From the royal Wunderkammern of the 16th century to the founding of imperial, encyclopedic museums in the 17th and 18th centuries, touch was considered a key modality for empirical investigation, aesthetic appreciation, and religious veneration. The discussion about touch in Western museums is nothing new. Since the “sensory turn” in cultural studies (Howes, 2006, 2014 Howes & Classen, 2014), research about and programming for embodied experiences in museums have become increasingly popular (Faron & Banda, 2014 Kai-Kee et al., 2020). The presence of the artists’ hand in a swipe of paint, marks on artifacts indicating their original use or find context, a finger in a portrait stroking lace or resting on a shiny globe: all invite and activate sensory experience (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007). Outside of structured programs designed to explicitly recruit touch as a learning modality, art and objects in museums nevertheless excite memory and emotion through their (imagined) tactility and sensory qualities. In museums, hands-on programs designed to enhance conceptual learning in the social sciences may look like artifact-handling sessions for the general public or touch-tours for blind or low-vision visitors. By recruiting perceptual-motor systems through movement and interaction, hands-on learning coordinates the body with symbolic representations (Abrahamson & Sánchez-García, 2016 Schwartz et al., 2016). Embodied cognition recognizes the entanglement of experience, perception, and thinking, in which cognitive structures both emerge from sensorimotor activities and guide perception (Varela et al., 1991).
Indeed, substantial research affirms the value of hands-on learning for conceptual change. Object-handling programs in museums thus align with the recommendations set forth in Excellence and Equity. Among other functions deemed “essential” to educational practice, the report cites “human interaction and interaction with objects and ideas” and “direct encounters with objects” as key contributions that museums make to public service and scholarship (American Association of Museums & Hirzy, 2008, p. The report offered a new definition of museums “as educational institutions that carry out their public service in the spirit of excellence and equity” and argued that “useum missions should state unequivocally that an educational purpose is imbedded in every museum activity” (American Association of Museums & Hirzy, 2008, p. The 1992 report Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums by the AAM summarized these changes and asserted the central role of education in museum practice. Museum education has been caught up in these institutional shifts. The requirement for museums to produce outcome-based assessments and impact statements have thus shifted priorities in policy and practice toward effectiveness and public accountability. This trend was compounded by the founding of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Museum Assessment Program of the American Association of Museums (AAM). Whereas museums used to be internally-facing institutions, focusing almost exclusively on the accumulation, preservation, and interpretation of their collections on behalf of the public, museums are now compelled by funding requirements to demonstrate their public value more broadly (Weil, 1999, 2000). Embracing insights from sociocultural theory, sociology, neuroscience, and psychology, museums have begun to recognize themselves as multimodal, sensory, and affective spaces (Levent & Pascual-Leone, 2014) and have shifted their communication, programmatic, and educational strategies accordingly.Ĭiting the United Way of America’s adoption of new evaluation practices in 1995 and the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act in 1993, Stephen Weil argues that the structural changes to non-profit and government funding in the United States has fundamentally transformed the work of museums. Since the 1990s, museums have increasingly articulated their public value in terms of education and community wellbeing (Hooper-Greenhill, 1999). This paper was written for an introductory research methods class at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.Ĭontemporary museums are more than mausoleums conserving the material culture of late, great empires for receptive, elite publics.
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