Emancipating the Museum Visitor: Implicating the Gallery in Self-directed Learning

Summary

While museum education is often thought of as a guided tour or a pre-booked arrangement with museum staff, scholarship on the interpretation of visual culture delves into pedagogical possibilities that render museum displays and exhibits an important platform for learning. While the museum collection is an important element of the gallery experience, this project draws from theoretical perspectives that implicate the learner themselves as the key component for the learning experience. In fostering such an engagement, the visitors’ learning processes are thought to create knowledge in interaction with the social environment as a process of sharing, participation, and association. How a museum gallery can support this process may require curators to reconfigure how exhibits are constructed, to open up possibilities for self-directed meaning-making. This analysis takes a closer look at how putting such theories into praxis could affect visitor attendance. Using data generated from visitors at the Oriental Institute Museum gallery at the University of Chicago, the purpose of this project is to create a better understanding of what visitors think their museum gallery visit should require of them. Or more specifically, to further define visitor expectations of curatorial boundaries as they relate to the gallery experience.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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