New technology enables museums and other heritage institutions to establish more personal links with their audience, and hopefully by doing so make history more compelling to them. The author explores some Dutch practices with interactive community websites and other ways of making connections between personal stories and urban history.

Museums in the past have been static institutions, exhibiting their collections as public displays. Today, the public has come to expect more from these institutions, seeing them as safe havens where conversations can begin. As reproductive rights have moved to the forefront of political and social debate, dialogue seems to be a step in the right…

A local childcare centre embarks on a first-time project to exhibit preschool children's artworks, acknowledging the importance of art-based activities in the development of young children. In the planning and implementation of a successful afternoon event, the centre's children, along with parents, other family members, friends, and educators,…

Aspiring art teachers must acquire theoretical and practical knowledge spanning a number of subject areas such as studio, pedagogy, children's development, classroom management, and assessment tools as well as instructional skills. Chief among them are curriculum development, advocacy, and leadership skills. Preparing prospective art teachers is…

It seems uncontroversial to claim that museums are unique places of interest with the potential to inspire learners, yet what this means and how it is managed are complex questions. Museum educators' work is currently shaped by accountability requirements typically expressed as visitor targets. Centralised teaching and learning initiatives are…

New ways of working in teacher education are currently being highlighted, especially in relation to partnerships. One type of partnership that is under utilised is that with cultural organisations. This paper reports on two projects where the authors work with preservice teachers in partnership with a wildlife sanctuary and a national gallery.…

This paper discusses some of the issues surrounding the nature of adult play. More specifically, we explore "family play-learning", where play activities result in forms of added knowledge or insight for the adults involved. Adult play itself is an under-researched area, and play-learning even more so. We discuss related research and, in…

This article describes a family-friendly science day event that encourages scientific discovery through hands-on activities, while also providing an opportunity to learn about scientific careers from actual research scientists and science educators, thereby raising awareness of the importance of STEM in our society. The one-day event bought…

Science museums, science centers, zoos, and aquariums (MCZAs) constitute major settings of science learning with unique characteristics of informal science education. Emphasis will be given to the analysis of four specific characteristics of MCZAs that seem relevant for educational research and practice, namely, conditions of mixed motives and…

We consider the phenomenon of social interactions within the art museum, arguing that even the bare possibility of meeting others or intruding into their gaze can have a profoundly detrimental effect on art experience. This is done by tracing a finding from our previous studies in which we considered three museum galleries--each with the same…

We present results of an experimental study of an urban, museum-based science teacher PD programme. A total of 125 teachers and 1676 of their students in grades 4-8 were tested at the beginning and end of the school year in which the PD programme took place. Teachers and students were assessed on subject content knowledge and attitudes towards…

Concepts relating to outer space are difficult to grasp because we lack direct experience of this environment. We analysed students' understanding of gravitation on Earth and beyond by testing the effect of training on it. In a pretest (T1), 28 seventh graders answered a questionnaire about space concepts. They all then underwent the same formal…

This article presents a model of public scholarship in which the knowledge-generation binary in traditional and public scholarship can and does blur, even dissolve, through interdependent partnerships. The author analyzes the overlapping issues of authority and voice between the scholarship of community-engaged research and the discipline of…

When Albert Barnes established an art education program at the Barnes Foundation in 1924, he asked John Dewey to become the first president and director of education. Barnes and Dewey enjoyed a sustained and fruitful relationship with regard to aesthetic experience and scientific theory as applied to education. Barnes and Dewey shared a serious…

This month, the "Journal of Web Librarianship" is exploring the idea of data curation and its uses in libraries. The word "data" is as universal now as the word "cloud" was last year, and it is no accident that libraries are exploring how best to support data curation services. Data curation involves library activities in just about every way,…