Conference Agenda

The basis for diversity in education is full-fledged communication, but this is often a problem zone. It leads to a decrease of the effectiveness of educational projects and conflicts between the stakeholders and participants of the educational process.

In this work we analyze the views of different stakeholders on the role of museums in contemporary education eco-system. In the modern world, the role of the museum is constantly being transformed and rethought (Dalle Nogare, Murzyn-Kupisz, 2021; Castillo et all, 2021). Nowadays the key trend in European countries is building interaction between the spheres of culture and education, especially Universities, to create a common space for the generation of meanings (Poce et all, 2022; Ippoliti, Casale, 2021). This question is so actual that The Network of European museum organizations created special group The learning museum (LEM) to develop partnership between museums and education (NEMO, 2022). Simultaneously museums create its own projects from adaptation of permanent exposition to national educational standards (Stone, 2017) to special boxes with museum materials for history teachers (Dragonetti, 2022).

Most often, the interaction between museums and schools is built within the framework of the so-called "museum pedagogy" ‑ the direction of scientific and practical interdisciplinary activity of museums, aimed at the transfer of cultural experience and knowledge through the pedagogical means of the museum exhibition (Ng-He, 2015). Currently, museum pedagogy is based on a number of principles involving the placement of the learner in the focus of the process. Particular attention is paid to the ideas of lifelong learning, active communication with the visitor of any age, and the formation of the museum environment as "their" space (Peltzer, 2020).

Museum pedagogy is setting the trend for the museum-school contact, in which both museums trying to more fully implement their own cultural and educational mission and teachers wishing to use the museum for a variety of classes. According to E. Hooper-Greenhill 48 % of the surveyed American educators see the value of a museum not only in transferring knowledge, but also in increasing motivation and 87 % talk about the possibility of developing communicative skills of students (Hooper-Greenhill, 2007).

This is largely due to the fact that modern educational standards, such as the learner-centered and applied nature of knowledge, are easier to implement in cooperation with museums. Naturally, the success of cooperative educational programs mainly depends on the quality of communication between the parties. Although there have been several recent works describing experiences of interaction between schools and museums (Pavlenko, Vilkhova, Topchii, 2019; Cabała, Grzelak, 2020; Gómez-Hurtado, Cuenca-López, Borghi, 2020), but no comparative studies on the positions of key stakeholders have been published yet.

The goal of the study was to compare the perceptions of teachers, museum workers and school students' parents about the educational potential of museum spaces in the city in order to identify opportunities to improve the effectiveness of cooperation between schools and museums.

Many schools rely on a range of partnerships with external subjects to carry out their functions, including those from the private sector. One type of entity that schools commonly partner with is providers of supplemental education services who offer school-based after-school tutoring programmes that focus on academic as well as non-academic (leisure-time) activities and tutoring. Whilst tutoring in non-academic subjects is less likely to clash with school offerings, school partnerships with providers of private tutoring in academic subjects, especially with those operating for profit, may bring corruption risks and potential backwash on schooling (Bray & Zhang, 2018). Although private tutoring private tutoring might be a flexible tool to remedy problems in understanding the school curriculum and can provide more individualized instructions compared to classroom lessons, it threatens children’s well-being if used excessively and, in its paid form, contributes to maintaining or exacerbating social inequalities (Bray, 2009). There are also issues of teacher corruption and unethical practices associated with the provision of shadow education by students’ schoolteachers, coerced tutoring or the deliberate omission of parts of the curriculum in school lessons to generate a greater demand for additional private tutoring provided by the teacher (Brehm & Silova, 2014).

So far, the research of such school and private tutoring partnerships has focused on the context either of developing countries with relatively low-quality schooling and low accountability, such as Myanmar, India or Cambodia (Bray et al., 2020, 2019; Ghosh & Bray, 2020), or of those on the other extreme, for example, Korea, Japan or Shanghai – China (Kim & Jung, 2019; Yamato & Zhang, 2017; Zhang & Bray, 2017). The present research thus complements these studies with findings from a context somewhere “in between” these two extremes, that is, the Czech Republic, a post-socialist country in the center of Europe, where students display a largely average level of achievement where schools’ accountability for students’ results is relatively low and at the same time schools have considerable autonomy.

Previous studies (e.g., Bray et al., 2020, 2019; Ghosh & Bray, 2020) acknowledged the importance of the principal’s leadership in determining a school’s policies toward the private tutoring phenomenon, to enhance its positive aspects while avoiding associated issues. Awareness of the possible benefits and risks of partnerships between schools and private tutoring providers is thus important for school principals, who are the main decision makers about such partnerships in most contexts. Therefore, the present study aims to shed light on different kinds of school–private tutoring partnerships and to contribute to an understanding of principals’ perceptions of the benefits and risks of such partnerships.

A range of typologies covering the partnerships of schools with external bodies were considered for framing and structuring the findings of the study. However, they were found to be too general or with a different focus, so the present study uses the typology of Bray and Zhang (2018), which – as far as the authors of this study are aware – is the only existing typology of school partnerships with shadow education providers. For analytical reasons, Bray and Zhang (2018, p. 4) distinguished three different forms of such partnerships according to the degree of cooperation between the school and the private tutoring provider:

(1) Passive (public schooling and private supplements complement each other but are not coordinated);

(2) Moderate (e.g., public teachers may recommend tutors to students and their families, and perhaps even monitor the activities of the tutors and liaise with the families);

(3) Active (public schools and private supplementary education providers collaborate in specific programmes).

The paper is mainly concerned with the second and third forms of collaboration.

Across the globe museum-school partnerships have long been shown to be effective in enhancing students' learning and engagement across various subjects (Osterman & Shepard, 2010; Raaijmakers, Mc Ewen, Walan & Christenson, 2021). These partnerships can provide students with authentic and hands-on learning experiences that are not typically available in the classroom (Bobick & Hornby, 2013). They can also help to increase students' interest in and understanding of history, science, and the arts (Grenier, 2010; Melber & Cox-Petersen, 2005; Xanthoudaki, 1998), as well as supporting the development of 21st century skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving (Corbisiero-Drakos etal., 2021). Furthermore, museum-school partnerships can help to promote opportunities for community engagement and cultural exchange, which can lead to the understanding and appreciation of diverse perspectives and cultural agency (Matthewson-Mitchell, 2008).

However, research has shown that there are also some challenges that can arise in museum-school partnerships. These include issues such as limited resources and funding (Bobick & Hornby, 2013), lack of teacher professional learning (Grenier, 2010) and difficulty in aligning the curriculum with the museum's offerings (Ne-He, 2015). In order to be successful, it is important for museum and school staff to work closely together to plan, set goals and implement the partnership (Lang & Reeve, 2007; Ne-He, 2015), and to continually evaluate and adjust the program as needed.

This paper presents an evaluation of an innovative museum-school partnership established between the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and St Alban’s Heights Primary School. St Alban’s Heights is a government primary school in the western suburbs of Melbourne, it has a rich and diverse student population, of which 95% have a language background other than English. While only 29 kilometres from the city centre and ACMI, prior to this partnership it was rare for students from St Albans Heights to come into the city, let alone access the museum. Therefore, the overarching goals of the partnership project were twofold:

• For ACMI and St Albans Heights Primary School to explore an extended partnership (3-5 years) to develop and deliver learning experiences for students, teachers and the school community with a focus on digital, screen and media literacies. ​
• Additionally, ACMI aimed to develop best practice support to schools to improve equity of access to their facilities and participation in the creation and use of screen content and digital tools and in so doing expand their museum-school partnerships.

The evaluation of the project was undertaken by a team from the School of Education at RMIT University, who acted as an impartial third party and the research questions guiding our evaluation were (1) ‘What was required to make a positive, interactive, and sustainable partnership between ACMI and St Albans Heights Primary School? (2) How might ACMI use learnings from this current partnership to inform the development of future partnerships with primary schools at scale?