Museums' social resources, along with their status as places of informal learning, make them well-suited to serve people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As autistic young adults report high instances of social isolation and receive fewer services after high school, there is a clear need for more programing for this audience. In 2017, the San…

Using the case study of an unstaffed, interactive making space at the Portland Museum of Art, this article explores the potential for museums to facilitate visitor to visitor learning without the in-person assistance of a gallery educator. It offers concrete steps to design activities, environments, and supporting resources which prompt close…

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has used a mission-aligned learning framework for more than a decade. Designed to foster and support adult-child interaction in exhibitions and programs, the central tool of the family learning framework is the Assessment of Learning Families in Exhibits (ALFIE) Inventory. ALFIE is used as a tool to plan for…

By prompting imagined or actual bodily experience, we can guide interpretation of tools to emphasize the action that those tools perform. The technique requires little more than an extension from looking at an object, to imagining how the body engages with it, perhaps even trying out those specialist postures, to nourish an interpretation centered…

Launching an ambitious cycle of educational programming can be daunting, especially when the subject of it is unavailable. With some perseverance, flexibility, and a lot of collaboration, the obstacles can be surmounted and the art can shine through. Cathy Callaway examines the Artists' Book Conference entitled "Cultural Bricolage,"…

Over the last decade, museums have reevaluated the ways in which they serve the public, particularly K-12 audiences. As funding concerns, travel distance, and school requirements prevent many students from visiting museums in person, America's 8.9 million rural students are disproportionately impacted, and educators are left to fill the gap with…

This case study explores differences between two online course models by investigating the results of a student end-of-course evaluation survey and teacher communication logs in two online high school courses. The two course models were designed with different types and levels of interaction, one with high levels of student-content interaction,…

In this article, we position museums as 'pedagogic contact zones,' sites fraught with both problems and potential. Using five stories drawn from our work and engagement with public museums over the past five years in Canada, England and Scotland, we illustrate how contemporary practices of critical cultural pedagogy work to construct, deconstruct,…

Although museums for peace claim peace education to be a primary mission, their definitions of "peace" and their aims and practices for peace education vary widely. In this article, we draw from the field of critical museology and the knowledge construction perspective to understand the role of museums for peace in the service of peace…

Overlooking the Lake of Zurich, Switzerland, the team of "Sustainability Communication" at the Institute of Natural Resource Sciences, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, is exploring new possibilities of comprehensive and sustainable communication and teaching methods. Using narrative environments as working tools to promote…

"ArtInSight" is a three-pronged constructivist education model for museum teaching. Utilizing (1) conversational tours, (2) mindfulness-based insight activities, and (3) art-making exercises, viewers develop critical and visual thinking skills and apply them to both arts-based experiences and to everyday life. This approach broadens…

For marginalized girls in developing countries whose life outcomes are threatened by poverty and gender-based discrimination, life skills education can arm them with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to rewrite their futures. Oftentimes, their only access to education is through non-formal spaces provided by non-governmental organizations…

In 2016, the education department at the National Building Museum offered a series of Late Night programs in conjunction with the Summer Block Party installation, ICEBERGS. The museum wanted to evaluate the programs but had limited resources to do so. In the following article, we describe the use of critical appraisal, an economic method applied…

Teaching general adult audiences in art museums requires the teacher to consider different goals and priorities than those of school, teacher, or family programs. In this reflective essay, one gallery educator whose primary museum teaching experiences had been with the latter audiences discusses a transition to leading public tours. He describes…

Be they paid or volunteer docents, teaching staff members play an essential role in fulfilling a museum's mission. Yet the experiences that visitors have on docent tours--despite all of the time expended on docent training--are not often as powerful or meaningful as they could be. Knowing this, how can we support and empower docents as adult…