Increasing Engagement (Asynchronous Session)
Museology Within Comparative Music Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nikita Mamedov
Music museums define an immense scope of musicology worldwide and present audience members with various perspectives into musical cultures, traditions, and epochs. Thematic and content-specific music museums are beneficial to define history, introduce artistic insights, and shed light on composers, their works, and careers while offering a unique experience to music enthusiasts. However, as per Simon’s framework (Carbonell, 2012), seeking a path into history by centering on a particular portion of the past limits the audience members’ perceptions due to history – as a method to concentrate on the future rather than the past – allows one to focus on the interdisciplinary multi-cultural approach to introduce musicology and ethnomusicology to students in K-12 institutions through the use of digital literacies and comparative education. This study’s purpose is to reinvent the music museum experience by providing a series of contrasting views through which one views music and its influence. Through museology, comparative music education allows students to emphasize project-based learning while attaining new cultural knowledge, thoughts, and ideas.
Educators and Students as Visitors - Lessons From Social Museology: Using Museums to Teach and Act for Justice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Therese Quinn
Museums worldwide are public assets that all residents fund, directly and indirectly, through local and national subsidies. And today there are over 35,000 museums in the United States (US), a number that has doubled since the 1990s. Schoolchildren are a primary, and often the largest, museum audience in the US and many locations. Still, despite their prevalence, public responsibility, and potential to support learning, many museums are underused. For example, in the US, visitation is low overall for people of color, with African Americans engaging with museums less than other groups. Further, research, such as that conducted by The Visitors of Color Project, reveals that marginalized groups—a majority of public-school students in the most populated areas of the US—may experience cultural institutions as uncomfortable, even hostile spaces. This paper draws on social museology and Paulo Freire’s “problem-posing” pedagogy, to argue that by directly addressing museums’ difficult histories and current practices, teachers can counter alienation and support students’ critical explorations of the world. Further, this presentation suggests that, as storehouses of culture and history, museums can be rich sites of popular and political education for learners of all ages and powerfully support teaching for justice and social action. The paper shares examples and resources for classroom-and museum-based educators, with topics including Indigenous science, racial and disability justice, disability access as a tool, exhibits and collections as agents of social change, decolonization as a verb, celebrating LGBTQ lives and cultures in museums, organized labor in cultural institutions, and more.
Regulation Influences on Contemporary Chinese Art Museums: A Case Study of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peiyi Lyu
This paper explores the twenty-first century concept of the art museum in China known as Meishuguan (美术馆) and its relation to government stakeholders, through analysising the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai. Established in 2010, RAM has experienced a significant societal change starting from 2000, which this paper proposes as the ‘fifth phase’ of the unprecedentedness ‘art museum boom’ in China. The uniqueness of the fifth phase is in the complexity of defining contemporary Chinese art museums under strong political influences. In 2016, the central government published the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan of China which included plans for the further development of art museums. As a result, the field receives substantial policy and financial supports, but professionals have yet to reach a consensus on a common institutional structure and managemental system. RAM is thus introduced as a case study to unpack the entanglement between the ambitious policy and the thriving but under-constructed art museum world. RAM is a privately-funded, non-profit, contemporary art museum. Located in the Huangpu District, one of the historical areas in Shanghai, RAM is housed in a British colonial heritage building, its predecessor was the first modern museum in China. RAM has been navigating the Shanghai government’s art museum-related policy carefully while maintaining its autonomous vision and values. By analysing RAM’s operational strategies, this paper discusses the challenges and opportunities brought by ‘Socialism with distinct Chinese characteristics’, and argues its significant contribution to the emerging ‘art museum boom’.
Access through InSite: A Co-design Study to Inform Automated Extended Descriptions for Museum Information Access
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stacy Doore
Museums around the world hold vast collections of art and cultural history that are often inaccessible to blind museum visitors. One of the most difficult challenges is the lack of spatial information about gallery configuration, the exhibit objects, and the scenes portrayed within the artwork. This paper describes a co-design study conducted with museum visitors with blindness and visual impairments (BVI) to investigate characteristics of layered spatial language structures for accessible scene descriptions that will inform the development of an automated extended caption system.
To Relevance and Beyond: Asset Pedagogies in the Museum Context View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kenna Hernly
This paper is based on a literature review of how asset (or resource) pedagogies have been applied in museum exhibitions, education programs, and technology. The museum field is not alone in trying to improve inclusion. In the field of education, researchers have found asset pedagogies – a series of teaching practices designed to access the cultures and identities of marginalized learners – to be successful in improving classroom achievement. A 2020 survey by the platform Culture Track found that the audiences of 653 cultural institutions in the US identified as 85% white. With this extreme level of inequity, increasing the relevance of museums to historically underserved audiences is essential to long-term sustainability. This research contributes to making museums more equitable by providing new pedagogical models for engaging audiences. In a systematic literature review, I analyze papers since 1990 that included at least one asset pedagogy as a grounding theory, method of analysis, or suggestion based on research findings. I use an inductive coding process to identify the key trends in applying these learning models. My results suggest that while some institutions have applied asset pedagogies, they have not been widely studied in the museum context. The papers suggest that these pedagogies can be successfully used as design models in museum programming and as methods of analysis for determining the effectiveness of designs. Asset pedagogies may help museums improve relevance to underrepresented audiences by providing more equitable learning experiences and potentially supporting decolonization.
Featured On the Accessibility of Collections Spaces in a Post-COVID World : Performing Museum Research While Newly Disabled View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rebecca Gibson
As we hopefully transition to a post-COVID-19 world, all vocations will experience an influx of newly disabled participants, museums included. To be newly disabled is a uniquely liminal experience—as one grapples with the limitations of one’s body, one also has to learn to navigate perilous physical systems which were previously not encumbrances. Stairs, long walks, uneven terrain, and even restrictions on when and how to eat or drink or go to the bathroom can impede a researcher’s ability to carry out their work. Museums are wonderful and welcoming resources for scholars performing necessary research. However, often the collections are not accessible for scholars with disabilities, being up or down staircases, in cold, small spaces, where wheelchairs will not fit, or restrictive of food and hydration, due to the nature of the artifacts. Expectations are often not communicated before the scholar visits, leading to interesting but untimely and uncomfortable improvisations on the date of access. Often this lack of accessibility is due to the age of the building housing the collections, however, when these structural exceptions are taken as the last word on the subject rather than used to spur on creative ways to ensure that all scholars, regardless of ability level, can safely and comfortably access the space, we set scholars up for limited research capacities. This paper addresses experiences in anonymized non-accessible collections spaces, and suggest ways in which standards of accessibility can be raised to address concerns had by disabled scholars, current and future.
