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1.3. Museums as Constructors of Knowledge

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1.3. Museums as Constructors of Knowledge

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Nina’s video is quite interesting. In her opinion museums are not just only places that people come in to visit, they can also be places where you can actively connect to culture and, through experience, connect more deeply with each other.

Thus, opening the museum to the public has a huge impact on learning. People are culturally engaged and they like to do it actively. People want to participate, to contribute to make the museum a better place. Simply by giving a suggestion, people are getting involved in their own history and they see themselves as creative agents. Besides being active in their museum enrolment they can also discover new things about their communities and the people who live around because museum artifacts are an excellent way to develop dialogues between visitors.

These strategies open the museum to the community and transform the museum from things that are nice to see into things that are really necessary to make communities move forward.

So, in my opinion, these ideas are very useful because our students don’t see a museum field trip only as a static thing, but they feel excited to participate in their own learning and in the evolving of the history of their own community. Besides, as they are evolved in their own learning process, they will be much more “open” to the visit.

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Without looking for a definition online or in any encyclopedia, I would dare to say that a museum is a place where national history is displayed, through various forms and objects, for future generations to understand what life was like at a certain point in the past. We can, thus, have museums in many different categories (arts, transport, science, toys, famous people …). So, they are always a place for us, the public, to develop our knowledge and learn more about something.
I really agree with the director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Gary Tinterow, when he explains how Museums have changed from passive places for specialists into community centres. Nowadays they attract a very diverse audience and without any previous knowledge or preparation we can just step into a museum and learn what our ancestors have made and by doing that we are realizing who we are, how we have come this far, why we are the way we are and where are we going from now on. So, they work as a centre where communities can discover themselves and this is such a progress.

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Museums as Learnng Agents

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I decided to take this course because I think that providing students with real life experiences is very important for their learning process. The more they contact with real life, the more they engage themselves in their leaning process. So, taking them to a Museum is quite an interesting activity. I would like to get information on how to prepare, implement and evaluate an activity in a museum.

Last year I took my students to our national TV station museum and they loved it as they were invited to act as journalists and they felt involved.  I also visited a National Palace which they loved as the visit was done with an interactive recreation of life in the 16th century. This year, I’m planning to take them to a National Gallery “Serralves”, and this is why I enrolled in the course. I want to learn strategies to help me implement this activity in an innovative and interesting way for my students.

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My name is Ana Fonseca and I am from Portugal. I live in the city of Coimbra, in the centre of the country. I have been an English teacher for more than 20 years and I really like it very much. I've worked in several schools, but I've been in the same school for 16 years. It's not really close to where I live. I have to travel 60km every day to go to work, but I like my school. It is formed by a group of several schools: kindergarten schools, primary level schools, middle school and the secondary school (where I work). It may seem a lot, but it is a small school when compared to the ones in the city where I live. So you can see, I work in a little village where students don't have all the facilities we are used to. The whole school has about 600 students, but the one I work in has only 300 students. However, I think my school has a lot of good things. It is surrounded by trees and pure air and the buildings are modern. There are big classrooms, with a classical layout (students in rows in front of the teacher's desk). There are some interactive whiteboards, every classroom has a PC linked to the projector and the WiFi connection is very good. Besides there are 3 computer classrooms we can use upon reservation. The students can also book laptops to take into the classroom and work if necessary and the same happens with the 22 Ipads (which teachers can ask for in advance).