Museipedagogik och erfarande

• Main Author: Ljung, Berit
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Pedagogiska institutionen 2009
• Subjects: museum education; experience; communication; transaction; John Dewey; museipedagogik; erfarande; kommunikation; demokrati; transaktion; Education; Pedagogik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-28755; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:978-91-7155-911-1

This thesis is intended to contribute to development of communicative frames of reference for museum education. Inspired by the philosopher John Dewey it seeks for new perspectives of the research problem – museum education and experience. The understanding of museum education is based on research literature about museum education, two empirical studies and theoretical interpretations. Some of the conclusions points towards museum education being an interdisciplinary knowledge area in progress that is insufficiently scientifically investigated. Experience is here understood as transaction between people and context – processes of trying and undergoing and can include or correspond to education, “Bildung” and learning. Museum educators describe museum education in many various ways in my questionnaire. The material ground, surroundings and their own actions are three of the dimensions. Their intentions or purposes are the fourth and with Dewey we can name this dimension “consequences of museum education”. The fifth dimension consists of metaphors about the educators own role in the museum, like “the bridge”. Furthermore, my study about young peoples´ experiences in relation to an exhibition highlights the visitor perspective. For them the exhibition created many important questions and thoughts and they were much affected by the pictures in the exhibit. They appreciated being active together, to have joint engagement and to take standpoints in the workshops. To some degree they reached a conjoint communicated experience. Communication is at the core of museum education. From theoretical readings, research literature and empirical results the context of museum education get three crucial and overlapping meanings. One is the meaning or aspect as environment – a prerequisite for the visitors’ transactions and experiences. The second is context as circumstances – the situation. A third aspect of context, that will be more and more important in a globalized world, can be named continuity or connectedness. All three meanings have something to do with space, place and time and can also be discovered in Dewey’s extensive text production.