One of the characteristics of adult education is the degree to which it is dispersed throughout society. Much adult education is practiced in organizations and institutions that have purposes other than adult education. Schroeder (1970, p. 37) has suggested a category of adult education agencies (Type III agencies) established to serve both the educational and non-educational needs of the community, agencies in which "adult education is an allied function employed to fill only some of the needs which agencies recognize as their responsibility." The purpose of this study was to examine adult education in Schroeder's Type III agencies using libraries and museums as examples. The study addressed the definition and description of adult education, the importance of adult education relative to other functions of the organization, and the purposes for which the organizations used adult education. A comparative analysis of the adult education function of three libraries and three museums was conducted. Print materials (annual reports and publicity brochures) and interviews with the person responsible for programming were used as data sources. Analysis of the findings was done in three stages: single case analysis (within case analysis), analysis of libraries and museums (within category analysis), and comparison of libraries and museums (across category analysis). Many definitions of adult education were found. Most described the purposes of adult education rather than the process of teaching and learning. It was also found that the importance of adult education varied among the organizations studied. Adult education was less important than other organizational functions in four of the six organizations studied. It was as important as other functions in one organization and was not ranked in one organization. Five uses for adult education were found: stimulation (encouraging better use of the library or museum), enrichment (adding extra information), extension (enlarging community contacts), service (filling a social need), and advocacy (promoting social change). Generally, libraries used programming for extension and museums used it for enrichment. This study has contributed to understanding adult education in Type III organizations by describing some ways non-professional adult educators view adult education. It has also suggested some contextual factors that influence the adult education function in those organizations and has suggested a variety of purposes for which adult education could be used. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

Picturebooks are an important part of the classroom environment in early childhood education. They open doors to new experiences, nurture students' cultural identities, and invite students to explore connections across cultures. In the United States today, many of the picturebooks that are available to teachers and students in preschool classrooms come from the state curriculum that the school district has implemented. Shifting demographic trends have led many educators to recognize a need for more diversity of literature in classrooms. This study was conducted in response to this growing concern that books should better reflect the cultures and identities of the children who read them, with a particular emphasis on young female children of color. The research question guiding this study is: How do picturebook texts and illustrations in an early childhood curriculum represent the identities of female characters of color as viewed through a critical feminist theoretical lens? To investigate this question, I critically analyzed children's picturebooks from a current early childhood curriculum adopted by the state of Texas, focusing on representations of gender and race. The selected books were analyzed using critical content and critical visual analyses to consider how the text and illustrations together represent female characters of color. Although earlier studies of picturebooks have pointed out a deficit of authentic portrayals of female characters of color, this study found that books in the sample did show some attention to authentic cultural themes including motherhood, action and agency, and subjugated knowledge and culture. However, implications for practice and research included the need for more balanced representation of diverse cultures within the curriculum to better reflect preschool demographics, as well as the need for more classroom instruction on books that give voice and agency to young female children of color as they develop their personal and cultural identities.

In the years since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement, American art museums have increased attempts to address the racial inequities that persist in the field. These inequities impact all aspects of museum work, not least of which education. Because museum educators are often seen as the conduit between museum collections and audiences, the work of implementing anti-racist programming often falls to them. However, the museum education field is majority White, and while there is a rich body of literature treating the adverse impacts of Whiteness on classroom teaching practices, very little exists on how Whiteness might manifest in gallery teaching practices specifically for White museum educators. Utilizing participatory action research, practitioner inquiry, and a White affinity group model, this qualitative study explores aspects of Whiteness that impact the gallery teaching practices of four White museum educators. Our research questions seek to understand better how Whiteness manifests in our teaching specifically in the context of single visit field trips, how those impacts might shift depending on the racial demographics of the groups we are teaching, what questions come for us as a White practitioner-researcher group dedicated to undermining Whiteness in our teaching, and how, if at all, does participation in such a study impact how we think about and implement anti-racist teaching in our practice. As per the research traditions guiding this study, I treated myself as a participant alongside three other White museum educators, and together as a practitioner inquiry group we co-generated our research questions and agreed to our research methods. These included the formation of a digital space in which we could communicate with each other, observations of our teaching, reflective writing responding to the observations, and conversations in the digital space based on these writings. This period of data generation was followed by interviews between myself and each participant as well as a focus group with all of us. Findings surfaced various avoidance techniques we each employed in our teaching to avoid race talk or push our anti-racist teaching more deeply. Our avoidance pointed to perceived tensions we felt between our trainings and the demands of anti-racist teaching, as well as the limitations of the single visit field trip model. Findings also surfaced anxiety when discussing Blackness in particular, as well as problematic assumptions about both White students and students of color we work with. Analysis of these findings provide insights into the ways art museum pedagogies in addition to critical emotional pedagogies might be deployed towards anti-racist teaching, as well as the emotional qualities of naming and dismantling Whiteness as White practitioners. While the findings are limited to the four museum educator participants and the specific contexts in which we work, this study points to ways we might begin to develop deeper understandings of how Whiteness might impact gallery teaching practices. More importantly, in the tradition of practitioner inquiry, this study raises important questions around how visitors of color experience Whiteness in museum education programs, how professional development might be reimagined for museum educators, as well as ways to rethink the traditional single visit field trip model to better accommodate anti-racist learning goals.

In 2 experiments, I investigated the role of conditioned seeing on incidental bidirectional naming (Inc-BiN) for unfamiliar stimuli and reading achievement. In Experiment 1, I investigated the correlation, associations, and differences between conditioned seeing, Inc-BiN, and measures of reading achievement for 49 participants in kindergarten through second grade. Unfamiliar visual stimuli were presented with spoken words during a naming experience and participants’ stimulus control for conditioned seeing was measured by drawing responses in the absence of the target stimuli. Reading achievement measures included Winter and Spring diagnostic scores from the iReady® K-12 Adaptive Reading diagnostic (Curriculum Associates, LLC, 2017). Pearson’s correlation analyses showed that participants’ stimulus control for conditioned seeing was significantly correlated with all measures of reading achievement and the stimulus control for untaught listener responses (Inc-UniN), 𝘳 (47) = .440, 𝑝 = .002, and untaught speaker responses (Inc-BiN), 𝘳 (47) = .384, 𝑝 = .007. A Spearman’s rank correlation test showed that participants’ performance percentile for the iReady® reading diagnostic was also significantly correlated with participants’ stimulus control for conditioned seeing. Lastly, results from the independent sample t-tests showed that there were significant differences in participants’ stimulus control for Inc-UniN and Inc-BiN and reading achievement as a function of low and high stimulus control for conditioned seeing. Experiment 1 established the need to further investigate conditioned seeing and its effects on reading comprehension and Inc-BiN for students in kindergarten through second grade, thus in Experiment 2, I investigated the effects of a multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) across delayed selection and production responses intervention on the establishment of conditioned seeing for 6 kindergarten students. Furthermore, I investigated the effects of the establishment conditioned seeing on reading comprehension, conditioned reinforcement for books without pictures, and Inc-BiN. Results show that the MEI across delayed selection and production responses was effective in establishing conditioned seeing for all participants. Results further show that the establishment of conditioned seeing resulted in increases in measures for reading comprehension and the reinforcement value for books without pictures. Though the establishment of conditioned seeing did not establish Inc-BiN for participants, Experiment 2 demonstrates the need to further investigate the relation between conditioned seeing and Inc-BiN in young readers.

This thesis investigates the factors that influence whether visitors to art exhibitions experience accessible introductory art labels or not. From the need of making art exhibitions and their communication available to more people of society the aim with this study is to increase awareness about the factors that influence accessibility and generate ideas about useful theory concerning accessible labels. By connecting theory concerning the purpose of art exhibitions, the social context of art exhibitions, orientation and disorientation and different views related to exhibition labels the author, by influence from the swedish Special pedagogy educational authority (Specialpedagogiska skolmyndigheten) accessibility model ”tillgänglighetsmodellen”, creates a accessibility model concerning the context of introductory art labels. The study gathered material from visitor interviews and observations from two different art exhibition institutions in Stockholm: Bonniers Konsthall and Spritmuseum, one art gallery and one cultural museum with an art exhibition feature. The analysis from the field work then formed the content of the accessibility model concerning the context of introductory art labels. As a background to the ideas behind the labels interviews where also performed with personnel in command of the communication concerning the labels. The results show that the visitors experience of accessible introductory art labels can be related to physical, social and pedagogical factors. Where the physical factors included reading situation, placing, lighting and soundscape. The social factors included other visitors, the willingness to ”do things right” and disorientation, confusion and uncertainty. The pedagogical factors included legibility, readability and well worth reading. The study also shows that the visitors pre-knowledge of art and habit of visiting art exhibitions could influence the visitors experience of accessibility. Where visitors without pre-knowledge about art history in the art gallery Bonniers Konsthall all found the texts non-accessible depending on a mix of physical, social and pedagogical factors. At the cultural museum Spritmuseum however visitors without pre-knowledge of art could find the text accessible. There a positive experience of the reading situation, including lightning and few other visitors, made visitors feel that the text where more accessible even when they experienced some difficulty with the accessibility related to pedagogical factors like text length. The study shows that the different factors of accessibility related to introductory art labels interacted and influenced the overall experience of text accessibility. This is a two years master's thesis in Museum and cultural heritage studies.

The purpose of the investigation was to collect information from ninety representative art museums in Europe and North America, with visits made to forty-five and a validated questionnaire sent to the others; to study their research-oriented publications as to contents; and to organize the data so that they would be of value to graduate art students. Although this information will be of value to scholars, undergraduate students, and museum personnel, the study was restricted to the graduate art student because some museum libraries restrict their facilities to this educational level.

No description available.

Museums and schools evolved as the definition of the concept of education to describe a lifelong process of developing knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that take place not only in the classroom, but also in a variety of formal and informal contexts and settings. In order to fulfil and extend the potential of the partnership, museum educators and school teachers should be assisted to develop a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the museum-school collaboration. They should learn the difference between museums and classrooms. When the Botswana National Museum was established in 1968, the Botswana government aspired to avail information relating to Botswana customs, indigenous knowledge system and values to Botswana‘s future citizens, with the hope that the information and artefacts collected at the time would retell the story of Botswana to learners and the public alike. The Botswana National Museum, through its educational programmes, has the capability to help educate learners; make teaching and learning an exciting undertaking; and provide the opportunities for hands-on activities and interaction with real objects. In order to address the research question posed for this study, the researcher conducted open-ended interviews with a sample comprising 40 participants: 10 teachers, 10 learners, 10 museum employees and 10 curriculum developers. The data collected from the interviews were decoded and presented in narrative form. The responses were presented using three identified categories: the curriculum development process in Botswana; the typical learner activities in the classroom and in the Botswana National Museum; and collaboration between the Botswana National Museum and schools. The data analysis revealed that the curriculum development process in Botswana was exclusively done by curriculum developers. Learners, teachers and museum employees were not involved. The Botswana National Museum‘s education programmes are not familiar to all role-players. All role-players were positive regarding a possible collaboration with the Botswana National Museum. Generic and specific recommendations were put forward to this end. / Educational Studies / D. Ed. (Didactics)

Although many science educators and researchers believe that emotion is an important part of the learning process, few researchers have dealt with the topic in a systematic fashion. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of emotion in the learning process, particularly in the learning of science content. My study utilized a dimensional perspective which defined emotion in terms of arousal and valence, and drew on research from the fields of psychology and neuroscience to examine how emotion affects different aspects of cognition such as attention and memory. On the basis of these findings, I developed and tested a path model to investigate the predicted relationships among emotional arousal, valence, attention, intrinsic motivation and short- and long-term learning outcomes. I conducted the study in two phases. The first phase took place in a psychology laboratory in which participants watched either an exciting or neutral nature video, read a factual article related to the video and were tested on their learning. The second phase took place at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in which participants watched a narrated otter or sea lion presentation and took a short posttest after the show. In both phases, participants' emotional arousal, valence, attention, and motivation levels were also measured for inclusion in the model. The results indicated that emotional arousal was an important predictor of short-term learning in both experiments although its effect was fully mediated by attention at the aquarium. In addition, negative valence (displeasure) and intrinsic motivation were strong predictors of short-term learning in the laboratory experiment. At the aquarium, the narrator of the animal presentation strongly affected both attention and short-term learning—visitors who listened to a non-scripted rather than a scripted narration paid more attention and had significantly better short-term learning outcomes. In the aquarium study, emotional arousal correlated strongly with several measures of long-term learning. In particular, those who felt more arousal during the animal presentation were able to describe their experience at greater length and with more detail and complexity two to three months after their visit. My findings suggest that emotional arousal is an important component of science learning both directly and through its relationship with attention. Therefore, science educators in both informal and formal learning institutions may be able to increase both attention and learning outcomes by designing emotionally arousing learning experiences around the science content they wish to teach. In addition, the importance of narrator quality in the aquarium study suggests that narrators and teachers should be trained to deliver information in such a way that supports short- and long-term science learning. / Graduation date: 2012

University of Macau / Faculty of Education