“The Educational Promise of Historical Museum Exhibits”
description
Transcript of “The Educational Promise of Historical Museum Exhibits”
ARTICLE WRITTEN BY:
BRENDA M. TROFANENKOACADIA UNIVERSITY
IN THE ACADEMIC JOURNAL:
THEORY AND RESEARCH IN SOCIAL EDUCATION
SPRING, 2010, VOL. 38, NUMBER 2, PP. 270- 288.
“The Educational Promise of Historical Museum
Exhibits”
Creating A Historical Narrative Activity
While listening to this song , your job as a museum curator is to:
1. Classify/group the objects you were given.
2. Order the objects to tell a brief narrative from Canadian history.
3. Create a label for the display. 4. Photograph it.5. Select one person to share the narrative
with the class.
Introduction
“Public history museums play a critical role in validating a nation’s history.
The museum’s institutional strategies of object display are used to define a
particular representation of past events…often without critical
reflection on their broader educational impact. ”
Object based epistemology
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, scope, and limitations of knowledge. It deals with analyzing the nature of knowledge and
how it relates to such notions as truth, belief and justification.
In the context of this article - it is concerned with the production of knowledge.
Museum elements:Museum elements:
Physical exhibition space
ObjectsText panelsFirst person
narrativesShort historical
vignettes
“Traditional exhibition
standards turn the displayed objects into something
else [a narrative] – that which we call
history”.
Elements of a Museum Display
Trofanenko asserts:
1. “We need to know how to judge what is being presented as historical.”
2. “We need to engage in historical inquiry to understand the past on display.”
Potential questions to ask students:
What is the story being told?
Why might they tell this story – at this time?
Describe the story from one display in your with one words.
Who is telling the story?
How are these objects “out of context”?
Are there alternative interpretations to this story?
What or who do you believe may be missing in the display?
Will the story change if we do not read the tags or we grouped the items differently?
How would it change?
James Luna: Artifact Piece, 1985 -1987.
“I had long looked at
representation of our peoples in museums and
they all dwelled in the past. They were one—sided. We were simply objects among bones, bones
among objects, and then signed and sealed with a date.” James
Luna
If you are interested in seeing the NMAH exhibit on-line:
www.americanhistory.si.edu/Militaryhistory/
Summary
&
Peer
Evaluations