In North America, art museums have rendered services to elementary schools since the early 1900s. Although the scope and number of these services have expanded in the past several decades, the nature of the art museum-elementary school collaborative relationship can be problematic, and even counterproductive to the enhancement of quality of art education. There are some crucial issues related to the nature of and factors underlying collaboration among elementary schools and art museums, that need to be carefully considered in order for these efforts to be successful and fruitful. Since the relationship between attitudes and behavior is reciprocal, the attitudes of art museum educators in regard to art museum-elementary school collaboration are crucial to the quality and effectiveness of any collaborative endeavors and directly impact art museums' contribution to elementary art education. Therefore, this study explores art museum educators' attitudes in regard to art museum-elementary school collaboration. The present investigation is the only study of its kind in Canada to date. From the fall of 1997 to the spring of 1998, I conducted a survey of art museum educators in the province of British Columbia, Canada as well as interviews involving nine informants working in two art museums. Moreover, in order to meaningfully interpret the interview data, I observed the informants' daily routines in these galleries and collected documents related to the two study sites. This mixed method design was used to study BC art museum educators' attitudes in regard to art museum-elementary school collaboration relative to six specific issues: 1) models of art museum/gallery-school collaboration; 2) pedagogy and methods of art museum/gallery programs for elementary schools; 3) art museum/gallery programs and resources for elementary school teachers; 4) elementary school teacher participation in school-oriented art museum education; 5) content of art museum/gallery programs for elementary schools; and 6) linkage of art museum/gallery school programs and elementary school curricula. The results of this study suggest important implications to the future of collaborative endeavors bringing together elementary schools and art museums by highlighting issues related to the dynamics of the art museum educator - elementary school teacher relationships, professional knowledge and expertise, and curriculum links that strongly impact on such partnerships. They also provide guidance for future related research. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

This research briefly introduces the roles of art museums and presents selected digital technology implementation challenges and benefits in art museums in the Gauteng Province. An art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of work of art, usually visual art. Art museums collect objects of art and other historic artefacts that are documented and exhibited for different purposes, such as aesthetic value, social, historic cultural and educational, significance and research values that are traceable to a specific society or group of individuals. In South Africa, particularly in the Gauteng Province, art museums are failing to keep pace with international trends about the use of digital technology. It is, therefore, important for art museums as information dissemination centres to incorporate digital technology in their daily museum business as it may offer the opportunity for these museums to become more effective and competitive in the global information society. A literature review is done to understand the trends of different digital technologies in other first world international cities. The examined literature revealed that the Internet and other technological applications of the new millennium prompted a re-evaluation of cutting edge museum research, education roles, and documentation capabilities. Consequently, digital technology became an integral component of the digital policies of many art museums, allowing them to satisfy the demand for online information sharing abilities. A qualitative research approach together with a constructivism educational theory is used to fully understand South Africa’s position regarding the use of digital technology. In South Africa, digital technology usage in art museums is predominantly limited to email exchange, electronic invitations to exhibitions, data capturing of collections and viewing of basic websites. In other words, digital technologies are not optimally used in the South African art museum environment. The study explores the benefits of digital technology interfaces at art museums against fixed traditional art museum information dissemination practices. The objectives of the study are to create an awareness of best practice in the implementation of digital technology interfaces at art museums in Gauteng. The findings in this study indicate that digital technologies have proved to be useful in several spheres of public life resulting in the popular utilization of e-learning, e-mail, e-health, e-government and e-commerce. It is, therefore, proposed that art museums in South Africa embrace digital technologies to enhance the transformation of these museums. In essence, the implementation of digital technologies such as ‘virtual tours’ and other popular social media platforms and applications may raise the profile of art museums and market their contents to wider audiences, and may also help to popularise their heritage collections for leisure and scholarly purposes. / Mini Dissertation (MCHS)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Department of Arts & Culture / University of Pretoria / Visual Arts / MHCS / Unrestricted

This doctoral study explores the museum as site and resource for language learning by adult migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) provision has emerged over the past decade in museums across the UK and elsewhere within an increasing emphasis on informal adult learning programs. While there has been extensive research on second language acquisition, museum learning and social inclusion separately, there have been few studies that have investigated language learning in the context of museums, and even fewer studies that have sought to understand the benefits of language learning in museums for this target group of learners and how it might relate to the concept of inclusion. The study is centred around an ethnography that addresses these gaps in the literature and which examined three primary questions: (a) what are the target learners’ experiences of social inclusion and exclusion post-migration, and its interface with their English language abilities? (b) what are learners’ perceptions of the impact of participating in ESOL in museums in terms of exclusion and inclusion?, and (c) what occurs in interaction during ESOL in museums? In collaboration with City of Edinburgh Council Museums and Galleries Service, a cohort of 14 adult ESOL learners were studied over a 5-month ESOL course held in the City’s Museums and Galleries. In-depth time-series interviews were conducted with participants over the 5-month period. Narrative analysis (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Riessman, 1993) of interviews examined narrative trajectories within case and across cases, mapping experiences post migration, in and beyond museums. In order to investigate the affordances of dialogue in museums, conversational interaction was observed and recorded during the 11 weekly museum visits. Conversation analysis (Leinhardt & Knutson, 2004; Markee, 2000) examined what occurred in talk, focusing on interaction between interlocutors, its function and content. Drawing on a social theory that conceptualizes language as symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1977, 1989, 1991) and identities as constructed and reflexive (Block, 2007b; Giddens, 1991; Norton, 2000), analysis indicates that the experience of migration provoked deficit conceptions of self as participants negotiated their new social milieu through English language. Access to opportunities to engage in English are mediated both by institutional forces, e.g. social space afforded in institutional contexts, and perceptions of self. Analysis of dialogue in museums shows participants positioning themselves and being positioned as ‘knowers’, where primacy was given to collaborative meaning making about museum displays, objects and artefacts in conversational interaction. Analyses of interviews indicate shifts in identity trajectories from deficit to competent views of self through participation in ESOL in museums. These findings suggest a cumulative effect of micro-interactions on identities constructed in dialogue and point to the critical role which learning in museums and other informal environments can have in terms of providing social space within which to engage in positive dialogue that both challenges isolation and exclusion and helps foster increasing confidence and competence in the target language alongside feelings of inclusion for the majority of participants in the research.

In this dissertation I analyze the social history of an anthropological collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Combining archival and historical research with interviews, I trace the Army Medical Museum (AMM) collection from its origin in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The Smithsonian's AMM collection is the product of mid- to late-nineteenth century government science. Assembled in the midst of westward expansion and colonization, this collection is the result of numerous government-sanctioned collecting efforts. Accordingly, the objects and human remains that comprise this collection were taken from scores of Native American tribes from all parts of the United States. Amassed during some of the darkest moments in the history of the United States - marked by warfare, death and the displacement of countless Native Americans - the AMM collection represents the Smithsonian's earliest collecting efforts. The social history of this collection spans from the earliest days of the SI to the present, marked by concerns regarding cultural property rights. And what the present moment demonstrates is the continued relevance of this colonial past, especially in the context of repatriation. I analyze critical contemporary issues of repatriation in terms of the historical legacy of collecting in the U.S. and demonstrate the role that collections play in negotiating identities. For that purpose, I begin with the supposition that objects shape as well as materialize identity, and that disciplines define themselves by virtue of what they collect. I examine recent shifts in what is deemed ethically appropriate for collection and how this affects the various ways museum anthropologists define the discipline. Ultimately, this dissertation advances a critical historical analysis of the AMM collection, providing a more dynamic understanding of the role that repatriation plays in redefining the roles of anthropologists within museums.

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This thesis is a study of the changing model of the local history museum in Ontario, Canada and the consequential changing interpretations of the past in these institutions. <br /><br /> Beginning in 1879, local history museums in Ontario developed largely from the energies of local historical societies bent on collecting the past. While science museums used taxonomy and classification to mirror the natural state of the world, history museums had no equivalent framework for organizing collections as real-world referents. Often organized without apparent design, by the early 20th century a deductive method was used to categorize and display history collections into functional groups based on manufacture and use. <br /><br /> By the mid-twentieth century an inductive approach for interpreting collections in exhibits was promoted to make these objects more meaningful and interesting to museum visitors, and to justify their collection. This approach relied on the recontextualization of the object through two methods: text-based, narrative exhibits; and verisimilitude, the recreation of the historical environment in which the artifact would have been originally used. These exhibit practices became part of the syllabus of history museum work as it professionalized during the mid-twentieth century, almost a full century after the science museum. In Ontario, recontextualizing artifacts eventually dominated the process of recreating the past at museums. Objects were consigned to placement within textual storylines in order to impart accurate meaning. At its most elaborate, artifacts were recontextualized into houses, and buildings into villages, wherein the public could fully immerse themselves in a tableau of the past. Throughout this process, the dynamic of recontextualization to enhance visitor experience subtlety shifted the historical artifact from its previous position in the museum as an autonomous relic of the past, to one subordinate to context. <br /><br /> Although presented as absolute, the narratives and reconstructions formed by these collecting and exhibiting practices were contingent on a multitude of shifting factors, such as accepted museum practice, physical, economic and human resources available to the museum operation, and prevailing beliefs about the past and community identity. This thesis exposes the wider field of museum practice in Ontario community history museums over a century while the case study of Doon Pioneer Village shows in detail the conditional qualities of historical reconstruction in museum exhibits and historical restoration.

This thesis explores important aspects of the debates and practices that since the First World War have both extended the meaning of museums and museology, and renovated what was seen by many as a stagnated 19th century model of museum policy and communication. For the purpose of illustrating the manifold nature of these debates this thesis examines the life and work of French museologist and innovator of modern French ethnographical practice, Georges Henri Rivière (1897 – 1985). It draws on the conceptual distinction made in some international museum literature between museology and museums. This distinction stems from the different assumptions introduced by two long term projects of cultural development: the 18th century projects of enlightenment and the 20th century promotion of an anthropological conception of culture. The former is closely related to the European system of fine art understood as a system of promotion and popularization of the arts. The latter is part of the efforts of the human and social sciences to insert museums in the society they serve and/or to give a democratic representation to the variety of cultures existing in a society at large. The consequence was the development, in the course of the 20th Century, of two often opposing managerial policies and cultures, one inwards looking, aiming at modernization and professionalization of internal museum functions, the other focusing on closing the relationship of museology and its natural and social environment. The first was essentially administrative and scholar-based, and has thrived with the adoption of a culture of mass consumption and multiplied its functions according to an ever-dominant division of labour. The second is proactive and externally driven, a policy and managerial culture aiming at the management of processes and resources, and at the identifications and development of the living cultures existing in a society. In this line of thought this research explores the museology of Rivet-Rivière’s Musée-Laboratoire as part of a national project of cultural development aiming at changing the relationship of French citizens to their material culture and heritage. As the museological embodiment of the myth of primitivism, Rivet-Rivière’s ‘structural museology’ was shaped by the convergence of avant-garde movements in contemporary arts with the object-based ethnology of Marcel Mauss. It eventually led not only to Rivière’s most famous concept, the Ecomusée, but also to a ‘museology without walls’ and to the diversification and multiplication of local museological practices by which every activity existing in a territory could be given museographical expression. As cultural activist, Rivière was at the crossroads of major events and personalities of his time, and his museological talent was placed at the service of their concerns and expectations, particularly through his long involvement with the UNESCO-linked International Council of Museums (ICOM). Furthermore, his privileged positions in the culture of its time made him a significant witness, not just of the debate about museums, but of 20th century French cultural life.

The idea of curiosity has evolved over time and is a major building-block in the foundation and expansion of museums and their precursors, cabinets of curiosity. These proto-museums began in Italy and spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cabinets of curiosity and museums transformed as visitors traveled to burgeoning collections across the Continent and England. Individuals visited curiosities for a variety of reasons. Some treated outings to collections as social events in which they could see others in their social circles and perhaps rise in social status if seen by the correct people. Others were merely curious and hoped to see rare, astonishing, monstrous, and beautiful objects. Scholars of the era often desired to discover new items and ideas, and discuss scientific and philosophical matters. The British Isles are removed from the main body of Europe, but still play a major role in the history of collecting. A number of private collectors and the eventual foundation of the British Museum contributed seminally to the ever-increasing realm of curiosities and historic, cultural, and scientific artifacts. The collectors and collections of Oxford and London and its surrounding areas, drew a diverse population of visitors to their doors. Individuals, both foreign and local, female and male, visitors and collectors in Early Modern England chose to actively participate in the formation of a collecting culture by gathering, visiting, discussing, writing about, and publishing on collections.

The aim of this investigation is to analyze the effects of incorporating scent-based elements in ethnographic exhibits. Specifically, it attempts to identify changes in patron response to a visual display, with and without a scent element. Groups of patrons were observed throughout their engagement with the exhibit, and interviewed post-engagement to generate data on information retention, opinion on content and empathetic response in relation to the exhibit. Findings suggest that the inclusion of scent did increase memorization of the limited facts reinforced through the scent element. However, there was no detectable difference between the groups on measures of overall comprehension of the subject matter, nor their empathetic responses toward the exhibited culture. The results of the study are discussed as a measure of the observer—observed dichotomy, and the argument is made that multisensory representation in the museum can aid in the facilitation of cross-cultural education. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The decades following the fall of the Soviet Union have seen drastic changes in society and culture within Europe. The desire to create a unified, pan-European historical narrative has been challenged by the expansion of the European Union. Previous Western European discourse of history has been confronted by the alternative perspectives of many former Soviet countries, such as Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states. One of the greatest challenges to a new, inclusive pan-European narrative has been the perceived exclusion of Holocaust recognition in these former Soviet-bloc countries – a topic made more volatile considering the vast majority of the violence of the Holocaust took place in Central and Eastern Europe. Recent governmental decisions regarding the recognition of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe have been extremely disconcerting to Holocaust scholars and survivors, as well as the broad Western European community. But Eastern Europe insists that they are not neglecting Holocaust narratives in their respective countries; instead, they claim the lack of Western recognition of their suffering under Soviet rule has forced them to compensate by focusing their attention on an exploration of Soviet oppression. Eastern European scholars maintain that the best way forward is to embrace a pluralist narrative that recognizes both the victims of the Holocaust and the Soviet project. This thesis analyses the adoption of memory pluralism in two places of cultural memory of one Eastern European city – Riga, Latvia.