Propositions for Museum Education (Book)

International Art Educators in Conversation

Examines the ways international art educators are engaging with twenty-first-century challenges in museum education. Organized into five sections, this collection reconceptualizes the role of museums via new technologies, socially just practices, accessibility, differences in lived experiences, and pedagogic pivots to create impactful change. 75 colour illus.

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Category: Visual Arts

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From the perspective of art educators, museum education is shifting to a new paradigm, which this collection showcases and marks as threshold moments of change underway internationally. The goal in drawing together international perspectives is to facilitate deeper thinking, making and doing practices central to museum engagement across global, local and glocal contexts.

Museums as cultural brokers facilitate public pedagogies, and the dispositions and practices offered in 33 chapters from 19 countries articulate how and why collections enact responsibility in public exchange,
leading cultural discourses of empowerment in new ways. Organized into five sections, a wide range of topics and arts-based modes of inquiry imagine new possibilities concerning theory-practice, sustainability of educational partnerships and communities of practice with, in and through artwork scholarship.

Chapters diverse in issues, art forms and museum orientations are well-situated within museum studies, enlarging discussions with trans-topographies (transdisciplinary, transnational, translocal and more) as critical directions for art educators.

Authors impart collective diversity through richly textured exposés, first-person accounts, essays and visual essays that enfold cultural activism, sustainable practices and experimental teaching and learning alongside transformative exhibitions, all while questioning – Who is a learner? What is a museum? Whose art is missing?

Anita Sinner is a professor of Art Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She works extensively with stories as pedagogic pivots, with emphasis on creative geographies in education.

Boyd White is an associate professor (retired, August 2023) from the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, Faculty of Education, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His teaching and research interests are
in the areas of philosophy and art education, with a focus on aesthetics and art criticism.

Trish Osler is a PhD Candidate and researcher in Art Education and Concordia University Public Scholar. Her transdisciplinary practice aims to deepen understanding and awareness of arts-based approaches through embodied engagement with the environment and through artistic inquiry. Research interests draw upon the neuroscience of creativity and museum education.

Table of Contents 
Preface-ing 
Anita Sinner, Boyd White and Patricia Osler
The Promise of Museums: An Introduction 
Dónal O’Donoghue
I: Decolonizing Museums 
Displays of Inhumanity and the Inhumanity of Displays: Dialogue at the Junctures of Contemporary Art, Museum Collections and Hate Speech 
Raphael Vella and Shaun Grech
Museums as Intersectional Spaces for Artivist Solidarity 
Riikka Haapalainen, Anniina Suominen, Tiina Pusa, Jasmin Järvinen and Melanie Orenius
Decolonizing Benjamin Franklin House Through Comics: Reflections and Potential 
Kremena Dimitrova
Community Museums: Dialogical Spaces for Knowledge Creation, Mobilization and Income Generation for Marginalized Citizens in Brazil 
Bruno de Oliveira Jayme
“Becoming Ecological” for Nature Conservation: Insights from Two Museums in the Island State of lutruwita / Tasmania, Australia 
Abbey MacDonald, Annalise Rees, Jan Hogan and Benjamin J. Richardson
On the Possibility of Reconstructing a Contested Past Through Memory Museums in Turkey
Esra Yildiz
II: Museums of Purpose 
Disrupting Museum Education: Counter-Monument as a Pedagogical Space 
Susana Vargas-Mejía
Korundi Recreated: Participatory Experience Creates a Dialogue Between Past and Present 
Anniina Koivurova and Tatiana Kravtsov
Be the Nature: Enhancing Nature Connectedness Through Art Museum Pedagogy 
Timo Jokela, Maria Huhmarniemi and Tanja Mäkitalo
Interpretation Design at a Crossroads with Museum Education 
Richard Lachapelle
The Portuguese Contemporary Art Museum Today 
João Pedro Fróis
Museum-School Partnership: Synergizing Paradigmatic Engagements 
Attwell Mamvuto
Every School is a Museum: The Case of “Art for Learning Art” in Tegucigalpa, Honduras 
Joaquín Roldán, Andrea Rubio-Fernández and Ángela Moreno-Córdoba
III: Pedagogic Pivots 
Not Knowing: Creating Spaces for Co-curation 
Deborah Riding
Children’s Voices: Making Children’s Perspectives Visible in Gallery Spaces 
Lilly Blue and Sue Girak
The Art of Learning Art 
Paloma Palau-Pellicer, Maria Avariento-Adsuara and Paola Ruiz-Moltó
Out of the Museum into the Art 
Lise Sattrup and Lars Emmerik Damgaard Knudsen
Thinking Ahead in Art Education.... 
Rolf Laven and Wolfgang Weinlich
Social Functions of Museum Education in Double Peripheries: Between Museology and Sociology 
Dominik Porczyński
The Role of the University Museum in Museum Education: The Example of the University of Tartu Museum 
Jaanika Anderson
IV: Sites of Sensorial Practice 
“You Have to Form Your Mediators. It’s a Series”: On Mediation, Encounters and Deleuze in the Art Museum 
Marie-France Berard
Learning Changes the Museum
Ricardo Marín-Viadel and Joaquín Roldán
Encounters on the Fringe of a Museum Tour – Trailing Behind as a Site of Affective Intensities
Keven Lee, Melissa Park and Marilyn Lajeunesse
The Educational Turn and A/r/tography: An Interplay Between Curating, Education and Artmaking
Jaime Mena and Guadalupe Pérez-Cuesta
Redescribing Territories: Inhabiting the Continuum of Art Production and Education 
Lene Crone Jensen and Hilde Østergaard
Senses and Sensibility: Finding the Balance in Sensory Museum Education
Emilie Sitzia
Towards a More Human-Centred Museum: A Narrative of an Imagined Visit to a Trauma-Aware Art Museum
Jackie Armstrong, Laura Evans, Stephen Legari, Ronna Tulgan Ostheimer, Andrew Palamara and Emily Wiskera

V: Virtual Museums 
The Art of Teaching in the Museum: A Proposition for Pedagogy of Dissensus 
Lisbet Skregelid
The Virtual of Abstract Art: Museum Educational Encounters with Concrete Abstraction 
Heidi Kukkonen
Projection-Based Augmented Reality for Visual Learning and Creation in Contemporary Art Museums 
Rocío Lara-Osuna and Xabier Molinet
Co-imagining the Museum of the Future: Meaningful Interactions Among Art(efacts), Visitors and Technology in Museum Spaces 
Priscilla Van Even, Annika Wolff, Stefanie Steinbeck, Anne Pässilä and Kevin Vanhaelewijn
Immersive Museum Technologies in Turkey and Future Projections in the Field 
Ceren Güneröz and Ayşem Yanar
A New Pedagogy of Museology? Innovative Changes in Museum Education for Cultural Heritage, Social Communication and Participation: A Case Study
Renata Pater

Biographies
Index

Propositions for Museum Education, is a most timely and thought-provoking collection of scholarly perspectives essential all museum professionals seeking to understand and harness the social political and educational changes that are occurring in our societies and institutions. The book champions and proposes hopeful possibilities for museums as contiguous sites of learning for the present day and future realities of institutions who are embedded and connected with communities, from diverse global perspectives. I strongly recommend this book to all seeking to make a positive difference to their museological practice and greater influence on and within the communities in which their museums are embedded. 

Professor of museum and science education, The University of British Columbia David Anderson
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