At the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, an annual art exhibition with no ties to science content provides an opportunity to explore how juxtaposing an art gallery experience within a science museum could impact audience engagement with science thereafter. Prior evidence suggests that art gallery-based workshops have value for science…

Just as engineering and computational thinking have recently gained increased attention in pre-college school-based education, many museums and science centers have also designed exhibits and experiences to promote computational thinking and engineering learning. Recent reports suggest that computational and engineering thinking can empower each…

Informal science learning environments, such as science museums, afford a variety of interactions, sense-making processes, participation modes, and roles. Accumulating research advances our understanding of the cognitive and affective dimensions of science learning in informal environments, including the development of scientific sense-making and…

Socializing and interaction are important aspects for families who visit museums. Mixed reality (MR) uses a set of technology that museums employ to encourage this behavior, but they face challenges in maintaining family cohesion with experiences across different exhibitions and kiosks. In this paper, we explore these challenges broadly to provide…

This paper explores the British art patronage scheme "Pictures for Schools," which sold affordable works of art to educational buyers at annual exhibitions between 1947 and 1969, focusing on the work of "Pictures for Schools" founder and organiser Nan Youngman (1906-1995) as an artist, educationalist and activist. It shows…

This qualitative and exploratory study aimed to understand the experience of adolescents during visits outside the school context in science museums and centres, and how the free-choice learning processes are constructed in this context. We analyzed the visits of four adolescents groups, from public schools, to Maloka (Bogotá, Colombia), and…

This chapter explores participatory visual practices in museums.

For female adolescent and young adults with autism, a narrative approach to art therapy can provide a forum to highlight their voices. In multi-week art therapy group that included creating their own collections of art to display in a gallery, clients described their identities related to understanding their diagnosis and intersectional identities.

Artist Jo Dacombe remembers a school residency when she was working as an Associate Artist at Nottingham Contemporary, a large contemporary arts centre. Through the residency, she worked with a group of primary children of mixed ages to explore themes from the exhibition Rights of Nature. She describes the experience for the children, the nature…

Awareness-making (AM) describes a process by which visitors bring with them past experiences and knowledge, all of which help them make sense of museum exhibits. Meaning-making (MM) is when museum visitors' memories transform their museum experience into new knowledge and meaning. This article explores how AM elicits MM in museum visitors. We…

Purpose: This paper focuses on the donation in 1888 of a Sèvres Vase to the Education Department of Victoria after the International Exhibition in Melbourne. Using the vase as its focus the paper reflects on what this donation may be able to tell us about the impact, primarily on education, of a series of International Exhibitions held both in…

The article is based on a participatory action research project with refugees, volunteers and concerned citizens in rural Germany facing the challenges of integration in diverse communities. Integration is an interactionist and open-ended process with the aim of fair chances of participation in society. The word 'integration' is still the…

This article offers insights from an on-going research project titled, "Experimenting Interpretation," which explores pedagogical approaches to guided visits that enable visitors to encounter and interpret multi-sensory contemporary art through attunement to embodied knowledge and affective responses. The case study discussed here was…

This paper focuses on "Pictures for Schools," an art patronage scheme established in postwar Britain by the artist and educationalist Nan Youngman (1906-1995) to sell affordable works of art to educational establishments. Highlighting the use of works of art as a pedagogical tool, "Pictures for Schools" is contextualised within…

This dissertation presents three studies on learning in children museums. The first study is a literature review of the research that was done on learning in children's museums between 2010 and 2021. In this review, I focused on presenting a current state of the field with insights into what research has been done and where there may be gaps in…