Museum games can be a powerful meaning-making experience for players, but only if we understand that what makes games fun is also what makes them meaningful. Renowned game designer Sid Meier ("Civilization", "Railroad Tycoon", "Pirates") famously defined a good game as "a series of interesting choices." What…

Museums have an important role to both educate the public and also to preserve museum objects for the future. These two responsibilities often conflict with one another. Museums continuously struggle in deciding what objects in their collection must be placed in permanent storage as opposed to being on display and being used to educate the public.…

Three years after the Detroit Institute of Arts opened with all new, "visitor-centered" galleries, the museum's executive director of learning and interpretation shares the processes, successes, and lessons learned at an institution that embraced an array of hands-on learning models. The models are discussed as components of a…

As Howard Gardner persuasively argued, movement, or kinesthetics, can be a powerful educational tool and one to which some learners are particularly attuned. Museums, however, are typically places that discourage movement (don't run, don't jump, watch out for the artifacts). This makes incorporating kinesthetic learning challenging. This article…

Recent education policy designed to promote arts education tends to focus on how such curriculum supports "skills for innovation" required for success in the global economy. Emphasis on the transfer of arts-based learning to professional innovation and achievement, a dynamic that is difficult to determine, can undermine the value of…

In this case study, I give a brief account of my doctoral research, with a focus on fieldwork that I carried out during 2014-2015. My research explores how gender, social class, and ethnicity shape girls' engagement with science and how their engagement with science may shift across school, science museum, and family settings. The participants of…

Much of the foundational scholarship in writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines privileges pedagogies that introduce students to disciplinary writing. Recent scholarship, however, suggests that some faculty members do not want to teach disciplinary writing to their students, particularly in general education courses that cater…

This naturalistic, qualitative study examines the nature of child- and adult-led interactions in a children's museum. Using dialogic learning as a theoretical framework, the study examines how children and adults engage in interactions while learning at a museum. Findings suggest that children and adults are almost equally likely to lead…

Learning Museum 2011-13 is a nationwide multidisciplinary collaboration project involving 26 Danish museums (art, cultural and natural history) along with 13 colleges of education. The project has provided a large group of pre-service teachers with unique opportunities to participate in training courses, academic internships and bachelor's thesis…

"International Conference on Social and Education Sciences" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Social and Education Sciences (IConSES) which took place on October 15-18, 2020 in Chicago, IL, USA. The aim of the conference is to offer opportunities to share your ideas, to discuss theoretical and practical…

The current heritage fascination signals the omnipresence of the Present. Recently it has spawned a distinct type of teaching and learning: "heritage education". In this article we argue that, despite its presentist connotations, heritage education offers interesting opportunities for understanding the foreignness of the past, a…

The calling of public scholarship is inherently multifaceted, and often inherently controversial; public scholars have to accommodate different spheres of society, different cultural values and goods, and even different political agendas in their work. Unlike academic workers, public scholars rarely have the opportunity to do work that is driven…

Objective: The authors designed an intervention to reduce beginning medical students' stigmatization of people with chronic mental illness (CMI). Methods: Pre-clinical medical students visited a state psychiatric facility's "Living Museum," a combination patient art studio/display space, as the intervention. During the visit, students interacted…

The national conversation on early learning and its importance as a foundation of lifelong learning has reached a tipping point, with increased attention at the local, state, and federal level. The context for this conversation includes a growing corpus of respected research on early childhood development that points to a critical learning "pivot…

This case study of "Listen, Look, & Do," a multi-visit preschool program at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum, provides a model for how other history museums can program for young learners in their neighborhoods. In striving to meet local community audience needs identified by annual evaluations, staff created a program that…