Back to the Future?: Emergent Visions for Object-Based Teaching in and beyond the Classroom (original) (raw)
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This article introduces a special issue of Museum Anthropology devoted to innovative strategies for teaching with objects. Although a century ago anthropology, museums, and objects were intimately entwined, trends in many museology and anthropology courses have drifted toward focusing on ideas and people rather than objects. The contributors to this special issue have cultivated new pedagogical approaches that complement or realign literaturefocused classroom canons that can distance students from the very objects under study. In keeping with recent theoretical approaches to objects that highlight the sensory dimensions of material culture, many of the articles in this special issue examine the challenges and potential rewards when educators foster physical engagement with objects in and beyond the classroom. Taken together, the articles also underscore how object-based teaching can yield new theoretical and practical insights, enhance the social relevance of classroom activities, and facilitate meaningful benefits for local communities. [material culture, praxis, pedagogy, embodied practices, object-based teaching] museu m anthropolog y
Object-based learning, or learning from objects in the anthropology museum
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2018
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.
Teaching Anthropology with Museum Collections
Teaching Anthropology, 2020
Material culture provides powerful teaching opportunities for core anthropological themes and issues. Based on experience in teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate students, teh authors provide examples and a framework for a class exercise which supports students to learn from objects and to think anthropologically about them.
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Much recent writing on object-based learning (OBL) in museums assumes that the prevailing paradigm sanctions against touch. However, the Museum and Study Collection at Central Saint Martins has always been a handling collection within a wider tradition of teaching collections associated with art schools. This chapter argues that haptics and material culture play a key role in art and design pedagogy, and that interactions with museum collections should reflect that. The nature of learning in an art and design context is explored and the general benefits of OBL are considered. Themes include knowledge transaction, meaning making and the creation of more student-centred learning environments. The chapter also addresses new research into how OBL is experienced by art and design students. Touch has emerged as a key part of their experience, particularly for fashion and textiles students who find that wearing gloves to handle textiles limits learning opportunities. The potential importan...
Embracing the Physical in Museums
Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations deeply explores various conceptions of and relations to museum objects. This collection of essays, woven together with reflections by the editor, mounts a challenge to a dominant paradigm in the material culture of museums. Although museums collect, preserve, protect, and display objects, museum practice often confers superior value to the ideas that the objects represent over the objects themselves. Rooted in Western cultural traditions that venerate mind over body and the general over the specific, the essays assert or imply that museums privilege information transfer and education over direct sensual engagement and visitor-centered personal experience. Shining light directly on this tension, Museum Materialities does not suggest that museums must choose either objects or ideas. Rather, it explores diverse possibilities for engaging with and interpreting objects, and the consequences that result. Without offering prescriptions, the authors advocate a position—to reconsider the traditional use of objects as vehicles for ideas, and to embrace objects as actors in object-subject interactions.
MATERIALITY AND IMMATERIALITY IN OBJECT-BASED PEDAGOGIES AT THE URE MUSEUM OF GREEK ARCHAEOLOGY
Anuari de Filologia. Antiqua et Medievalia, 2019
The Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology (University of Reading) leads an educational programme closely linked to pedagogies of active teaching, which regard hands-on engagement with the object of study as a key experience to develop own opinions and long term retention of ideas. At the Ure Museum, Key Stage 2 students (7-11 years old) children have the opportunity to handle artefacts and analyse the material, shape, function, decoration, etc. from Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. The introduction of 3D modelling and 3D printing during the school sessions, however, has proven to open a new line of experiential learning dynamic, allowing the audience to interact with the artefacts of our collection that are too fragile to be handled. This paper will focus on the importance of new technologies from a pedagogic point of view, as a didactic resource that allows and motivate insightful discussions. MATERIALIDAD E IMMATERIALIDAD EN LA PEDAGOGÍA BASADA EN OBJETOS EN EL URE MUSEUM OF GREEK ARCHAEOLOGY RESUMEN El Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, parte integral del Departamento de Clásicas de la Universidad de Reading, lidera un programa educativo íntimamente asociado a las pedagogías de enseñanza activa, las cuales consideran clave la interacción directa entre la audiencia y los objetos para aprender, desarrollar pensamiento crítico y retener nueva información. En este museo, estudiantes de primaria (7 a 11 años) tienen la oportunidad de tocar y manipular materiales arqueológicos procedentes de Egipto y Grecia con el fin de analizar el material del que están compuestos, la forma del diseño, la función del objeto, el tipo de decoración, etc. La introducción de nuevas tecnologías en el programa didáctico escolar ha representado una oportunidad para abrir nuevas líneas de enseñanza activa, utilizando modelos virtuales en 3D y sus posteriores impresiones (también en 3D). De esta manera, los niños cuentan con otra forma de relacionarse con los objetos de la colección Ure, especialmente cuando éstos resultan ser demasiado frágiles para ser manipulados directamente. El presente estudio se centra en la importancia de la realidad aumentada y las impresiones en 3D como un recurso didáctico más que promueve y motiva discusiones en el proceso de aprendizaje.
Body Based Pedagogy in Museums
Body Based Pedagogy in Museums, 2021
Today, the public in the United States considers museums as the most reliable source of information (American Alliance of Museums, 2021). This "educational-asinformation-based" orientation and institutional status, that is reflected in peoples' beliefs, stems from museums' historically consistent interest in education. The topdown transfer of information that sees museum visitors as empty vessels that are passively filled up with information, is what Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire, parent of critical pedagogy, described as the "banking model" ("modelo bancário de educação"). Augusto Boal, Brazilian activist and theater practitioner, parent of the Theater of the Oppressed, building on Freire's work on critical pedagogy, saw participants as spectactors, learners who are actively engaged in the process of knowing. Roxana Ng, an activist, scholar and well regarded thinker of decolonial pedagogy argues that the core of a pedagogy that sees the learner holistically, as an embodied entity of emotions, body, spirit and mind calls for an interdisciplinary approach that expands beyond current epistemological and ontological norms and traditions (Ng R., 2018, p.33). The majority of museum leaders, practitioners, workers, artists, and thinkers, would argue today that Museum Education goes beyond a transmission of information. Yet, when adults visit an art museum today, the opportunities they have to be engaged are based on discursive modes (tours, labels, talks) and the Eurocentric-colonial concept of the body-mind binary, that privileges the intellect (the mind) and places the body in the background of the learning experience. At the same time, adult programming in art museums is mainly situated in the galleries, framed spatially and temporarily. While there are certainly significant exceptions to this norm, Museum Education, or more accurately "education-learning-knowing" in museums and galleries, is based on the pedagogy of disembodiment. An array of decisions, practices and discourses reflect, sometimes implicitly, the agenda of the neoliberal museum, still attached to the Eurocentric-colonial ways of knowing and being. With the goal to contribute to the decolonial praxis in Museum Education, I propose a pedagogy that is not framed exclusively in the galleries, and acknowledges the whole self of the visitor as a body-mind-spirit entity. A body based pedagogy (BBP) in the galleries, is a pedagogy of encounters, affect and friction that disrupts colonial practices in the museum, supporting authentic encounters in the museum space.
Presencing Culture: Ethnology Museums, Objects, and Spaces
Ethnology museums are pedagogical. As educators attempting to make sense of how museums teach about the world, we are especially interested in how ethnology museums curate otherness through objects, texts, and spaces, and how these combine to present a narrative of others. Ellsworth has referred to this as the pedagogical address of the museum, which includes analyzing whose stories are authorized, how those identities are represented, and what is made of those representations by visitors . This article examines a variety of pedagogical concerns related to the use of objects in museums, including the materials that bring a thing into presence in a museum and the attendant absence this presence implies, the interpretive space that surrounds objects in museums, and the necessary distortion that objects create in their effort to conjure another, displaced reality. These pedagogical concerns are not unique to objects, of course, as any representation such as words, images, and sounds bear similar burdens. But we focus on museums because they are understood as a significant place of objects and, as such, offer a repository of insights that can be brought to bear on other institutions, such as schools. After this survey of issues, we consider what can be gleaned from how presencing works with objects and museums in order to apply these practices to the work of educators and researchers of education.