the sharing of memory through discussion will carry on in the lives of the visitors.     

Engaging the Experts in Museum Computing: Seven Years of Queries on MCN‐L

MCN‐L, an email listserv administered by the Museum Computer Network, is open to anyone interested in discussing information technology in museums and other cultural heritage organizations. To determine how MCN‐L meets the needs of museum information professionals, this study presents an analysis of more than 6,000 emails sent to the listserv over a seven‐year period (2004–2011). The results of this analysis indicate that MCN‐L adds value to the online community of museum information professionals by providing an online communication channel focused on professional outreach and expert support, backed up by specific examples drawn from personal experiences. MCN‐L's emphasis on personal expertise is a key characteristic that speaks to the listserv's lasting value to the museum community and has implications for researchers and practitioners as they consider the future of computer‐mediated communication for all museum professionals.     

“When I Grow Up I'd Like to Work in a Place Like This”: Museum Professionals' Narratives of Early Interest in Museums

As part of an exploratory research study, museum professionals were asked to share their stories about pivotal learning experiences in museums. Several offered personal narratives of how they first became interested in museums and started down the path toward careers in museum work, or had their imaginations opened to the possibility of broader life horizons. This group of stories seemed to be grounded in particularly vivid memories and frequently elicited strong emotions in the telling. The narratives are evidence of the impact of early museum experiences on people who later found their way into museum careers, and suggest avenues for further study of the roots of museum careers as well as other ways museums profoundly affect people's lives. The stories can also reveal to the teller, as well as to researchers and others, what stands out in their memories and the importance they assign to those memories. By attending to the thematic and emotional content of these narratives, both narrator and colleagues can find clues about where their beliefs and values really lie and, therefore, where their and the profession's time and resources might be most productively invested.     

近代西方人在华建立自然史博物馆类型及目的取向研究

自然史类博物馆是中国近代以来出现最早的博物馆类型之一,中国最早的在华大英博物馆、徐家汇博物院、上海亚洲文会博物馆以及北疆博物院等都是自然史类的博物馆。深入考察这些博物馆建设之初的讨论,并对比这些博物馆建设者的具体意图和办馆实践,可以看出这些博物馆都以服务西方自然史研究为主要目的,但却有着不同的建设取向。这些自然史博物馆不仅为西方的自然史研究提供中国的标本资料,有的博物馆还成为了西方人在华开展自然史研究的平台,为西方提供自然史的研究成果。