Education, Narrative Technologies and Digital Learning by Tony Hall

Author:Tony Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Pedagogical Activity

In addition to their role as places that are enjoyable for children to visit, museums must also serve important societal and educational objectives (Hooper-Greenhill, 1998; Randall, 1998; Stevens & Toro-Martell, 2003). Therefore, considering the research for this book was concerned with designing a computer-augmented learning experience for children in a museum, it would also need to consult museum pedagogical theory and identify the kinds of educational activities it would need to support in order to build an ‘educationally effective’ exhibition. The design themes: narrativity, sociality, engagement and so on would all contribute to making the experience ‘educational’, but it was imperative to clarify, more specifically, the type of learning or understanding it would need to support in the museum.

The principal theoretical influences informing the design of educational aspects of the exhibition in the museum were Kiberd and Hooper-Greenhill, and specifically their ideas relating to open interpretation and questioning of artefacts. Kiberd (2002) argues that museums, like literature, need to become Post-Colonial. He maintains that museums need to move away from encasing artefacts behind glass and ‘fixing’ interpretations through text labels and so on and move more towards supporting handling, open interpretation, discussion and questioning of historical objects. This, Kiberd argues, should be part of a more profound educational programme to remind visitors of the complexity and uncertainty of the present moment: “They will do this most effectively of all if they cure them of that temporal provincialism of mind which used to make visitors believe they were history’s cutting edge, the grand climax of civilisation rehearsed and approached in all those exhibition rooms” (2002, p. 9). Kiberd advocates that a “better model of the past would be more dialectical./It sees in a past moment a molecule which, as in a chemical experiment, collides into the molecule that is the present, releasing wholly new energies into the utopian museum that is the future. This is a knowledge incapable of fixity, but one that brings us face to face with our own strangeness as human agents in history” (2002, p. 13). Kiberd proposes questioning and open interpretation and discussion of artefacts as means by which curators and museum educators might “reconnect us with our own strangeness”. If museums can do this, Kiberd argues that “they can fulfil a useful and beautiful function” (2002, p. 13). Hooper-Greenhill (1998) concurs, museums need to support deeper questioning of artefacts and open interpretation of the past, challenging ‘canonical truth’ about objects. Citing Dewey, in discussing meaning-making in museums, Hein also questions the ‘educational efficacy’ of absolute truth in museums: “John Dewey in The Quest for Certainty argued that the long tradition of Western philosophy of seeking absolute truth has been not only fruitless but also caused humans to downgrade practical knowledge and the arts. He contends that the effort to find security in a search for Truth leads to uncritical acceptance of dubious propositions about the world” (2002, p. 39). Therefore, a key part of this research’s remit in designing the exhibition in the museum

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