Community Engagement
Educating Engagement Professionals: How an Art School Has Taken on the Emerging Field of Community Engagement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Tucker
As museums take on the challenge of confronting their historical lack of community engagement and experiment with approaches towards increasing that engagement, schools and training programs must take on the related challenge of educating students to enter a professional field where the skill-sets of community organizing, facilitation, public programming, and outreach are increasingly valued and prioritized. This study details a range of examples from Moore College of Art & Design's Socially-Engaged Art MFA and MA programs where the curriculum, public symposia, or specific student research have interfaced with the emerging field of community engagement in museums. These include courses that balance the interdisciplinary skills of project management while still offering aspiring curators and educators a grounding in art historical frameworks relevant to their research. Student examples include an action-based research project about the changing role of docents who serve as "reliable narrators" for specific collections connected to their own life and immigration experiences, a project dealing with measuring the role of interpersonal connection in affecting participation in arts programming, and a project dealing with the function of exhibition documentation to connect with real world community engagement practices. The paper also provides an overview of numerous public programs hosted by the department to explore the confluence of four major museums in the Philadelphia area all hiring community engagement and diversity "coordinators" at the same time and the discussion that ensued based on bringing them together to explore the particular dynamics facing these professionals working between curation and education divisions at museums.
Engaging Young People in Learning about Their Multicultural Pasts: Transforming Museum Education in Amman, Jordan
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robin Skeates, Arwa Badran
Communities and especially the younger generation in Jordan are poorly engaged with their multicultural heritage, both in formal education and at touristic heritage sites and museums which do much for the Jordanian economy but little for its social development. In this paper, we report on our on-going research project designed to understand and tackle this challenge. Despite over 40 years of academic and professional research and debate over community engagement in heritage and museums globally, we still need to understand much more about the Jordanian museum situation, including the professional and social barriers to fully exploiting their educational potential. We are finding out that high quality international training of our collaborating museum staff and educators can make a difference. But we are also experimenting with new ways of teaching and learning in museums, to figure out what approaches work best in the Jordanian context. Some key principles underpin our mission: working with the past for the benefit of present-day and future generations of Jordanians; celebrating the multicultural heritage of Jordan’s diverse communities; highlighting the educational value of museums and their collections; identifying, sharing and adapting best professional practice for the Jordanian museum and education sectors; creating and working in new partnerships that connect museums, schools and universities, for mutual benefit; and persuading policy makers that, by adopting these transformative principles, museums and their users can make a positive and lasting difference to Jordan’s economy, culture, and society.
Facilitated Art-Viewing Experience: Fostering Intellectual Curiosity among College Students when Interacting with Artworks
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pinar Ceyhan
This grounded theory research is concerned with increasingly technology-mediated art museum experiences, and how technology can be used to enhance younger audiences’ engagement with artworks. It contributes to our understanding of various factors that influence the aesthetic experience of college students in the art museum setting. Overall, 102 undergraduate students from North Carolina State University voluntarily participated in the study. Findings reveal college students’ art museum expectations and preferences, and their aesthetic experience when observing modern and contemporary artworks. Surveys, video observations, interview, and think-aloud data were collected to understand behaviors when viewing the exhibition. Participants’ observations, thoughts, and interpretations when looking at artworks are analyzed to gain insights into how the younger audiences experience modern and contemporary art in museums. Through systematic analysis, they were found to examine and interpret art, and generate questions in three main categories: comprehensive, reflective, and naïve. Additionally, face-to-face interviews revealed that articulating and verbalizing the art-viewing experience positively influenced the participants’ museum visit.
From Forgotten Collections to Tools for Educational Outreach: Bringing Egyptological Collections Back to Life in Rural Australian Classrooms
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Annelies Van De Ven, Sharyn Volk
Egyptological collections are ubiquitous at museums all over the world. They are central to the public reception of archaeology and popular destinations for scholars and visitors alike. However, the material that is on display represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most museums only have a fraction of their collections exhibited at any given time. Elsewhere in storage facilities are thousands of objects waiting for a research project, loan, temporary exhibition, or gallery redevelopment which might inspire their recall from obscurity. Whilst some celebrity items may be able to leave storage regularly, many of these collections constitute common finds, making them less appealing for display. Rather than leaving these collections to collect dust, we should become actively involved in promoting and permitting their accessibility to a more diverse public. Such collections can be particularly beneficial for opening up museums to communities suffering from geographical or socio-economic disadvantage, who often have little opportunity to visit collections. In this paper we present our own project incorporating deaccessioned ceramic collections alongside replicas and authentic artifacts to engage students from disadvantaged rural schools in Australia in the study of ancient Egypt. Through participation in an object-based learning pedagogy, the students are able to improve their critical thinking and source analysis skills. Confidence and knowledge is built through hands-on encounters with the past.
