This thesis details a study that I conducted in order to better understand family groups who visit the Blanton Museum of Art. This data is presented using a case study methodology. I interviewed and observed eight families in an attempt to better understand what brought them to the Blanton, and what they wanted to accomplish during their time at the museum. The data collected revealed six themes. Four of these themes were goals the families brought with them to the Blanton Museum of Art. One of the themes pertained to individual motivations for coming to the museum. The final theme related to the participating families use of museum resources other than the art on display. The data was meaningful in that it demonstrated that these families did have specific goals for their time at the Blanton, and the families demonstrated behaviors which served as a means to accomplishing these goals. A goal of this research was to provide me, as an educator, with a more full and rich understanding of family groups that visit museums. / text

By engaging in collaborative arts-based and arts-informed narrative inquiry with my six-year-old daughter, we explored self-guided materials in art museums in the North Texas area. Though the field of art museum education is becoming increasingly participatory, most academic research related to self-guided materials has fallen short of exploring visitors' experiences with these materials. Furthermore, the perspectives of children have been long overlooked in academic and, at times, institutional research about family experiences in museums. Over the course of nine months, my daughter and I visited art museums and engaged with their self-guided materials, ranging from audio tours to interactive galleries. During this time we created collaborative works of art based on our experiences, which acted as both data collection and analysis in preparation for writing narratives. Our narrative explorations allowed us each to better understand our collective experiences. Though this research specifically targets self-guided materials in art museums, any educator interested in intergenerational or collaborative family learning may find both our methodologies and our conclusions to be helpful in better understanding how narratives are essential to this type of learning.

The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of the types and purposes of art museum educational programs, services and collaborative projects that have been developed by art museum educators for university audiences. Additionally, this study examines the challenges in creating and sustaining these educational experiences. This study presents results from an exploratory qualitative web survey administered to art museum educators from public, private, and university art museums. This study provides insight into the relationships between the art museum educators and the university audiences. Additionally, this study underscores the importance of understanding theoretical differences from which art museum educators and university audiences view the educational role of the art museum and its collections.

This qualitative study defined the hermeneutic approach as a strategy for developing museum education programs, and examined its implementation in two museum settings. A hermeneutic research methodology was used to design, interpret, and explain the hermeneutic approach to museum education program development and its implementation by two museum educator research participants, a codeveloper and an implementer. Four sequential stages comprised the study that addressed the following questions: What is the hermeneutic approach to museum education program development? How does the hermeneutic approach to museum education program development work? What does the hermeneutic approach to museum education program development offer to museum educators? In Stage One, elements of hermeneutics, curriculum theory, pedagogy, and museology were drawn from a review of the literature to define the hermeneutic approach. The hermeneutic approach was aligned to an interpretive curriculum theory paradigm. After establishing its theoretical foundation, the hermeneutic approach was diagrammed as a template for guiding the development of museum education programs that included the following components: curriculum topic, museum's mandate, storyline, themes, artifacts, and program: pre-understanding, meaning in-context, connectedness, process, experience, and communication. Stage Two continued with the introduction of the co-developer, a seasoned museum educator who assisted in refining the hermeneutic approach template by piloting its implementation in the development of a museum education program. Insights gained from this stage were used to modify the hermeneutic approach for Stages Three and Four of the study. The hermeneutic principles of pre-understanding, meaning-in-context, connectedness, process, experience, and communication were used as a format for conducting a workshop to teach the hermeneutic approach to seasoned and novice museum educators in Stage Three. According to the study's design, the Stage Four museum educator implementer autonomously developed a museum education program using the hermeneutic approach. A back and forth interplay between the experiences of the co-developer in Stage One and the implementer in Stage Four was mediated by the researcher to examine the template and its components. Results of the study indicate that the hermeneutic approach forces museum educators to move away from an objectives-based program planning strategy, thus redefining the role of artifact interpretation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the use of contemporary storytelling practice in a museum setting can successfully engage visitor voices with objects. Specifically, this research used an exploratory case study to better understand Object Stories at the Portland Art Museum. The unique attributes inherent in Object Stories make it an exemplary program to research and through which to gain understandings regarding effective contemporary storytelling techniques within a museum. The use of digital archives, the creation of a safe space, and enabling visitors to share personal stories about museum objects are some of the qualities that set Object Stories apart from other contemporary storytelling programs in the United States. Four themes emerged through interviews, observations, and the study of documents forming a rich and detailed understanding of Object Stories. These themes are found within and help elucidate the successful characteristics of Object Stories. Based on the findings of this study, museum educators can look to this interactive gallery space at the Portland Art Museum to help them develop or enhance storytelling programs, and ultimately to improve the development of empathetic connections between visitors and museum objects. / text

Museums today frequently consider education as one of their priorities. As such, museum administrators will provide resources, field trips, or professional development opportunities to support teachers and schools. In an era of high-stakes testing, museums, like schools, are also influenced by standards that may dictate what information is taught and when. Therefore, to remain relevant and useful to school systems, museums have altered their educational practices to align with standards. Some museums choose to provide professional development workshops for educators that focus on a topic included within those standards. The Holocaust, a topic that is mandated by over 30 states, is an example of one such topic—albeit one that might also be difficult or controversial to teach. A regional Holocaust Museum that has chosen to provide a weeklong professional development opportunity for educators on teaching the Holocaust serves as an example of a museum providing support to local school divisions. However, the literature indicates that museums and teachers, while both working toward the goal of educating students, often have little communication with each other. While multiple studies have examined how teacher participants react to professional development workshops, far less attention has been paid to those that plan such opportunities. The multi-tiered issue of interest, then, is that little is known about how museum educators plan a Holocaust-related professional development opportunity, what role they play in workshop implementation, and what they consider to be crucial when preparing teachers to cover the topic This qualitative inquiry focused on understanding how museum educators planned and presented a weeklong Holocaust education workshop for teachers. The research question was developed to determine how museum staff members understand the Holocaust and Holocaust education, and how that understanding influenced their role when implementing the workshop. Data collection methods included observation and semi-structured interviews. Analysis methods utilized in this study included first and second cycle coding methods, as well as episode profiles for each participant. The key finding from this investigation suggests that museum educators' understanding of the Holocaust and Holocaust education greatly shaped their planning processes, as well as the role they fulfilled in workshop implementation. Though museum staff members agreed that the Holocaust is difficult knowledge, they each approached the topic and how it should be taught in a different manner. The implications of this study, its limitations, and suggestions for future research are detailed herein. / Ph. D.

Self-guided tours for museums require authors to define a learning objective, research content, design graphics, and implement inclusive interpretive methods. However, museum education literature does not provide clear, comprehensive direction for these complex projects. By recounting the development of a self-guided tour of Judiciary Square for the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, this thesis assesses the value and limitations of theoretical literature in practice. It introduces additional research methods and approaches to address project components that museum education literature overlooks.

This research study provides answers to questions pertaining to current practices in the art museum field regarding socially responsive programming and the motivations for developing and implementing such programs. Socially responsive programming is programming that encourages dialogue and debate about social, economic and political issues in order to promote honesty, fairness, concern for the rights and welfare of others, empathy, and compassion (Desai & Chalmers, 2007). The study engaged a mixed methods approach by utilizing a survey and three case studies. The purpose of the survey was to gauge the position of the field in relation to their values and support of socially responsive programs. Janes’ and Conaty’s (2005) four characteristics of socially responsive museums: seeing social issues and acting to create social change (idealism); building and sustaining strong relationships with the community (intimacy); investing time for reflection and resources to fully understand social issues (depth); and judging the museum’s worth, not based on building size, prestige of collections, or attendance numbers, but on the quality programs a museum provides to the community (interconnectedness) guided the construction of the survey and served as an analytical tool for the case studies. The survey sample resulted from distributing the survey through major museum-themed listservs. The survey also aided in identifying three exemplars of socially responsive museum. These institutions, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, comprised a purposeful sample in order to further investigate museum staff members’ motivations for creating and instituting socially responsive art museum practices. / text

The research presented in this PhD dissertation provides a socio-educational perspective on the participatory representation of identity in Greek Laographic Museums. Museums are seen as an extension of formal educational spaces through their educational activities and school partnerships or outreach programmes (Hooper-Greenhill, 2007). However, they are also mainly engaging in the process of interpreting the cultures and communities represented in their collection, thus, assigning them an identity, which they then present to the public (McLean, 2005, 2008). The public, in turn, interprets it through the lens of their own identities. A result of this process is the creation and sharing of new knowledge about identity through exhibition design (Jones, Sandweiss, Mouliou, & Orloff, 2012; McLean, 2006; Newman & McLean, 2006; O’Neill, 2006). This study adopts the stance that exhibition design is the primary way museums are fulfilling their educational role. It puts forward the idea that the involvement of community members in the founding of a museum about their local identity can result in a rich, polyphonous narrative and positively affect the bond and sense of ownership the community develops in relation to the museum and their locale. This is in line with literature predicting that in the context of multicultural societies and increased mobility, bringing people together through shared cultural elements of the location they have in common, can aid social cohesion and inclusion (Graham & Howard, 2008; Hague & Jenkins, 2005; Howard, 2003). As a theoretical starting point, this research was guided by the views of Hall (1997a,1992) on changing identities and the links between identity, culture, interpretation and narrative for being potentially more reflective of current museological practice that is starting to operate within a participatory paradigm. Designed as a case study around the founding of a new museum on a small Greek island, Astypalaia, it used participatory methods in a variety of ways to engage local residents in the process of collaboratively designing the exhibition narrative of this new space that would share the story of life on the island. To frame the main case study, this research also mapped the practices of laographic museums across Greece, in order to point out what a typical museum of that type looks like in this context and assess in what ways Astypalaia is in line or deviates from this. The results of this process were compared to the findings of the case study and linked to literature on participation, education, and identity construction in museums and communities. The following discussion argues that, while collaborative projects require structure, effort and skills in their facilitation, they have the potential to make a museum narrative more representative and inclusive and benefit their participants in multiple ways. By having access to the project from its conception until its final stages, this work aims to provide a holistic view of the challenges and possibilities of implementing a participatory approach in the founding of a new museum and to discuss the knowledge such a process generates.

This thesis examines Charles Willson Peale’s utilization of visual metaphors within his founding institution, The Philadelphia Museum. After establishing himself as a portrait painter, it became second nature for Peale to employ an aesthetic approach when developing museum exhibits and programs. Throughout his practices he continuously used imagery and objects to represent broader fields of research, along with his views as a naturalist and American patriot. By using these allegorical forms to arouse the public’s curiosity, he was able to attract more visitors to his museum and subsequently draw them into the learning process. / text