Museum Education

Abstract

Education has been associated with museums from their earliest days, back to the famous Hellenic Mouseion of Alexandria, a resource for scholars. The modern Western public museum’s origin is usually attributed to the 18th-century Enlightenment, when public institutions began to replace religious powers, guilds, and nobility in providing public services. By the mid-18th century the term museum referred to any kind of collection that was open to the public in theory, although admission was often restricted to upper-class visitors or scholars. Education frequently remained a minor activity compared to collection, preservation, research, and exhibition. Early efforts to reach broader audiences include Charles Willson Peale’s American Museum, which opened around 1800, and the British Victoria and Albert Museum, which opened in the mid-19th century. Museum education as an organized activity carried out by dedicated, trained staff did not arise until the 20th century and has come to prominence with its own professional associations, journals, and degree-granting academic programs only since World War II. Responsibilities of museum educators have shifted dramatically, going from mainly direct instruction to school pupils or lectures for adult visitors, to providing means for all visitors to interpret and make meaning of their museum experience. More recently, museums have reached out increasingly to communities to engage underserved populations and remain relevant at a time of dramatic social upheaval. These developments, described by some as a paradigm shift, have been influenced by increased recognition of 20th-century educational theories, criticism of traditional classification of objects, and increased recognition of the significance of people from different cultures as museum visitors. The results of museum visitor research (visitor studies), a field originally begun in the United States in the 1920s and heavily influenced by behaviorist educational theory, has also expanded over the past four decades to provide a larger range of methods to understand learning in and from museums. In the first two decades of the 21st century, museum educators have increasingly emphasized community engagement and broad accessibility to welcome an ever-wider range of visitors. Museum education has also expanded to include emotional responses, health, and well-being as desired outcomes of museum experiences. Advances in technology, especially the ability to greatly extend the possibility for visitors to rapidly gain information, interact with exhibitions, and share information or experiences, are also expanding our understanding of learning in museums and providing tools for museum educators to improve visitor experiences.