Postmodern Pedagogical Principles of Museum-Informed Art Education
Abstract
This chapter summarizes two pedagogical modes of art education informed by theories and practices in the museum field. Situated in a postmodern framework, the pedagogical principles of museum-informed art education (MIAE) are rooted in relational aesthetics and are tied to the two features of learning in museum settings: awareness of exhibition culture and object-based learning. The two pedagogical principles, co-interpretation and co-construction, also demand new understanding of the roles of practitioners involved in art education, especially the changing identities of facilitators and new pedagogical challenges they face when it comes to MIAE.
More than a decade ago, Spalding (2002: 7) stated that “museums are not fixtures but creations; they influence, often subliminally, our whole view of culture.” This observation has been echoed by many other scholars. As early as the 1960s, Theodor Adorno commented on how museums can render things differently and he coined the term “museal” to describe the situation when objects in museums “are no longer connected to the culture that produced them or to the present” (Marstine 2006: 15). Museum is therefore more a cultural concept than a physical space. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 51) explains the two consequences of “museum effect”: “ordinary things become special in museum settings” and “the museum experience itself becomes a model for experiencing life outside its walls.” She also describes how people have developed a detached observational stance toward their own life, influenced by the abundance of expositions and museums in the nineteenth century. For instance, today, reality TV shows “place the quotidian idiosyncrasies of other people (who are, simultaneously, like us and not like us), under the camera's microscopic eye” (Dicks 2004: 22).
From an educational perspective, the distinctive feature of museums creates a motivational learning space, “enabling people to discover and develop new passions, in making a previously mundane set of facts suddenly come alive and become meaningful” (Hooper-Greenhill 1999: 1). For over a century, collectors, curators, philosophers, artists, and educators (mainly in Europe and the USA) have contributed to the evolvement of museums through their reflections and practices. “Museum education” began to develop into a legitimate academic field in the late twentieth century and has stimulated discussions over a diverse range of topics.
Discussions on “pedagogy” in museum-related contexts imply at least two distinct aspects. First, museums provide a free-choice and self-directed learning environment where visitors can make their own decisions about what, when, where, why, and with whom to learn (Adams, Falk, and Dierking 2003). In this sense, the museum space embodies pedagogical considerations. Second, museums can be specific learning contexts where educators facilitate learning that connects to a wide range of educational agendas.
This chapter intends to identify the main pedagogical principles of museum-informed art education (MIAE) within a postmodern framework. Postmodern pedagogy acknowledges the pluralist and relativist nature of culture and embraces the blurred boundaries between disciplines. In addition, it is fully compatible with the constructivist model of learning, recognizing that truth and meaning come into existence through our engagement with the realities of our own worlds and that meaning or knowledge is constructed not discovered. The intersection between museum education and art education is not to be oversimplified as art programs or lessons in museums. Besides art education in museum settings, MIAE also enquires into the pedagogical features of museum education. Echoing John Dewey's (1998) view, Eisner (2002: 10) has suggested that “art is a mode of human experience that in principle can be secured whenever an individual interacts with any aspect of the world,” and this chapter focuses on how ways of interactions with museum objects and museum settings can contribute to art education.
In Pringle's (2006: 6) review of contemporary gallery education, she stresses the necessity of distinguishing galleries from museums in order to “productively identify the specific practice within galleries.” Pringle (2006: 6) underscores the differences in the nature of collections, pedagogical approaches, and expected outcomes between galleries (defined as “art exhibition spaces within galleries, museums, arts centres and artists' studios”) and other museums. The discussions in this chapter, however, are not restricted to art exhibition spaces. Instead, the term “museum” is employed in its everyday usage, referring to public spaces where the heritage of humanity and contemporary human creations are consciously conserved and exhibited (virtual museums are not considered here). “Art education” is also used in its broad sense, referring to the area of learning related to making sense of and producing art.
The chapter begins with a discussion of exhibition culture and object-based learning as two distinctive features of learning in the museum context. The next part of the chapter introduces co-interpretation and co-construction as two pedagogical principles of MIAE underpinned by the theory of relational aesthetics. This is followed by a brief examination of the changing roles and identity of professionals involved in such art-educational practices. This chapter aims to argue that art education (especially for and with children and young people) can benefit from integrating features of museum learning into art pedagogies.
Features of Museum Learning: Exhibition Culture and Object-Based Learning
Museums have nurtured and sustained exhibition culture. It is worth mentioning one particular form of exhibition, world expositions (otherwise known as world fairs or universal expositions), which developed from the first World's Fair, which took place in London in 1851. Compared to exhibitions, expositions are usually grander in scale. In the early days, world expositions provided opportunities for the showcasing of industrial products and they gradually evolved into regular feasts for celebrating different cultures by presenting the material achievements of various nations. Between 1880 and 1920, expositions at national and even international level became “a regular feature of the American and European social landscape” (Roberts 1997: 30). World expositions not only gave birth to a number of museums1 but also reinforced the tradition of displaying objects in a similar hierarchy of classification in neoclassical museum-like architecture (Roberts 1997).
The emergence of such private collections in the form of cabinets of curiosities was influenced by a passion for collection, developed from antiquarian impulses in urban northern Italy and spread to other places in Europe (Arnold 2006). In contrast to the post-Enlightenment period (roughly starting from the nineteenth century), which was “denoted by the order and rationalism of newly-formed classification systems,” collections during that earlier period were “more subjectively accrued than those that succeeded them and some appear to be extremely whimsical in character” (Robins 2013: 18–19). From the seventeenth century onward, the increasing dominance of rationality as the new moral order turned museums into places where “art artifacts and specimens were re-conceptualised to construct rational knowledge and represent the new epistemological imperative [with the intention] to identify universals in knowledge that could supersede a former propensity for superstition and myths” (Robins 2013: 26). This epistemological principle was then reinforced by intellectual thought in the Enlightenment period.Cabinets – little rooms or cases – are often locked. Inside are secret, extraordinary things which might turn out to be quite ordinary and comprehensible if only we had a chance to look at them properly … A curio or curiosity is something rare and strange, often on display. (Selwood, Clive, and Irving 1994: n.p.)
In addition, modern museums in the West benefited greatly from the colonial project, facilitating the accumulation of artifacts from around the world. Once in museums, these artifacts are detached, reinterpreted, taken out of context, and on most occasions reappropriated to represent other cultures. Through exhibitions, museums are able to reify the notion of “otherness” by creating a different time–spatial axis (Fabian 1983).
Exhibition culture also has strong implications for our understanding and appreciation of art. One dimension of defining art is by context. For instance, the artist Marcel Duchamp's experimental artworks in the form of ready-mades (e.g., displaying a porcelain urinal as a piece of artwork entitled Fountain) aimed to critique the authority held by institutions such as museums in marking the boundary between art and non-art. A similar quest was made more recently by Susan Vogel's 1988 exhibition ART/Artifact, which deliberately played around the idea that the white cube gallery space could aestheticize African material culture.2 As Jantjes (2005: 20) comments, “any object added to a museum collection becomes ‘art’ in perpetuity … Any material that has undergone artistic transformation can never return to being anything other than what the artist has chosen to call it.”
Critical awareness of the museum's exhibition culture and its historical trajectory is one significant site-specific feature of museum education. In terms of art education, exhibition culture of museums can be part of the curriculum, cultivating critical thinking into the definition of art and the politics behind art history. Under what criteria are artworks selected as part of museum collections? Who has the authority to make such decisions? What are the implications of the method of displaying art in museums? In Tate Britain in London, for example, Pre-Raphaelite paintings are hung three or more meters up in rooms with several damask walls to offer “a picturesque, country-house look,” whereas postwar art is “usually displayed in a ‘white box’ with generous space between a single row of art works” (Grigg 2004: 51).
Furthermore, encounters with real art exhibited in museums can add a spatial dimension to the learning experience. As Karen Hosack Janes (2014: 11) states, “rarely are the colours and the textures of the materials transferred authentically to a reproduction; you have to see these in the flesh.” This leads to the second feature of learning in the museum space: object-based learning.
From an educational perspective, the physicality of objects can trigger curiosity as it “enables the possibility of an arousal of interest or a focus of attention that is qualitatively different from the attention given to the written word” (Hooper-Greenhill 1991: 98).There can be no substitute for the experience of seeing with your own eyes the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, the beaks of the finches that gave Darwin his first inkling of the theory of evolution, or the worn shoes that victims of the Holocaust took off before they entered the gas chamber. (Spalding 2002: 9)
Understandings of the purposes and value of object-based learning have developed over the centuries. Hooper-Greenhill (1988) traces the idea of learning from objects to the Middle Ages, when in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas proposed that abstract notions cannot be fully understood unless they have some grounding in material experience. In modern times, object-based learning became popular “in Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century, at a time when the target of knowledge was the understanding, through observation, of the natural world” (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 105). In the late Victorian period (late nineteenth century) in Britain, teaching with objects in schools even led to the emergence of school museums (Lawn 2005). However, object lessons (usually applied in the teaching of science) were mainly delivered in line with the goal of education in those days – that is, advancing technical literacy to develop “workers for the new industrial organizations” (Lawn 2005: 160).
From the late twentieth century onward, the field of museum education has reinvigorated discussions and practices of object-based learning. In relation to critical reflections of the exhibition culture in museums, scholars have explored the nature of engagement with objects. Alpers (1991) criticizes museums' tendency to prioritize the visual sense, and Classen (2005) and Candlin (2010) have both linked the history of modern museums to the cultural construction of the senses. While handling of objects was common before the nineteenth century, the changing attitudes toward conservation and the widening of public access to museums made handling less practical.
The multisensory and embodied nature of object-based learning can thus enrich our understanding of specific knowledge and our emotional and intuitive engagement with the living world. Kavanagh (2000: 118) calls attention to the power of museum objects to trigger memory, which can “help build self-esteem and bolster a sense of identity.”The encounter between an active agent and an object has two sides to it: the interpretive framework brought to bear by the individual subject, which is both personal and social, and the physical character of the artifact. The material properties and the physical presence of the artifact demand embodied responses, which may be intuitive and immediate … The initial reaction to an object may be at a tacit and sensory rather than an articulated verbal level. (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 112)
We can notice a revival of object-based learning in university settings. In the USA, the former curator of the Harvard Art Museum, David Gordon Mitten, used archeological objects in teaching for more than 40 years, with the aim of connecting his students both “intellectually and viscerally” (Brauer 2010: 7) with the ancient world. More recently, University College of London, for example, has been exploring the value of object-based learning through linking the pedagogical framework of museum learning and teaching practices in the university classroom (Chatterjee 2010).
The characteristics of object-based learning bear much relevance to art education. As mentioned above, engagement with real artworks is qualitatively different from the experience offered by two-dimensional images. Features of object-based learning in museum contexts also support the widening scope of art education, which has seen a shift from visual arts education and discipline-based art education (Clark, Day, and Greer 1987) to visual culture art education (Duncum 2002) and further to art education that embraces approaches of material culture studies (Bolin and Blandy 2003). The concept of discipline-based art education aims to justify art as a subject and positions art education as integrating “content from four art disciplines, namely, aesthetics, art criticism, art history, and art production” (Clark, Day, and Greer 1987: 130). Visual culture art education (VCAE) responds to the postmodernist approach to the interpretation and making of artworks (which is beyond the teaching of technical skills) with the replacement of “arts” with “visual culture” as the topic of art education (Duncum 2002). VCAE aims at breaking down the distinction between high art and popular art and bringing about interaction between different communicative modes (Duncum 2004). Elsewhere, Bolin and Blandy (2003: 247) put forward the suggestion of complementing art education with perspectives from material culture studies, which entails the goal of assisting students in “comprehending and engaging the cultural forms and practices encountered on a daily basis.” This implied proposal of “material culture art education” advocates for an even broader canon of art education than VCAE as it entails not only visual images in everyday life but also “the broadest possible range of objects, artifacts, spaces, expressions, and experiences” (Bolin and Blandy 2003: 246).
On this note, the next section will illustrate the pedagogical principles of MIAE, which integrate these two features of learning in museum settings: exhibition culture and object-based learning.
Postmodern Pedagogical Principles of Museum-Informed Art Education
In the modernist museum, the museum was positioned as “positivist, objective, rational, evaluative, distanced, and set aside from the real world” (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 130). Casey (2003) describes this type of museum as a “legislating museum,” where museums' authority is strengthened and sustained through curators' selection, presentation, and interpretation of objects. We can discern traces of postmodern influence in the two pedagogical features of learning in museum settings discussed in the previous section. The shift toward the post-museum (Hooper-Greenhill 2000), to a large degree, demystifies curators' authority in shaping knowledge in the museum space (Hooper-Greenhill 1992). As Robert R. Janes (2009: 80) notes, museums often maintain the anonymity of their “interpreters,” and he believes that it is an ethical requirement for the exhibition members to identify themselves, “along with some explanation of the etiology and motivation for the exhibit.” That is to say, instead of presenting an authoritative interpretation hidden in an anonymous voice, museum staff can try to communicate to the audience directly and explain more explicitly why and how they decide to exhibit things in such ways. Beyond ethical considerations, the identification of curators and the exhibition team can be one signal of tackling the challenge of “the reconceptualisation of the museum/audience” (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 1). A postmodern perspective supports the “delegitimation” of the grand narrative and calls attention to little narratives (Lyotard 1984). Grand narratives are usually connected, uniform, and systematic, and organized to make sense of human history. Little narratives are about individuals' lives and can be trivial, fragmented, and emotional. For instance, immigration policies and control at a national level are a grand narrative, while immigrants' personal experiences form a diverse range of little narratives.
In the “post-museum” (Hooper-Greenhill 2000) or the “constructivist museum” (Hein 1998), more emphasis is placed on communication and diversity of interpretation, and the museum even “tries to involve the emotions and imagination of visitors” (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 143). The discussion of pedagogical principles of MIAE in this chapter is situated in a postmodern framework and is further grounded in the theory of relational aesthetics.
Relational Aesthetics
Relational aesthetics is a conceptual framework developed by Bourriaud (2002) in understanding contemporary art. Bourriaud positions art not as a finished product but as “a state of encounter” (18). He conceptualizes contemporary art as “formation” rather than “form” (21). He proposes relational aesthetics as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space” (113). While Bourriaud largely uses examples of contemporary art, this concept can be widely applied to reframe our understanding of aesthetics and it directs our attention to the participatory and interactive role that viewers play.
When extended to the museum realm, relational aesthetics implies that exhibitions in museums are always in a state of becoming as each visitor contributes to the formation of exhibitions with their own interpretations. Relational aesthetics thus advances the conceptual transition from “an informing museology” dominated by the transmission of knowledge to “a performing museology” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2000: 11, original emphasis) that acknowledges the museum's own sociohistorical role.
MIAE in a postmodern framework is underpinned by relational aesthetics and can be broadly divided into two pedagogical principles: co-interpretation and co-construction (as illustrated in Figure 1). While the former is more related to aspects of making sense of art and the latter to aspects of producing art, they are to be considered as two blended and complementary frames rather than two separate approaches. Figure 1 illustrates the two pedagogical principles, mainly drawing upon examples of art education concerning children and young people (ranging from 5-year-olds to teenagers).
Co-Interpretation
Co-interpretation is a pedagogical principle that emphasizes the role of interpersonal meaning-making in learning; learners' interpretative perspectives are strongly influenced by their own experience and by interaction with the physical and social environment. The two pedagogical features are dialogic teaching and cross-curricular approaches.
Museums in a postmodern framework can no longer be posited as neutral spaces, and visitors are to be positioned as learners who come with their own backgrounds, preferences, and learning styles. Visitors' interpretation in the museum space is always linked with “their existing learning skills and their existing knowledge” (Hooper-Greenhill 2007: 176). Informed by this view, formats of educational initiatives in museums have also been diversified: lecturers and guided tours dominated by museum staff have been supplemented by facilitated dialogues led by museum staff. Burnham and Kai-Kee (2011) have discussed in details how strategies of dialogic teaching adopted by educators in museums can encourage visitors to look closely at the artworks and can stimulate the visitors' own interpretations.
Museums are often pioneering in experimenting with and promoting dialogic teaching, although practices in museums can also be transferred to other settings (particularly school classrooms). One example is visual thinking strategy, developed by Yenawine (2013), the former education director of the New York Museum of Modern Art. In Yuan, Stephenson, and Hickman's (2015) review of the initial teacher education in museum contexts in relation to the “Take One Picture” project, it is noted that dialogic teaching is a major principle that trainee teachers (more often called “pre-service” teachers in the USA) often gain when learning from museum educators. In learning from museum educators, who strove to involve learners by stimulating dialogue, teachers practiced asking open-ended questions to direct students to think about the paintings and reach a more sophisticated understanding of them. However, dialogic teaching should not be simplified as dialogues initiated with questions. Its main aim is fostering meaningful idea exchanges and collaborative interpretation, which can be facilitated through the educational technique of providing an open-ended, progressive, and comforting space to inspire learners' critical and creative engagement with art. One trainee teacher brought students to Monet's Springtime at the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, UK) and prompted them to think about the personal life of the artist, the senses conveyed by the picture, and how the artist achieved these effects. On another occasion, students were invited to lead a teaching session by “acting as a teacher” to ask fellow students questions about the painting Cupid and Psyche by Jacopo del Sellaio (Yuan, Stephenson, and Hickman 2015).
In line with this objective, dialogic teaching is often connected with cross-curricular approaches. Conversations about art often extend to other disciplinary areas. Jacobs (1989) describes the cross-curricular approach as learning across academic disciplines in the context of a common stimulus, such as a topic heading, an event, or an object. This connects to object-based learning and Bolin and Blandy's (2003) proposal of a material culture studies perspective in art education. Research has revealed that, while students are learning the basic information in core subject areas, they are not necessarily learning to apply their knowledge effectively with regard to thinking and reasoning (Applebee, Langer, and Mullis 1989). Cross-curricular approaches, however, provide a meaningful way in which learners can use knowledge developed in one context as a framework for constructing knowledge in other learning contexts, both formal and informal (Collins, Brown, and Newman 1989); cross-curricular approaches can thereby be an important factor in children's metacognitive development. There is also evidence that cross-curricular teaching environments increase motivation for learning and levels of engagement. When children participate in interdisciplinary experiences, they see the value of what they are learning and become more actively engaged (Resnick 1989). Postmodern museum education embraces cross-curricular approaches with the potential of dealing with fragmentation of knowledge and isolated concept/skill instruction. Cross-curricular approaches align with “a postmodern conception of curriculum [that] involves interdisciplinary content and the study of a variety of visual culture” (Efland, Freedman, and Stuhr 1996: 44). For example, Efland, Freedman, and Stuhr's (1996) proposal of a postmodern art curriculum includes Amish quilts, postcards, and an American Indian powwow – objects that touch upon multicultural contents and everyday life experience.
Therefore, it should be noted that neither dialogic teaching nor cross-curricular approaches are exclusively about cognitive engagement. The emotional dimension related to personal experience is a crucial element in the co-interpretation principle, acknowledging that “perhaps the single most universal thing about human experience is the phenomenon of ‘Self,’ and we know that education is crucial to its formation” (Bruner 1996: 35). In practice, the two-year project (2012–2014) Scotland Creates can serve as an example. It was initiated by the National Museum of Scotland in partnership with four other museums in Scotland to engage young people aged 16–24. Young people were invited to reinterpret museum collections to express their sense of place. With the support of the museum staff and other creative partners, young people created exhibitions, dance, music, and films (see National Museums Scotland 2018).the ability to find meaning in imagery. It involves a set of skills ranging from simple identification – naming what one sees – to complex interpretation on contextual, metaphoric and philosophical levels. Many aspects of cognition are called upon, such as personal association, questioning, speculating, analyzing, fact-finding, and categorizing. Objective understanding is the premise of much of this literacy, but subjective and affective aspects of knowing are equally important. Visual literacy usually begins to develop as a viewer finds his/her own relative understanding of what s/he confronts, usually based on concrete and circumstantial evidence. (Yenawine 1997: 845)
Co-Construction
Co-construction is a pedagogical principle that emphasizes “doing” and learners' active participation in structuring and developing learning; educators and learners are positioned as co-learners and learning is achieved through creating and sharing. Pringle (2006) identifies three modes of contemporary gallery education: instruction, construction, and co-construction. The last mode fits into the postmodern framework in recognizing the capacity of relational and intercultural perspectives in creating new possibilities of knowing and expressing ideas. It also echoes Abbs's (2003) suggestion of the three reciprocal principles of educational activity: education is existential in nature; education is essentially a collaborative activity; and education is always a cultural activity that has to be continuously deepened and extended.
While the principle of co-interpretation is in most cases centered around existing orders (e.g., particular artworks or exhibitions), co-construction encourages learners to contribute to building and sharing knowledge throughout the learning process. This principle fits into the shifting landscape of museum education and contemporary art practices. The idea of the post-museum (Hooper-Greenhill 2000) suggests a “participatory museum” where “visitors can create, share and connect with each other around content” (Simon 2010: ii). Many museums are actively organizing activities to empower visitors to participate in and even host museum-related events. For instance, Kids in Museums is a charity organization in Britain aiming at encouraging and helping museums across the country to attract more family visits. In 2012, it introduced an annual Takeover Day, on which children and young people are invited to make their contributions to museums. Ancient House Museum, Thetford, for example, gave young people from the museum's Teenage History Club an opportunity to design and create their own shop stock and to sell the items on the Takeover Day in 2013. In 2014, the Teenage History Club curated a World War I display and created a murder mystery evening for which they developed the storyline, played all the characters, created the marketing, and organized front-of-house operations.
Mirroring the participatory agenda in museums are participatory and interactive art projects, which are a major trend in contemporary art practices. For example, take the Taiwanese American artist Candy Chang's Before I Die project. Chang initiated the participatory art project at an abandoned house in her New Orleans neighborhood and invited people to share their aspirations and stories about things they care about and hope to accomplish before dying.
In line with the above features of museum education and artistic practices, the co-construction principle of MIAE manifests two characteristics: collaborative approach and experimental nature. The collaborative approach is rooted in Vygotsky's (1978) cultural history theory of learning, affirming the significance of teacher–student interaction and peer cooperation in learning. In art education, advocates for the collaborative dimension of learning emerged in the late twentieth century. Houser (1991) proposes a collaborative, progressive model for teaching art and he argues that the collaborative process of creating, analyzing, and evaluating can strengthen students' social skills and foster cross-cultural awareness and appreciation. A collaborative approach also resonates with the changing nature of arts in a postmodern age. Irwin (1999) affirms the value of collaborative processes in practices of teaching and art-making as she draws on connective aesthetics (Gablik 1995) and feminist pedagogy (Collins and Sandell 1996; Irwin 1997). From the perspective of connective aesthetics, art is not about individual effort and self-expression, but about social engagement and community collaboration. In the same vein, feminist pedagogy seeks to remove inherent oppressions, thus “creating a liberating environment [that] promotes a democrative process wherein learners are directly involved in an inquiry process” (Irwin 1999: 37).
The co-construction principle of MIAE is based on democratic terms, indicating that the collaborative process is sustained by a participatory learning environment that encourages diversity and change. Collaboration is facilitated rather than dictated by educators. Therefore, the collaborative approach as pedagogical principle goes hand in hand with its experimental nature, emphasizing the open-ended and flexible features of collaborative efforts. In terms of relational aesthetics, the process of art-making is increasingly process oriented and interactional. It is recognized that, in museums, “people need to see a personal relevance or connection in order to recognize something's value [and] creating and contributing provides an essential hook for the appreciation of museum objects and collections” (Earle 2012: 20). The right to create and the joy of participation are also crucial when it comes to the art-making aspect in art education, reflecting Hickman's (2010: 159) vision of art education that “value[s] imagination and expression, … tak[ing] place in an environment where individuals are taught practical skills in the handling of materials and media and where learners are encouraged to develop their own sense of identity.”
Museum collections and exhibitions can trigger the urge to create and offer inspiration. The “Take One Picture” project mentioned above involves initiatives to encourage art-making as well. For example, primary school teachers were offered notes on Degas's Beach Scene by the National Gallery, London, to help students to create their own work inspired by the masterpiece (Janes 2014). Another example is artists' collaborative projects with young people at Modern Art Oxford. One artist, Paweł Althamer, collaborated with young people in an Oxfordshire-based multi-arts program for young people not in education, employment, or training; the project was called Common Task and included wearing a gold spacesuit on the way to visit the ethnographic collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The young people filmed the walk and their film was added to the artist's work shown at the gallery (Mossop 2011). It can be noted that, in these projects, young learners are more than “viewers” and “interpreters”; they become active creators who develop further understanding of what they encounter in museums, though such initiatives need to be supported by educators.
Changing Roles and Identities of “Educators” in Museum Settings
This penultimate section reflects on how the pedagogical features of MIAE in a postmodern framework influence and are influenced by changing roles and identities of “educators” in museum settings.
One profession that makes a significant contribution to the development of MIAE is artist. Corresponding to the transition from a modernist paradigm to a postmodern one and the emergence of museum education, artists as educators have also transformed from celebrity performers to creative facilitators (Sekules 2003). In museum settings, Marcel Duchamp's work represents artists' early “proto-interventionist works,” characterized by “destabilization” and “confrontational humour” (Robins 2013: 57). These initiatives were taken further in the 1960s and 1970s when the scale of artists' intervention in museum settings placed more emphasis on “site specificity, contingency, audience response and interaction” (Robins 2013: 64). At the same time, artists have begun to work as temporary residents with a pedagogical role in educational settings,3 although their efforts can often be outshone. Pujol (2001: 5–6), for example, notes a tendency of artists to work on “a humble B-list of contemporary art programming running side by side with a curatorially generated A-list”; as a result, “artists' creative process [can be turned] into a ‘deprofessionalized spectacle.’”
To some degree, artists' work is now often an integrated part of MIAE. At macro levels, initiatives such as creative partnerships and reviews of cultural education (Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2016) encourage institutional partnership in fostering learning that is creative in nature. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, artists' work in museums has moved into a new stage as artists “have slowly veered away from their earlier allegiance to parodic and ironic methodologies towards closer affiliations with museum professionals” (Robins 2013: 197). There has been a shift toward a more mature pedagogic development in museums that favors dialogic strategies, poly-vocality, and co-production (Robins 2013: 197–214). When it comes to educational schemes for young people, Balshaw (2008: 10) identifies four distinct formats: artist-led sessions in galleries for pupils as part of the school curriculum; close partnerships and collaborations between schools and galleries that explore creative learning; projects led by young people and facilitated by artists and educators; and interpretations authored by young people for other children and adults.
Collaboration and partnership have brought about new challenges and opportunities. Programs such as Watch This Space4 in England – based on gallery–school collaboration – can create a positive learning experience for all parties involved, including visual arts venues, artists, gallery educators, and schoolteachers (Jones and Daly 2008). However, it is often difficult to resolve the tension between schools and museum settings concerning their different assessment methods and institutional cultures. Schools need to constantly respond to a whole package of assessment tests and public examinations (e.g., in the UK, Standard Assessment Tests, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, and A Levels), while art educators can often regard “assessment as antithetical to the very nature and purpose of artistic expression” (McGregor 2008: 40). Turvey (2008) describes how gallery education, with the intention of extending learning inside school, can often become a Trojan horse wheeled into the school unexpectedly, causing chaos and disruption. Although artists are often invited to empower students to express themselves in new ways, many schools still have little tolerance toward experimentation, ambiguity, and freedom of movement.
While transformation of the entrenched nature of philosophy in education takes place slowly, changes of pedagogical features have already widened the professional roles of practitioners in areas pertaining to MIAE. The identity crisis for museum educators (Eisner and Dobbs 1986) can give birth to new opportunities. Artists and museum practitioners are often expected to “take a number of different roles (educator, collaborator, role model, social activist and research), requiring a broad understanding of the term ‘educator’” (Pringle 2006: 13). In art museums, educational projects for young people often involve artists, school teachers, and museum educators as three main roles that work together to facilitate learning. But, when it comes to real practices, the titles (whether artists, art educators, teachers, collaborators, facilitators, researchers, practitioners, or something else) do not matter as much as what the individual can contribute to facilitate learning. Therefore, when it comes to learning in museum settings or learning that involves collaboration with museums, an open mind will be helpful in liberating the static connections between pedagogical methods and clearly divided roles.
Concluding Remarks
This chapter has proposed co-interpretation and co-construction as two pedagogical principles of MIAE in a postmodern framework. The term “museum-informed art education” has been coined to emphasize the link between changes in art pedagogy and educational features in museum settings. The two features of learning in museums, exhibition culture and object-based learning, have strong implications for art education.
As outlined above, the two pedagogical principles of co-interpretation and co-construction champion learner-centered education, indicating that both making sense of art and participating in art-marking demand learners' creative input and participation as well as their interaction with their wider sociocultural and physical world.
Practitioners embracing such pedagogical principles face new challenges and they will need new forms of support and collaborative methods. In Jeffers's (2003: 24) discussion of the university art gallery as a center for fostering connection between the university and the community, she positions the gallery as a nexus that is “synergistic, expansive, inviting its human participants to actively endow art objects with cultural meaning and to reposition them within the real world.” This observation can be extended beyond the university art gallery. The museum setting can be a unique space for art education, and collections and exhibitions in museums can be valuable teaching resources. What is key to MIAE is the recognition of learners' input and meaning-making in the learning process, as these lie at the center of co-interpretation and co-construction. Art-related teaching can find inspiration from museums, and in this sense a museum is far more than a physical space, being also a learning space with creative triggers. For children and young learners, museum spaces can offer a different environment (compared to schools). The support of “facilitators,” however, is crucial, and such roles often require collaborations from various sectors. The biggest challenge of MIAE, which is not fully explored here, is how to make a sustained effort and keep a balance between catering to learners' active participation and ensuring effective teaching.
Yanyue Yuan is assistant professor at the College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, China, and visiting assistant art professor at New York University Shanghai, China. She completed her PhD in education at the University of Cambridge, UK, during which she explored visitors' imaginative responses toward cultural objects in anthropological museums using arts-informed methodologies and self-narrative methods. She has a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK, and a bachelor's degree in English literature from Fudan University, China. Her research interests include art education, innovative education, humanistic psychology, art-based methodologies, and urban culture.
SEE ALSO: The Liberation of Visual Imagination and the Museum's Promise; Paradox and Art Education: The Disobedience of the Force of Art and the Adventure of Pedagogy; Visual Culture and Visual Literacy; Cultural Diversity in Art Education; Pedagogy and the A/r/tographic Invitation; Visual Proficiency: Perspectives in Art Education
