Informal learning is an important venue for educating the general public about complex socio- scientific issues: intersections of scientific understanding and society. My dissertation is a multi-tiered analysis of how informal education, and particularly informal educators, can leverage learning to respond to one particular socio-scientific issue:…

Is a capability to engage students as fundamental to effective museum education as a working knowledge of the collections? What strategies can raise the level of engagement with students and sustain student engagement with works of art? What are the challenges that older students on school tours present to docents? This article highlights…

The Museum of Vancouver recently undertook a major rethinking of its role in the city. New interplays are being proposed between emerging conceptions of urbanity and civic participation, and the museum's collection and function as facilitator and advocate. This short paper provides a brief overview of the museum's recent transformation, situates…

Changes at Museum Rotterdam illustrate how history museums can rethink their relationship to history and community. Recognizing that its residents are increasingly transnational, without ties to the Rotterdam of the past, Museum Rotterdam is using the tools of urban anthropologists to involve residents in exploring contemporary heritage. Museum…

This article explores how to ensure visitor engagement with art objects at exhibition spaces in art museums through relational aesthetics, which focuses on the intersubjective relationship that art objects arouse in visitors. In the 1990s, Bourriaud coined the term "relational aesthetics" in reference to interactive installation art, but…

The dissertation offers a historical inquiry about how television's material traces entered archival spaces. Material traces refer to both the moving image products and the assortment of documentation about the processes of television as industrial and creative endeavors. By identifying the development of television-specific archives and…

Using an analytical framework based on the concept of historical distance, this article explores how Dutch history teachers and educators navigate between the past and the present when making curriculum decisions on the sensitive topic of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery. Four history teachers and 2 museum educators were selected on the…

We write from a public university in Mexico's interior, as 2 language professors from countries with fraught, yet intertwined, sets of histories--Mexico and the United States. Having lived in 2 countries with dramatic increases in nationalist policies, we reflect on having lived abroad through the increases in nationalism in our lived experiences.…

The present contribution is situated in the framework of a broad government project (entitled Pacte pour un Enseignement d'Excellence) and is specifically devoted to the learning and teaching of modern languages. Our group has been working on the collection, selection, and validation of innovative tools for foreign language learning targeting all…

This study aims to assess the effectiveness of immersive environments that have been implemented by museums to attract new visitors. Based on the frameworks introduced by telepresence and media richness theories, and following a constructivist-based learning approach, we argue that the greater the similarity of an online museum experience is to…

Hands-on workshops in museums have become ubiquitous. What is the best approach to leading these materials-based experiences and how might they relate to gallery teaching? This article outlines best practices for facilitating museum workshops. Describing a framework for designing activities, giving feedback, and sharing information, it draws…

This article argues that webcasting holds great potential to connect students to museum content and to their peers while building content knowledge and skills. The authors outline the opportunities and challenges of webcasts for secondary students by discussing their experience with the National Museum of American History's National Youth Summit…

We repeated the historical infra-red radiation experiments performed by Melloni, to investigate why, at the end of his life, he came to the conclusion that radiation from light and heat rely on the same basic principle, what has been translated as the so called unitary formalism. In doing so, we profited from a Master thesis on heat radiation and…

The article presents the educational activities that, since its establishment, the Museum of the School of the University of Macerata has developed with particular attention to university and school students. As a result of a fruitful synthesis of the most recent trends in History of Education, Heritage Education and finally in History Teaching,…

The main aim of this study is to assess the spatial perception of historical world heritage buildings using wearable technologies in an educational framework. The proposal seeks to complement the real experience of visiting the Casa Batlló Museum, an emblematic space (1904-1906, Antonio Gaudí, Barcelona). The main innovative feature of the project…