'Why study the arts at school?' This book offers a fresh perspective on this question. Informed by rigorous research, the book argues that the arts help young people to develop key skills, knowledge and practices that support them to become both critical appreciative audiences and socially engaged cultural producers. Drawing on a three-year study…

What does a learning center for civic education do in a museum environment? How and why can democracy be taught in a museum? The Museum Arbeitswelt in Steyr, Austria, offers with its "Politikwerkstatt" a learning environment for people of different age groups where they can learn, discuss, and talk about democracy. This article shows the…

This dissertation and research study is dedicated to the exploration of "critical posthuman educational technology." Research in this study determines, evaluates, and considers educational technology in U.S. art museums through a wide-reaching survey and case study evaluations of the implementation of digital content creation in museums…

The three-dimensional nature of macromolecules is often difficult for undergraduate students to grasp. This leads to difficulties in understanding key concepts in Biochemistry, such as protein function and conformational change. Virtual reality (VR) technologies, which can aid students in three-dimensional visualizations, have been shown to…

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is a research professor at Arizona State University, a bereavement educator, and the founder of the MISS Foundation. Her research focuses on traumatic grief and loss. In this interview, Dr. Cacciatore offers her thoughts on grief, some misconceptions, and her notion of fierce compassion. The interviewers and Dr. Cacciatore…

This article explores how the Museum, Art and Wellbeing project brought primary school children and seniors from the same local community together to engage in explorative activities designed to reveal individual and mutual assets for wellbeing. The Museum, Art and Wellbeing project undertook a participatory arts-based approach to investigate how…

Museums and galleries have long welcomed, and long valued, visiting family groups, and many offer 'family workshops'. In practice, most workshops are primarily directed at children, and accompanying adults are left to observe. However, we suggest that in actively observing and also pitching in, adults too are engaged in learning. Using the…

Art museums around the world play an integral role in the formation and preservation of collective identity and national belonging. As part of wider efforts for social change, these institutions are being challenged to decolonize and confront racism with renewed and sustained focus. As such, they are thinking more deeply about how they engage…

The relation between episodic and semantic memory was examined by testing how semantic knowledge influences children's episodic memory for events and their locations. Five-, six-, and seven-year-olds (N = 87) engaged in events in a children's museum designed as a town. Events were semantically congruent or incongruent with the spatial location…

Interest is an important precursor to engaging the public in environmental and science learning. We used focus groups to explore ocean learning interests of inland residents of a coastal U.S. state, reasons for those interests, and differences between adults and children. We found adults and children generally had similar interests including…

The contribution aims at introducing some points to reflect on the new role which university museums of schools and education can play today in the wake of current international processes of revitalisation of university heritage and museums, particularly in the light of the new objectives of the University Third Mission. Starting from the…

Agency is a core pedagogical goal of the maker education movement. However, there are still many unknowns about how agency is identified in maker settings. To document maker educator professional visions of agency, we conducted video-cued interviews with eleven U.S-based maker educators using video clips of families making in a drop-in…

In recent years, art museums have been putting more effort into creating e-learning resources (ELR) to encourage young children to learn about art off-site. However, research on art museum ELR from the perspective of educational content is scarce. Using the ELR offered to children by Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Australia (QAGOMA…

The article discusses how digitization in libraries, museums, and archives (LAM) can become more democratic. Digitization within LAM scholarship has been seen historically as a democratic act because it provides universal access to cultural heritage content, breaks down authoritative narratives, and enables participation from users. The article…

Museum-based settings such as zoos provide a unique opportunity to engage educators in professional development opportunities. For instance, zoo settings can provide professional development opportunities focused on facilitating learning through a lens of conservation action to promote sustained action by teachers and their students. In this…