The Educational Role of the Museum: (Leicester Readers in Museum Studies)

This edition incorporates articles of the late 1990s that address the relationships of museums and galleries to their audiences. The text covers broad themes relevant to providing for all museum visitors and also focuses specifically on educational groups. Contents include: new communication models for the museum; problems in visitor orientation and circulation; increased exhibit accessibility through multisensory interaction; education - at the heart of museums.

Table of Contents:
Preface Part I Communication theories 1 Education, communication and interpretation: towards a critical pedagogy in museums 2 Communication in theory and practice 3 Learning in art museums: strategies of interpretation 4 The museum as a communicator: a semiotic analysis of the Western Australian Museum Aboriginal Gallery, Perth Part II Learning in museums 5 Museum learners as active postmodernists: contextualizing constructivism 6 The constructivist museum 7 Teaching yourself to teach with objects 8 Improving worksheets 9 Open windows, open doors 10 Museum multicultural education for young learners 11 Children, teenagers and adults in museums: a developmental perspective 12 Museum-goers: life-styles and learning characteristics 13 Whose museum is it anyway? Museum education and the community Part III Developing effective exhibitions 14 Learning from learning theory in museums 15 Intrinsic motivation in museums: why does one want to learn? 16 Cognitive psychology and interpretation: synthesis and application 17 Collaboration: towards a more holistic design process 18 Spatial considerations 19 The exhibition development process 20 Combating redundancy: writing texts for exhibitions 21 Writing readable text: evaluation of the Ekarv method 22 How old is this text? 23 Museum text as mediated message 24 Increased exhibit accessibility through multisensory interaction Part IV Thinking about museum audiences 25 That those who run may read 26 Audiences: a curatorial dilemma 27 Cultural imagining among museum visitors 28 The disabling society 29 Museums and cultural diversity in contemporary Britain 30 A beginner’s guide to evaluation 31 Monitoring and evaluation: the techniques 32 Small-scale evaluation 33 Evaluation of museum programmes and exhibits 34 Pupils’ perceptions of museum education sessions 35 Collaborative evaluation studies between the University of Liverpool and national museums and galleries on Merseyside 36 Sending them home alive.

About the Author :
Eileen Hooper-Greenhill is well-known internationally for her work on museum communications and education. She has also been a lecturer in museum studies at the University of Leicester since 1980 and is the author of Museum annd Gallery Education(1991), Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge(1992) and Museums and Their Visitors (1994).

Review :
'This is a wide-ranging book with lots of excellent, thought-provoking articles that vary in approach from relatively heavy theoretical contributions to rather tongue-in-cheek ones all of which will provoke thought and discussion as to how and why we interpret museum collection.' - International Journal of Heritage Studies