The goal of this study was to identify the impact that participation in the Urban Advantage Initiative, a professional development program designed for middle school science teachers in New York City, has had on science teaching and learning. Urban Advantage is a long-term situated learning model whereby teachers engaged in over 100 hours of…

This integrative literature review critically examined how scholars were articulating the work of museums to make a space for "adult learning for social change through community engagement". We applied sociocultural adult learning theories (situated learning and cultural-historical activity theory), to 25 theoretical and empirical…

A unique partnership among six museums and Loyola University Chicago's "Teaching Learning and Leading with Schools and Communities" teacher preparation program provided cross-disciplinary field sites for understanding and witnessing developmental and learning theories. Pre-service teacher candidates were able to identify constructs and…

Museum professionalism remains an unexplored area in museum studies, particularly with regard to what is arguably the core generic question of a "sui generis" professional knowledge base, and its necessary and sufficient conditions. The need to examine this question becomes all the more important with the increasing expansion of the…

The incorporation of cultural productions and virtual experiences in museum spaces adds to the objects' significance and also turns them into important contributions to adult education. Yet, how far do they trouble, decolonise, revisualise, tell alternative stories, interrogate intolerance and privilege or stimulate critical literacies? This…

Canada, like other settler nations such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, faces considerable challenges in repairing and transforming relationships with Indigenous peoples. The country's reconciliation efforts need to overcome a general failure among non-Indigenous Canadians to acknowledge and understand colonialism and to…

This article reports the results of a quartile analysis of the "2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Visual Arts Report Card." The analysis was made from original datasets supplied by the National Center for Education Statistics. It focuses on 8th-grade students who were currently taking art or recently had taken art.…

A museum belonging to a school district demonstrates how teachers integrate museum resources into classroom curricula. A former teacher reflects on her experience with the Karshner Memorial Museum in the Puyallup School District (WA), and explains how the museum's exhibitions and artifacts are curriculum resources, specifically tied to grade level…

In late 2006, the Columbus Museum of Art adopted a new framework that established creativity as the lens for learning and visitor experiences. The purpose of our article is to critically examine the role of evaluation in CMA's reinvention, and in particular to highlight three features of evaluation at CMA that we believe contributed to the…

In this small-scale study, the use of a simple interactive device was designed and studied ethnographically to discover how groups visiting a museum as part of a guided tour interacted with the device as viewed from the perspective of the group tour guides. As the emphasis placed on utilizing interactive devices in museums is increasing, one can…

This research report discusses Indigenous cultural representation and its internal critiques, based on the case study of an Indigenous-run museum, the Woodland Cultural Centre, in Canada. Since its establishment in 1972, the Woodland Cultural Centre has strived to promote Indigenous culture, especially First Nations art, and has challenged the…

For museums interested in making audience research and evaluation an integral part of their operations, looking to local universities--and the expertise their faculty and students bring--can be a natural starting point. These partnerships can be mutually beneficial, giving students valuable real world experience while providing museums with…

This paper explores the accounts of science teachers working within the UK's only "museum school" and what they perceive as the benefits and shortcomings of "museum pedagogy" as a process of object-based teaching (and learning). Museum pedagogy is in this context considered for its potential in harmonising informal and formal…

During the past 50 years the amount of chemistry applied to the preservation of all sorts of materials, from wood, to ceramics, glass and metallic objects has increased dramatically as materials conservation laboratories became established around the world. In Australia, the finding of a series of historic shipwrecks of ships from the Dutch…

During a program titled "Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture," co-sponsored by the Salzburg Global Seminar (SGS) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), one of the discussion groups developed recommendations for skills needed by librarians and museum professionals in today's connected and…