Aesthetic encounters and learning in the museum

Abstract

This article discusses how museum settings can provide opportunities for sensory and aesthetic encounters and learning. It draws on research into museum education programmes that included examinations of curatorial construction and display, observations of teaching and open-ended interviews with museum educators. The examples selected here focus on themes of display and learning to illustrate how aesthetic experiences can emerge as incidental adjuncts to learning in other fields. They also acknowledge how museums draw on aesthetic judgements to categorise or present objects and employ aesthetic artefacts and practices as representative devices of cultural engagement, especially in learning themes in the humanities. The studies show how museums can offer opportunities and skills, and cultivate dispositions to the examination of challenging ideas about aesthetic status, sensibility, interpretation or value. Examples of purposefully constructed sites for aesthetic learning show how museum educators have rethought ways of facilitating affective sensory experiences, and raising questions of aesthetic status, response and the social and cultural functions of the arts. The studies discussed here suggest that museums can provide dedicated opportunities to cultivate independent aesthetic thinking and debate about aesthetic ideas as lifelong skills and pleasures.     

The Development and Field Testing of the Chinese Career Key among High School and College Students in Hong Kong

A career interest inventory, the Chinese Career Key (CCK) was adapted from the Career Key (Jones, 1987, 1997), which is based on Holland’s theory of vocational choice. The goal was to create a professional-quality career interest inventory for use in China and countries having significant populations of Chinese speaking citizens. This report describes the development of the CCK and its first study at a public high school (n=101) and a public university (n=80) in Hong Kong. In general, the research findings support its validity, reliability and user satisfaction among high school and university students in Hong Kong. Cultural differences were explained.     

The Intelligent Teacher’s Guide Through Campaign Propaganda

Seven adolescents who are blind and seven of their parents were interviewed about the adolescents’ social lives. Adolescent and parent perspectives are reviewed, followed by implications for teachers to support the social connections of students who are blind.     

The Aerial View of Parnassus (Literature as Objective Knowledge)

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (James Baldwin)     

ADULT AGE DIFFERENCES IN VOCABULARY ACQUISITION

Both working memory (WM) and existing vocabulary knowledge are used when the meaning of a new word is deciphered in context. Age-related WM deficits and vocabulary strengths suggest that younger and older adults rely on these factors differently. Participants gave definitions for rare, novel words that appeared in short passages. Three measures of each individual difference factor (WM and vocabulary) were administered. Older adults gave more complete definitions for the novel words, had higher vocabulary knowledge test scores, but reduced WM scores compared to younger adults. As predicted, existing vocabulary knowledge contributed more to extracting word meaning from context than did WM for the older adults only.     

Factors underlying distance learner satisfaction with televised college‐level courses

Abstract

Two investigations were conducted to identify the major dimensions of distance learner satisfaction with live‐broadcast, interactive (one‐way video, two‐way audio) televised college‐level courses. In the first study, factor analyses were used to explore the responses of 201 currently enrolled students to the Telecourse Evaluation Questionnaire. The analyses identified seven distinct dimensions of course satisfaction. A comparable study was conducted one year later using a different sample of 177 distance learners who were also enrolled in the televised courses. A factor analysis of these data validated the original results in that, as predicted, seven comparable dimensions were identified. Overall results are discussed in terms of the practical benefits the research offers to both program personnel and evaluation researchers.