From Obstacle to Growth Dewey's Legacy of Experience‐Based Art Education

In the last decades theories that emphasise visitors’experience as the key element in the process of meaning‐making have influenced art education in museums considerably. However, there is remarkably little evidence in practice that museums shape their exhibits and educational tools by the actual experiences of visitors. Because museum education is still too much knowledge‐based, people often do not come to understanding or engagement of thinking. This article demonstrates this inconsistency and its consequences based on visitors’conversations during a museum visit while looking at contemporary art. In order to engage visitors into their own thinking and create lasting experiences, the article also investigates Dewey's ideas about experienced‐based education and inquiry learning. The study especially shows that experiences felt as obstacles for interpretation are extremely suitable to stimulate, deepen and improve visitors’engagement in the inquiry cycle.     

The Museum of Irish Industry,Robert Kane and education for all in the Dublin of the 1850s and 1860s 1

The Museum of Irish Industry in Dublin, in its short existence (1845–1867) facilitated the access of ordinary people to popular scientific education, became a cause célèbre and was defended by popular protest when the government recommended its abolition in 1862. Its Director, Sir Robert Kane (1809–1890) was not only an advocate of popular industrial education but also had a lifelong commitment to ‘united’ (or non‐denominational) education believing that only this type of education would achieve the ultimate result of tolerance, religious peace and national prosperity in Ireland. From 1854 a Government School of Science was part of the museum’s educational activities and from 1854 to 1867 the professors attached to the museum offered courses of lectures, both ‘popular’ and formal courses, on physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and geology, and in applied science. With its exhibition collections, its laboratories and the range of educational courses organised by its staff the museum was one of the British government’s most innovative experiments in education in Victorian Ireland. Beyond this, Kane’s determination that the courses offered by the museum would be available to all, with no distinction of creed or gender, distinguishes this institution as a pioneer in providing equal access to scientific education to all in the mid‐nineteenth century. This article will explore the role this unique education played in the educational and social life of mid‐Victorian Dublin.     

Learning Robotics in a Science Museum Theatre Play: Investigation of Learning Outcomes,Contexts and Experiences

Theatre is often introduced into science museums to enhance visitor experience. While learning in museums exhibitions received considerable research attention, learning from museum theatre has not. The goal of this exploratory study was to investigate the potential educational role of a science museum theatre play. The study aimed to investigate (1) cognitive learning outcomes of the play, (2) how these outcomes interact with different viewing contexts and (3) experiential learning outcomes through the theatrical experience. The play ‘Robot and I’, addressing principles in robotics, was commissioned by a science museum. Data consisted of 391 questionnaires and interviews with 47 children and 20 parents. Findings indicate that explicit but not implicit learning goals were decoded successfully. There was little synergy between learning outcomes of the play and an exhibition on robotics, demonstrating the effect of two different physical contexts. Interview data revealed that prior knowledge, experience and interest played a major role in children’s understanding of the play. Analysis of the theatrical experience showed that despite strong identification with the child protagonist, children often doubted the protagonist’s knowledge jeopardizing integration of scientific content. The study extends the empirical knowledge and theoretical thinking on museum theatre to better support claims of its virtues and respond to their criticism.     

In Search of Museum Professional Knowledge Base: Mapping the professional knowledge debate onto museum work

Museum professionalism remains an unexplored area in museum studies, particularly with regard to what is arguably the core generic question of a sui generis professional knowledge base, and its necessary and sufficient conditions. The need to examine this question becomes all the more important with the increasing expansion of the museum’s roles and functions. This paper starts by mapping out the policy and organizational context within which the roles of museums have expanded in the UK. It then situates the discussion of museum professional knowledge within a cross-disciplinary matrix bearing on the question of what is professional about occupations classified—or classifiable—as professions. Against the backdrop of the current organizational context of the museum as well as theories of professional knowledge, it highlights the ways in which museum work, more specifically museography, poses a distinctive set of questions compared to other ‘professional’ fields; the paper thus homes in on the question of what it is that constitutes the uniqueness of museum professional knowledge in relation to museographic practice and the type of professional knowledge and expertise that can sustain it and enact its creative and educational potentials and affordances.     

Communities of practice and participatory action research: the formation of a synergy for the development of museum programmes for early childhood

This study explores the integration of two key ideas and working frameworks: a community of educational practice formed by the synergy between a natural history museum and a university department of pre-school education, which undertook participatory action research aimed at the creation of innovative museum programmes for young children. Data analysis and the evaluation of the research process show that the community was able to bring its situated knowledge into question and interrogate propositional knowledge by means of re-evaluating the learning targets, the nature of children’s activity, the nature of interaction between adults and learners, and the nature of resources used in existing and newly designed programmes offered to young children. Participatory action research enabled the community to monitor the implementation of theory with scientific rigour and formulate a new ‘knowledge strategy’, which in theoretical terms will guide future developments.     

Adults’ Learning about Science in Free‐choice Settings

This paper synthesizes findings from three studies to answer a general question: What do casual, adult visitors learn about science from their science‐related experiences in free‐choice settings? Specifically we asked whether there are changes in how people think about science in their daily lives, the nature and use of scientific knowledge, and its communication by scientists. The three studies involved samples of visitors to an interactive science centre, visitors to a traditional natural history museum, and attendees at a series of public lectures, each given by an expert scientist in human genetics. Pretest and post‐test data collected by parallel questionnaires indicated that, despite the different nature of their experience in the three different settings, participants became more positive about the value of science and the work done by scientists and their ability to communicate with the public. At all venues, however, participants became less scientific in their thinking about the nature of scientific knowledge, becoming more likely to believe it to be infallible. The consistency of these findings was surprising, and participants’ changed views about the nature of scientific knowledge were unexpected. Possible explanations for theses outcomes were suggested in terms of participants’ reasons for attending the venue, the nature of their engagement, and the non‐controversial ways in which the exhibitions and lectures were structured. The findings suggest that the educational role of free‐choice settings should be considered carefully, particularly with regard to the representation of science.     

Practices of parental participation: a case study

The nature of parental participation in children’s education is changing rapidly. A growing body of research points to the positive effect that parental involvement has on outcomes of schooling and on children’s well‐being. This paper examines parental participation practices in terms of parents working together with a range of professionals, exchanging knowledge and information regarding their child’s SEN, challenging practices, and negotiating SEN provision. The parents in this study exercised agency – that is, they showed resilience and took initiative, within a context of shared responsibility and accountability, and advocated for their child’s right to educational provision. This paper argues for a strengths‐based approach towards enabling active parental participation and advocacy.     

Museums as avenues of learning for children: a decade of research

In this review, we focus on the museum activities and strategies that encourage and support children’s learning. In order to provide insight into what is known about children’s learning in museums, we examined study content, methodology and the resultant knowledge from the last decade of research. Because interactivity is increasingly seen as essential in children’s learning experiences in a museum context, we developed a framework that distinguishes between three main interactivity types for facilitating strategies and activities in children’s learning: child–adults/peers; child–technology and child–environment. We identify the most promising strategies and activities for boosting children’s learning as situated in overlapping areas of these interactivity types. Specifically, we identify scaffolding as a key to enhanced museum learning. Our review concludes by highlighting research challenges from the last decade and recommendations for practice and future research on how to design, evaluate and guide theoretically-grounded educational programs for children in museums.     

Parents’ Metacognitive Knowledge: Influences on Parent–Child Interactions in a Science Museum Setting

Despite science learning in settings such as science museums being recognized as important and given increasing attention in science education circles, the investigation of parents’ and their children’s metacognition in such settings is still in its infancy. This is despite an individual’s metacognition being acknowledged as an important influence on their learning within and across contexts. This research investigated parents’ metacognitive procedural and conditional knowledge, a key element of their metacognition, related to (a) what they knew about how they and their children thought and learned, and (b) whether this metacognitive knowledge influenced their interactions with their children during their interaction with a moderately complex simulation in a science museum. Parents reported metacognitive procedural and conditional knowledge regarding their own and their children’s thinking and learning processes. Further, parents were aware that this metacognitive knowledge influenced their interactions with their children, seeing this as appropriate pedagogical action for them within the context of the particular exhibit and its task requirements at the science museum, and for the child involved. These findings have implications for exhibit and activity development within science museum settings.     

MEETING THE EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF SERVICE PROVIDERS: EFFECTS OF A CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAM ON SELF‐REPORTED KNOWLEDGE AND ATTITUDES ABOUT AGING

A variety of approaches are available for meeting the educational needs of professionals currently providing services to older adults. This article focuses on the development of the Professional Development Program in Gerontology offered through Continuing Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and examines the effectiveness of this program in educating regional service providers. The discussion is based on participants’ self‐reported before‐and‐after data on their knowledge and attitudes about aging and the aged. The importance of changing employers’ attitudes about the importance of gerontology education as a qualification for service providers is also discussed.     

Blindness,Art and Exclusion in Museums and Galleries

Drawing on interviews with blind people, this paper examines both their exclusion from museums and galleries and their responses to the art educational provision that is specifically designed to remedy that marginalisation. Blind visitors’ responses to these educational projects were polarised; respondents were either highly critical or very enthusiastic. This paper begins by outlining the interviewees’ criticisms which included; education officers’ misconception of how touch facilitates learning and aesthetic response, a lack of educational progression and blind people's exclusion from mainstream events. I then ask why, given these problems, did other respondents reply so favourably, suggest that these high levels of satisfaction had little to do with museum provision but were in fact the result of social interaction and of rare inclusion within the sighted community. I argue that, ironically, this sense of inclusion is premised on blind visitors’ structural exclusion from art institutions. Finally, the article examines those visitors who, illicitly or otherwise, already experience some aspects of the museum in multisensory terms, but maintain that until museums’ and galleries’ ocularcentric orientation is reconfigured, there will be little possibility for these rogue visitors to develop their knowledge of art. Likewise, without institutional change, educational events for the blind will continue to be an inadequate supplement to a structure that is and remains inequitable.     

Provoking Points of Convergence: Museum and University Collaborating and Co‐evolving

This article outlines art education courses undertaken in museum and gallery contexts as a component of the Certificate Programme in Visual and Material Culture within the University of British Columbia's Department of Curriculum Studies. With the creation of this programme and through the forging of relationships with area museums, unique ways have evolved for graduate students from diverse areas of education and art teacher education candidates to interact with works of art, museum professionals, artists, and the museum space itself. The purpose of these courses is to use museum and gallery settings as sites to test ideas, critique educational programmes, and advance new approaches for teachers to use museums in more creative and integrated ways in their teaching while expanding theoretical knowledge and interpretive repertoires. Through participating in this collaborative venture we have learned that when you invite teachers into museums, make efforts to increase their comfort within these spaces, while recognising what interpretive insights they offer as active participants in museum discourses, points of convergence between teachers, universities, and museums are formed.     

Dare we know the nation? Considering the nexus of discursive leveraging and identity

The public history museum holds an inherent pedagogical purpose to define the nation through a history considered collectively supported by its citizenry. Widely acknowledged criticism often accompanies such exhibits and prompts calls for a more critical examination of the narratives advanced through the affirmed educational intent held by museums. How scholars are engaging the question of how – and even whether – history can succeed in interrogating the strategies utilized by the public history museum means reconsidering what role social education holds in advancing a critical sensibility about how nation is defined. This article offers a theoretical analysis that reviews the inherent nationalist purpose advanced by the public museum, and the tensions educators could face when seeking to better understand how it affirms a particular understanding of history and of the nation. This article suggests that social education needs to address its role to engage critically the complicity the public history museum holds in defining and guarding the nation, and in confronting the museum authority of history and exhibition practices.     

CENTRAL AGENCIES AS A NECESSARY RESPONSE

This paper traces the mainstreaming of American Jewish history and social studies in the American Jewish school curricula, a process which began in the 1920s and picked up momentum in the mid‐late 1930s and 1940s. From the beginning, the raison d'etre for teaching American Jewish history and community studies was articulated in terms of socialization as opposed to content. Thus, the extent to which an educational agency or institution's agenda was driven by a desire to effect students’ social adjustment as opposed to expanding their knowledge base, and the degree to which the educational program itself was shaped by indigenous as opposed to Eastern European Jewish pedagogic paradigms and priorities determined their receptivity to American Jewish history and social studies as legitimate fields of study.     

Is It Always Worth the Trip? The contribution of museum and gallery educational programmes to classroom art education

Drawing on observations of classroom art practice and visits to one museum and two galleries and on interviews with teachers and museum and gallery educators, this article examines the interactive relationship between school art education and museum and gallery visits. It studies: the ways primary teachers use such visits for art teaching purposes; and the reasons for the existing limitations in incorporating museum or gallery visits into school art education despite the wide acknowledgement of their educational value. The findings suggest the presence of two models of educational programmes which appear to influence differently the ‘three‐part unit’ of preliminary work, visit to the institution and follow‐up activities in the classroom.     

'Disciplines Contributing to Education?' Educational Studies and the Disciplines

This article explores disciplinary approaches to educational studies over the past fifty years, in particular those developed by exponents of the 'foundation disciplines' of history, philosophy, psychology and sociology. It investigates the establishment of the disciplines during the first half of the period, and their consolidation, survival, and adaptation since the 1970s in a rapidly changing educational and political context. The nature of the contribution of the disciplines, both separately and together, to the study of education is assessed. The article also considers the role of the disciplines in stimulating a pluralist and eclectic approach to the study of education, as opposed to the notion of a unitary and autonomous field of knowledge represented as 'educational research'.     

Powerful knowledge,intercultural learning and history education

This article theorizes on the role of school subjects, especially history, in multicultural and intercultural education, arguing that to ensure intercultural learning there is a need to integrate these curricular intentions in subject teaching. However, the epistemological reorganization that such integration involves will challenge both a traditional structured content knowledge, and the multicultural research focused on deconstructing these traditions. This article investigates Michael Young’s concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ as a way to incorporate knowledge in the discourses of intercultural education. While proponents of the intercultural perspective emphasise educational policies and socialisation, advocates of powerful knowledge tend to dismiss such political interference. In order to use powerful knowledge in this context the concept is reconceptualised by relating it to curriculum theory and Gert Biesta’s conceptual distinction between educational purposes. Finally, this intersection is pursued through the example of history education. When acknowledging that societal needs, policy and disciplinary boundaries are interrelated, the perspective of ‘powerful knowledge’ can bring the potential of subject knowledge to intercultural research, and thus prove useful in identifying the guidelines necessary to develop History as a contemporary relevant subject.     

Inferentialism at Work: The Significance of Social Epistemology in Theorising Education

In connecting educational theory to a neo‐pragmatist social epistemology, we set out to understand education as knowledge practices that yield ‘the cultural world again’ by retelling culture or by making explicit what is implicit in culture. Recent trends in German educational studies towards holistic understanding of education demonstrate that such a holistic, non‐representationalist framework is deliberately placed outside the traditional procedure of merely applying knowledge gained in the so‐called foundational disciplines such as philosophy, sociology or psychology to the field of education. By constructively relating Brandom's non‐representational inferentialism to a re‐reading of Mollenhauer's distinction of the presentation and representation of culture in and through education, we try to show that Brandom's philosophy can also be used to point out an inferentialism that is already at work in educational theory. Together, this strengthens a social theoretic account of education that explores how to conceptualise the role of knowledge in educational processes in terms of a holistic epistemology.     

Keepers of the sacred flame: patriotism,politics and the Chinese history subject community in Hong Kong

Chinese history (a subject entirely separate and distinct from ‘history’) has long been the most politically sensitive subject in Hong Kong's school curriculum. Previous studies have analysed the policies of the colonial and postcolonial Governments towards this subject. Here, we examine the role played by the Chinese history subject community (comprising teachers, academics and officials in the Government's educational bureaucracy), and look at the way in which this has operated as an autonomous interest group. We conclude that the influence of this subject community has been a key factor limiting the extent to which the local educational authorities have been able to develop a coherent policy in relation to history education in general, and the teaching of national history in particular. Specifically, advocates of the maintenance of Chinese history as a separate subject within the school curriculum have been able, by associating themselves with the post‐1997 agenda of ‘patriotic education’, to effectively hoist the local educational bureaucracy with its own petard.     

Educational psychologists: the early search for an identity

Contemporary society’s expectations of educational psychology, and of a role for educational psychologists within these expectations, were major themes of, and subtexts to, many of the papers delivered at recent annual courses of the Association of Educational Psychologists (AEP). The distinctive contribution of educational psychology and a perceived “identity crisis” of its practitioners was the subject of examination in recent issues of Educational Psychology in Practice. Within this context it may be both salutary and heartening to review the aspirations of educational psychologists, during a period from the mid‐1960s to the late‐1980s, to shed their stereotype as psychometricians, and later as gatekeepers to special education, in favour of a supportive role to pupils, teachers and parents. Articles published in this journal and its predecessors are drawn upon to illustrate the earlier search by educational psychologists for a role and a status within the local government field. Reference is also made to the author’s experience of working as an educational psychologist from the early 1950s to the end of the 1980s.