29. Research on Arts Education
Paper
Pupils’ Experience with Historical Objects at a History Museum and How it Affects Pupils’ Historical Consciousness
Victoria Percy-Smith
DanishSchool of Education, Denmark
Presenting Author: Percy-Smith, Victoria
In this paper, I explore how pupils, aged 13-16, experience historical objects during an educational visit to a history museum, and how this experience affects their historical consciousness. Historical consciousness denotes the understanding of coherence between the past, present, and future – how humans are created by and creating history (Jensen, 2017).
As an applicable pedagogical term, historical consciousness has been widely discussed and criticised for its intangibility (Binderup et al., 2014). Historical consciousness is developed through learning processes affected by the culture one lives in, and therefore culture and history are understood as entwined (Jensen, 2017). Historical consciousness is therefore researched in this paper as a broad cultural process that happens ubiquitously, especially at a history museum.
This is why I choose to investigate how historical consciousness as an applicable pedagogical term and a cultural process, can become more tangible when pupils experience historical objects at a history museum. This stems from historical objects being a favourable way to be in bodily and tactile contact with the past, by providing a bodily presence (Dudley, 2012; Gumbrecht, 2004). Furthermore, museum education can be an advantageous pedagogical approach to create such an opportunity for pupils to be in contact with the past through historical objects. The question is how the connection to the past through objects, can encourage pupils to reflect on their cultural understanding concerning the past, present, and future?
To research how a historical object can affect pupils’ historical consciousness; it is essential to further investigate the relation between subject and object. This means that instead of understanding the physical world around us as a resource to fulfil one’s own needs, as many do in our Anthropocene world, I centralize the relation between subject and object (Chakrabarty, 2009). To do this the relation between subject and object needs to be realized as entangled. In other words, an interaction with one another. This entails a shift of focus to the entangled production of the pupil’s subjectivities as affected by and affecting its surroundings/world. Yet the pupil’s subjectivities and life are messy and complex and should be acknowledged and embraced, instead of attending to claims of the authentic pupil (Spyrou, 2018).
Within this study the focus on entangled production of pupil’s subjectivities, are the pupil’s experience with the historical objects and how that affects the pupil’s historical consciousness. Considering the entangled production of historical consciousness, I argue that a more material perspective on historical consciousness would entail that the pupils’ experiences with the historical objects – the material past – would support the development of their historical consciousness. This will lead to a more tangible applicable pedagogical understanding of historical consciousness, which the term has previously been criticized for not being (Haas, 2022). However, using the material past to understand the present and future, is not to establish history as magistrae vitae. Instead, it is an understanding of and openness towards a perspective on bildung with a temporal aspect which takes the relational encounters with the material world into account.
To research historical consciousness as a more tangible applicable pedagogical understanding, I find it essential that it is the pupil’s experience and voice which is the guidelines to this development. Even though I find an ethical obligation to represent the pupil’s voices, I do not consider this study as giving the pupils a voice. Instead, I understand that with the choice of methods in the study, it can give space to the pupils’ voices. I, therefore, acknowledge the limits of pupils’ voices and recognize the importance of the performative character it may hold (Spyrou, 2018).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis paper presents a study with pupils during an educational museum visit, based on qualitative cartographic observations and qualitative photo-elicited surveys. The actual study is part of a larger empirical study (Ph.D.-thesis), but this paper mainly focuses on the two methods to investigate the performative character of pupils’ voices and to give space to the pupils’ voices. Much empirical research is mediated through power, and acknowledging the pupils as experts and co-creators of the data is no exception (Spyrou, 2018). Therefore, it has been vital in my choice of methods and throughout the whole research process to be aware of the power differential.
The qualitative cartographic observation form where you draw to see, instead of drawing to represent (Causey, 2017). I.e. the observer draws the pupils’ interaction in space and place on a floor plan of a history museum – Rosenborg Castle. The purpose is to gain spatial insight of how the pupils interact in space and place, and balance between experience and enlightenment during the museum education. The cartographic observations are therefore understood as qualitative insights into the interaction between subject and object, instead of quantitative tracking data of the pupils’ movement. The observation is conducted with 16 different classes who visit Rosenborg Castle for educational purposes.
With the same pupils who are observed, I also use qualitative photo-elicited surveys, to get an insight into the pupils’ experience with the historical objects and how that experience affects the pupils’ historical consciousness. My method could arguably be within the continuum between participatory photography and photo-elicited interviews (Banks & Zeitlyn, 2015; Latz & Mulvihill, 2017), because the pupils are asked to take a photo of the object that they think has had the biggest influence on their visit to the museum and explain their experience with the object while standing in front of the object. Videlicet, when the pupils’ take the photo themselves and explain their experiences with the object, their visual narratives are incorporated into the data production and thereby positioned as authors of their own stories. After the pupils’ visit to the museum, the pupils will get a more extended qualitative photo-elicited survey, with open reflective questions about their experience with the specific object. The photo is in other words used as a steppingstone to get insights into the pupils’ experience with the objects.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe expected outcome of this study is broader insights into pupils’ experiences with historical objects at a history museum during an educational visit. Experiences and processes that are much affected by the presence effects of the material objects present at a history museum. These outcomes will be supported by findings of how the pupils’ historical consciousness is affected by their experiences with the historical objects. This will be a vital foundation for developing how museum educators can didactically create the opportunities for the pupils to experience the historical objects and support the development of historical consciousness. Such a development will contribute to the historical consciousness as a bildung and culturally orientated pedagogical term. These findings will also allow the term to be understood as a more material process and acknowledge the term within an entangled understanding. The openness towards the entangled production of historical consciousness will broaden the understandings of pedagogical use of historical objects – the material past – to understand our present, and to help navigate what the future might hold. This pedagogical approach will be further developed in my Ph.D. thesis.
It is also expected that that the study will conclude that a more creative methodological approach can support researchers in approaching the pupils’ messy and complex voices. This will lead to broad perspectives of why researchers should acknowledge that the pupils should be narrators of their own story, instead of caricaturing pupils. Most importantly this study will conclude that the pupils should be recognized as a person who has a past and past experiences, who contributes to the present, who is becoming of age, who is shaping the future, and a person who exists in their own right.
ReferencesBanks, M., & Zeitlyn, D. (2015). Visual methods in social research (2. edition. ed.). SAGE.
Binderup, T., Troelsen, B., & Andersen, T. M. (2014). Historiepædagogik. Kvan.
Braun, V., Clarke, V., Boulton, E., Davey, L., & McEvoy, C. (2021). The online survey as a qualitative research tool. International journal of social research methodology, 24(6), 641-654. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1805550
Causey, A. (2017). Drawn to see : drawing as an ethnographic method. University of Toronto Press.
Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical inquiry, 35(2), 197-222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640
Dudley, S. H. (2012). Museum objects : experiencing the properties of things. Routledge.
Gumbrecht, H. U. (2004). Production of presence : what meaning cannot convey. Stanford University Press.
Haas, C. (2022). Historieundervisning. Pædagogisk indblik, 16. https://dpu.au.dk/fileadmin/edu/Paedagogisk_Indblik/Historieundervisning/16_-_Historieundervisning_-_28-03-2022.pdf
Jensen, B. E. (2017). Historiebevidsthed/fortidsbrug : teori og empiri (1. udgave. ed.). Historia.
Koselleck, R. (2007). Begreber, tid og erfaring : en tekstsamling (1. udgave. ed.). Hans Reitzel.
Latz, A. O., & Mulvihill, T. M. (2017). Photovoice research in education and beyond : a practical guide from theory to exhibition. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315724089
Spyrou, S. (2018). Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4
Woodward, S. (2020). Material Methods: Researching and Thinking with Things. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Wyness, M. (2003). Children's Space and Interests: Constructing an Agenda for Student Voice. Children's geographies, 1(2), 223-239. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280302193
29. Research on Arts Education
Paper
Re-dressed: Encounters with Materiality in Visitor/Researcher/Maker Practice in Foundling Museums.
Adele Nye1, Jennifer Clark2
1University of New England, Australia; 2University of Adelaide, Australia
Presenting Author: Nye, Adele;
Clark, Jennifer
In our work we bring arts-based research and post qualitative history pedagogies to the museum space. In this presentation we will discuss the generative affective entanglements and the encounters of learning about and researching the vital matter of foundling home collections. We consider the ethico-onto-epistemological challenges (Barad, 2003, Geertz & Carsten, 2019) and the contestations of memory, positionality, responsibility, affect, and representation. Such contestations and entanglements offer an entry point into historical thinking, how historical knowledge can be constructed and can evolve, and how such engagement with material culture in a museum at the embodied level can produce a powerful educative experience for the museum visitor.
In particular, we work at two museums, the London Foundling Hospital Museum and the Museo Degli Innocenti in Florence. We look closely at their token and fabric swatch collections. We consider how connection over time casts a legacy of affective entanglements for researchers and visitors (Clark & Nye, 2023). We have developed a visitor/researcher/maker practice whereby we draw on the practices and methods of traditional histories, museology, and arts-based research to engage creatively with the archive.
This work relies on an openness to plugging in as a ‘production of the new: the assemblage in formation’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, 2). Through art-based research and thinking with theoretical ideas we reconfigure the traces of the past, the stories, the colours, and material remains. The legacies of the foundling hospital have been visited and revisited in multiple disciplinary contexts by numerous scholars and artists. We have seen sculpture, paintings, videos, stories, and images produced through museum fellowships and curations. Our own visitations come through (and with) theory, textiles, and talk. This engagement allows us to navigate creative and experimental pathways to delve into the world of the surrendered child and we also, as Carol Taylor suggests, afford different approaches to knowledge-making which is open, affirmative, political and joyous (2021, 39)
In this paper we bring together an interdisciplinary story of love and loss that is revitalised and reanimated through creative responses (Taylor, 2003; Phillips-Hutton, 2018). We ask: how might we re-imagine child surrender using pencil, cloth and thread that takes our level of awareness and affective engagement with the archive to a new level? How might our initial encounters with foundling tokens be explored, understood and reconstituted through the experience of visitor/researcher/maker to take the story of child surrender to a new place of contemporary significance and consideration? Ultimately, how might our making of children’s garments that resonate with the material residue of the foundlings allow us to generate new knowledge and reveal the educative value of encounter and entanglement in museums? In this (re)-dressing of the children, how do we educate ourselves and others about the past in new ways?
In this paper we present an affective journey as experienced by the museum researcher/visitor/maker on encountering the token collections of two foundling museums, and then, referencing Phillips-Hutton and Pérez-Bustos, create a textile ‘repertoire’ in response to the archive that not only represents our processing of, and engagement with, that archive, but also, in the act of creation, produces new knowledge that can be shared with others.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedIn this work we consider how the materiality of museums and the discipline of History develop when applying relational ontologically informed process methodologies (Mazzei, 2021). This generative, and often serendipitous, approach can produce rich outcomes and ideas for new directions. As Mazzei states ‘It is not a method with a script, but is that which emerges as a process methodology’ (2021, p. 198).
Drawing on new materialism (Fox & Alldred, 2017) and post qualitative approaches (St Pierre, 2019) we previously explored the affective entanglements of the researcher /visitor museum experience. It seemed a natural progression, given our interest in drawing, textiles and sewing, to develop another extension to this research practice by infusing arts-based research (Mreiwed, 2023, Ingham, 2022, Pillay et al, 2017). The researcher/visitor/maker practice is an assemblage that evolved through collaborative talk, imagining, and close noticing and walking with methodologies (Springgay &Truman, 2019). It is an embodied endeavour where we work with pencils, paint, digital images, printing, textiles and stitching. We create reconfigurations of our academic work with fabrics and art which speaks to the multiple ways of doing and thinking about matter and history. We engage in an intentional ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2003) dialogue to tease apart the temporal and affective layers of this work. We talk about colour casting a vitality across time, symbolic shapes and messages as signifiers of connection to kin. As a process methodology, of being and becoming through careful noticing and art(ful) practices we are energised as researchers. We recognise the value in exploring the ways in which we, our writing and thinking are changed by these encounters. In this context such thresholding produces new and generative opportunities for extending historical thinking and practice.
Because we are specifically working with museum archives, collections and exhibitions, we have found resonance in the work of Phillips-Hutton and Diane Taylor particularly useful. Both explore the relationship between archive and creative practice, or ‘repertoire’, as ‘an embodied way of knowing that is enacted through performance’ (Phillips-Hutton, 2018, 189). The impermanence and performative nature of ‘repertoire’ becomes a key concept for our performative making, our interpretative artistic sewing, our ‘(re)dressing’ of surrendered children.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe intention of this paper is to promote an imaginative conversation about arts-based work, history and post-qualitative research methods. It builds on our earlier work of using these approaches as provocations for thinking about history education in universities (Nye & Clark, 2021), this time with fabrics, thread, inks and pencils. The researcher/visitor/maker assemblage infuses new possibilities for arts based, historical and archival research. Arts-based research offers an alternative form of access to the social and cultural memory of museums. The reconfigurations of the token images through a mixed arts-based practice allow us to think differently about the museum experience and represent our embodied knowledge in a highly visual and tactile way. It highlights temporality, vital matter, and representations of corporeality of the foundlings, and their mothers who relinquished the babies but left a chosen token as an identity document. This process represents a story of becoming for us as researchers. Choosing to embrace ‘withness’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023); to listen, walk with, think, write and make differently has facilitated our sharing in an affective encounter amid the archives of the foundling homes. As an emergent research assemblage, (Re)dressing speaks to our own ongoing process of relational becoming as researchers who are perpetually transformed, as much as it speaks to the vitality of the matter of the tokens.
ReferencesBarad, K. (2003). Posthuman performativity: Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801-831.
Clark, J. & Nye, A. (2023). Foundling museums: Exhibition design and the intersections of the vital materiality of foundling tokens and affective visitor experience. Museum Management and Curatorship, 38(6), 662-678.
Geertz, E. & Carstens, D. (2019). Ethico-onto-epistemology. Philosophy Today, 63(4), 915-925.
Ingham, B. (2022). Artistic sensibility is inherent to research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21, 1-11.
Jackson, A. & Mazzei, L. (2023). Thinking with theory in qualitative research, Routledge.
Mazzei, L. (2021). Postqualitative inquiry: Or the necessity of theory. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(2), 198-200.
Mreiwed, H. (2023). Storytelling through textiles: The rebirth of a Phoenix called Damascus, in H. Mreiwed, M. Carter, S Harshem, & C. Blake-Amarente (Eds.), Making Connections in and through arts-based educational research, Springer pp.153-166.
Nye, A. & Clark, J. (Eds.), (2021). Teaching history for the contemporary world: Tensions, challenges and classroom experiences in higher education, Springer.
Pérez-Bustos, T., & Bello-Tocancipá, A., (2023). Thinking methodologies with textiles, thinking textiles as methodologies in the context of transitional justice. Qualitative Research, DOI: 10.1177/14687941231216639, 1-21.
Phillips-Hutton, A. (2018). Performing the South African archive in REwind: A cantata for voice, tape, and testimony, Twentieth-Century Music 15(2), 187–209.
Pillay, D., Pithouse-Morgan, K. & Naicker I. (2017). Composing object medleys, in D. Pillay, K. Pithouse-Morgan, and I. Naicker (Eds.), Object medleys: Interpretive possibilities for educational research, Sense pp. 1-10.
Springgay, S. & Truman, S. (2019). Walking methodologies in a more than human world: Walking lab, Routledge.
Taylor, C. (2021). Knowledge matters, in K. Murris (Ed.), Navigating the postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist terrain across disciplines: An introductory guide, Routledge pp. 22-42.
Taylor, D., (2003). The Archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas, Duke University Press.
29. Research on Arts Education
Paper
The Digital Museum Útil: Enacting Educational Change through Art and Museums.
Sara Pastore
Federico II, Italy
Presenting Author: Pastore, Sara
In the educational domain, digitization has been often conducted in a tension towards techno-solutionism, thus feeding commodification and financialization mechanisms (McLaren, Jandrić 2015, Grimaldi, Ball, Peruzzo 2023). This presentation moves from the assumption, shared by many scholars, that this is just one of the possible unfoldings of digital technologies in education. Here, in fact, they can as well provide numerous spaces for contradictory practices (Rose 2015); enable new ecologies of participation and meaning making (McLaren, Jandrić 2015); and set up a fertile ground to open many different routes for human learning (Hayes 2015).
This study tries then to walk through one of these: specifically, that which encounters art and museum education. If art education calls on us to embark on a path of unlearning (Baldacchino 2019), opposing the positivistic approach and the developmental narrative not seldomly attached to digitization, contemporary museum studies suggest to acknowledge the museum as a potential site for critical pedagogical practices (Mayo 2004, 2013). As research shows, digital technologies, by supporting more open and flexible museum experiences (Hein 1998, Hooper-Greenhill 2007, Tallon, Walker 2008), can help unlock this potentiality, thus triggering a virtuous circle in which the digital museum educational experience rises as an occasion for collaborative knowledge construction and co-production of difference.
Drawing upon such a position, this presentation gathers the initial results of a two-year study, which attempts to explore how art and museum education can be areas from which to envision and enact a different account of educational digitisation. Namely, one that evades from the common normative stance and technocentric approach, and instead centres and shapes around the pedagogies it cherishes. The study consists of three stages: a transdisciplinary literature review, aimed at reassembling a theoretical framework which combines the ideas of different scholarships, such as critical pedagogy and networked learning (McLaren 1995, Jandrić, Boras 2015) with critical museology and art education (Byrne et al. 2018, Irwin 2015); a context analysis, engaging with the selection and exploration of some existing case studies; and a participatory action research, addressed to design a digital museum educational project in collaboration with a group of higher education students. In this presentation I will discuss some findings from the second stage, i.e. context analysis: assuming the intertwining of action and reflection necessary for further transformation, which is inherent in the notion of praxis (Mayo 2004), my aim is to explore a set of case studies that shed further light on the theoretical insights voiced through the literature review.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe presentation will draw on the analysis of three existing projects proposed by European museums from 2020 to the present, as we recognize the Covid-19 pandemic as a decisive threshold for digital innovation in cultural and educational institutions. For the selection of the case studies, we coupled the use of digital technologies with the criteria traced by the Arte Útil movement, and above all with its shift from spectatorship to usership, conceived as a way to expand the notion of education through an act of emancipation (Saviotti 2022, Byrne, Saviotti, Estupiñán 2022).
Crafted in this way, the resulting sample comprises three case studies: The Uncertain Space virtual museum by the University of Bristol; the Deep Viewpoint web application by the IMMA of Dublin; the project Collections of Ghent developed by the Design Museum of Ghent in collaboration with other actors of the city. Though encompassing different digital technologies, all three projects use them as resources to replace spectators with users and advance new uses for art within society, thus re-establishing art as a system of transformation.
Adopting critique as a mode of analysis that interrogates texts, institutions, and social practices to reveal how they relate to the current hegemonic script, we investigate the case studies through document analysis and interviews with key informants. We then discuss them in reconnection with those dimensions that, according to our relevant literature, inevitably entangle with teaching and learning. First, the knowledge construction process they endorse, focusing on the degrees of decentralization, collaboration and horizontality, and as well on the epistemological values they embody (or refuse), for example regarding the notions commonly tied to technology, such as speed and objectivity. Second, the identities they allow to narrate, drawing upon the act of (self-) narration as a space of subjectivation, agency and empowerment, and likewise on the interplay between inclusion and exclusion at stake in every cultural representation. Last, as we uphold critical pedagogy’s refuse to separate culture from systemic relations of power or the production of knowledge and identities from politics, we must engage with the power relationships which are continually (re)negotiated through teaching and learning, looking at this latter as crucial nodes in the articulation of a wider democratic project (Giroux 2011).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsBoth digitization and art have been often misread for quick learning fixes. Rejecting such ideas, the field of museum and art education is a sensitive territory to harvest the recommendations of a more conscious and open education, less biased towards a developmental domestication of knowledge. Accordingly, we would like to unveil how it could become a worksite for a reappropriation of educational digitization, challenging the positivistic posture which in this process flattens education in a series of stimulus/response interactions and predetermined patterns.
The study here presented, then, through the selected cases, aims to demonstrate how from different methodological grounds it is possible to find alternative trajectories for digital educational practices. In other words, we argue that, when performed from a specific perspective – in our case that of art and museum education – technology can decentralize and democratize power relationships, promote access to knowledge and encourage symmetrical, horizontal peer learning relationships (Peters, Jandrić 2018). Moreover, the case studies, while rejecting the common appetite for growth, standardization and fastness often associated with digital innovation, will also come as an example of the possibility to evade from the disciplinary boundaries of traditional higher education, thus taking care of its civic dimension and restoring its connection with self-formation and collective life – also known as Bildung.
In this way digitalization, (un)learning from art and museum education, could be recoded as a process which facilitates the production of situated and antihegemonic knowledges, which arise from and foster traditionally marginalized theoretical viewpoints and methodological sensitivities.
ReferencesBaldacchino, J. (2019). Art as Unlearning. Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy, Routledge: London & New York
Byrne, J., Morgan, E., Paynter, N., Sánchez de Serdio, A., Železnik, A. (eds.) (2018). The Constituent Museum. Constellations of Knowledge, Politics and Mediation: A Generator of Social change, Valiz: Amsterdam
Byrne J., Saviotti A. (2022). Hacking Education: Arte Útil as an educational methodology to foster change in curriculum planning, Art & the Public Sphere, 11 (1), pp. 99-114
Giroux, H.A. (2011). On Critical Pedagogy, Continuum Books: New York
Grimaldi, E., Ball, S., Perruzzo, F. (2023). Platformization and the enactment of multiple economic forms. In Còbo, C., Rivas, A. (eds), The new digital education policy landscape. From education systems to platforms, pp.122-146, Routledge: New York/London
Hayes, S. (2015). Counting on Use of Technology to Enhance Learning, in Jandrić, P., Boras, B., (eds.) (2015). Critical Learning in Digital Networks. Springer: London and New York
Hein, G.E. (1998). Learning in the Museum, Routledge: New York
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2007). Museums and Education. Purpose, pedagogy, performance. Routledge: London and New York
Irwin, L.R., (2015). Becoming A/r/tography, Studies in Art Education, 54:3
Jandrić, P., Peters, M.A. (2018). Digital University: a Dialogue and Manifesto, Peter Lang: Bristol
Jandrić, P., Boras, B., (eds.) (2015). Critical Learning in Digital Networks. Springer: London and New York
Mayo, P. (2004). Liberating Praxis. Paulo Freire’s Legacy for Radical Education and Politics. Sense Publisher: Rotterdam and Taipei
Mayo, P. (2013). Museums as Sites of Critical Pedagogical Practice, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 35:2, pp. 144-153
McLaren, P. (1995). Critical pedagogy and predatory culture: Oppositional politics in a postmodern era. Routledge: London and New York.
McLaren, P., Jandrić P. (2015), The Critical Challenge of Networked Learning: Using Information Technologies in the Service of Humanity, in Jandrić, P., Boras, B., (eds.) (2015). Critical Learning in Digital Networks. Springer: London and New York
Peters M. A., Jandrić P. (2018). The Digital University. A Dialogue and Manifesto, Peter Lang Publishing: New York
Rose, L. (2015). Subversive Epistemologies in Constructing Time and Space in Networked Environments: The Project of a Virtual Emancipatory Pedagogy, in Jandrić, P., Boras, B., (eds.) (2015). Critical Learning in Digital Networks. Springer: London and New York
Saviotti A., Estupiñán G.M. (2022). Usological Turn in Archiving, Curating and Educating: The Case of Arte Útil, Arts, 11, 22
Tallon L., Walker, K., (eds.) (2008). Digital Tecnhologies and The Museum Experience. Handheld Guides and Other Media. AltaMira Press: New York.
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