Museums and Design Education: Looking to Learn, Learning to See, edited by Beth Cook, Rebecca Reynolds and Catherine Speight, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 201 pages

A Critical Review by David Hopes, 21 August 2012

Museums and Design Education is the product of a collaborative project between the University of Brighton, the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and the Royal College of Art (RCA). With Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) investment, these four partners formed a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD) in 2005. This volume was produced two years into this project to ventilate and contextualise research findings, to place CETLD projects ‘in the wider context of other research and teaching experiments’ in order to provide ‘an evidence base for continuing strategic support to develop and sustain long-term and constructive relationships between museums and universities’  and to encourage ‘radical dialogue’  between museums and the HE sector. 


Since many of the fourteen essays focus on CETLD research projects, the majority of authors are employees of partner organisations (principally the University of Brighton, and the V&A Museum) with backgrounds ranging from art and design education, architecture, museology, and curatorship. Two of the last essays in the book are written by experts in information and media technology. All three editors are involved in the CETLD project: Beth Cook and Catherine Speight are CETLD Research Fellows, both with museology postgraduate degrees and research interests in visitor engagement and learning (respectively). The third editor, Rebecca Reynolds, is CETLD Higher Education Officer. Reynolds also has an MA in Museum Studies and her work involves the production of resources at the V&A Museum for HE students. Of the sixteen authors, only three are detailed as having publishing histories.

The book generally succeeds in placing CETLD projects in the wider context of other research and teaching experiments, and is unique in its focus on museums and design learning at HE level. The opening essay by Kate Arnold-Forster and Catherine Speight usefully sets out the political context for collaboration and areas of possible ‘convergence’   between museums and the HE sector. In contrast, Speight’s solo essay, ‘Museums and Higher Education: A New Specialist Service?’ discusses the historiography of museums and Higher Education, looking back to what she describes as ‘traditional academic audiences’  in a somewhat nostalgic and unsubstantiated view of the origins of museums. Equally vague is Speight’s use of the word ‘decode’  in reference to how students create meaning in the gallery. More enlightening is Speight’s identification of key dichotomies (such as specialist research / general commentary) found within museums although this may have been more revealing if it had been reflected back on universities to expose comparable tensions in Higher Education. Speight’s tracing of fault lines within and between museums and the HE sector is used as a way of discursively approaching the CETLD Baseline Research Programme carried out in 2006 to analyse design students’ patterns of exploration in the V&A Museum. Findings from the Programme are discussed with reference to the work of, among others, Fisher, Bourdieu, Darbel and Schnapper, adding context to a significant piece of action research and paving the way for other research into a much neglected area of learning in museums for HE students.

In another way, drawing on the experience of an Australian museum-HE partnership, Geoffrey Caban and Carol Scott’s joint essay, ‘Design Learning in an Australian Museum: A Partnership Project Between the Powerhouse Museum and the University of Technology, Sydney’, bolsters and contextualises the CETLD projects. Caban and Scott’s ‘spirit of enquiry’  shares the same focus on learning styles and meaning-making in the gallery as the CETLD projects but their employment of Falk’s ‘Personal Meaning Mapping Methodology’ and use of references other than the rather narrow range of literature repeatedly cited by the other CETLD Project contributors (most frequently Anderson, (1997) and Hooper Greenhill (1992, 1994, and 1999) ) does much to illuminate not only their own project findings but the discussion around constructivist and independent learning running throughout the book.

In showcasing CETLD projects, Museums and Design Education: Looking to Learn, Learning to See does provide an ‘evidence base’ for the development of long-term and constructive relationships between museums and universities. But the different ways that data from projects have been presented and used does not make this entirely clear despite the rather weak conclusions to most essays pointing to the need for further research and greater collaboration. Indeed, the value of new research carried out by CETLD is diluted by a series of summaries which return to the same questions, ‘Much remains to investigate’ and ‘Developing technology in museums for HE design students requires us to ask how HE students use museums’ disappointingly rounding off Rebecca Reynolds essay, ‘How Can Technology Support Design Students’ Learning in Museums?’. This highlights the issue-based approach of many of the essays which disregard the true value of project findings in an effort to point to the bigger picture resulting in conclusions which can be trite and circular.

Beth Cook and Catherine Speight’s essay, ‘Bridging Perspectives – Approaches to Learning in Museums and Universities’ scratches the surface of similarities and differences in museum and HE pedagogies but is useful in setting out some of the main theories underwriting current thinking on the strengths and weaknesses of each. It is especially insightful in two areas. It points to the grey areas between pedagogical practice (as opposed to theory) in museums and the HE sector, questioning the ‘active’ nature of gallery education and the value of deep / surface learning paradigms in analysing the HE student in each environment (museum and lecture hall). Secondly, it draws attention to the difficulties of assessing efficacy of learning, particularly in the museum environment. Attempts to extend and deepen these lines of thinking to consider real ways of ‘bridging perspectives’ does however fall short of the book’s overall aim of generating ‘radical dialogue’ between museums and the HE sector. Instead, the authors opt tepidly for a call for the student and both institutions to develop ‘Greater understanding’.

In terms of promoting a ‘radical dialogue’ between sectors, a conversation between an academic and curator at the heart of the book epitomises both the promise and the failure of Museums and Design Education to kick-start genuinely far-reaching discussions on the future of HE learning in museums. An edited transcript of a conversation in the V&A’s Cast Courts between Chris Rose, Principal Lecturer in 3D Design at the University of Brighton, and Norbert Jopek, Sculpture Curator at the V&A, highlights the similarities and differences in approach between the two practitioners. This should have been the focus of research and commentary per se to radicalise discussions on collaboration by examining factors (made manifest in language) which influence the shape and dynamism of partnership. Instead, three paragraphs prosaically describe the context of the discussion and a concluding paragraph merely states, ‘There may be resonances with points made in other chapters about interpretation and understanding of objects in the museum and HE sectors’ .  This represents a lost opportunity to get underneath the surface of a recurring question, i.e. to what extent do practitioner perspectives help or hinder greater student use of museum collections?

Language as a signifier of these perspectives is abundant not only in this essay but throughout the book and reveals a number of biases among contributors.   Written from the perspective of a PhD student in fashion and textile design education, Torunn KjØlberg’s essay, ‘Museums and Material Knowledge: The V&A as Source in Fashion and Textile Design Research’ betrays a scepticism about museums in her weighted use of language. She summarises the sorts of artefacts found in museums saying, ‘There are objects on display and objects hidden in storage, objects for sale and objects taken for granted’ . She goes on to say that ‘For design students who must learn not to take objects for granted, museums are important for gaining material knowledge’ . There are numerous examples of sententious language throughout the book. For example, the co-authored essay, ‘The Virtual Museum’, by Mark Carnall and Beth Cook which shows signs of the tensions created when practitioners come together in a reflective capacity.

Carnall and Cook’s essay is the third of four pieces at the end of the book which again fails to live up to the description of ‘radical dialogue’. The editors have included four essays which involve digital technologies either as a way of compensating for the extent to which this is omitted from the other essays or in an attempt to future-proof the book. Rebecca Reynolds’ essay, ‘Learning Paths: Museum-Based Learning Materials for Design Students’ deals with mobile learning environments advocating critical use of technologies, supporting Diane Laurillard’s  view that pedagogy should be in the driving seat. A second essay by Patrick Letschka and Jill Seddon deals with a project empowering students as creative practitioners by encouraging them to capture and reflect on their own creative process. This also connects well with a concept developed by Bruns and explained by Reynolds in the preceding essay, the notion of the ‘produser’ , learners who actively author content rather than just make use of it. The other two essays sit oddly with the rest of the collection because none of these deal with design education, which is the presiding theme and raison d'être for the book.  Instead they focus on computer games and Second Life technology and the potential of each to fit pedagogically with the work of museums and the HE sector. As an exercise in either stretching the debate or signposting the future these two essays fail to reach the mark since they do not connect to themes issuing from or surrounding the CETLD’s own research and are written in an awkward, unscholarly style.

Overall, the book’s efforts to integrate the work of the CETLD in the context of other research and teaching experiments must be considered a strength. This is achieved by looking beyond the Centre’s own projects to reflect on the significance of its findings earning them validity and potential, especially in conceptualising the museum experience from the student perspective (done most effectively by Jos Boys in  'Creative Differences: Deconstructing the Conceptual Learning Spaces of Higher Education and Museums' pp. 43-60). However, the fact that many of the essays were written by individuals closely involved in the CETLD project renders the collection an unevenness and subjectivity. This is made plain in a number of weak conclusions which reiterate the aim of each essay and point towards a continuation of the work of the Centre without actually moving the debate into more radical territory.  This partially undermines its ability to act as an evidence base to support ‘long term and constructive relationships between museums and universities’ but the worthiness of each project is apparent despite the variety of ways data are presented and interpreted. Nevertheless, Museums and Design Education is a welcome addition to an overlooked area of research and makes a valuable contribution to understanding the theory and practice of design learning in the museum.

What's the Use? Utilising Museum Artefacts in Higher Education

Use is a small word with big consequences for both the museums sector and universities where the user, be they general visitor, school group, student, or lecturer is meant to be the alpha and omega of programme development and impact assessment. In that context, ‘What’s the use?’ means both how do we use and why should we use museums or learning resources. But what does the word actually signify when we speak about using physical artefacts or digital material generated from them in teaching or research?

Most literature on the subject of object-centred learning is dominated by case studies and ideas for engaging HE users with real artefacts, without looking at underlying issues such as the connections between materiality and reception, interpretive frameworks in the real and digital encounter with the artefact, the stylistics of learning, pedagogical shifts in online learning, and the relationship between users and producers of content. Although some interesting work has been carried out in these areas by UCL and the University of Brighton, the V&A Museum et al (Cook, Reynolds, and Speight, 2010) there remains a gap in understanding the basics of the relationship between the artefact-user and the artefact used.

As a former curator-turned-academic working between a large independent heritage organisation and a postgraduate teaching and research institute, I find myself inhabiting that gap. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Shakespeare Institute both have significant museum, library, archive and built heritage collections at their disposal, and both use these to a limited extent in teaching and research. Both organisations have been magnets for visitors and scholars from across the world given their unique location in the town where William Shakespeare spent much of his life. But the opportunities of digitising those collections and engaging users across the globe on new platforms, have led both organisations to ask fundamental questions about who those users are, what they want and how this can be delivered sustainably. This has also raised questions about how the digital relates to the experience of actually being in Shakespeare’s birthplace, physically handling a First Folio of his work, or attending a lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon and asking questions face-to-face.
As gamekeeper-turned-poacher, my interest in all of this is how the various constituents involved in the preparation and use of collections interact with each other and with the artefact, at first hand and in virtual environments for learning.

In order to explore these connections, I designed and worked on a project called Digital CoPs and Robbers: Communities of Practice and the Use of Artefacts in Virtual Learning Environments, funded by the AHRC and run by the University of Birmingham from Feb – Aug 2012. During the project I tested Etienne Wenger’s concept of communities of practice in a real environment populated by users and producers of artefact-based content (curators, archivists, librarians, digital consultants of various shapes and sizes, actors, students, and lecturers), and the artefacts themselves in real and virtual environments.

Wenger’s model for how communities form around shared interests and common endeavour proved extremely useful in understanding how particular (practitioner) ways of seeing influence ways of using artefacts. Although spoken language as a tool is not a clear-cut way of divining intention Swales (2003, 207), using Grounded Theory to analyse transcripts from workshops and visits to the museum store allowed me to generate patterns of use from words and actions. Starting with the basic question, ‘how are participants in the trial using artefacts?’ I looked for descriptors which relate to cerebral and physical engagement with artefacts – the space around the object in terms of actual, physical engagement with the artefact or use implied by action or discussion. Loosening my idea of what use might be to include intellectual and emotional usage, as well as physical use, was an important part of the process to consider the widest range of responses and uses and to avoid confirmation bias. Employing this wider definition, I identified 112 examples of use which were then distilled into parent and child codes. This then developed into a taxonomic scheme of artefact usage which was intended to set-out how practitioners and students are actually engaging with physical artefacts or their digital representations.

Given this basis for data collection and analysis, what does the data tell us about how artefacts are used? The big picture is that communities of practice seem to be using artefacts in ways which suggest not only different ways of seeing but different ways of learning, and this seems to depend upon whether artefacts are used in physical or digital form. The implications of this are profound: if the learning styles of producers and users (or produsers, a hybrid of both (Bruns 2007, 3)) are better known then interdisciplinary projects (which most object-based and digital initiatives are) have a better chance of producing more effective artefact-based learning resources.
The taxonomy of use also revealed patterns concerning the main types of engagement with the artefact. These broadly were discovery, identification, contextualisation, and interpretation but how each community of practice carried out this varied widely, as again this depends on the physical or digital nature of the engagement. Students interacting with the real or the digital material tended to act in much the same way in identifying artefacts through looking more closely, describing physical features, and by reference to metadata. However, progressing to contextualisation and interpretation, there is more divergence between those students who make contact with real artefacts and those who just engage with digital images and metadata generated (by other communities of practice) from them. For students who first viewed the real, physical artefact, during the contextualisation and interpretation stages they show evidence of thinking about issues which arise from material features of the artefact suggesting that the early encounter with the real artefact has a formative influence on the course of their research. In other words, the physical encounter triggers certain way of seeing artefacts or thinking about them.

Therefore, knowing more about how artefacts are used by practitioners associated with transforming artefacts into learning resources and research students who generally use them moves us some way from the question ‘what’s the use?’towards ‘which use?’. Potentially, the taxonomic approach could result in improved heuristics for the digitisation of material, a model for studying the effect of environment (as suggested in Taylor's 2001 study of surrogation at the Toledo Museum of Art), or even metrics for measuring the impact of artefact-based learning.

References:-

Bruns, Axel. 2007. Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-led Age. Proceedings ICE 3: ideas, cyberspace, education, Loch Lomond, Scotland, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/6622/1/6622.pdf retrieved 21/09/2012

Cook, B., Reynolds, R. and Speight, C. Ed. 2010. Museums and Design Education: Looking to Learn, Learning to See. Ashgate, Farnham

Swales, John. 2003. ‘Is the university a community of practice?, British Studies in Applied Linguistics 18, 203-216

Taylor, Bradley L. 2001. The Effect of Surrogation on Viewer Response to Expressional Qualities in Works of Art: Preliminary Findings from the Toledo Picture Study, http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2001/papers/taylor/taylor.html#ixzz2BkFcJfpGretrieved 09/11/2012