General & Miscellaneous Art, Educational Settings, Educational Levels & Settings, Educational Theory, Research & History
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Overview
What do people learn from visiting museums and how do they learn it? The editors approach this question by focusing on conversations as both the process and the outcome of museum learning. People do not come to museums to talk, but they often do talk. This talk can drift from discussions of managing the visit, to remembrances of family members and friends not present, to close analyses of particular objects or displays. This volume explores how these conversations reflect and change a visitor's identity, discipline-specific knowledge, and engagement with an informal learning environment that has been purposefully constructed by an almost invisible community of designers, planners, and educators.Fitting nicely into a small but rapidly expanding market, this book presents:
*one of the first theoretically grounded set of studies on museum learning;
*an explicit presentation of innovative and rich methodologies on learning in museums;
*information on a variety of museums and subject matter;
*a study on exhibitions, ranging from art to science content;
*authors from the museum and the academic world;
*a range of methods--from the analysis of diaries written to record museum visits, to studies of preservice teachers using pre- and post-museum visit tests;
*an examination of visitors ranging from age 4-75 years of age, and from known and unknown sample populations; and
*a lens that examines museum visits in a fine grained (1 second) or big picture (week, year long) way.
Editorials
Booknews
Produced by the Museum Learning Collaborative, this volume collects 13 theoretically-grounded studies of the educational-social-cultural aspects of museum exhibits. A unique feature of this emerging field of social science research is that museums themselves often seek out evaluations of visitor behavior. Time is the organizing construct for studies that move from ethnographic case studies of museum staff and a family's museum visits over time, to interactions at single exhibits, to moments in which visitors confront identity issues or use exhibit contents to support family activities or science learning. A second volume reporting research on how these conversations impact learning is planned. The editors are with the U. of Pittsburgh. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
October 12, 2012
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Pages
480
ISBN
9781135640378