Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The interpretive frameworks that guide and determine the public display of collections draw closely on the specific specialisms of curators. These might be, for example, historical, art-historical, anthropological or archaeological. However, making those collections accessible as tools for teaching across the broad intellectual range of a university means opening them to other interpretations and other modes of looking. The same object will be as differently interesting and useful to scholars from different academic subjects as the disciplines themselves. Making museum collections useful as resources for enhancing and developing the university curriculum, therefore, requires an agile teaching-curatorial practice which encourages the interrogation of the object from the standpoint of the discipline at hand rather than the delivery of information from the point of view of the curator. Drawing on the experience of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation-funded University Engagement Programme at then Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford, this paper discusses some of the ways that the museum’s display and reserve collections have been deployed in teaching, for example in medicine, literary and language studies, theology and philosophy. It explores the role of the Teaching Curator in developing this agile practice and in training non-museum academics to employ object-led teaching as part of their own pedagogy, and considers the capacity of both the collections and individual objects themselves to express the quality of ‘agility’ as they are serially re-examined by students and scholars from across the academy.