Toward sustainable museum education practices: confronting challenges and uncertainties

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum educators
• sustainable museum education practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

AlmaDís Kristinsdóttir is a Ph.D. candidate and part-time lecturer at University of Iceland.

ORCID

AlmaDís Kristinsdóttir http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6833-4280

Notes

1. This definition encompasses museum educators who develop educational content and facilitate learning opportunities.

2. The methodology consisted of sampling books and articles in English through a series of comprehensive searches specifically focusing on museum educators. I selected 76 texts: 39 books (both complete works and chapters); 30 peer-reviewed articles; one Ph.D. dissertation and six reports or policies within the time frame from 1980 to 2016.

3. Heritage professionals are experts in pinpointing value and identity that give places social and cultural meaning (Schwarz, Knoop, and Elffers 2016).

4. Interpretation includes educational activities used at national parks, monuments, historic houses, and museums that aim to reveal meaning through the use of original objects and first-hand experience (Tilden 2007).

5. Sustainism goes beyond environmental sustainability and equally concerns the concept of culture of sharing, networks, and collaboration (Schwarz, Knoop, and Elffers 2016). I will however use the term sustainability throughout this paper.

6. The spaces were surveyed, controlled, and relations within the institution were privileged (Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Knowledge was produced behind the scenes and ‘offered for passive consumption’ in the public spaces of the museum (Bennett 1995, 89).

7. Informal learning occurs through family, social or civic life, whereas non-formal learning is structured and organized yet does not lead to qualification (Gibbs, Sani, and Thompson 2007). Lifelong learning can be both informal (voluntary, non-linear, and self-paced exploration), as well as non-formal (participation in programs) and it thrives in museum culture that understands its importance to the ‘ageing society’ (Reeve and Woollard 2015, 552).

8. Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852–1933) declared the art museum as ‘primarily an institution of culture and only secondarily a seat of learning’ (Rice 1995, 16).

9. John Cotton Dana (1856–1929) saw the museum as a service to enrich people’s lives since ‘a museum is good only in so far as it is of use’ (Rice 1995, 17).

10. Witcomb refers to Sharon Macdonald’s 2006 version of A Companion to Museum Studies. The 2011 version is used here. The shifts in museology have also been spoken of in terms of three museum revolutions: the first around 1900 when museums became institutionalized and more professional, the second in the 1970s as described above in relation to new museology, and the third as the ‘Latin’ new museology (see Heijnen 2010 who quotes Van Mensch 1992).

11. The seven job titles are docent, educator, explainer, facilitator, guide, interpreter, and museum educator (Nolan 2011).

12. American Alliance of Museums report, first released in 1992.

13. The complete list is too long for this article. See Eisner and Dobbs (1986a, 6–79) and condensed version in Stapp (1992, 58).

14. See Eisner and Dobbs (1986a, 83–99), Reeve and Woollard (2015) and Stapp (1992, 59).

15. For example, pressure to serve as many groups as possible (quantity) rather than focus on quality.

16. The model of constructivism draws on the idea that knowledge is constructed individually and socially by active learners who make their own interpretations of experience. John Dewey (1859–1952) was critical in making education central to museums’ mission (Nolan 2011). He had faith in progressive education, experiential pedagogy and democratic practices (Hein 2012), strategies that have much in common with new museology and critical pedagogy.

17. Trends of renaming museum educators as ‘curators of education’ might be regarded as small attempts to become change agents in the sense of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ thus validating the position of educators as equal to curators. However, this effort might also be viewed as counterproductive, reinforcing the superiority of the title ‘curator’ whereas ‘educator’ should be equally satisfying. This trend might actually indicate the lack of a solid professional ground.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Delta Kappa Gamma International Society for Key Women Educators.