Questions Asked in Art-museum Education Research

Abstract

Research on art-museum education appears across a spectrum of publications including museum journals and art education journals, as well as in occasional articles on museum history and sometimes in journals of curriculum studies. In this chapter, I offer a snapshot of the kinds of research questions, and the perspectives they reflect, that are available to arts-education researchers, with the important caveat that the literature specifically on art-museum education research is untidily scattered across several disciplines and does not yet seem to constitute a separate discipline of its own. This chapter explores several perspectives that guide ‐ and might guide ‐ our inquiries as to how art learning occurs with artifacts in museums; it draws from work in the fields that most inform artmuseum education, specifically school-based art education and museum education generally, as well as an emerging field that encourages study of visual images that have not yet entered museums. This chapter synthesizes three major perspectives through which we can both ask research questions and interpret their findings. Two perspectives are long established in educational inquiry: John Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience, and Joseph Schwab’s conceptual framework of the “commonplaces” of schooling, both here applied to the museum experience, Added to this standard mix is the newer perspective of contemporary visual culture studies, which can bracket our research on museum learning by helping researchers to understand the similarities and differences between visitors’ responses to everyday objects and to objects selected and arranged to facilitate an aesthetic response in a museum setting. We will explore how these three perspectives can intermix to reveal some important and promising research questions about how learning in art museums can best be understood and facilitated. The chapter concludes with a quick snapshot of topics actually covered in current museum education research in a sampling of relevant European, Canadian, and American research reports, assessed against the matrix that emerges from a synthesis of the three perspectives.