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…

In this article, the authors present early research in using 3-D printing to develop tactile experiences to improve understanding and enable broader aesthetic participation in arts learning contexts for all learners that would benefit from tactility and in particular those with low vision. Their exploration of 3-D printing to create assistive…

This action research study examined the impact of the Historical Thinking Method (HTM) on how students interacted with actual and virtual historical sites and museums. From September 2017 to May 2018, students engaged in analysis and evaluation of online exhibits and actual sites in the Washington, DC, and Columbia, South Carolina, areas using the…

Engineering is Elementary (EiE) is a curriculum project of the Museum of Science, Boston, that promotes and supports engineering literacy and educational equity for all children. Building on the success of its award-winning curriculum for grades 1-5, the team has recently turned its attention to Wee Engineer, a research-based engineering…

Multimedial and multimodal communication arouse interest in many fields of research today. By contrast, little attention is paid to multimodality in relation to designs for learning, especially in relation to representations of knowledge on an aggregated level. By analyzing three multimodal texts about the Middle Ages, including a textbook, a film…

Despite its vital importance in our lives, chemistry is inadequately represented in most museums. Issues such as safety, replenishing and disposal of chemicals, supervision required, and cost are constraints that have limited the number and size of chemistry exhibits. Taking into account the constraints, a 21-station interactive and inexpensive…

This article presents some of the reflections articulated in the author's doctoral thesis: "Saberes y aprendizajes en la construcción de la identidad y la subjetividad de una educadora de museos: El caso del proyecto Cartografiem-nos en el museo Es Baluard". (Knowledge and learning in the construction of the identity and the subjectivity…

From the 1920s through the 1940s, a number of artist-teachers developed methods of creative self-expression in their teaching. The life and teachings of artist and art educator Mabel D'Amico (1909-1998), wife of Museum of Modern Art museum educator Victor D'Amico, are considered within this context. This article attempts to construct an…

This dissertation compares and contrasts the founding and early manuscript collecting activities of four publicly accessible American archival repositories known for their extensive holdings in business, industrial, and technological history: the Baker Library at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts; the Hagley Library and Museum in…

As teachers trainees, the authors were frustrated trying to create a lesson on the British Empire. But this challenge seems to be magnified ten-fold when teaching the history of Britain's empire: a complex political, cultural, social and economic phenomenon that has a broad chronological and geographical scope. And yet, despite the seemingly…

Drawing on an autoethnographic approach, we explore the role of museums in contributing to a decolonizing discourse. Through a guided tour of the Alex Janvier exhibition at the Glenbow Museum, a review of additional artifacts associated with the exhibition, and autoethnographic texts, we have come to see the deep potential of public institutions…

Smartphone technology has the potential to make heritage science accessible to museums, individual collectors, and educators. Infrared reflectography (IRR) is a nondestructive analysis method used by museums to gain information about the provenance, history, and aging of artworks. This paper introduces a highly accessible, inexpensive apparatus…

Despite rapid growth in young children visiting museums, and an increasing acknowledgement that these visits are important to children's development as cultural citizens [Mudiappa and Kluczniok 2015. "Visits to Cultural Learning Places in the Early Childhood." "European Early Childhood Education Research Journal" 23 (2):…

The aim of this article is to explore the worth of a materialist/posthumanist approach to ethics, specifically affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2018, 2019a), within the field of education. I work empirical material that 'does' this ethics in classrooms and draw on Deleuze's (1988) ethically guided materialism as taken up by Braidotti (2019b), to…

This co-authored qualitative case study explores the problem of teachers connecting with their students especially at the middle school level. While research has established the need for teachers to better understand the background experiences of their students, more research is needed to explore the value of place-based professional development…