Symposium 2002 final revise - National Gallery of Ireland

Proceedings of the Symposium
held on 1 November 2002 at
The National Gallery of Ireland.
Series No 4
The National Gallery of Ireland
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LEARNING IN MUSEUMS
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Published in 2003 by
The National Gallery of Ireland
Merrion Square West
Dublin 2
Text copyright © the contributors and the National Gallery of Ireland, 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior permission of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Series No 1 The Role of Education in Museums 1999
Series No 2 The Nature of the Education Service 2000
Series No 3 The Museum Visit: Virtual Reality and the Gallery 2001
Series No 4 Learning in Museums 2003
ii
National
Gallery of
IRELAND
Text editor: Marie Bourke
Designer: Bill Bolger
Printed in Ireland by: McBrinn Print
Cover: Taking Measurements: the artist copying
a cast in the Hall of the National Gallery of Ireland 1887.
Richard T. Moynan (1856-1906)
ISBN 1-904288-022
Page 1
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Preface
Raymond Keaveney, Director, The National Gallery of Ireland
Learning in Museums
Declan Kiberd, Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama,
University College Dublin
15 What would it be like if learning in museums was taken seriously?
David Fleming, Director, Museums and Galleries of Merseyside
27 How are museums and galleries accessible sources of learning?
Jane Ryder, Director, The Scottish Museums Council
37 A Review of the Morning Discussion
Stephen Allen, Head of Education, The National Portrait Gallery, London
39 Learning in the Context of Irish Museums
Marie Bourke, Keeper and Head of Education, The National Gallery of Ireland
54 Learning Can be Fun: Interactives at W5 Science and Discovery Centre
Dr Sally Montgomery, Director, W5, Belfast
56 Innovative Learning Programmes
Pat O’Hare, Research Curator and Education Officer, Muckross House, Kerry
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Contents
64 Discovery as a Vehicle for Learning
Nora Hickey, Education Officer, The Hunt Museum, Limerick
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68 Informal Learning in American Art Museums
Liz Coman, Education Officer, The National Gallery of Ireland
71 Getting it Right: World War I, Exhibition and Learning Materials
Caroline Carr, Research Assistant, Donegal County Museum
74 Group for Education in Museums (GEM)
Robin Clutterbuck, Convenor of the GEM Freelance Network
75 Visitor Studies Group, UK
Juliette Fritsch
76 Acknowledgements
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Raymond Keaveney
Director, National Gallery of Ireland
In his articulate and erudite contribution to this symposium, Professor Kilberd noted that collecting institutions should not be mere hoarders of things (as was Mr Deacy, the Headmaster
of the school in Dalkey attended by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses). To be fair, most museums aspire to an enlightened and productive role for their collections. Yet is is clear that not all
museums are agreed on what precisely is their function in terms of education. Historically,
education has been acknowledged as constituting a central element in the operation of cultural institutions. For some it is presented in a neat, ready packaged programme based on a
straight-line version of history. Prof. Kilberd goes on to say that it is the task of curators to
resist the notion that knowledge has been stabilised once and for all and to remind viewers
constantly of the present, providing a fuller, more contemporary context for considerations of
the past.
Throughout the morning and afternoon sessions the expert contributors, drawn from sister
institutions in Ireland and the UK, related their own experience of education in museums,
providing statistics, the recommendations of various reports, the commitments set down in
mission statements and the empirical evidence made available from various initiatives. Their
observations will provide informative and instructive to museum professionals entrusted with
the responsibility of developing the educational role of their institutions.
The National Gallery of Ireland would like to thank the many contributors to this symposium, which was organised by the Gallery’s Education Department. It also acknowledges
gratefully the support provided by the Heritage Council and the British Council.
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Preface
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Declan Kiberd
Professor of Anglo Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin
As far as modern writing goes, museums have got a bad press. If a novelist compares some
institution to a museum, this is usually less than complimentary. In the second episode of
James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, Mr Garrett Deasy is headmaster of a school in Dalkey and a
narrow-gauge Orange Loyalist who believes that history is over because the British Empire is
secure across the world. It soon emerges that Mr Deasy has a very limited view of his role: ‘To
learn, one must be humble’, he tells Stephen Dedalus, ‘but life is the great teacher.’ Yet the
establishment that he directs seems devoted less to the education of its boys – leading forth
their essential natures – than to mere schooling. Everything is done by copying – the boys
copy sums from the board but do not understand them; they recite a Roman History lesson by
rote, but miss its point – that Pyrrhus had won a battle but at a cost too great to be borne.
Joyce uses the scene to capture the mimicry inherent in the colonial mission, which turns
natives into copycats and teachers into imitators of distant power-elites.
Mr Deasy is, or thinks he is, a Christian. He says that history is moving towards one great
goal: the manifestation of God. Like the social theorist Karl Marx or the evolutionist Charles
Darwin, he believes that it is going along a straight line towards a definite, discernible conclusion; and Joyce is quite mischievous in the way he links the teleology of Marxism and Darwinism to that of Christianity, as if they were but obverse sides of the same coin. The young poet
Stephen does not agree: for him there can be no straight line. God is not the fulfilment of
some long process but rather ‘a shout in the street’. In other words, either God is with us now
or he may not exist at all. Without God, history may be just a succession of civilisations without purpose or change, a fearful circle. This is his greatest fear, confided with the scepticism of
a modernist to Mr Deasy: ‘History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave
you a back kick?’
As he sits later, teaching his classroom of boys Roman History, Stephen contemplates the futility of war by quoting Pyrrhus: ‘Another victory like that and we are done for’. But his is also a
mind that reflects Joyce’s experience of aerial bombardment of buildings near Locarno in 1917:
‘I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame’.
Most museums were built and based on the ‘straight line’ principle of history: that the world
was improving and that its progress could literally be mapped by the straight lines along which
a visitor to a gallery walked, as he or she made the symbolic re-enactment of the passage from
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Learning in Museums
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antiquity, through feudalism, into the Renaissance, and beyond that into the triumph of the
modern individual. Those museums were rich in material things, as were their sponsors, the
triumphant bourgeoisie, and not averse to displaying acquired trophies. Mr Deasy instinctively
understands this.
His religion is a lot less spiritual than he’d care to admit. He advises the young teacher Stephen
to put money in his purse, unaware of the fact that the source of the quotation is one of
Shakespeare’s villains, Iago. He fills his school with glass display cases that contain Stuart coins
and apostle spoons, symbols of a triumphant State and Church, those forces of Christ and
Caesar that work hand-in-glove to threaten Stephen. He claims to be a follower of Christ, yet
epitomises the truth of Nietzsche’s aphorism that there was only ever one Christian – and they
crucified him. Ireland, Mr Deasy boasts with racist complacency, has the honour of never having persecuted the Jews, because it had the good sense never to let them in. ‘They sinned
against the light’, he explains to Stephen, but the young man responds: ‘Who has not?’ It is as
if Stephen is unconsciously preparing for that later moment in the book when he will meet Mr
Leopold Bloom, at least one Jew who has managed to get in.
So Mr Deasy’s comfortable lies are exposed, and so is his view of history as an opportunity to
store up useless objects from the past, Stuart coins and apostle spoons, symbols of an outworn
Church and decayed polity. If Stephen appears in the scene as a reluctant prisoner of history,
the Orangeman is her willing slave. He has gathered the trophies of the past, an ‘old pilgrim’s
hoard’, but (as Richard Ellmann noted), in doing so he has missed its spiritual point; and his
inner emptiness is epitomised by his third hobby, the collection of shells, ‘dead treasure, hollow shells’. They actually remind Stephen of the hollow shells that pass for teeth in his own
ruined mouth, further instances of history’s nightmare and time’s decay, but, although
Stephen’s body may be rotting, at least he is living. Mr Deasy, by contrast, is a mere hoarder of
things from the past, saving their outer shells but losing their deeper lessons. In the end, he is
shown to worship a false God, a version of the past that seems established once and for all, no
longer a dynamic process with an open future. His shells and coins and spoons are used by
Joyce to make him seem more like a curator of a museum than the head teacher of a school.
That may even be Joyce’s central point: that museums are like schools, except that there are
often more dead things in schools. Mr Deasy is a bleak illustration of Oscar Wilde’s sad
observation that ‘in the modern world everyone who has forgotten how to learn has taken to
teaching’. He hoards dead facts as he saves dead shells, but in the very next episode of Ulysses,
Stephen will crunch the shells of Sandymount Strand under his live feet, as if in deliberate
repudiation of that notion of tradition.
When I read that telling scene now, I often think of Walter Benjamin’s remark about ‘the
melancholy of the collector’. Most museums have an aura of sadness and melancholy, which
may first have attached itself to those colonial explorers and collaborators who made so many
of the great museums possible. Benjamin, a great collector of books and photographs himself,
never fully explained what he meant by that haunting phrase, but it seems to suggest a depressive streak in the collector, as if he were somehow trying to ratify and augment his own uncer-
Science is a criticism of myth. There would be no Darwin had there been no Book of
Genesis, no elections but for the Greek atomic myth, and yet when the criticism is finished, there is not even a drift of ashes on the pyre… there is no improvement: only a
series of sudden fires, each though fainter as necessary as the one before it. We free ourselves from delusion that we may be nothing. The last kiss is given to the void.
It is strange to think of that sort of lesson being drawn by Yeats from a visit to London Zoo,
but then the case against traditional zoos may be rather like the arguments that can be
advanced against museums: that they rip objects out of their natural settings, in which alone
they have full integrity and meaning, setting them up as objects that exist solely for the education and pleasure of others. Not that there is an absolute equivalence; at least the objects in
museums are dead before the thing is done.
However, even to state the case as starkly as that may not be to go far enough. Many of those
objects collected in museums are works of art, or at least acquire that aura in the transition
from the past to the present – think of old photographs, once casual, now arty – or in the transition from the fields of Bali to a European museum. In fact, as Margaret Mead found when
first she arrived in Bali and tried to discover whether the Balinese had any pictorial representations of their society, the most integrated and balanced societies would have no such thing.
After some considerable time spent listening to Mead’s descriptions of pictures, frames, representations of the body, etc., the Balinese laughingly said, ‘We have no art, we simply do everything as well as we can.’ Yet objects from their artisan world acquired the status of art by virtue of
being relocated in museums and galleries. So those who make the case against museums have
to face the fact that the argument against curatorial display may simply be one element of the
much wider and deeper case against the very idea of art itself, of a separate Art with a capital A.
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tain selfhood and identity by surrounding himself with beautiful objects – trophies that might
testify to the final triumph of his fragile but purposeful spirit. The problem with nineteenthcentury taxonomy was that it often seemed a prelude to taxidermy: you crossed the world,
gathered specimens and examples, asserted your almost unlimited intellectual powers, and
then discovered that you were descended from apes (who like to gather and store bright
objects too). The more you asserted your own civil authority and refined knowledge, the more
you were brought face to face with the implications of your own barbarism. When the poet
W.B. Yeats walked into London Zoo – itself a form of museum – late in the nineteenth century,
he headed straight for the monkey house and then wrote a letter asking a friend a leading
question: ‘Do you not think that monkeys might not be degenerate men – hence their look of
wizened age?’ In short, he offered a subversive reversal of the more ‘optimistic’ Darwinian
model. In Yeats’ museum, the visitor would first have confronted the present moment, and
then gone back over time, to the period of primitive man, who had so much more to teach us.
He would have had his visitors walk in straight lines, but in the opposite direction to most, for
this is what Yeats wrote in defence of his own theory of devolution or degeneration:
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Still, it’s hard to deny the force of Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the philosophy of history. Its
most famous paragraph reads like, though not intended as such, a call to close down every
museum in Europe:
Whoever has emerged victorious in battle participates to this day in the triumphal
procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called
cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment.
For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot
contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the
great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their
contemporaries. There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a
document of barbarism, and just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.
A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards
it as his task to brush history against the grain.
The questions raised by Benjamin are immense, but they are rooted in one simple enough
idea: that the victors always think history is over, having come to a culmination in them, and
that all knowledge has been stabilised once and for all. I remember having that feeling of great
privilege, even as a nine-year-old child, when my parents first took me to the National Museum of Ireland. We dutifully inspected everything: Stone Age flints, Bronze Age cups, brooches
worn by Gaelic ladies, but the images that stayed in my imagination for years afterward were
the charred uniforms of the leaders of the Easter Rebellion. This was as near as history got; it
was a version of the sublime, evoking extreme danger, vicariously experienced by one not actually in peril himself, as I fondly imagined, because, with the permission of the glass case
around the uniforms, it seemed possible to conclude that the whole aspect of our history was
over.
In later years as a student at Trinity, I lived for four years within a three-minute walk of the
National Museum, but never went in, because I had come to feel troubled by the implications
surrounding the images. I was bothered not just by the idea that the history of the Irish struggle for self-determination was concluded (which it patently wasn’t), but also by the simplification of Patrick Pearse into a military hero, without a due weighting being given to his literary
achievements as poet, playwright and storyteller, to his liberal child-centred philosophy of
education, or to his insistence that tradition was living and vital and not a thing to be
embalmed. As I read Pearse’s thoughts and considered his life in Trinity’s libraries, the museum
version began to seem a misrepresentation of much that he stood for.
On another Trinity course I was reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose fate struck me as
strangely like that of Pearse. Here was another gifted, versatile man in his thirties, a courtier,
soldier, scholar, about to come into his own when he met a ghost from the nightmare of history, and henceforth could never become his true self. Although the role of military revenger was
In a similar tragedy of mistaken identity, Pearse and Connolly have passed into Irish iconography attired forever in that most inappropriate costume, the military uniform, whereas the real
meaning of the revolution which they led was that there should be no more copying of
approved costumes and that everyone would thereafter feel free to wear their own clothes.
In calling for a learning that brushes history against its own grain, Walter Benjamin implied
an approach which would not just privilege the winners but also the losers of battles, and
beyond them the vast majority who just got on with other lives and took little interest in such
contests. The problem is obvious: how to document the subaltern, the marginal, the ones who
leave fewer records of themselves, and often none, at official level? And who is to define and
set those limits? After all, if Joyce’s Mr Deasy had lived long enough to see the Easter rebels’
uniforms in the National Museum, he might well have regarded them as a wholly inappropriate presence, a subversion of so much that the earlier objects in the collection stood for. All we
can say for sure is that every triumphant nationalism tends to use museums to mythologise
itself, with the attendant simplification that seems too often to be the price of explanation at a
popular level. Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children provides a tell-tale example of how
this very process of museumisation begins even before independence has been won.
In Midnight’s Children, just before January 1948, a rising Indian businessman, Ahmed Sinai,
buys a colonial estate from the departing Englishman, Mr Methwold, and he gets it at a bargain price, but only on a condition: that the sale will be closed on Independence Day and that
until then every ornament and item of furniture will be left exactly as it is. This is the great
deceit perpetrated by post-colonial time – to make everything appear to stand still and to
freeze everything in just that state it was in at the moment of independence. One consequence
in Rushdie’s telling is that the emerging middle class which buys the British out doesn’t really
inherit a dynamic, evolving society so much as a post-colonial museum, over which the new
elites will merely preside as custodians.
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one to which he was thoroughly ill-suited, he was compelled to fill it and he became in consequence a character obsessed with role-playing, a frequenter of theatres, a coach of good and
bad actors, a mimic who could in the end play many different parts except his own. In Act V
of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet disappears and reappears as a sort of ghost come back from the
dead, much as Pearse and Connolly eternally return, their words and meanings simplified and
insisting that those who follow them simplify themselves too. Having hovered for four acts
between an assigned role and an emerging self, Hamlet finally surrenders to the revenger’s
plot. Anyone who has loved the Hamlet of the earlier acts can only feel betrayed by the gutwrenching irony of that closing scene in which Fortinbras orders a soldier’s burial for a man
who was everything else but a militarist – a poet, philosopher, scholar, lover, clown, but a soldier least of all. The true Hamlet wished to live his life as a thing particular to himself and had
expressed huge reservation about a derring-do soldier such as Fortinbras, but he is doomed to
have his meaning for posterity set by this man of action: ‘Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the
grave. For he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally’.
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The task of curators, of course, is to resist this notion of a knowledge that has been stabilised
once and for all, and to mount displays that recognise that history is an open process, never
concluded, not even fully representable, and seldom agreed over by its chief interpreters. But
the odds against such openness are huge, because it is a perfectly natural thing for peoples who
have emerged victorious after a period of struggle to wish to memorialise that phase of their
development, whether they be the Jews emerging after the Holocaust, or South African blacks
recovering from apartheid.
The question curators face is how to give as full as possible an account without lapsing into
nationalist apologetics. Some curators have to document nations without nationalism and
peoples who elude national categories altogether. By their nature, museums are as selective as
literary anthologies, which in many respects they greatly resemble, precisely because they are
often the result of a colonial encounter and are based on the notion that a native culture need
not be known whole and entire but can be studied through representative examples or characteristic extracts. It is surprising how tenacious this tradition of anthologising has remained,
even in the age of post-colonialism. While it might be easy to understand why British scholars
produced anthologies of Indian or Gaelic literature in the nineteenth century to assist administrators in the task of knowing the mind-set of their subjects, it is harder to understand why
contemporary Indian and Irish scholars keep on producing such anthologies. It is a high irony
that the most anti-colonial of all cultural movements in contemporary Ireland, the Field
Day Company of Derry, is the one that produced a now five-volume anthology of the entire
conspectus of Irish history and writing from earliest times to the present. The underlying idea
– that you can study a whole civilisation from its rise to its demise – is deeply embedded in
colonial ideology, for the colonialists felt that they alone could construe the natives who might
never be expected to construe themselves. But in that last phrase lurks the makings of an
explanation: for, as Seamus Deane observed in justifying the Field Day Anthology, if people
are going to have to live in enclaves and ghettos, they might at least be enclaves and ghettos of
their own making, as opposed to sites constructed by others.
This may serve better as a strategy for literary intellectuals, however, because words are less at
the mercy of material conditions than are objects, the lingua franca of museum-keepers. Slave
narratives, oral traditions, folk tales all allow the literary scholar at least the possibility of
reconstructing some of the counter-narratives that opposed the old world systems: but the
actual objects used in such acts of resistance were less likely to have survived intact. And
because they deal in objects, palpable, solid, measurable, museums seem to give material form
almost immediately to official versions of the past, reinforcing a type of ‘public memory’ which
privileges the social over the personal and so narrows the definition of what the ‘political’
might in fact be.
Often the old structures of thought remain surprisingly unchallenged. For instance, the
British imperial obsession with militaria was replicated in the Irish National Museum of my
youth, despite the fact that Pearse saw soldiering as a mere means to the recovery of a cultural
sovereignty that might have been more fully represented through exhibits. What I am suggest-
For instance, in South Africa today curators are quite rightly refusing to throw out many of
the old exhibits first collected and mounted by exponents of a racist regime, but they are
recaptioning them in ways that ask pertinent questions; questions such as: why are less than 1
per cent of the 4000 national monuments of South Africa related to a pre-colonial African
heritage? Large museums have semi-permanent exhibitions which militate against rapid
change, but which can be destabilised by the use of counter-images, or by using captions that
ask visitors to consider the relationship between knowledge and power. In whose interest was a
particular collection first staged? Moreover, the South Africans, like the Irish before them, are
converting famous buildings from past history into sites that investigate the ways in which the
past may be reconstructed. If in Dublin Kilmainham Gaol has gone from being an image of
oppression to a centre for creative arts and thence to a dynamic, interrogative museum –
which even shows how little poor prisoners got to eat compared with the comforts enjoyed by
a VIP nationalist captive such as Parnell – in South Africa the Robben Island prison has been
transformed, in the words of Patricia Davison, ‘into a symbol of transcendence over oppression, an icon of hope’. An exhibition there includes official documents of the apartheid
regime, but also letters from wives, children, friends outside, while interactive facilities (as in
Kilmainham) encourage visitors to leave their own comments and analyses. Even in this
process, alas, memory is selective, for Robben Island is not strictly being preserved so much as
transformed to another use, and the sheer numbers of tourists now descending on it pose a
new kind of threat to the archive of the African National Congress. One could imagine a similar fate for the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland in years to come. Just as there are now
Robben Island tee-shirts, tea-cups and ball-point pens, there may some day be Maze wallets,
Maze harps and Maze belts on sale in an interactive museum onsite.
The best way of challenging the old ‘straight-line’ colonialist versions of the museum is to subvert the seemingly timeless authority of all past exhibits by constantly reminding viewers of
the present and of the fact that every narrative construct is made at the mercy of the present
moment, as is every subsequent act of interpretation. What is a past moment for us was once
someone else’s uncertain present. What is present now is no more privileged, no more secure
or lasting, but liable to further subversion and disruption itself. If museums, in doing this, can
make viewers less sure of the ground on which they stand, they will have genuinely educated
their users. They will do this most effectively of all if they cure them of that temporal provincialism of mind which used to make viewers believe that they were history’s cutting edge, the
grand climax of civilisation rehearsed and approached in all those exhibition rooms. The ways
in which museums once fed this illusion might well be one of the major topics for study, and,
after that perhaps, the ways in which more modern museums have thrown all such understandings into question. Many of the older collections that purported to construe the lives of
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ing is too obvious: if public memory has been powerfully shaped by regime, it may need to be
forcefully reshaped by its successor. This is all the more vital given the fact that children are
among the most frequent users and will have their initial understandings of the past strongly
influenced by the images on display and, even more crucially, by the uses to which such
images are put.
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African tribesmen or Irish peasants were put together by confident aristocrats who never once
stopped to think that some day a time would come when viewers of these exhibitions would
begin to construe the texts that purported to construe them. A telling question, now posed on
captions in some museums, is whether the object on exhibition should be returned to its natural context.
If in the post-colonial novels of Chinua Achebe, Alice Walker and Salman Rushdie the empire
writes back, and in the process rewrites some of the classic narratives of Europe, the same
thing is happening in many museums. Let me offer some working analogies. Some years ago a
writer from Africa named Tayeb Salih wrote a book called Season of Migration to the North: it
was about a guest-worker in a great European capital city and the privations he suffered, but it
was composed as a contrapuntal version of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness.
Whereas Conrad’s Europeans had sailed up the Congo river into the bush, there to discover
absolute barbarism and African natives who could scarcely be represented in English words,
Salih preferred to perform his own reverse anthropology on the heart of darkness and uncommunicative, unwelcoming natives of a European city. The Strokestown Park Museum, curated
by Luke Dodd at County Roscommon, seems to work off a similarly contrapuntal method. It
displays the impressive ornaments, paintings, stucco plasterwork, furniture, kitchen utensils
and childhood toys of an Anglo-Irish residence, but not in the usual coffee-table-book style.
That style, favoured by many exponents of the heritage industry, is to dehistoricise the Big
House by separating it wholly from its past of domination over a local tenantry and to render
it up solely as a timeless art-object filled with others’ objets d’art. What Luke Dodd did, however, was to create alongside the stately house a Famine Museum which examined local interactions between landlord and tenant in the Great Hunger, including the scheme of the local
gentry to pay for the passage of 800 hungry tenants to the new world. Half died en route, and
one young man among the stay-at-homes, separated from his departed lover forever, took
revenge by shooting the landlord, whose killing was celebrated by bonfires among the remaining tenantry. The Famine Museum uses local papers, court records and handwritten letters to
measure the human cost of all the elegance in the Big House, but the contrapuntal method is
subtle too, for it allows the record of the landed estate to show what great sacrifices were made
by the landlord’s own sons for the project of the empire. These sacrifices finally included the
house itself, whose refurbishment was made possible by the wealth and generosity of one of
the ‘risen people’, a local garage owner.
This contrapuntal technique may be used most effectively of all in museums in Northern
Ireland, where two utterly contested versions of the past exist side by side, with no short-term
likelihood of resolution. A Dublin-born curator of the Orchard Gallery in Derry decided that,
where a conflict seems insoluble, it is better to teach the conflict as such than to adopt
Olympian positions. So the past century of sectarian conflict in this city is represented by a
single street with two footpaths on either side – one nationalist, the other unionist. (At the
official launch, the Reverend Ian Paisley was photographed by a mischievous cameraman
under the signpost pointing to a United Ireland, and John Hume under one pointing towards
final, full integration within the United Kingdom.)
It is probably inevitable in such a context that museums will sometimes succumb to the temptation of giving idealised versions of past societies, especially when people begin to despair of
achieving a transformed future, as was the case in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, which seemed
filled with Victorian rediscoveries and re-enactments. However, Raphael Samuel has rightly
questioned a tendency among socialists to engage in what he called, memorably, ‘heritagebaiting’. Many of the recently built heritage centres, for all their simplifications, have restored
to ordinary people a sense of the material conditions in which their ancestors were asked to
live their lives. Most who disapproved of such things were document-driven historians, fixated
on archival research and on the textual. Raphael Samuel contended that if more demographic
historians actually visited such heritage sites or actually dressed up as Victorian fathers or
mothers, they might indeed write a more felt and convincing form of history. He asked
whether some element of the critique of heritage centres might not be based on old-style snobbery in the face of a project that restores a mass entertainment value to the analysis of lived
history. He ended his chapter on heritage-baiting with a magnificent corrective:
The perceived opposition between ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’, and the unspoken,
unargued-for assumption that pleasure is almost by definition mindless, ought not to
go unchallenged. There is no reason to think that people are more passive when looking
at old photographs or film-footage, handling a museum exhibit, following a local history
trail, or even buying a historical souvenir, than when reading a book.
All that said, the best way to connect ourselves and our children to past monuments is to take
things out of glass cases and enclosing frames, in order to show that the past is never really
past, never completely over. Rather, it is a process, crying out for understanding. The task of
the teacher or curator, like that of the historian, is literally to re-member, to put the different
parts of its body back together again, and to restore to it the fuller context that once it had.
There is a beautiful poem by Seamus Heaney which bears on this theme: it’s called ‘Bog Queen’.
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Northern Ireland in general has a wonderful variety of museums, many of them recreations of
past communities, such as the American-Ireland Museum in Tyrone or the Folk Museum in
Cultra. When first I visited Cultra with the critic John Wilson Foster, he pointed waggishly to
the large sign outside which read ‘Folk Museum’ and said, ‘There’s only one thing wrong with
that sign. It’s in the wrong place. It should be at Aldergrove Airport at the entrance to Northern Ireland. The whole place is a folk museum.’ This was not necessarily a serious criticism.
After all, a people who have no art but do everything as well as they can are also likely to want
to keep the tokens of the past within the integrated world of their own present, rather than
sequestering them in the clinical conditions of a museum. The very existence of museums as
sites of preservation suggests the predicament of a culture that lacks other, more natural methods of preserving old things. Museums, in effect, are a sign of a rampant modernity rather
than of a fixation upon the past. They appeal to a society forever liquidating its own past more
than they do to one that still has a practical use for it.
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Most of Heaney’s bog poems speak about bodies exhumed from the turf in Jutland, but this
figure (feminine and Irish) speaks for herself:
I lay waiting
between turf-face and demesne wall
between heathery levels
and glass-toothed stone.
Caught between the native Irish boglands and the demesne walls of the ascendancy, she awaits
(like rebels and rapparees) for the moment when she may rise again. The bog preserves not
just her body but her consciousness. Like all who make Freud’s desperate bargain to live with the
discontents that alone make a culture possible, she has in fact been preserved by the sheer weight
of the earth that suffocated her. She is also proof that the dead, though often forgotten, are never
truly gone; and since they do not even know that they are dead, may just be wintering out:
My skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair
which they robbed.
I was barbered
and stripped
by a turfcutter’s spade
who veiled me again
and packed coom softly
between the stone jambs
of my head and my feet.
The kindly turfcutter who dug her up by accident, in a quite literal sense ‘remembered’ her,
reassembling her bones in proper order before the discreet ‘veiling’. This was, of course, that
very moment for which all along she had been waiting, that instant when she would re-enter
human minds as a troubling challenge.
The facts, however, record, that when she was dug out on Lord Moira’s estate in 1781, her body
was not accorded the dignity deserved by such patient, prayerful waiting. The cutter was paid
in cash and Lady Moira plundered the corpse, which the cutter might respectfully have
restored to its resting place:
Till a peer’s wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
a slimy birth-cord
of bog, had been cut
and I rose from the dark,
hacked bone, skull-wave,
frayed stitches, tufts,
small gleams on the bank.
Yet in ‘Bog Queen’, more in its rhythms than its statements, there is enacted a dignified hope.
The greater the insult to the body, the surer the queen’s eventual revival from it. Although she
feels violated by the planter’s wife, she also finds a sweet confirmation of her hope that she
could rise again, to re-enter the human mind. Though made available for contemplation as
exhibit in an aristocrat’s museum, she is rescued for human dignity by Heaney’s imagination,
which recreates a fuller context for her total story. His poem is actually an attack upon a certain kind of museumisation, that sort with which I began. It is a refusal to connive in the common curatorial desire to present anything old as an art work, an effect most often achieved by
removing the object from its first enabling context. And the danger is that which attaches to so
many old museums – that a discourse of connoisseurship (such as Lady Moira’s) will take the
place of the turfcutter’s honest workings. Better by far to return such objects to the bog, which
will preserve them more fully than any museum. The problem with the colonial museum is
the rather restricted role it accords to the dead, for, unlike Heaney’s poem, it gives them no
chance to answer back.
A better model of the past would be more dialectical. It would recognise what Yeats once said:
that the dead may not even know that they are dead but just keep on talking. Tradition can
never be stabilised. The past can never be completely used up but will retain unfinished energies, still to be unleashed in a troubled present. This revolutionary use of tradition is quite at
odds with that of the colonialist. It sees in a past moment a molecule which, as in a chemical
experiment, collides into the molecule that is the present, releasing wholly new energies into
the utopian museum that is the future. This is a knowledge incapable of fixity, but one that
brings us face to face with our own strangeness as human agents in history.
Heaney’s poetic project – so often linked to objects in the National Museum of Ireland –
moves to a sort of climax in ‘Bog Queen’. That project is to give the dead not just votes but
voices, to recall them from the insolence of forgetfulness and what E.P. Thompson called ‘the
enormous condescension of posterity’. In the images of the museum Heaney found the real
unfinished business of the modern Irish Republic, that sense of lost energies in need of reactivation and a sense of his own as yet unexcavated depths as a person.
And that, in the end, is the only really good reason to walk into a museum or a gallery – in
order to come, as if by accident, upon some unexpected, long-lost but immensely healing element of our own buried selves. If museums can reconnect us with our own strangeness, they
can fulfil a useful and beautiful function.
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The grave decorum of the earlier stanzas is turbo-charged at the close and some readers have
heard in its lines an echo of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, a witch back from the dead in vengeful
mode, protesting the insult to a body reduced to mere exhibit. Deeper still is the anonymity of
pain, as suffering erases all traces of the individual and past wars spill over into the present.
Even the dead, as Walter Benjamin said, can never be wholly safe from an enemy who wins.
And this raises a deeper issue: are we that enemy who wins? Why is it all right to display bones
of a man who died in ad 52 but not of one who died in ad 1952?
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Select Bibliography
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (London, 1972).
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
Seamus Heaney, North (London, 1975).
James Joyce, Ulysses (London, 1991).
Margaret Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea (Harmondsworth, 1966).
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London, 1981).
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London, 1994).
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (London, 1966).
Patricia Davison, Negotiating the Past: South Africa (Oxford, 1998).
David Fleming
Director, Museums and Galleries of Mersyside
I speak with no small sense of trepidation on this subject, for I am no education specialist, yet
this meeting is billed as an education symposium. Nor am I especially knowledgeable about
the intellectual and sensory processes that we might describe as ‘learning’, which are at the
heart of the question I am supposed to be answering. I could sink rapidly and without trace in
the quicksands of education and learning. Ah, but this is about learning and museums, and I’ve
worked in museums for twenty-one years, so I should be able to find some solid ground there.
But then I thought learning in museums was ‘taken seriously’ nowadays. Isn’t it?
What are my credentials for speaking to you? Let’s get back to basics: I have said, often
enough, in my own crude way, that museums are solely about learning; sometimes that comes
out as ‘museums are solely about education’, so with such a sloppy interchange of terms you
can tell I’m no academic. Actually, it was back in 1979 that I first began to think in these
terms. That was when I was an academic, albeit only with very modest talents, and working as
a historical researcher and jobbing lecturer. As I ploughed my way through thick volumes on
the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, desperately trying to keep
one step ahead of the disinterested students I was supposed to be teaching; and as I delved
more deeply into my own arcane subject of research – the pre-industrial market town, if you
really must know – thus slowly but surely fading from the view of normal society, I began to
wish for more from my working life. The idea grew inside me that I wanted to get involved
in education and find a use for myself in an area where I felt moderately competent, that is,
history. But the target audience I had in mind for receiving the benefit of my vast store of
historical knowledge was not children, who, thankfully, had plenty of access through school to
far better teachers of history than I could ever hope to be, but adults. And, quite precisely,
adults who had, perhaps, never themselves had much of a schooling. It seemed to me then – it
still does – that there are very many people, mostly, it has to be said, from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, who leave school, often at a relatively young age, and
who spend a lot of their adult lives wondering what might have been. What if they had been
better at school? What if they had worked harder instead of messing about? What if someone
had shown an interest in their education, and given them some encouragement? There are
many families, which we might describe as working class, where this is still the common adult
experience, even in these days of far greater access to further and higher education.
So, there I was, in search of adults with a truncated formal education, to excite about history. I
tried the Workers Educational Association, and I tried the Open University, but neither catered
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What would it be like if learning in museums was taken seriously?
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primarily for the targets I was looking for. I decided that the museum was the medium where
I could achieve my ambitions. How naïve of me.
What I discovered, of course, when I found myself working in the museum sector, was an
extremely complex set of contradictory attitudes. There were in those days, in the early 1980s,
such things as education officers in museums, though there weren’t that many. In the first local
authority museum I worked in, quite a big one, there weren’t any. In my second local authority museum service in Hull, there were three, including the driver, but they worked not for an
Education Department but a Schools Services Department, and much of their energy was
spent administering a school loans collection rather than, for example, influencing exhibitions. The salaries of these staff were, moreover, paid by Humberside County Council’s Education Committee, not by the City Council which funded the rest of the museum service. It
was a service to schoolchildren that the County Council was interested in, not lifelong learning or any other such newfangled notion.
Against this kind of background the learning power of museums was well and truly in the
hands of curators, not people who could be described as educational specialists.
Come 1990 and I found myself working for my third local authority service. By now there had
been some progress, and at Tyne and Wear Museums there were actually some museum education staff, funded out of core budgets. The trouble was that, however valuable the work of these
staff with schools or other parties in pre-booked groups, they still had virtually no influence
in other aspects of the service’s role – exhibitions, displays, publications. They were there to do
a specific job, by and large, and ‘interpretation’ of the collections was very much in the hands
of the curators. Education staff were not organised into a department, and there was no coordination of effort. Education and learning were not high on TWM’s corporate agenda and
the staff did not feel especially valued. From discussions with education staff over the years I
have to conclude that this was a common situation throughout the 1990s, and, I fear, it is not
uncommon today. Hence, I imagine, the validity of the title of this paper.
Now, museums before there were education officers, or before such people might come to
develop an influential role, need not inevitably have been places where learning was not taken
seriously. After all, the curators were there, and the lack of a formal training in educational or
communication matters in itself need not prevent them from being effective educators or
communicators. There have always been curators who wish to educate and improve understanding of their collections. Indeed, since the earliest days of museum collections they have
been viewed as engines of learning. It would be way off the mark to suggest otherwise. Since
classical times collections have been assembled for a variety of reasons – religious, aesthetic, for
their curiosity value, for the prestige they might convey, but also because of their value as
historical evidence, as evidence of alien cultures, or because of their scientific value. Certainly,
by the early nineteenth century it was widely understood that museums had a clear educational
value. Indeed, in 1823 the Vicar of Bradford was so alarmed at the prospect of a museum being
founded in his town and enabling those of a humble background to be educated beyond their
Why, then, if museums were so often created with the express purpose of encouraging people
to better themselves through learning, did we ever come to need education officers? Were
museums so unsuccessful in promoting learning that the need was eventually acknowledged
for a new breed of specialist – the educationalist? In a word, yes. Now, I believe that at no time
since the days of those early British municipal museums has the curatorial profession believed
other than that museums are places for learning – in 1890, for example, the Chairman of the
Liverpool Museum Committee said that while ‘the soul of the Museum is the Curator, success
therein is the teaching of the truth, whatever form it may take, as communicated through
lessons from objects’. I also believe, however, that somewhere along the way, the democratic
aims of the early museums were subverted by people who, instead of striving to make museums accessible and valuable to all, continued to make them formidable and forbidding to all
but the already well-educated.
The example of the work of Molly Harrison, who died just three months ago aged eighty-two,
is the kind of exception that proves the rule. Harrison ran the Geffrye Museum in east London between 1940 and 1969. She wrote: ‘The primary function of the museum is to educate.
Its essential contribution should be the enlightenment and inspiration of its visitors; the conservation and preservation of exhibits must be a means to a much wider end’. Harrison was no
posturer. The bulk of the Geffrye’s visitors were poor, and poorly educated. ‘Education’, she
wrote, ‘is much more a matter of environment and of deepening sensitivity than of instruction
or exhortation’, but then she was not a trained curator, but a trained schoolteacher, hired by
the Geffrye in response to the wishes of its new governing body, a municipal Education Committee, which wanted to develop the museum as a resource for schools.
There have, of course, been others who, like Molly Harrison, wanted museums to play an
important learning role, but others still would have subscribed to the following, penned in
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station that he condemned the proposal from his pulpit and killed the idea off. Elsewhere,
museums fared better, and in Norwich, for example, the Literary Institute agreed in 1824 to set
up a museum for the ‘scientific instruction to the inhabitants of this city’. By 1827 the
Committee of the Institute was positively encouraging schoolchildren to visit. By 1845 the
British Government formally acknowledged the educational value of museums by passing the
Museums Act, intended to promote the ‘instruction and amusement’ of the public, which
authorised municipal authorities to provide museums. In 1855 the Committee of the Free Public Library and The Derby Museum in Liverpool noted with some satisfaction ‘the increasing
desire shown to participate in [the institution’s] benefits by the operative classes, for whose
benefit the lending libraries were specially established’. The Committee also felt moved to
note, with some relief, that ‘the conduct of the visitors has been satisfactory in the highest
degree’. Note the easy linking of museum and library; in many respects the nineteenth-century museums were regarded by their creators as very closely related to libraries. There was a
strong sense of meeting a public need, and while the motives may have been complex, the
anticipated outcome of such ventures was undeniably a learning outcome on the part of ordinary, non-specialist audiences.
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1984: ‘The primary duty of museums is not didactic. The public must have an aesthetic,
cultural experience… The visitor must not be pandered to by labels in "Noddy" language, by
coloured flashing lights, blonde information officers or any of those caricatures and gimmicks
beloved of the educational administrator venturing into the museum field. The museum’s
client is generally intelligent and able to read and even use libraries… Good taste and restraint
are vital’. No idle musings of an obscure curator this, but the considered comments of the
Director of the British Museum.
And there we have it. Museums are more about good taste and restraint than about learning.
Admittedly, not all curators would have subscribed to these views, and it seems likely, I hope,
that Sir David Wilson had at least some of his tongue in his cheek. Nonetheless, there are
deep-seated attitudes about museums that have handicapped them in terms of unleashing
their learning power. These attitudes, I believe, have their origins in two features shared by
generations of museum curator. Firstly, the scholarship necessary to develop expert knowledge
about collections often created an intellectual arrogance – of the kind revealed in David Wilson’s remarks – which was incapable of opening up a meaningful access to museums for most
people. Secondly, museums have long been run by people with no understanding of the needs
of others who have not had the benefit of an extensive and extended education. Museums have
been dominated, in other words, by a self-serving intellectual elite which, despite its dependence upon public funding, has not until recently been held properly accountable to the public.
Let us acknowledge, then, that museums have taken learning seriously, but unfortunately this
has been in the most restricted sense. The people who have gained most learning benefit from
museums have not been those who have needed it most, but those who have most resembled
the museum curators themselves in being already learned, or coming from a background
where learning was encouraged. It is the legacy of this situation that we have to confront
today. Attitudes are changing, and at a meeting with the other British national museum directors earlier this week, as I looked around the table, I decided that it was inconceivable that any
of them would support the David Wilson view I quoted earlier. Well, hardly any! It is true,
though, that in some quarters attitudes are changing rather grudgingly, and in others there is
active opposition from those who argue that to promote learning for all, a museum must
devalue itself and dumb down. There is still much to achieve.
Let us try to describe a museum where learning is taken seriously. Such a museum would have
stated, overtly and uncompromisingly, that education and learning are at the heart of what it
is for. This statement might well be accompanied by other imperatives, some of them a direct
consequence of a learning agenda, others linked more obliquely. For example, a mission or a
vision might declare that a museum aims to collect, and to look after its collections. Nonetheless, research, collecting, documentation, conservation, marketing, strategic planning, project
management, fundraising, design, the creation of exhibitions, publications and communications – all these endeavours are in the cause of learning. This view would have been expressed
by the museum’s governing body, and a majority of its staff would subscribe to the view with
enthusiasm. We are talking of policy, whole-museum policy.
This last belief is significant because, arguably, it takes the learning agenda one further step,
and suggests what the learning is for – social change. This Statement of Purpose and Beliefs is
evidence, I would argue, that TWM is a museum service where learning is now taken very
seriously indeed.
At National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside we are a few years behind TWM in this,
but we are changing fast. Currently we are working on creating an agreed vision for the organisation. This vision will assuredly place learning at the centre of what we do and why we exist,
and a phrase which we keep repeating in this process is that we wish to ‘unleash our educational power’. Looking back at the notes I prepared for my job interview as Director of
NMGM in June 2001 I see that I put this a slightly different way when I said that NMGM
must aim ‘to be a social, cultural and educational powerhouse’. The words and phrases are still
coming into focus, but the ambition is clear: we will become a museum service where learning
is taken very seriously. This is our vision and this is our policy.
In the museum where learning is taken seriously, there is a staffing structure that gives education and learning a place at the top table, and a significant proportion of the staffing budget is
given over to education staff. At Glasgow Museums 11 per cent of the staff are education staff,
and about 6 per cent of the total budget is devoted to education. At NMGM we have forty
education staff, the annual wage bill for whom is £_ million, i.e. 7.25 per cent of the staff budget,
or 5 per cent of the total budget. This is the kind of distribution of budget in the museum that
takes learning seriously.
So, in our learning-centred museum we have a learning-centred mission, and we have an
appropriate level of resource invested in education staff. There must, in addition, be an organisational culture that promotes and celebrates learning. If visitors and other users are to learn
from their contact with the museum, then the museum has to have ingrained within it a real
commitment to team working, and has to have a level of trust and respect between staff who
have different skills, which is often missing in museums. There are no elites. There are no
groups of staff whose outputs are less valued than those of others. There is a hierarchy, but the
museum is not hierarchical. In this way true integration of effort can take place on the basis of
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At Tyne and Wear Museums, where I worked for twelve years, we, the staff, prepared a Statement of Purpose and Beliefs, which was adopted by our governing body, the Tyne and Wear
Joint Museums Committee. This statement included the mission: ‘To help people determine
their place in the world, and understand their identities, so enhancing their self-respect and
their respect for others’. The statement went on to list our core beliefs, which included:
We make a positive difference to people’s lives.
We inspire and challenge people to explore their world and open up new horizons.
We are a powerful educational and learning resource for all the community, regardless
of age, need or background.
Also:
We act as an agent of social and economic regeneration.
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an understanding of roles and of purpose. So many museums have curators on a pedestal,
because they are the ones with greatest knowledge of the collections. But if this knowledge
cannot be unlocked it is of no value, and it can only be unlocked by the curators learning to
work, as equals, with people who have other knowledge, other skills. All successful teams
contain individuals with complementary skills. Nobody would ever pick a soccer team made
up entirely of goalkeepers, or strikers, if they wanted it to succeed; it is the blend of different
skills that makes it work. So it is with museums.
Therefore, when it comes to creating exhibitions, or educational programmes, or publications,
the learning-centred museum harnesses all its talents, and from their outset these projects
involve, among others, education specialists. It may be that these education specialists take the
lead in exhibitions – why not? There’s nothing more useless than an exhibition from which
nobody learns, unless it’s one that nobody visits.
In the learning-centred museum, staff are able to take risks. There is no blame culture, so that
when things don’t work there are no recriminations, just lessons to be learned. Staff are given
credit when things go well. The museum experiments and tries to do things differently, to see
whether there are better ways. Staff are encouraged to learn and broaden their own skills
through training programmes and other development opportunities.
Change is regarded as a good thing, not a threat, and change is anticipated, not just reacted to.
In a fast-moving world, the learning-centred museum moves fast.
The learning-centred museum is comfortable with the notion that people have different needs
and different ways of learning. We cannot control what people learn, and there is no monocultural approach to learning that can come through quiet contemplation or dressing up and
role-playing noisily. The audience may be relatively learned, or it may be utterly inexperienced; it may be highly receptive, or difficult and awkward. Techniques may be high tech, or
no tech, visual or aural, written or spoken. You might, as they say, ‘see it, hear it and feel it’.
The spice of the museum where learning is taken seriously is the variety, of medium and of
message. Moreover, the museum does not expect its users to have to get themselves embroiled
in a workshop or other organised, possibly pre-booked activity in order to learn. It is understood that most users will visit the museum and simply take as they find: they will view an
exhibition which, hopefully, will provoke a reaction, will change their view of the world somehow. It might stimulate them in any number of ways, gently or vigorously. It might have
museum collections on show, it might not – perhaps the theme of the exhibition does not lend
itself to the display of objects. That’s alright. It’s the learning that’s important, the end, not the
means. Nobody ever wrote a rule that said museums must restrict themselves to displaying
material culture, their own or someone else’s, though there are people who wish someone had.
The learning-centred museum will tackle difficult, contemporary issues, or issues with a
contemporary relevance. It will offer up observations on the state of the environment, not just
display lots of rocks; it will make the links between the architectural splendour of modern
In our learning-centred museum we research our audiences, existing and potential, and we
devise learning programmes to suit them. We listen to our public. We evaluate everything we
do. We do not simply hunt project-funding, lurching from one learning scheme to another,
but we have a strategy and we have core funding. We have fast-track procedures for new audiences, who want things today or tomorrow, not in five years’ time. We recognise that without
access there can be no learning, so we take the broadest view of access imaginable – not just
the physical but the intellectual; not just the programme but the promotion; not just the message but the medium. We wish to see the diversity of our communities properly represented in
our museums. We remove all the barriers we can think of, including admission charges.
There are lots of techniques we can use to maximise our learning value, most of which help
create a varied and stimulating environment for our diverse audiences. For example, ensuring
that language, or languages, are appropriate, with different reading-age levels; using in-gallery
demonstrators; using handling collections in all displays; having loans collections and travelling exhibitions; having flexible opening hours; having huge web sites; producing a range of
publications; allowing access to stored collections; using varied design techniques and varied
media; involving community groups in creating exhibitions. You will all be familiar with these
and other approaches, at least if you work in museums that take learning seriously.
These are some of the techniques we can adopt to put learning centre-stream. But there is
more that we must do. The museum needs to be networked on a grand scale. Unless it has
scores, perhaps hundreds, of community, cultural and educational partnerships, it cannot
claim to be learning-centred. These partnerships provide new ideas, contacts, information,
audiences and confidence, and they can often enable the museum to shortcut to the relationships based on trust which are so important when museums attempt to work with socially
excluded people. Such partnerships are not one-way streets, and museums can play a learning
role in, for example, helping the professional development of teachers and other educators.
We can have work exchanges. We should consult with partners on exhibitions, publications
and the rest; we need to be a listening organisation.
If we were to do a SWOT analysis of education and learning in the learning-centred museum,
I guess that we might come up with something like the following:
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Liverpool, and the obscenity of the slave trade that so enriched Liverpool merchants; it will
consider the Troubles in Ulster, or homelessness, or AIDS. But more than this, the learningcentred museum will actively seek out people who do not or who may not use museums, and
pursue programmes designed to include them. It will take positive action. Hence, for example,
our projects with asylum-seekers in Liverpool. Personally, I have never, for a moment, been
dissuaded from undertaking this kind of targeted project by critics who claim it to be patronising, when what they mean is that they would prefer you to spend resources on something
mainstream for the already included, usually themselves.
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Strengths
Highest corporate priority
Supportive senior management
Excellent specialist staff
Staff central in structure
Excellent interdepartmental co-operation
Wide range of experience
Good media coverage of activity
Regional and national profile
Award-winning
Innovative
Free service
Internal and external networks
Links with formal education
Wide range of services
Use of volunteers, placements, etc.
Good training and development
Flexible and responsive
Input into all areas of museum work
Access and audience development programmes
Varied collections and exhibitions
Interactive exhibitions
Designated children’s and other education galleries
Loans collections
Strong outreach programmes
Good visitor facilities
Effective targeting of audiences
Good education facilities
Adequate budgets
Of course, with such a list of strengths we actually have no weaknesses! And there are few
opportunities not already seized, though we might imagine that more and more positive Government attitudes to education, certainly in the UK, would continue to throw up new opportunities, as would Government attitudes towards social inclusion. Indeed, it is probably
through positive shifts in Government policy, therefore increases in the availability of funding
for learning, that we see most new opportunity. As for threats, well, all sorts of things could
threaten our learning-centred museum:
Budget restrictions
Curriculum changes
Competition from other ‘attractions’
Competing IT developments
Changes in Government policy
New management, reversion to traditional values
Overwhelming workload!
Quoted material:
CURRENT OUTREACH AND SOCIAL INCLUSION INITIATIVES
The Education and Public Programmes division at National Museums and Galleries on
Merseyside (NMGM) is committed to the development of accessible and inclusive learning
opportunities for everybody, both through our core programmes for formal education groups
and general visitors, and through innovative project work.
Development work with target audiences
● disaffected young people
● older people
● disabled audiences
● ethnic-minority groups
● socially excluded audiences
Themed projects
● sustainable development and environmental conservation
● adult basic skills
Disaffected young people
We have an extensive track record in working with youth and community groups across the
city, through the development of Generations Apart and earlier initiatives. More recently, we
have developed new provision, for example:
● Working with SPRINT (Sefton Positive Response to Inclusion in Teaching) to develop a
pack specifically aimed at disaffected Key Stage 3 pupils in pupil referral or learning
suport units. The pack provides pre, during and post visit activity worksheets for teachers
based around a visit to the Natural History Centre at Liverpool Museum. A final draft of
the pack is currently with our design team, and can be made available later in the year.
● Saturday activities at Liverpool Museum every month, for 12–16s who are too old for our
children’s programme. Our first session last week offered young people the opportunity
to work with a professional graffiti artist, with accessory- and music-based workshops to
follow.
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In conclusion, Marie Bourke asked me to give some practical examples, so I will quote some
sections from a set of briefing notes prepared by our Education and Public Programmes staff
for Department of Culture, Media and Sport officials from the Education and Social Policy
Unit who visited Liverpool last week (by the way, our Education and Public Programmes
Division has just been renamed the Learning Division, and a job advert for a Head of Learning can be found in the current, November, edition of the UK Museums Journal):
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Older visitors
We have a dedicated Outreach Officer for Older People, funded through the City Memories
project. As a result we have been able to develop programmes specific to the needs of older visitors. These include:
● ‘Stroll Through Time’ at the Museum of Liverpool Life offers visitors the opportunity to
reminisce about the old days. A booklet guides visitors to the most appropriate gallery
exhibits.
● Our reminiscence boxes contain objects, smells and sounds to stimulate the memory,
and are available for loan from the Museum of Liverpool Life.
● We create ‘strolls’ and reminiscence activities for temporary exhibitions, including Teddy
Bear Story at Liverpool Museum, and the forthcoming Indian Presence in Liverpool
exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool Life.
Disabled people
NMGM is committed to developing more accessible public programmes. Examples of our
work to develop disabled audiences include:
● Imaging the Body – a seminar to tie in with a recent exhibition of Marc Quinn
sculptures.
● DaDaFest – last December, NMGM supported the North West Disability Arts Forum’s
pilot festival by hosting a temporary exhibition of art and photography by participants in
a local mental health project, and through the programming of sign-interpreted tours
and events. We aim to build on this commitment year on year, and to implement the
successful activities piloted in the Festival in our core programme.
● A web exhibition of artwork created by visually impaired members of the Liverpool
Voluntary Society for the Blind can be viewed on our website at www. nmgm. org. uk/lvsb.
● Working with the Chance to Be Included project, which offers Basic Skills courses to
adults in Sefton with learning disabilities. Visits include the opportunity for students to
question and work with museum facilitators, in order to build confidence and develop
communication skills.
Ethnic-minority groups
Liverpool is a diverse city. Its black and Chinese communities are amongst the oldest in the
country. We aim to ensure that the diverse population of Liverpool is reflected in the delivery
of our public programmes, and in our audience. Examples of our work in this area include:
● NMGM hosts an annual event to mark Slavery Remembrance Day, on the quaysides
where slave ships were repaired for voyages to Africa and the Americas. Slavery Remem
brance Day is led by an advisory group of leaders from Liverpool’s black community.
It has stimulated the development of additional projects, such as this year a video
conference between pupils from Archbishop Blanch High School in Liverpool, and
young people from Simba African Caribbean Youth Project in South London. Featured
highlights from the conference are available to view on the NMGM website.
Socially excluded audiences
Liverpool is a city that experiences high levels of poverty and social exclusion. NMGM is
mindful of the fact that many people who make up our local audience may face particular barriers – financial, social, personal or physical – in visiting our venues. There are no quick solutions to these issues. However, within the Celebrating Diversity project we are trying out new
ways of building bridges between our museums, and isolated communities in Liverpool. For
example:
● Over summer 2002 we distributed 2500 passes which offered a free drink and snack
when handed in at one of our cafés. The passes were given out via different methods,
including door-to-door distribution and via community groups, and the take-up rate
analysed. Through this project it has become clear that face-to-face contact with museum staff or enthusiastic museum advocates is essential in developing relationships with
socially excluded audiences.
● We are providing information points in three of our venues, to give free and easy access
to the NMGM website and its new education and community content.
● The Conservation Centre is taking an exhibition and public programme out to venues
across Liverpool, including libraries, community centres and schools. The exhibition
offers simple advice on how people can care for their own treasured possessions and
maintain their family collections for the future.
Themed Projects
Sustainable development and environmental conservation
Our Natural History Centre at Liverpool Museum works in several ways to promote biodiversity and environmental awareness:
● Contributions to local organisations such as the Merseyside Biodiversity Group.
● Involvement in developing the RECORD biodiversity information systems for Cheshire,
Halton, Warrington and Wirral.
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● The World Cultures strand of the Celebrating Diversity project creates festival programmes in conjunction with local community groups. For example, this year we will
celebrate Diwali with the support of women from the Hindu Cultural Centre in Liverpool, who will demonstrate traditional Indian art and assist children in activities such as
sari tying and hand painting. The dance group from the Hindu Cultural Centre will perform on the gallery. Pupils from Shorefields School will be devising art and creative writing activities themed around Ramadan and Eid-ul-Fitr in this school term, to be displayed either on gallery or on the NMGM website.
● Through the Celebrating Diversity project, we have worked with refugees and asylumseekers, offering free days out with transport and refreshments provided. These holidaytime sessions, delivered in partnership with the LEA, have become increasingly popular,
and are valuable in providing a safe and secure starting point from which these families
can begin to explore Liverpool.
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● Promotion of environmental awareness through interpretation of collections and provision of information to visitors to the Natural History Centre.
● An events programme including activities such as mini beast safaris, geological walks and
bird walks.
● Outreach activities, such as delivery of sessions for Family Learning Day in partnership
with a local Education Action Zone.
● We are currently in discussions with both Mersey Ferries and Seacat about the potential
to provide a mini Natural History Centre on ferries next summer, targeting family
groups and schools with a lively programme of activities.
Adult basic skills
NMGM is working in partnership with Liverpool Community College to create resources for
tutors teaching Adult Basic Skills. The resources will be worksheets for use during a visit or in
the classroom. Two teams of tutors, in English and Maths, are working with education officers
and curators at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, HM Customs and Excise Museum and the
Museum of Liverpool Life. The English resources are currently going through the design
process, and the Maths resources are in final draft. Both will be rolled out in college in the
New Year.
We are planning to develop resources for ESOL tutors in Spring 2003, themed around ‘getting
to know Liverpool’. Clear demand has been identified for this type of resource from tutors,
many of whom are working with newly arrived refugees and asylum-seekers.
Finally, I should like to thank Sue Aldridge, Ruth Bradbury, Julia Bryan, Frank Milner, Annie
O’Neill and Kate Rodenhurst, all from NMGM, for their help in my writing this paper, and
Mark O’Neill of Glasgow Museums for permission to read his paper on Museum Education
which he delivered at the Group for Education in Museums conference held in Edinburgh in
September.
What would it be like if learning in museums was taken seriously? It would be FANTASTIC!
Jane Ryder
Director, The Scottish Museums Council
Thank you for inviting me to speak today on a subject that is of vital importance to all
who work in the museum sector – the question of how museums in the twenty-first century
operate as effective centres of learning. What contribution can and do museums make to
society’s wider learning agendas?
There are, of course, superb examples of how museums at their best constitute a formidable
force for learning and you will hear from some of them in the course of the conference. Such
examples are important because they show what is possible when a museum achieves that perfect synergy – commitment to learning embedded in the philosophy and structure of the
museum, skilled education staff, productive partnerships with other bodies and viable core
funding. Such museums act as beacons to others in the museum and learning sectors, showing
the wider potential of all museums to contribute to formal and informal learning.
But is this the picture overall? A host of recent studies have shown that current learning provision through museums is inconsistent and under-resourced, in terms of staff numbers, skills
and budget. Too many museums operate from an inadequate policy base, missing out on the
opportunities to embed museum learning in wider local authority strategies, and failing to
evaluate and develop services that are user- rather than collection-focused. Problems of underinvestment over time have meant that only the minority are in a position to make the most of
the potential for learning offered by new technology.
In the course of this conference, there will be many opportunities to explore particular
issues in depth. I would like to keep my contribution simple. I want to explore our collective
aspirations for future learning, the mounting body of evidence describing current provision,
and some ideas about mechanisms for delivery, that is, about how to bridge the gap between
aspiration and reality.
I want to look first of all at ASPIRATIONS:
● Vision: What is our vision for future learning through museums?
● Outcomes: What outcomes do we want to see as a result of increased investment in
learning through museums?
● Objectives: How specific can we be in describing what we would like to achieve?
● Priorities: Can we prioritise?
This has been an aspirational year for museums across the UK. In Scotland, the National
Audit, the first ever national survey of Scotland’s rich cultural heritage held in museums and
galleries, was launched at the beginning of July. The Audit establishes for the first time a picture of the contribution museums make not only to the preservation of our national heritage
but also to other key areas of Scottish life, such as learning, community development and
tourism. In launching the Audit, Scottish Minister for Culture, Tourism and Sport, Mike
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How are museums and galleries accessible sources of learning?
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Watson, announced a national consultation to inform the development of an Action Plan
for Museums in Scotland to be produced by Spring 2003. Incidentally, Mike Watson spoke
eloquently of his own childhood experience of the McManus Gallery in Dundee where, as
a boy on a primary school trip, he encountered and was enthralled by the skeleton of an
enormous whale washed up in Invergowrie Bay. He concluded that it was essential that
children should be offered the opportunity to learn through museum visits, and that resources
should be allocated to ‘ensuring schools and local authorities are as aware as they possibly can
be of the potential of museums and galleries in educational terms’.
Also, this summer 2002, the Scottish Executive announced a National Debate on Education.
Cathy Jamieson, Scottish Minister for Education and Young people, said that the purpose of
the National Debate was to ‘create a vision for the future, and a strategy for how to get there’,
an opportunity to ‘take stock and consider what we want from our education system in years
to come’. 15,000 people were involved in that consultation and over 1,200 responses were
received. By the time of the conference the University of Edinburgh had produced a preliminary analysis of the results and we can expect further developments in 2003.
In England, the work of the Regional Task Force, leading to the publication of Renaissance in
the Regions, set out to present a new vision and framework for museums and galleries in the
English regions. It called for museum collections and spaces to be ‘opened up for all to use in a
creative way for learning, inspiration and enjoyment’. The Task Force identified a need for a
co-ordinated approach to support formal and informal learning at all levels in order to realise
museums’ potential for learning. The most important regional museums are to become ‘beacons of excellence in learning’, providing comprehensive services to schools and adult learners,
but also acting as sources of support and models of good practice to other museums. The
Welsh Assembly meanwhile published its first National Cultural Strategy in February, and in
October announced the creation of a new strategic and advisory structure for museums,
libraries and archives in Wales. A common theme to each of these initiatives is aspiration in
the area of learning through museums.
We see recognition, at least within the sector, that museums have enormous potential to deliver
against wider learning agendas, but also acknowledgement that museums face great challenges, not least in the areas of resources and investment, if they are to do so effectively. But if
museums have aspirations, they are more than matched by the rising expectations of the
intended audience for education, entertainment and innovation.
Pachter and Landry in their recent book Culture at the Crossroads concluded:
Cultural institutions are at a crossroads. . . The conditions under which we operate are
changing, not only in the availability of resources but in the expectations placed upon
us. In response, we in the cultural sector have too often been reactors rather than actors,
retreating to old certainties and snobberies in some cases or asking how to jump in others.
If we have values we have to interpret them for our times. If we have our own ways of
contributing to the well-being of society we need to assert them.
Renaissance in the Regions advances the argument that investment in learning capacity for
museums could deliver the following outcomes:
●
Increased access to learning and education resources.
●
A comprehensive and integrated service to schools and adult learners.
● Teachers better skilled to use museums and galleries.
●
Museums as learning centres.
●
Putting objects into classroom learning.
In Scotland, the development of the Action Plan for Museums will be the opportunity to agree
a vision for learning and what that entails on a national scale. At SMC we articulate that vision
through our strategic aim to ‘promote the role of museums in contributing to the learning
society’. We believe that people in Scotland should have access to a variety of educators and
high-quality learning opportunities, and that these should be delivered within diverse educational environments. SMC identifies the following outcomes for its plans for learning over the
period to 2004:
●
●
●
●
●
Increased access to museum resources for schoolchildren and adult learners.
Effective provision for community learning in museums.
Better links between schools and museums, leading to new audiences.
Appropriate museum resources to support the curriculum.
Museum activities within 25 per cent of Cultural Co-ordinators programmes by 2004.
(The Cultural Co-ordinators scheme is a new pilot initiative funded by the Scottish Executive
to provide a link between cultural organisations and schools. Co-ordinators may be drawn
from a variety of backgrounds, for instance, teachers employed in local schools, and informal
educators or museum/arts professionals.)
An inspiring vision is emerging of what we want from museums as dynamic learning environments in the twenty-first century. Online services would open up new worlds to learners of all
ages and abilities. Curators, rich in research and scholarship, would share their knowledge
using engaging and relevant interpretative techniques. In-depth research and needs analysis
with teachers and pupils would lead to new study materials drawing on museum resources to
enrich subjects across the curriculum. Touring exhibitions and improved outreach services to
schools and communities would take the best of our collections to the greatest number of
people possible, whether they live in London, Dublin, Edinburgh or in the Orkney and
Shetland or Aran Islands.
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The question facing museums is: can they give their values a contemporary relevance and resonance? Has the wealth of consultation and strategy on a national scale enabled the sector to
identify desired outcomes, which place museums at the heart of a productive, healthy and
happy society? I believe that there is a remarkable consensus across the UK.
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As a result of the development of new strategic and advisory structures, standard support and
learning materials would be developed, allowing small and large museums alike to offer a
high-quality service to learners. A culture of learning and exchange would develop within the
museum and teaching professions, resulting in mutual understanding and recognition of
respective roles. As access to training opportunities and career development become widespread, professional and volunteers’ contributions alike would increase. The employment profile of the sector would change to include people of all ages and from all social and ethnic
backgrounds.
What of the outcomes for the learners themselves? Museums will find themselves under
increasing pressure to demonstrate and to measure the impact they have made on learning and
on learners. A recent review by the Arts Education Partnership in the United States reviewed
sixty-three studies demonstrating academic and social outcomes as a result of involvement in
the arts, including museums. It highlighted, for example, that learning in the visual arts had a
resulting impact on children’s wider cognitive capabilities and on motivations to learn. No
surprise there for those who deliver learning through museums. But how good are we at
demonstrating what we do?
Closer to home, the Evaluation of the Education Challenge Fund in England, conducted by
Hooper-Greenhill and Jocelyn Dodd, identified the following outcomes for workshop
participants:
●
●
●
●
●
Development of new perceptions, including a sense of cultural ownership, sense of
identity and a ‘broadening of horizons’.
Changes in attitude, including greater motivation.
Increases in confidence and feelings of self-worth.
Development of new knowledge, for example about religion, history and world culture.
Practical skills, for example in research, analysis, ICT, communication, project
management and team-working.
Increasingly, we are able to show that through the interpretation of objects (seeing, listening,
testing and handling), museums can encourage new ways of learning, allowing learners of all
ages and abilities to develop skills and realise individual potential. If we are in agreement that
museums have a vision of the future for learning in museums that involves clear outcomes,
then we must consider where museums are now and how close we are to realisation of those
goals.
Turning now to the EVIDENCE:
●
Baseline: What is our starting point for action, where are we now?
●
Research: On what evidence do we base our plans and policies?
●
Standards: What are the gaps, the needs? What evidence do we have of best practice?
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Dissemination: How do we share, develop and repeat good ideas and practice?
●
Evaluation: How robust are our mechanisms for evaluation?
Although using different methodologies, these studies paint an extraordinarily consistent picture of the current challenges that museums face, and the needs that must be addressed if they
are to realise the vision. They provide a platform for evidence-based policy and indicate potential priorities for investment at national and local level. They also highlight how much more
could be done, some of it at little cost, within an appropriate strategic framework, one that
encouraged co-operation and developed the infrastructure for learning through museums.
I would like to provide examples from the detailed evidence of Scotland’s National Audit to explore provision for learning at the current time. Although our research focused on Scotland’s
170 museum organisations covering 435 sites, findings are remarkably consistent with DCMS’s
Renaissance in the Regions report in England and with the Heritage Lottery Fund’s UK Museums’
Needs Assessment. We set out to map Scotland’s museum collections, buildings and services as a
basis for future museum policy in Scotland. Full details are available on our website.
Education staff
The first point I wish to make is about capacity, by which I mean numbers of staff working in
museums and also the access to appropriate expertise and training opportunities for those staff
and volunteers. Experienced staff are pivotal to the creation of learning opportunities and the
fulfilment of the learning aspirations of the sector as a whole. Of the 10,885 personnel in the
Scottish museum sector, the Audit identified the equivalent of 117 full-time posts, which are
focused on education. In reality, education will often be part of a portfolio of tasks that a staff
member or volunteer undertakes and the number of specialist dedicated education officers
will be much less. A quarter of those posts are based within the national organisations, one
fifth in local authorities. Given that education work is heavily staff-dependent, it is likely that
these disparities translate into inequalities in learning provision and, therefore, in access to
museum learning. Access to networks of skilled education specialists, freelance or otherwise,
might be key to future developments in some parts of the UK. But if we are to realise our
vision for the museum of the future we need a step change in the number of people employed
to deliver learning through museums.
National Audit results on training are also consistent with the findings of the major review by
CHNTO (The Cultural Heritage National Training Organisation) and the Campaign for
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In recent months we have seen a raft of research studies and reports, which have analysed the
needs of the sector and outlined the action required to fulfil museums’ potential for learning.
These include:
● Renaissance in the Regions (Resource and DCMS)
● UK Museums’ Needs Assessment (Heritage Lottery Fund)
● The Collective Focus and The Collective Insight, reports from the National Audit of
Scotland’s Museums and Galleries (Scottish Museums Council)
● The Evaluation of the Education Challenge Fund in England (Resource and DCMS)
● What Did We Learn? The Evaluation of the Museums and Galleries Lifelong Learning Initiative (Department for Education and Skills and Campaign for Learning in Museums)
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Learning in Museums earlier this year of the training needs of museum and gallery educators.
Only half of museums in Scotland have a training policy and less than half have a training
budget. The CHNTO/ CLMG results showed a striking lack of skills training across the
board. You can see that they identified seventeen necessary skills used by educators in delivering projects, ranging from skills in ICT, fundraising and project management to advocacy and
influencing skills and the ability to work in partnership. Overall those working in the nationals
and local authorities were most likely to have access to training opportunities. The review concluded that more funding is needed to expand skills training through supporting the work of
existing providers, such as GEM and SMC.
Skills development is seen as a key strategic issue in each of the studies mentioned earlier, and
should be supported by core funding. Clarity on the role and the development of a new Sector
Skills Council will be crucial, but there will also need to be a commitment from individuals
and organisations at all levels to continuous professional development.
Education policy and evaluation
Nearly half of all museum organisations in Scotland do not have an education or learning policy. Existence of a policy is variable across museum type, with only the national organisations
able to claim a universal policy base for their education provision. Particularly surprising given
the strong emphasis on education in local authorities, is the finding that only 45 per cent of
local authorities have an education policy. Thirty-two of Scotland’s local authority museum
services are based within education departments, but this would not seem in itself to promote
close links between cultural and community planning. It is of concern that 18 per cent of
organisations annually reviewed their education services without having an education policy
in place, demonstrating that a significant proportion of education work takes place outside of
a formal policy framework.
The £500,000 available to the English AMCs through the Education Challenge Fund was
used in part to assist museums to develop education policies. This would appear to have been
successful in encouraging a more structured and focused approach to educational development and delivery and in placing a greater priority on education within museum services.
Education space
Just over half of Scotland’s museums set aside a dedicated space for educational purposes.
However, given the findings of both the National Audit and the HLF Needs Assessment it is
likely that spaces are not universally accessible or well-maintained. Curiously, while HLF
assess the need to maintain museum buildings as priority level 2 in their matrix of need, they
see the need to ensure compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act as the relatively low
level priority 4. This illustrates both the difficulty in ascribing priorities where resources are
scarce, but also the importance of agreeing priorities across major funding agencies at the very
least at national level. In Scotland the Action Plan for Museums should allow all bodies with a
strategic and funding role in the development of the sector to sign up to a common agenda.
Provision of outreach services
Provision of education resources
We asked museums in Scotland about the nature of their learning provision. The results
showed clear scope for the development of packs for teachers and more widespread use of loan
boxes to put museum resources at the heart of learning in schools. Links were weak between
museum exhibitions and the 5-14 curriculum, indicating that museums and schools alike need
to work harder to meet the National Curriculum guidelines, which state unequivocally that:
Aspects of the culture of Scotland should feature prominently in every Scottish school.
All pupils should develop an insight into the nature and diversity of Scottish culture
and an understanding of how they can relate to it constructively.
The use of museum websites to provide educational resources is limited to only 26 per cent of
sites, revealing that there is considerable scope for the development of ICT resources for educational purposes. The Scottish Executive in administering the Cultural Co-ordinators
scheme should consider the central role of technology in allowing access to online resources,
and encouraging knowledge- and skill-sharing. However, since over a quarter of museums in
Scotland have yet to develop a website of any kind, we are again faced with the need to ensure
a baseline of provision before developments can have impact in all parts of Scotland.
A learning standard
Indeed, one of the critical issues for the new Framework for Action will be whether we should
focus resources on where learning provision is excellent or on the areas of greatest need, to
ensure a baseline of satisfactory provision for all. The development of a learning standard such
as that proposed by Resource in the Inspiring Learning Framework should enable decisions to
be made on what constitutes excellent provision for learning. Importantly, the Inspiring
Learning Framework focuses on outcomes in the four key areas of people, policy, partnerships
and place. It aims to tie evidence to outcomes and to provide an evaluation mechanism, which
is flexible enough for all museums, archives and libraries to use. I believe it will be imperative
to establish an effective learning standard across the UK, and that this should form part of any
UK-wide museum standards scheme. Yes, we need an inclusive framework that makes the
improvement of learning provision in museums a common endeavour; in the spirit of learning, we also need to recognise and reward excellence where it exists, perhaps via the kind of
Excellence in Learning Awards scheme proposed through the Inspiring Learning consultation.
Museums must acknowledge that the status of museum education is in part dependent on the
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Of course, learning provision need not depend upon the existence of an education room. 62.1
per cent of museums in Scotland do not provide an outreach service to schools. This includes
the majority of local authority museums (64.2 per cent), representing a significant lost opportunity for cross-departmental opportunity on promoting learning. Findings in relation to
community outreach are far more encouraging. Here local authorities and independent museums demonstrate the greatest knowledge of their local communities, and are also the most
likely of all museum types to undertake community outreach work (68.8 per cent and 63.6 per
cent respectively). Does this suggest that museums find it easier to contribute to informal
rather than formal learning agendas, and if so, why is this the case?
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provision of demonstrable learning outcomes. Scotland’s Chief Inspector of Schools, Douglas
Osler, advocated one approach to mapping outcomes in a conference in Edinburgh last year.
He suggested that by using National Audit collections information and the Scottish 5-14 curriculum guidelines, it could be shown systematically how different museums could contribute
to different parts of the curriculum, for pupils at various stages in their school career. More
ominously, he stated that if museums could not find a way of convincing schools of how they
contribute to learning outcomes, then pressures on teachers were such that they would not
include museums in their planning.
But we also need to strike a balance between reliable evaluation mechanisms and the freedom
and flexibility necessary for creative learning. In SMC’s response to the National Debate on
Education we have argued that the Scottish Executive should advocate the importance of
learning through museums by assisting in the development of effective evaluation mechanisms that:
●
are flexible;
●
are sympathetic to cross-subject achievements;
●
acknowledge the place of complementary out-of-school learning opportunities.
In summary, we have much of the evidence upon which to base future policy for learning in
museums. We need to build upon it, for example, to measure the social and economic impact
of current provision and to obtain a better picture of what learners and teachers want from
museums. This is certainly an area that SMC would like to develop in any future Audit.
Still the overwhelming message from current findings is that there is a grave inconsistency and
disparity in learning provision across the sector, and that Government and others must act
now to address it. Of course, there is a danger that in outlining needs we overlook the many
examples of excellent learning provision throughout museums in Scotland and the rest of the
UK. You will hear of some of them in the course of this conference, and the challenge is to
make these the norm rather than the exception.
This leads me to my final point, on MECHANISMS. Knowing what we do about learning
through museums, how can we realise the learning potential of museums? I should confess at
the outset that I don’t have all the answers. But here are some of the important elements,
which we need to consider and which will be critical to the development of An Action Plan for
Museums in Scotland:
●
Advocacy: How do we ensure that learning though museums is championed at all levels
and in other parts of the learning and training sectors?
● Framework: What strategic and advisory structures are needed at national and local level
to help museums to deliver learning?
●
Strategy: How do we move from our current position to one in which we can realise our
aspirations? What action can we take to realise our vision for learning in museums?
●
Partnership: How effective are the partnerships between museums and the formal and
informal learning sectors? How can we improve and consolidate them?
Impact: How will we achieve greatest impact?
Sustainability: Do we have a sustainable framework for delivery? What levels of investment are required? Can we begin to move towards a shared definition of sustainability,
which moves beyond the financial to consider issues of capacity and cultural ownership?
Making the case for learning through museums to Government and partners in the formal
and informal learning sectors will continue to be fundamental to realising potential, and not
simply because effective advocacy will lead to investment. Already SMC has received commitments of cross-party political involvement in our November Conference to develop an Action
Plan for Museums in Scotland, and partners in Learning and Teaching Scotland, Visitscotland
and the Enterprise network will be represented in the debate. We need more occasions for dialogue at national and local level to promote learning through museums.
In England the establishment of the regional hubs goes some way towards creating appropriate strategic and advisory structures for future learning. In Scotland the need for a national
policy and funding framework remains fundamental. We need to identify what can be delivered most efficiently at national, regional and local level, giving appropriate resources and
recognition to roles. In doing so, we need to take particular account of Scotland’s geography
and the large number of independent museums (SMC has 160 independent members, many
of them small and volunteer-run). SMC entered the consultation process on an Action Plan
for Museums with an open mind, receptive to the changes that are needed to secure a sustainable future for museums in Scotland.
SMC’s response to the National Debate on Education, written following a joint consultation
between GEM and SMC members, contains over thirty detailed recommendations on how
museums and schools at least might work together more effectively. They include relatively
radical notions such as the idea that Scotland might follow the example of Holland and establish a form of statutory cultural entitlement, which would guarantee each Scottish child a certain number of museum visits in his/her school career. They also explore ways of improving
links, for example through museums’ involvement in teacher training and continuous professional development and through the development of placement schemes. If anyone is interested in finding out more, the full response is available through the SMC website. The ideas outlined in the response also resonate with those of the Regional Task Force in calling for more
analysis of what teachers and children need so that high-quality educational materials can be
developed. Some of the recommendations will depend upon additional investment, but the
amounts required are relatively modest compared to the sums requested and allocated in other
parts of the public sector. Other recommendations require more effective partnership, beginning with joined-up Government.
Finally, our consideration of the factors necessary to deliver future learning through museums
must consider both impact and sustainability. Putting aside difficulties in measuring social
impact, we also need to consider the balance between quick gains and long-term strategic
change. The Evaluation of the Education Challenge Fund noted that those AMCs who targeted
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so-called ‘hard-to-reach groups’ – small, volunteer-run museums – had least evidence of progression and impact. The same argument might also be applied to ‘hard-to-reach’ learners.
Nevertheless, if our values include extending access to all, we need to find ways of making
museums relevant to far wider groups of people. There remains a pressing need to agree a
shared definition of sustainability, which moves beyond the financial to consider issues of
capacity, cultural ownership and diversity.
UNESCO’s submission to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which took place
this autumn in Johannesburg, put it like this:
People’s attitudes and lifestyles, their responsiveness to educational programmes, their
sense of ownership of the drive to preserve a decent future for ensuing generations, the
reactions of national and local leaders to scientific and governance policy advice, are all
intimately linked to their own cultural identities and values, and no world-wide commitment to sustainable development will get anywhere without that recognition.
I talked at the beginning about bridging the gap between aspiration and reality. Unless and
until that gap is bridged my view is that museums are NOT accessible sources of learning and
we should not delude ourselves that they are. The potential and the opportunity are there and
the museum sector has begun to describe its vision for the future of learning in museums. Evidence and ideas abound. The critical and seismic next stage for museums is to connect these
ideas with the development of coherent strategic frameworks at national level and with museums’ own development. This will enable us collectively to translate aspiration into reality and
to make museums into truly accessible sources of learning.
Stephen Allen
Head of Education, National Portrait Gallery, London
The initial area of discussion addressed the question: ‘Who are the museum educators?’ The
panel agreed that educators, whilst part of an integrated team in a museum or gallery, represent a specialism in a range of communication skills, both direct and through museum interpretation. David Fleming saw them as ‘galvanisers and catalysts’ within institutions, whilst
Jane Ryder likened them to agents of ‘molecular collision’. It was felt that museum educators
play a key role in the work of institutions, as one contributor said, ‘documenting the marginal’ –
for example, young adults, people from socially and economically deprived areas, minority
ethnic groups and people with disabilities. The work of the educators is often to involve these
audiences through exhibitions, displays and activities both within and outside the museum.
As museums and galleries become more identified as centres of learning for an ever-expanding
range of audiences, the speakers felt that this is a whole museum issue, and should form part
of a wide ranging discussion among all sections including the education department.
Speakers and contributors agreed that there is a need for more consideration as to how we can
measure the impact of learning in museums. Recent Government (local and national) agendas
have helped develop learning as a core function in museums and galleries, but more evidence
needs to be collected and used, both for advocacy and to improve services. Institutional strategy and policies underpin the sustainability of education in museums, as well as funding. In
Ireland the work of the Heritage Council through its pilot Standards and Accreditation
Scheme is monitoring outcomes initially in 13 museums, national, regional and local. In the
UK, the work of Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries in developing a
framework for institutions to assess learning and access programmes and strategies is being
closely scrutinised through its pilot phase.
Current education provision in museums in the UK and Ireland is still patchy, with a sizeable
proportion of institutions with little or no specific education service. However, as David
Fleming and Jane Ryder both commented, the size of an institution should not be the determinant factor as to how museum education is prioritised. Smaller organisations can often be
more flexible than larger institutions in how they implement policies.
A member of the audience raised the question of whether museums and galleries are crowding
out traditional audiences. This brought a robust response from all members of the panel
including the Chair. They felt that museums have a duty to broaden their audiences and to
make their collections as accessible as possible to the public. If this changes previous ‘contemplative’ approaches to museum learning, then traditional audiences have to allow for the
democratisation of the collections. This does not, however, preclude the ability of any member
of the public to engage in quite contemplation with a work of art on display. In the past museums have too often been identified with a small section of society, there is now a genuine
desire to broaden the horizons of the museum audience so that they are viewed as attractive,
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A Review of the Morning Discussion
37
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38
stimulating and enjoyable places in which members of the public wish to spend time. This led
on to discussion as to whether museums are being used as instruments to pursue other social
agendas, such as social justice and inclusion. The political reality is that learning and access
often drive funding at local, regional and national government level. Whilst this may be seen
as chasing the funding, the panel stressed that museums have had an opportunity to help
shape the agenda in broader areas of policy-making. It was recognised that there is a risk that
museums are being asked to achieve more than they are capable of, but as public institutions
they must be responsive to broader social changes.
Marie Bourke
Keeper and Head of Education, National Gallery of Ireland
During this time of unprecedented change and opportunity in the area of Irish cultural heritage institutions, particularly museums, it is important that education is considered an integral part of the core activities of such institutions. While virtually everyone working in museums and nearly every aspect of museum work has an educational dimension, museum education needs time and support, not just to find the necessary staff and resources, but to make
everyone aware of what making learning a priority involves. There are many different aspects
to the structure and function of an education service, which when fully planned and thought
out, provide extraordinary benefits both to the institution and to the public, primarily in the
form of greater access to the collections. Of long-term value to the institution is the need to
explain what this means to management, boards of trustees and those who fund museums.
While the practice of education officers developing and promoting learning opportunities is
widespread in museums, less common is the pattern of established education services, such as
those in the Ulster Museum, the National Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the
Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and the four National Museum centres.1 This paper outlines the history of learning in museums in Ireland while making the case for devising a policy
framework to influence the strategic development of this area.
The Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of
Carlisle, opening the National
Gallery of Ireland in 1864
(The Illustrated London News)
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Learning in the Context of Irish Museums
39
Introduction
Education in museums has to be viewed within the wider development of the arts in Ireland,
and although the situation has improved significantly within the past few decades, it was not
always so. Ireland’s record of official arts policy initiatives and funding of the arts was poor in
the first half of the century. This was in some measure due to the cultural isolation of Ireland
between 1922 and the 1950s, also to the conservative nature of the people, as well as lack of
interest at Government level. The arts were seen as somewhat of a luxury.
1. Council of National Cultural Institutions, Review of Education, Community Education and Outreach at Ten
Cultural Heritage Institutions (unpublished report), compiled by Farrell Grant Sparks (Dublin, 2001).
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40
The Ground Floor of
the Natural History
Museum, c 1914
In the second half of the twentieth century the arts attracted greater Government attention
with the gradual realisation that, just as health, education and social welfare services were
essential, the arts too were a vital service. The need to protect the cultural heritage became
important, to encourage creativity, ensure access for all to the arts, and improve the environment and quality of life. The arts began to create employment. First-class museums and
cultural sites required staff, generated income from services and contributed to the desirability
of Ireland as a tourist destination. The emphasis shifted from the purely educational to the
contribution that the arts could make to the economy of the country. Consequently, the
improved economic climate of the 1990s enabled Government to address issues of improving
resources for cultural heritage institutions. While this fiscal growth may not always be sustainable at the same level, there is a continual need for support for the ongoing development of
education in museums in the twenty-first century.
Background
Prior to the Easter Rising (1916) and the foundation of the State, a range of cultural heritage
institutions, colleges and universities had already been set up in Ireland under British rule.
The list is impressive: Botanic Gardens, Dublin Zoo, Belfast Museum, Natural History
The Sculpture Gallery
(now Room 22, level 1,
Dargan Wing) National
Gallery of Ireland, c 1900
Dr Thomas Bodkin, by James Sleator
(National Gallery of Ireland)
The National Gallery had a policy of closing two days a
week to facilitate art students, painters and sculptors to
study directly from the works of art. The National Museum (originally the Museum of
Science and Art) in Kildare Street had a practice of lending objects for drawing classes to the
Metropolitan School of Art; they also had in circulation, around the country, cases with
museum objects and exhibitions aimed at raising awareness and understanding of their collections. The original exhibition cases for these touring exhibitions were rediscovered in 2003,
with their contents found to be perfectly intact. In looking at the development of learning in
Irish museums in the twentieth century, it is impossible to ignore this legacy of cultural infrastructure and substantial institutions of learning.
The pace of development slowed down by the turn of the century, following political events.
The Second Dáil Éireann established a Department of Fine Arts, which during the short term
of its existence (1921-2) approached the subject of art education by requesting Dr Thomas
Bodkin, an adviser in this area, to set out his views on art as part of general education. Dr
Bodkin provided an intelligent and far-sighted proposal regarding arts policy in 1922. However,
due to the difficulties of the period (civil war 1922-3), the means to advance the cause were not
forthcoming. William T. Cosgrave, President at that time, felt that matters such as unemployment were more urgent, so the 1920s saw few arts initiatives by Government. The political
unrest was such that the Metropolitan School of Art closed in 1923 and the National Gallery
closed for periods between 1921 and 1923, not reopening until 1924. Despite this, in 1924, The
Friends of the National Collections of Ireland was founded by Sarah Purser to acquire works
of art and objects of historic interest for Irish national and public collections by purchase,
gift or bequest. 3 In 1925 the Department of Education proposed the setting up of a committee
2. For information on the National Museum see N. Buttimer, C. Rynne & H. Guerin (eds), The Heritage of
Ireland, Section 3, Interpretation and Museology: Nigel Monaghan, ‘The National Museum of Ireland’
(Cork, 2001); E. Crooke, Politics, Archaeology and the Creation of a National Museum of Ireland (Irish
Academic Press, 2000), and M. Dunlevy, Dublin Barracks / A Brief History of Collins Barracks (National
Museum, Dublin, 2002).
3. Sarah Purser (1848-1943) was an established painter, leading figure in early 20th century Dublin’s cultural
revival, having founded An Túr Gloine (Tower of Glass) stained glass co-operative in 1903.
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Museum, National Gallery, Public Record Office,
the National Museum and the National Library. The
Science and Art Museums Act of 1877 alone resulted in
the transfer of the buildings and collections of the Royal
Dublin Society into State ownership and ultimately to
the National Museum (further enhanced by the transfer
of notable collections from the Royal Irish Academy and
Trinity College, Dublin). Many of these institutions,
such as the Natural History Museum (the old RDS
museum), were already offering services such as tours of
the collections, together with talks by a variety of distinguished speakers in their lecture theatre.2
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42
The Botanic Gardens, 1849
that would report on the workings of the Metropolitan School of Art (renamed the National
College of Art in 1936, adding Design in 1971) and on the teaching of art generally. It also
sought to set up a similar enquiry into the purpose of the National Museum and any reorganisation needed to help it carry out its work. While nothing was done about the Education
Review, action was taken on the National Museum Report, which prompted redrafting of the
National Monuments Bill (enacted in 1930). Despite the slow pace of change, developments
did take place, such as the celebrations held to mark Dublin Civic Week in 1929: the Royal
Photographic Society lent its collection for display in the Salon of Photography in Westmoreland Street; the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, then in Harcourt Street, was open daily to
provide guided tours; the National Library held a display of rare books, manuscripts, music,
maps and autographed letters relating to Ireland, while an exhibition of ecclesiastical arts was
held at the Metropolitan School of Art in Kildare Street. Books, prints and maps of Dublin
were shown at the Public Library in Pearse Street, together with a series of talks; University
College Dublin provided daily lectures and various departments of Trinity College were open
throughout the week; encouragement was given to visit the National Gallery of Ireland (open
daily during the week) ‘since the Director, Dr Thomas Bodkin, together with Mr George
Atkinson would be present from 3 to 5 p.m. to conduct visitors round and to lecture on the
various paintings’.4
In 1932, at a time of change of Government, an Official Handbook was published describing
recent developments in the country. The chapter on Modern Irish Art was written by Thomas
Bodkin, then Director of the National Gallery of Ireland (1927-35), who used the opportunity
to emphasise the need for art education at first, second and third level.5 Dr Patrick Little, who
was then Parliamentary Secretary (1933-9) and art advisor to President Éamon de Valera, had a
keen interest in the arts and tried to further a number of initiatives, but it proved to be a very
difficult period, not aided by the so-called Emergency (1939-45) during the Second World War.
4. E.M. Stephens (ed.), Dublin Civic Week Official Handbook, Civic week exhibitions, 7-14 September (Dublin,
1929).
5. B. Hobson (ed.), Saorstát Éireann, Official Handbook (Talbot Press, Dublin 1932), published by the Cumann
na nGaedhael Government
However, despite difficulties, a number of initiatives
did emerge, such as the setting up of the Haverty
Trust (1930) to purchase paintings by living artists to Dr Patrick J. Little, first Director of the
be distributed to public art galleries, ecclesiastical and Arts Council, 1951
educational institutions, including northern Ireland.6
The foundation of the Irish Manuscripts Commission (1928), the Purser Griffith Lectures in
the history of art to be administered between Trinity College and University College Dublin
(1934), and the Irish Folklore Commission (1935) were established, thus encouraging the Government to begin thinking about how it might approach the arts.7 The Committee for the
Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which was set up in 1940 to promote the arts in Great
Britain, merged in 1945 into the newly established Arts Council of Great Britain and the Arts
Council of Northern Ireland. 1948 saw the setting up of the Advisory Committee on Cultural
Relations (voluntary, non-statutory) in the Department of Foreign Affairs, the first official
State body in support of the arts in Ireland. Dr Bodkin was then commissioned in 1949 to
write a report on the state of the arts in Ireland, in which he reviewed the poor state of the cultural institutions, being most critical of the National Museum, but also detailing the state of
the National Gallery, the College of Art and regional art schools, the Royal Hibernian Academy school, university arts education, design in industry, promotion of Irish culture overseas,
preservation of heritage monuments and sites and the Irish Tourist Board. He also bemoaned
the lack of art education at all levels. Published in 1951, the Report on the Arts proposed the
establishment of a Government Department with responsibility for the fine arts, ultimately
under the control of An Taoiseach.8 It was some time before this became a reality.
Despite the fact that the 1950s in Ireland was a difficult time economically, with little scope for
development, the Arts Act was introduced in 1951, providing a legislative framework for the
arts in Ireland. Dr Patrick Little, the author of so many of these initiatives, was made Director
6. Dr S. B. Kennedy reviewed the role of the Haverty Trust noting that, while the works acquired between
1930–50 were conservative, they did result in changing trends in Irish art. Irish Art and Modernism, (Institute
of Irish Studies, Belfast, 1991) p.85
7. A. Kelly, Cultural Policy in Ireland (Irish Museums Trust, Dublin, 1989).
8. Dr B. P. Kennedy, Dreams and Responsibilities, The State and the Arts in Independent Ireland (The Arts
Council, Dublin, 1998).
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One effect of the Emergency was a request by the
Department of Education to the National Gallery to
place some of its key works in safekeeping. So it happened that over a hundred pictures were stored in 1940
in the vaults of the Bank of Ireland in Dublin, to be
returned in 1941. Dr George Furlong, then Director of
the National Gallery (1935-50), having protested that
the works were not safe in Dublin, supervised the
despatch in 1942 of over two hundred pictures to the
Preparatory College, Tourmakeady, Co. Mayo, to their
safe return in 1945.
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44
of the newly established Irish Arts Council. Other initiatives took place such as
An Tóstal, which, while described as an
annual pageant more directed towards
tourism than cultural interests, involved
Arts Council sponsorship of several exhibitions and concerts. Seven pageants were
held between 1953 and 1958, encouraging
the setting up of other festivals on film
and music.9 The Arts Council also organised international design exhibitions
between 1953 and 1956, several of which
involved lectures and toured to regional
venues, thus bringing industrial design to
A touring exhibition: ‘Sean Keating and the ESB’, from
the attention of a wider Irish audience.
the National Touring Exhibition Services 1980s
The National Monuments Act was enacted in 1954. While the 1960s saw greater awareness of arts issues and some improvement of the
cultural institutions, the most significant step was taken by Charles Haughey TD, then Minister of Finance, resulting in the enactment of Section 2 of the Finance Bill in 1969, providing
tax-free status for artists. During this period the Arts Council, under the chairmanship of Fr
Donal O’Sullivan and with council members including the architect Michael Scott, did
much to promote the arts, especially modern art in Ireland, and to encourage the mounting
of exhibitions with well-researched catalogues and the establishment of the Arts Council
Collection. While this partly led towards the study of art history as an academic subject in Irish
universities, it is worth recording that illustrated talks on art had been taking place at various
centers, including Technical Colleges, around the country. The success of the international
exhibition ROSC (an old Irish word meaning ‘poetry of vision’), held at the RDS in 1967,
went a large way towards encouraging the Irish public to discuss the subject of the arts. It not
alone reflected trends in modern art, but also highlighted a number of developments during
the 1960s in the arts in Ireland.10
During the 1970s the economic situation improved and there was a gradual opening up of
Irish society through membership of the EEC and access to free education. The Arts Act was
9. Initiated by Seán Lemass to encourage tourism, An Tóstal continued as an annual festival in Drumshanbo,
Co. Leitrim.
10.The first ROSC exhibition was held in 1967, the modern art section at the RDS and the ancient Celtic art
display at the National Museum. The second ROSC (1971) was held at the RDS including both modern art and
Viking art displays. The third ROSC (1977) displayed the modern art section at the Hugh Lane Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art, and early animal art at the National Museum. The fourth ROSC (1980) showed the
modern section at the School of Architecture, University College Dublin, and Chinese art at the National
Gallery of Ireland. The fifth ROSC (1984), devoted to contemporary art, was shown at the Guinness Hop Store.
The final and sixth ROSC (1988) included the modern art section at the Guinness Hop Store and a display of
Russian avant-garde art at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Other smaller associated ROSC shows included:
Irish Art 1900-50 at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (1975⁄6) and The Irish Imagination 1959-71 at the Hugh Lane
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (1971); in addition, ROSC na nÓg was a feature of the final exhibition.
Towards a new century and changes in cultural policy
The 1990s witnessed the main period of growth and development in Ireland, mainly due to
the greatly improved economic situation. A major step towards a coherent Government policy
on the arts came with the establishment in 1993 of the Department of Arts, Culture and the
Gaeltacht, including the transfer to the Department, in 1996, of the Heritage Service
(Dúchas). The appointment of a Minister for the Arts signalled a more progressive attitude
and marked changes in cultural policy. One of the key strategies for implementation identified
in the Statement of Strategy 2001-04 of the renamed Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht
and the Islands, was ‘developing, with the Cultural Institutions and the Heritage Council, a
policy framework to facilitate greater access to the national collections by the public and the
development of local and regional museums’.11 This showed understanding of the need to
further develop the wider Irish museum sector within a strategic framework, augmented by
publishing in 2002 the Action on Architecture and National Heritage Plan. The Department
also undertook a Review of Arts Legislation in 2001.12 Among the proposals was the setting up
of an interdepartmental committee, with the Department of Education and Science, to coordinate arts in education policies, and influence curricula development and schools usage of
cultural heritage institutions, which did not transpire. The Department drew on the Review
process to draft a Bill (published in April 2002) designed to promote development and participation in the arts, and to repeal the 1951 and 1973 Arts Acts (largely concerned with the Arts
Council). Aspects of this legislation are due to be reviewed prior to presentation to the Houses of the Oireachtas, before being enacted. The role of the Department altered in 2002 with
the change of Government and re-emerged as the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism.
The Heritage Service (Dúchas) has been removed with the built heritage under OPW in the
Department of Finance and other aspects including heritage policy now come under the aegis
11. Enriching Quality of Life and Sense of Identity, Statement of Strategy 2001-2004 (Department of Arts, Heritage,
Gaeltacht and the Islands, Dublin, 2001).
12.Towards A New Framework for the Arts: A Review of Arts Legislation (Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht
and the Islands, Dublin, 2000).
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introduced in 1973, amending legislation to the Arts Act of 1951. During this time museums
came under the responsibility of the Department of Education and the cultural section of the
Department of An Taoiseach. Under these departments a Programming Co-ordinating Committee for Educational Services based on the Institutions of Science and Art was set up to
encourage regional development in the arts, in addition to which Education Centres were
established in Trim and Castlebar. The committee, renamed the National Touring Exhibition
Services, met regularly during the 1970s and 1980s to co-ordinate publications and a series of
touring exhibitions. In the 1980s, when Dr Garret Fitzgerald was Taoiseach, a Ministry of
State for Arts and Culture was created and Government published a seminal White Paper on
cultural policy, Access and Opportunity (1987), initiated by Ted Nealon TD. Another development of the 1980s was the establishment of a National Lottery, a portion of which was to be
used towards funding the arts.
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46
of the Department of the Environment and
Local Government. Aligning the arts to
sports and tourism has not produced any significant change and policy in this area continues to be addressed on an ongoing basis.
Less clear is the effect of splitting up the heritage sector where the outcome in terms of
resourcing, legislation and any significant
developments has yet to be seen.
The Arts Council has addressed arts in education many times (see Benson: Arts in Education, 1979 and Art and the Ordinary, The
ACE Report, 1989)13 and in the Council’s
third Arts Plan 2002-2006 (which is estimated
at € 314,000 million for the period of the
Plan). While the Council maintains that
responsibility for overall policy and provision
in arts education belongs with the Department of Education and Science, it has proThe Royal Hospital Kilmainham becomes the centre
vided a number of ways to facilitate developfor the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1991
ment of understanding and practice in this
area, such as commissioning (in 2002) research on the principles, policy and practices defining
the role of the Arts Council in arts education, the findings of which will be drafted as a series
of recommendations. The third Arts Plan 2002-2006 also makes proposals to disseminate bestpractice models of arts in schools; it recommends a campaign to achieve better arts in education and to develop mechanisms to promote better standards for the visual arts in education.
Its active encouragement of opportunities for curatorial development via professional training,
specialised seminars and international exchange can only lead to higher standards and a
greater understanding of the practical issues determining the development of arts in education. In the meantime the Arts Council is exploring the ways and means of integrating the arts
into the education system.
Notable arts legislation of this period included the 1995 Finance Bill (Section 176) enabling
persons who donate art and heritage items to credit the value of those items against tax. Also,
the Cultural Institutions Act of 1997 established the Council of National Cultural Institutions/
CNCI; though not a statutory body, its remit does cover ten cultural heritage institutions. In
1999 it set up a Working Group on Education, Community Education and Outreach. Members of the group (education officers) felt that networking and partnership could produce
innovative, integrated strategies, resulting in key challenges for education in the cultural institutions. They agreed that an analysis of the current position could lead towards planning
13. C. Benson, The State of the Arts in Irish Education (The Arts Council, Dublin, 1979) and Art and the
Ordinary, ACE Report (The Arts Council and The Gulbenkian Foundation, Dublin, 1989).
Advances have also been facilitated by the National Heritage Council, which came into being
in 1988, became a statutory body in 1995, and created the post of Museum Officer in 1996.
The Council has been particularly involved in the strategic development of the Irish museums
sector. Since 1997 it has co-funded awards for Irish museums and galleries with the Gulbenkian Foundation (UK), administered by the Northern Ireland Museums Council/NIMC
(and may be jointly funded by the Heritage Council/NIMC in future). The awards, over a
decade in existence, are made on a thirty-two-county basis and are divided into a number of sections: museum of the year, best larger/smaller museum, collection care, most improved voluntary museum and best museum education project. These highly regarded awards go a long
way towards providing recognition of standards of excellence within the museum profession
in Ireland.
Perhaps of greater significance is the Heritage Council’s development of a model for a Museum
Standards and Accreditation Scheme (Pilot phase 1 in 2000-01, Phase 2 in 2002-03, leading
thirteen institutions towards interim accreditation), the purpose of which is the universal
adoption of high professional standards.15 The Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and
the Islands’ Statement of Strategy 2001-04 referred to the Scheme in the context of ‘promoting
high standards and an accreditation system for local museums’. In tandem with monitoring
the accreditation scheme, the Council has developed a museum training strategy, arising from
research undertaken in this area.16 This work is pointing the Heritage Council towards
exploring the setting up of a museum service as a method of unifying several functions under
one body; grant-aid, museum training, and administration of the accreditation scheme. It is in
this context that the Heritage Council made submissions towards the recently published
National Heritage Plan, in which Action 59 lists the need ‘to examine the feasibility of establishing an independent Museums Council to provide support for museums not funded centrally
14. Council of National Cultural Institutions, Review of Education, Community Education and Outreach at Ten
Cultural Heritage Institutions (unpublished report), compiled by Farrell Grant Sparks (Dublin, 2001).
15. L. Ryan, A Future for Irish Museums: A Report on the Pilot Study for a National Accreditation Scheme
(unpublished report), (The Heritage Council, 2000).
16. A Training Strategy for the Irish Museums Sector (unpublished report), (CHL Consulting for the Heritage
Council, 2000).
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strategic development. In this context a ‘Review of Education, Community Education and
Outreach at ten Cultural Heritage Institutions’ (2001) was commissioned, which outlined
some of the assets of the national cultural institutions: important collections, distinctive art
forms, documentary and material evidence relating to the evolution of Irish history, culture
and heritage past and present, historic buildings, the natural and built environment.14 A key
asset highlighted was the combined experience and expertise of the staff – forming a significant component of the nation’s arts educational infrastructure. While the Review examined
the range of services offered by the institutions, noting the co-operative and co-ordinated ventures carried out between these bodies, it concluded that it required a clear policy for strategic
decision-making to inform future development in this area. The Working Group is now
embarking on the process of devising an education and outreach policy.
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48
The Orientation Court at entrance level of the National Gallery of Ireland Millennium
Wing, 2002 (Photographer Roy Hewson)
by the State’.17 This identification of the need to promote high standards and an accreditation
system for Irish museums, in addition to a centralised museums agency, represents a step forward
in the strategic planning and development of the Irish museums sector.18 The Heritage Council
is in the meantime looking at the means and ways of further developing these plans.
Appointment of education officers
Specialist education staff were first employed in Irish museums during the mid 1970s. Prior to
that, initiatives such as talks and tours of the collections had been provided as early as the
17. National Heritage Plan (Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, 2002).
18. E. Verling, A Policy Framework for the Irish Museum Sector, (The Heritage Council, publication due 2003).
1930s at museums in Dublin and Belfast, and by 1964 the Children’s Christmas Art Holiday
had begun at the National Gallery of Ireland.19 It is notable that a Schools Organiser and
Guide Lecturer was first appointed at the Ulster Museum in 1947.20 Initial appointments were
made in 1974 to the National Gallery, Museum and Library, the Ulster Museum, the Arts
Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, followed by other northern museums such
as the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. The majority of education officers were appointed
in the 1990s (a few carrying education in addition to other duties) at the National Archives,
Concert Hall and Abbey Theatre, Botanic Gardens, Chester Beatty Library, Irish Museum of
Modern Art, Dublin Zoo, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, RHA Gallagher
Gallery and the Heritage Council. Education and outreach officers have recently been
appointed at National Museum branches at Collins Barracks and Castlebar. Education staff
can also be found at Limerick’s Hunt Museum, Waterford City Museum, Sligo’s Model Arts
Niland Gallery and at many of the local authority/area museums in Down, Armagh, Cork,
Fermanagh, Tipperary, Clare, Monaghan, Antrim, Donegal, Tyrone, Limerick, Cavan, Louth
and Kerry.21 While further development in learning in museums is resulting in the appointment of new posts in areas such as schools and tours, outreach, lifelong learning, access and
disability, there is concern that many of these posts are on fixed-term contracts. Pat Holland,
curator of Tipperary S.R. County Museum, aptly articulated the relevance of education from
a regional perspective in The Heritage of Ireland: ‘Education in all its aspects, and in the broadest sense of the term, must become a core function and attitude of the museum’.22
19. James White, then Curator of Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, in Parnell Square, founded the
Children’s Christmas Art Holiday in 1962. When he became Director of the National Gallery of Ireland
(1964), he transferred the Art Holiday to Merrion Square, where it remains today an annual Christmas
event, having expanded in the new millennium to offer activities for families; adults and children.
20 Noel Nesbitt, A Museum in Belfast–A History of the Belfast Museum and its Predecessor, (The Ulster Museum,
Belfast, 1979, p.42)
21. K. Stierle, List of Museums & Collections based organisation in Ireland 2001, (unpublished report, The Heritage
Council, 2002).
22. N. Buttimer, C. Rynne & H. Guerin (eds), The Heritage of Ireland, Section 3, Interpretation and Museology:
P. Holland ‘County museums’ (Cork, 2001).
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Farmhouse interior from
the Ulster Folk and
Transport Museum,
Co Down
49
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50
Recent developments in Northern Ireland
In Northern Ireland museums came under the responsibility of the Department of Education
up to 1999, when a Minister for the Arts was appointed and a Department of Culture, Arts
and Leisure was set up. The Belfast Agreement23 established the context within which the
Department operates and among the factors that will influence progress are new developments in education and the availability of resources. One of the key tasks identified in the
Corporate Strategy 2001-04 is to encourage ‘centres for curiosity and imagination’ in museums and libraries, and to develop a framework to foster the educational potential of Northern
Ireland’s cultural resources.24 The Department held a consultative workshop in 2000 on the
subject of ‘local museum and heritage’, which examined the past, present and future situation
for museums and heritage in Northern Ireland. Since then, a report entitled Local Museum
and Heritage Review (2001) was published under the auspices of the Department of Culture,
Arts and Leisure and the Department of the Environment.25 This is a significant document,
with a series of well-considered recommendations, one of which involves ‘developing the educational potential of Heritage’. The Steering Group who compiled the report recommended
that consultation with heritage interests should continue as part of this developmental process.
A Museums Council for Northern Ireland (NIMC) was set up in 1993 as a result of research
carried out by the Museums Advisory Committee (originally set up in 1989). The role of the
NIMC is to encourage excellence in museums by providing advisory and training services,
grant-aid and information, and it has been to the fore in developing the skills of key museum
personnel and putting in place strategies for access and outreach within museums. Changes in
Northern Ireland have also been assisted by RESOURCE. Set up in 2000 from an amalgam of
established library, archive and museum bodies, it is now the commission responsible for
libraries, archives and museums. In addition to monitoring the registration scheme, it has a
broader remit in the greater development of museums. One of the most significant recent
developments was the amalgamation, in 1998, of the Ulster Museum, the Ulster Folk and
Transport Museum, the Ulster American Folk Park, and Armagh Museum to form the
National Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland (MAGNI). The long-term objective of
MAGNI is to create an organisation that is recognised internationally for the quality of its collections, the standard of its visitor experience, its contribution to Northern Ireland, and for
putting people at the centre of its activities.
Associated developments with the cultural heritage sector
Developments within the museum sector have been supported by the Irish Museums Association (IMA), a thirty-two-county organisation established in 1977,26 twenty-five years after the
foundation of ICOM-Ireland, the International Council of Museums.27 It consists of
23. The Belfast Agreement was signed on Friday, 10 April 1989.
24. Corporate Strategy 2001-04 (Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Belfast, 2001).
25. Review of Local Heritage Provision (Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Belfast, 2002).
26. B. Crowley (ed.), Journal of the Irish Museums Association. A. Ireland: ‘Irish Museums Association: The first
twenty-five years’, Vol. 12 (Dublin, 2002).
27. A. Walsh (ed.), Journal of the Irish Museums Association. M. Scannell & J. White, ‘A History of ICOM in
Ireland’, Vol. 3 (Belfast, 1993).
full-time museum professionals, voluntary museum curators/assistants and interested parties.
The IMA has systematically pursued policies relevant to museums at departmental and Government level and engaged in countrywide programmes of museum training, publication and
seminars. More recently the IMA commissioned a review of the role and function of the
organisation, the findings of which were delivered in 2002.28 The organisation has since
embarked on the process of implementing the Report, involving an image review, a membership drive, an expansion of activities and a strengthening of the IMA’s advocacy role as an
independent voice for the Irish museums sector. During the 1980s education officers came
together to set up the Irish Heritage Education Network (IHEN) – a cross-border organisation formed in 1989 to promote educational services in cultural heritage venues (it was
absorbed into the IMA in the late 1990s). It organised seminars, training and published a
series of brochures demonstrating the educational potential of cultural centres.29 Group for
Education in Museums (GEM) is a UK-based organisation active in Northern Ireland (GEMINI). It publishes journals, organises symposia and training, and promotes education as a core
function of museums. The National Gallery of Ireland has made its contribution to learning
in museums by holding four symposia involving a wide range of Irish and international specialists on museum education: ‘The Role of Education in Museums’ (1998); ‘The Nature of
the Education Service’ (1999); ‘The Museum Visit: Virtual Reality and the Gallery’ (2000),
and ‘Learning in Museums’ (2002). The proceedings of each symposium have subsequently
been published.30
28. Strategic Review of the Irish Museums Association (CHL Consulting, 2002).
29. Irish Heritage Education Network papers (The National Archives, Dublin).
30. M. Bourke (ed), The Role of Education in Museums, Arts and Heritage Venues (1999); The Nature of the
Education Service in Museums (2000); The Museum Visit: Virtual Reality and the Gallery (2001); Learning in
Museums (2003), (The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin).
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The Chester Beatty Library,
Dublin Castle
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Conclusion: Museum learning enters a new era
This paper has tried to describe how the gradual process of museum learning has come of age.
The pattern of development has been somewhat haphazard for a number of reasons, such as
the political state of affairs in the last century, decades of difficult and gradually improving
economic circumstances, and the decision in the 1940s and 1950s to undertake State borrowings
for capital purposes, thus creating a situation where policies on the arts could be considered.
The initial period of growth in the 1970s was marked by the first appointment of education
officers in the cultural institutions and practical encouragement of regional development of
the arts. The 1990s witnessed the most significant growth with the establishment of a Ministry
of Arts and Culture together with increased resourcing of cultural institutions. A Ministry of
Culture, Arts and Leisure was also created in Northern Ireland following devolution of power
in 1998. Greatly enhanced grant-aid and training services facilitated by the Northern Ireland
Museums Council, both Arts Councils and the Heritage Council has helped improve the
infrastructure and raise standards in this area.
The new century has seen the advent of high-quality museum developments such as the
National Museum of Country Life in Castlebar, The Exhibition Wing of the Crawford
Gallery Cork, W5, the Science-Discovery centre in Belfast, the Chester Beatty Library in
Dublin Castle, the refurbished School of Art building for the National Library and the
National Gallery’s new Millennium Wing. What these developments signal is that largely as a
result of the more positive economic landscape, there is subsequent growth in cultural heritage
institutions such as museums and galleries. This is generating the need for a wider range of
learning services to help the public gain access, understanding and enjoyment from the collections. The time is right, therefore, to devise a policy framework that will have a national
impact in influencing the strategic planning of learning in these institutions. This will
involve drafting a policy document on access and learning; taking into account the unique
contribution educational work is making to the quality of Irish civic life; drawing analogies
with overseas models of good practice, highlighting the user-focused nature of their services;
suggesting new initiatives and possible partnerships for institutions to share and co-operate
with each other on a regional /north-south basis; identifying operational and strategic
proposals to expand and resource education services. While the recommendations will be
made within the anticipated growth, if slower pace of development of the new millennium,
the outcome of this process should lead towards a better understanding of learning so that the
maximum benefit can be gained from these institutions. Early in the twenty-first century
is the time to address this issue, when there is a greater awareness and recognition among
cultural policy-makers and at Government level of the significant economic and educational
benefits of the cultural heritage sector.
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The dates at which these institutions first opened to the public:
1733 Dublin Society Agriculture Museum
1777 Dublin University Museum
1791 Royal Irish Academy Museum
1800 National Botanic Gardens
1826 Royal Hibernian Academy
1829 Royal Botanic Garden, Belfast
1831 Zoological Gardens: Dublin Zoo
1833 Belfast Museum of Natural History (became, in 1961, the Ulster Museum)
1845 Museum of Economic Geology (renamed in 1847 Museum of Irish Industry, became in
1867 the Royal College of Science)
1857 Natural History Museum, Merrion Street
1864 National Gallery
1869-1986 Public Record Office of Ireland
1877 National Library
1885 Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork
1890 Museum of Science and Art, renamed in 1922 the National Museum, more recently,
Museum of Archaeology and History, Kildare Street
1904 Abbey Theatre (known as The National Theatre)
1908 Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (renamed in 2003 Dublin City Gallery The
Hugh Lane)
1923 Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
1937 Armagh Museum
1942 Kilkenny Art Gallery (renamed The Butler Gallery)
1945 Arts Council of Northern Ireland
1948 Limerick Municipal Art Gallery (renamed Limerick City Gallery)
1951 Arts Council
1964 Ulster Folk and Transport Museum
1968 Chester Beatty Library
1976 Ulster American Folk Park
1978 Douglas Hyde Gallery
1981 National Concert Hall
1983 Fota Wildlife Park, Co. Cork
1984 RHA Gallagher Gallery
1986 National Archives
1991 Irish Museum of Modern Art
1993 Museums Council of Northern Ireland
1995 Heritage Council
1997 Hunt Museum, Limerick
1997 Museum of Decorative Arts and History, Collins Barracks
2001 Museum of Country Life, Castlebar
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Learning Can be Fun:
Interactives at W5 Science and Discovery Centre
54
Dr Sally Montgomery
Director, W5, Belfast
W5 – Whowhatwherewhenwhy – was opened to the public on 30 March 2001 with approximately 110 exhibits; a further thirty exhibits were launched in October 2002. The exhibits have
been designed and made by professionals, which is essential from a health and safety aspect.
Interactive exhibits take a lot of looking after and require a professional team. Visitors complain bitterly if their favourite exhibit goes out of order, and they think that your staff, like
fairies (or was it elves), work through the night to fix everything!
The educational philosophy behind W5 is simple. Interactive exhibits give direct experience.
The exhibits chosen in W5 relate to a whole variety of topics, from maths, engineering,
aspects of physics like pneumatics, pulleys, levers, etc., health aspects, and the interfaces with
other topics like music and animation. The range of topics encourages the visitor to try
exhibits related to areas that they may have had no experience of. The exhibits provide a variety of physical, social and personal experiences (Dierking and Faulk’s theory) and relate to
multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical/mathematical, musical, artistic, spatial, bodily/
kinaesthetic, inter/intrapersonal, as suggested by Howard Gardner.
How do we know what we are good at, what interests us, or the kind of person we are, unless
we have the opportunities to try things out through educational, working, cultural and social
experiences? Research has shown that a vast number of people remember school visits to
museums, zoos, etc. long after the event.
Memory often involves active learning with personal strategies. Research has found that
sharing ideas, information and experience with others makes it more likely that knowledge
could be transferred to subsequent problems or used to compare new experiences to existing
concepts. Thus an environment that encourages personal, social and physical experience
would encourage learning and memory.
The exhibits have also been chosen to encourage creativity and promote and develop life and
thinking skills.
Science is a human process that cannot and should not be divorced from other disciplines.
One of the key aspects that any modern visitor-centred institution should support and value is
the ‘life skills’ that cross over every aspect of living in and understanding our world. Life skills
and thinking skills are the basis of the process of discovery and, consequently, should be one of
the key components used to guide both exhibit development and future programming. The
following list, while not exhaustive, provides a strong foundation for exhibit and programme
development.
Life Skills
Listening, observing, patience, laughing, perseverance, empathy, respect, curiosity, doing your
best, enjoying a challenge, good judgement, independence, kindness, imagination, sociability,
sense of responsibility, thinking, awareness, expressiveness, communication, questioning, not
over-reacting, trust, sharing, accepting consequences, collaboration/teamwork, individuality,
goal-setting, self-motivation, choosing, exploring, self-respect, flexibility, creativity, positive
thinking, spirituality, decision-making, practice, concentration and humility.
Thinking Skills (as per Activating Children Thinking Skills, Queens University, Belfast)
Sequencing, ordering information
Sorting, classifying, grouping
Analysing, part/whole relationships, compare/contrast
Making predictions
Drawing conclusions, giving reasons for conclusions
Distinguishing fact from fiction/opinion
Determining bias, the reliability of evidence
Generating new ideas/brainstorming
Relating causes and effects, designing fair tests
Problem-solving, thinking up different solutions
Testing solutions
Planning
Making decisions, weighing pros and cons
Exhibition content areas for W5
To further the focus on process and life skills the following areas have been developed. The
wide themes allow very wide subject areas so that future development is not restricted.
GO: An area focused on the physical exploration of the world – lifting, moving, flying, jumping, etc. This area is largely about discovering how the world ‘works’.
SEE: An area focused on the senses and the ways in which we perceive the world around us.
This area is largely about seeing the world from different perspectives to gain a greater understanding of its complexity.
DO: An area focused on how we manipulate the world and create new things within it. This
area is largely about physical and mental ‘building’ and problem-solving.
Within these three areas, we can provide experiences for visitors that cross all subjects, including but not limited to the original content themes, and underscore the interrelated nature of
all areas of learning and discovery.
START is an area for children of eight and under to explore in their own space without competing with older students. The exhibits have been designed to maximise experience at this
important developmental stage.
WOW is the introductory space. It is being designed to be non-threatening and ethereal, so
the exhibits are based on fire, water and air.
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Exterior view of W5 Belfast
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Innovative Learning Programmes
56
Pat O’Hare
Research Curator, Muckross House, Kerry
Muckross House, Gardens and Traditional Farms are located about five kilometres south of
Killarney town, one of Ireland’s busiest tourist destinations. Completed in 1843, Muckross
House is the focal point and most popular destination within Killarney National Park. The
Trustees of Muckross House, Killarney Ltd, work in partnership with Dúchas (the Heritage
Service of the Department of Environment and Local Government). Together they present
Muckross House to the public as a Victorian family mansion.
Muckross Traditional Farms are situated adjacent to Muckross House. These real working
farms were developed by The Trustees of Muckross House and first opened to the public in
1993. The aim of this open-air museum is to portray Irish rural life during the 1930s and 1940s,
before the introduction of widespread electrification and mechanisation. The differences in
social strata between the ‘small’, ‘middle sized’ and ‘strong’ farmers are illustrated by three
agricultural holdings of various sizes. Each farm is an integral unit, with its own animals, poultry
and horse-drawn farm machinery. A labourer’s cottage, blacksmith’s forge, harness-maker’s
workshop and carpenter’s workshop, complete the development.
Muckross Traditional Farms are based upon actual holdings from the Barleymount area,
which lies northwest of Killarney town. The dwellings and outhouses at Muckross Traditional
Farms are true replicas of the Barleymount originals; except for one, all of the latter are still
inhabited. The farms form a sharp contrast with the life of the gentry as portrayed at Muckross House.
Muckross Traditional Farms are open to the public from March until October. A bean an tí
(woman of the house) is employed to provide third-person interpretation, to visitors, in each
dwelling. She is responsible for relating information concerning the dwelling, its furnishings
and its economy, to the public. The bean an tí is also responsible for carrying out typical
domestic activities, such as baking over the open turf fire and churning butter.
The first ever Féile Chultúir Chiarraí was hosted by Muckross Traditional Farms on Lá Bealtaine
(May Day – the first day of summer) in 1999. Considered one of the most important days in
the traditional Irish calendar, it was therefore an appropriate day on which to celebrate the
folk life and culture of County Kerry with ceol agus craic (music and fun). Among the events
that took place that day were demonstrations of ploughing, basket-making, thatching, patchwork and lacework. Also present were a blacksmith, a tinsmith, a harness-maker and a stonemason. For the most part, these activities were centred on one or other of the traditional farm
dwellings. A festival marquee was erected and Siamsa Tíre and the Lartigue Theatre Company,
among others, provided additional entertainment. The event was repeated in May 2000. For
both these years, the féile (festival) was run in conjunction with Kerry County Council and
South Kerry Partnership. Additional sponsorship was received from Dawn Dairies, Killarney
On both these occasions, the féile proved very popular with the public. For instance, in May
2000 approximately 2,700 people visited the farms on the afternoon of the festival. However,
in the opinion of the organising committee, the farms had, in fact, become overcrowded. The
committee considered that the individual farm dwellings simply could not cope with that
large volume of visitors. This was despite the fact that the festival marquee did help to alleviate
the situation slightly. Concerns were expressed over levels of safety and the negative impact
these crowded conditions might have on people’s enjoyment of the festival.
As a result of these concerns, it was decided to alter the format of the féile in 2001. Instead of a
single day-long event it was decided to run the event over a five-day period. In addition, the
organising committee would concentrate on providing a series of ‘hands on’ workshops specifically for primary school children. A number of schools would attend each day of the festival.
The event would not be open to the general public.
The following four workshops were selected as suitable and were scheduled for each day of the
féile in 2001:
● Traditional bread-making;
● Butter-making;
● Harnessing the working horse;
● An introduction to the architectural features of the traditional Irish dwelling and its
furnishings.
Two primary school teachers were co-opted onto the organising committee. Following their
advice, it was decided that the duration of each workshop should be confined to forty-five
minutes. This time limit was also necessary in order to ensure that the children had time to
participate in all four workshops on the one day. Apart, obviously, from the harnessing
demonstration, each workshop was centred within one of the traditional farm dwellings. Two
mná tí (women of the house) were assigned to each workshop. The harnessing workshop took
place in the large open-sided barn to the rear of the large farmer’s house. This workshop was
the responsibility of Barry Richardson, our harness-maker, assisted by one other. Sufficient
time was allowed at the end of each workshop for the children to walk from one dwelling to
the next.
The committee took the decision to confine the event to children from third class upwards.
Once again, this decision was made on the advice of our teaching associates. They were of the
opinion that the length of the day, the amount of walking involved, and the type of workshop
activities being provided, were not suitable for younger children. There was also some discussion about the ideal number of participants that should be allowed in each workshop. Some
members of the committee were of the opinion that there should be no more than fifteen
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Credit Union, AIB Bank and Bord na Gaeilge/An Foras Teanga, as well as a number of smaller businesses. Members of the local guild of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association provided
assistance with the catering, which was very much appreciated.
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58
children in each. Others disagreed, saying that the average primary school class has more than
that number of pupils. In the end the committee decided that between twenty and twenty-five
participants could be adequately catered for in each workshop. Despite our best efforts, however, some groups attending the event were as large as thirty.
In 2001, as in previous years, the féile was scheduled for the month of May. All the primary
schools within the county were circularised about the upcoming event during early Spring.
Teachers who were interested in attending the event were required to book their places in
advance. We emphasised to each school that attendance at the event was totally free of charge.
As in previous years, the féile was run in conjunction with Kerry County Council and we also
retained most of our former sponsors.
The Trustees of Muckross House aim to promote the use of the Irish language in their daily
business, presentations and publications. Kerry County Council also actively promotes the
use of Irish. The organising committee was, therefore, committed to encouraging the use of
Irish throughout the event, in so far as that was possible.
Unfortunately, due to the threat of Foot and Mouth disease, Muckross Traditional Farms were
actually closed for much of May 2001. The committee had no option, therefore, but to postpone the event until the following September, when the schools had reopened following the
summer recess. Happily, almost all the schools that had booked their place at the event in May
were quite happy to reschedule for September. In an open-air museum such as this, the weather
can have a very big impact on many of our activities. We were, therefore, very fortunate also
that the weather in September was much better than it had been the previous May.
In order for the event to run smoothly, it was necessary to emphasise that all participants must
have arrived at the farms before 9.45 a.m. The workshops commenced at 10 a.m. sharp and
concluded at 2 p.m., in time to connect with local school buses. For schools travelling from a
distance, this tight schedule did pose difficulties. Lunch was scheduled between 11.45 a.m. and
12.30 p.m., and this allowed sufficient time for all participants to assemble together in the festival marquee. The latter was considered indispensable as, if it rained, there was nowhere for
the children to eat their lunch. The children were expected to bring their own food. However,
drinks were provided, courtesy of one of our sponsors, Dawn Dairies.
Twenty-four schools, representing almost 600 students from all over Kerry, attended the event
in 2001. Each school group was photographed using a digital camera and the children could
access their individual school photographs on the Muckross House website each evening.
The workshops
Traditional bread-making workshop
The idea of providing an enactive learning environment for children is based upon the constructivist theory of education. In the bread-making workshop, for example, the children take
While the bread is baking, the children usually take turns toasting bread (with great care and
under strict supervision) on long-handled toasting forks. Obviously this is one activity that is
not suitable for younger children. At the same time, the second bean an tí takes the opportunity to examine the traditional house furnishings, such as the dresser, settlebed and mealbin,
with the children. Finally, when the bread is baked, it is removed from the pot oven and
shown to the children. An earlier baked loaf, which has had time to cool, is then cut up, spread
with butter, and divided among them. Some children proceed to eat the bread with great
gusto, while others view it with feigned distaste.
Traditional dwelling workshop
In this workshop the children are encouraged to explore the differences between the dwelling
of the 1930s and their own homes. The dwelling in which this workshop takes place is a vernacular dwelling of a type typical of much of east Kerry. It is a direct-entry structure, that is, it
has no entrance hallway. Inside there are three interconnecting rooms, the central one being
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turns mixing and kneading the dough. This seems like such a simple activity, but many children have never previously seen bread being made. When the dough is ready, one of the mná
tí asks the children to locate the oven. The children will usually begin to look more and more
perplexed as they scan this recreated 1930s kitchen for an electric, gas or microwave oven.
Finally, to their great amazement, the bean an tí produces a pot oven and proceeds to suspend
it over the open fire. On occasion, a child might express some doubt that the bread will actually bake in this strange-looking object.
59
Practical Session: young people experiment with traditional bread making in one of the cottages on Muckross
Traditional Farms
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the kitchen. There is no ceiling and the sod under-thatch is visible immediately overhead. The
sight of half a pig’s head suspended near the hearth always fascinates the children. There is
obviously no running water or electricity. All cooking is carried out over the open fire and the
importance of the hearth within the traditional Irish dwelling is emphasised to the children.
This particular dwelling is also portrayed as a ‘rambling house’. Therefore, the important
social role of certain houses as centres for card-playing, dancing and music is also stressed. In
order to emphasise this point, the children are usually asked if anyone can sing, dance or play
an instrument. Usually one or more children oblige.
The dancers among the children listen with great glee to how, in the traditional Irish dwelling,
a horse’s skull was often buried beneath a flag at the kitchen hearth. This produced an echo,
which helped the dancers maintain their rhythm. Inevitably every child, whether dancer or
not, must then stamp upon the flag to hear their own echo! This is fun. It is also a learning
experience.
The butter-making workshop
60
Butter-making workshop
In the butter-making workshop the process of making butter is carefully explained to the children. Each child is given an opportunity to churn the milk, to taste the buttermilk, and to use
the butter spades. At the same time the mná tí discuss the important role of butter in the
household economy. The folk beliefs and traditions associated with butter, and butter stealing,
especially during Bealtaine (the month of May), are also discussed.
Harnessing the working horse workshop
In the working horse demonstration, Barry the harness-maker explains to the children about
different types of skin, hide and leather. The children feel, touch and examine these, before
investigating the various parts of the horse’s harness and seeing how it is fitted. The important
role played by the horse in the past as a working animal, and as a means of transport, is discussed. The children also examine some of the horse-drawn machinery and horse traps.
A traditional music workshop was introduced for Féile Chultúir Chiarraí 2002. It was hosted
by the traditional musician, Jimmy Crowley. Five workshops were, therefore, provided this
year, with each school group taking part in four out of the five sessions. The participants had a
choice of participating in either the bread- or the butter-making workshop. Twenty-five
schools attended the event in 2002; these represented just over 600 pupils.
Traditional music workshop
The traditional music workshop proved a very popular addition to our activities. We discovered that children need little encouragement to participate by singing and clapping to the
rhythm of the music. They listen to the stories behind many familiar folksongs, and again,
many groups produce their own performers. One song in particular, entitled ‘Fungi’, and
composed by Jimmy Crowley about the famous Dingle dolphin, is very popular with the
children. Another well-known skipping song, ‘I’ll tell me ma when I go home’, is usually sung
with great gusto and feeling.
To our younger visitors, Muckross Traditional Farms presents a totally alien world, far removed
from their twenty-first-century reality. For many of today’s children, visiting the farms brings
them into direct contact, for the first time, with large working horses and fowl. Hens, ducks
and turkeys freely wander around and about amongst the children. As one teacher commented
about the féile: ‘The comings and goings of various turkeys and hens added to the merriment’.
For some reason, perhaps due to the popularity of a well-known children’s story, the sow and
her piglets also particularly fascinate our younger visitors.
As a follow-up to the féile, a competition is organised for all the children who have attended
the event. They are invited to describe, in story or pictures, the activity they enjoyed most. In
2002 we received eighty competition entries from eleven of the twenty-five schools that
attended the event. The winners are invited to a small prize-winning ceremony and their winning entries are posted on the Muckross House website (www.muckross-house.ie). The competition encourages teachers to undertake some follow-up discussion of the activities in which
their pupils participated. It also enables pupils to reflect upon their experiences.The competition
entries allow museum staff to evaluate, to some extent, the quality of the message received by
the children. It is obvious that, for many teachers also, the events they have witnessed on the
farms are totally alien to their own life experiences.
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At the end of each day, every child receives a sample of freshly churned butter to share at home
with family and friends. We feel that this is a useful exercise as it provides the children with an
opportunity to involve those at home in their experience.
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Evaluation
This year, in a further attempt to evaluate the féile, a short questionnaire was dispatched to
each school that had participated in the event. The questions asked were as follows:
● Would a teacher’s preparatory information pack improve the day’s experience for
each child?
● In your opinion was the duration of the workshops suitable for each activity?
● What, in your opinion, is the ideal group size for each activity?
● Please number in order of preference:
Butter-making
Bread-making
The traditional dwelling
Harnessing the horse
Traditional music session
Approximately 80 per cent of the questionnaires were returned. The majority of teachers were
of the opinion that some preparatory material would be helpful. A number of them suggested
that this material might be provided via the Muckross House website.
In all cases, the duration of the workshops was considered suitable. However, there was little
agreement about the most suitable group size. One respondent was of the opinion that ten to
twelve children was the maximum number that should be allowed in each workshop. At the
other extreme, thirty was considered ideal. This difference of opinion probably mirrors the
class sizes within individual schools and even, sometimes, the size of the actual school itself.
Schools from urban areas tend to have larger class sizes. In small rural schools individual classes
may have less than ten pupils. The organising committee are, however, firmly of the opinion
that smaller groups work best.
The most popular workshop was the traditional Irish music session, followed by the workshop
on the traditional dwelling and its furnishings. The bread-making was third, the harnessing
came fourth and, finally, the butter-making. However, the teachers were careful to emphasise
that the children did enjoy all the workshops.
Unfortunately, in 2002, the weather was not as good as 2001. The week of the féile proved to
be quite cold and wet. As mentioned earlier, inclement weather can impact greatly upon our
activities, especially when the children have to walk from one workshop location to another.
In future, the necessity of wearing suitable clothing will be stressed to both teachers and pupils
alike. The weather, however, did not discourage the number of visitors, all of whom enjoyed
themselves.
The amount of work involved in running this week-long féile should not be underestimated.
There are, of course, all the actual practicalities of contacting the schools, taking the bookings,
organising the timetable and insurance, etc. But in addition, the work involved in the actual
workshops can be quite tiring. Butter-making is, for example, quite a strenuous activity. It can
However, having said all that, the organising committee and all the farm staff have derived
great satisfaction from the children’s obvious enjoyment of the last two féilte. The event has
received a very positive response from all the schools that have participated in it over the two
years. We consider the local community involvement, as manifested by our sponsors, to be
one of the main strengths of the féile. We look forward to the event continuing to evolve and
grow to meet the needs of our primary school children.
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be exhausting for the mná tí to have to make three or four lots of butter in one day. In addition, the farms are open to the public every afternoon in the month of May. So when the last
of the children have departed, at about 2.15 p.m. each day, the farm staff have to turn around
and resume their normal duties. The cost of running the event is also expensive.
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Discovery as a Vehicle for Learning
64
Nora Hickey
Education Officer, Hunt Museum, Limerick
‘Nothing is so well learned as that which is discovered.’ Socrates
The role of discovery in the learning process cannot be underestimated.
● Discovery suggests proactive learning, with the participation and involvement of the learner.
● Discovery avoids the passivity associated with learning that requires the absorption of given
facts.
● Discovery encourages a critical mind.
One might suggest that discovery as a learning method gives rise to a more meaningful and
enduring learning experience. Museum educators, therefore, should strive to create the conditions that facilitate discovery.
Presentation of objects
The Custom House in Limerick, an elegant eighteenth-century Palladian-style building,
houses the private collection of John and Gertrud Hunt. Before they donated their collection
to the people of Ireland, the Hunts lived with and enjoyed the objects now on display in the
Hunt Museum. A simple way in which we try to evoke the informality of the Hunts’ home
and encourage visitors to interact with museum objects is through the existence of drawers
and the non-ordered, random display in curiosity cabinets of various items from the collection, none of which have information captions attached. Researchers from the Interactive
Design Centre, University of Limerick, conducted field research into the manner in which
visitors respond to these drawers and engage with the objects within. They discovered that the
presence of drawers stimulates curiosity and exploration. Visitors tend to participate in discussion around the cabinet, pooling their knowledge to make sense of the exhibits. As we tend to
be programmed to look at labels, it was thought that putting certain objects on display without information captions would allow people to look at the exhibits with a more open mind.
Workshops using discovery-based learning techniques
The following educational workshops are delivered by volunteers who participate in the
museum’s well-known ‘docent’ programme, awarded a Commendation by the Heritage
Council in the 2002 Museum of the Year Awards. Many of the volunteers or docents are also
involved in the development of workshops.
Portrait workshop
1
Interactive discussion on a number of portraits in the Hunt Collection.
2
Practical session, in which participants draw self-portraits.
During workshops such as this one, in which participants are encouraged to make observations on works of art, it is important that the facilitator allows discovery to take place. The
facilitator must strike a balance between the information given and that which emerges
through discussion among the participants.
Discovering Archaeology workshop
1
Slide presentation to introduce children to the work of archaeologists.
2
Tour of the archaeological collection.
3
Simulated excavation.
The ‘Discovering Archaeology’ workshop was a joint initiative between the Discovery
Programme and the Hunt Museum, designed specifically for primary school children. The
financial backing of the Discovery Programme meant that we were able to offer the museum
visits free of charge, making the programme accessible to all schools.
The excavation, which is the applied aspect of the workshop, takes place in the Education
wing of the museum. Children dig in three large sandpits, in which are buried reproduction
artefacts, such as Stone Age pottery and axeheads and Bronze Age scrapers and dress-fasteners
(purchased from Irish Arms, www.irisharms.ie). Each pupil receives a trowel, bucket, brush
and clipboard and is instructed on how to search for objects. The children record their finds
and afterwards discuss what these finds reveal about how people lived in the past. They
attempt as a group to identify the age of their pit. There is much discussion between the pupils
as they compare objects and try to guess the function of each one. It is possibly through this
kind of interaction that the most effective learning takes place.
In February 2000 two Limerick schools participated in the filming of the Discovering Archaeology Programme for Expo 2000, on view in the Irish Pavilion in Hanover. The students filmed
the dig and recorded interviews about archaeology and the process of excavation. Again, this
interactive approach resulted in children gaining an excellent understanding of the processes
involved in archaeological research. The programme was awarded a Commendation in the
Gulbenkian and Heritage Council Museum of the Year Awards in 2000.
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Discovering Archaeology
workshop – a practical
session
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Time Travel Workshop:
object study from artefacts
in the drawers for a Bronze
Age drama enactmentº
Time Travel workshop
1
Video presentation of travelling in time.
2
Bronze Age drama re-enactment.
3
Quiz in the galleries.
4
Object study.
The development of the ‘Time Travel’ workshop was partially funded by the Heritage Council.
Children are brought on a journey of discovery in a time machine, constructed in the Education wing of the museum. Through the use of a video presentation, which acts as a window on
the outside world, children travel backwards in time. The video begins with contemporary
scenes. Whizzing images on the screen denote time travel. During this period children must
fasten their seat belts and place both feet firmly on the ground. They arrive in the Stone Age.
The video takes the children to the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Early and Late Medieval periods
and ends with contemporary scenes. A facilitator guides their discovery and interprets what
they are witnessing. There is no voice-over. The video was produced by the museum’s Education Department, was shot predominantly in the National Heritage Park and also includes
footage from an RTÉ documentary on Craggaunowen, Co. Clare.
After having witnessed a re-enactment of ceremonies at a Bronze Age fulacht fiadh (cooking
place) in the video, the children recreate a burial and feast. They dress up in hessian garments
and participate in mime. They become hunters. They grind corn on a saddle quern. They prepare the fulacht fiadh and mourn their chief.
A quiz, which can be a very effective means of encouraging discovery, based on material from
the Hunt Collection, reinforces what they have thus far learnt.
The object study, which is the main feature of the ‘Discovering Archaeology’ workshop, is a
formal one, with children completing reports on the objects.
The museum also offers the following workshops:
Costume, Prehistoric Ireland, From the Celts to the Vikings, Medieval Workshop, Multi-
Conclusion
I have drawn on examples from the Hunt Museum to advocate discovery as a vehicle for learning in museums and galleries. I will conclude by reiterating that ‘Learning is actively created
by the learners for themselves – it is not the passive absorption of someone else’s learning.
Learning comes from doing something, in context, and receiving feedback. Learners learn
from what they do, not from what the teacher does’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ciolfi, L., Bannon, L.,‘Designing Interactive Museum Exhibits: Enhancing visitor curiosity
through augmented artefacts’ in Bagnara, S., Pozzi, S., Rizzo, A. & Wright, P. (eds.), Proceedings
of ECCE 11, European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (Catania, Italy, September 2002).
Hall, T., Ciolfi, L, Hickey, N., Bannon, L., ‘From hands-on to minds-on: toward the design
of interaction and technology to enhance children’s learning in a museum’, International
Conference of Learning Sciences (Seattle [WA], October 2002).
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cultural weeks (e.g. Chinese week), Drawing in the Galleries, Introduction to the Hunt
Collection and seasonal workshops.
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Informal Learning in American Art Museums
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Liz Coman
Education Officer, National Gallery of Ireland
The past twenty years have witnessed unprecedented attitudinal change within US museums
regarding their educational role. This change was marked by the publication of the groundbreaking 1992 report Excellence and Equity by the American Association of Museums, calling
on museums to ‘place education – in the broadest sense of the word – at the centre of their
public service role.’1 This emphasis on public learning has been a challenge in particular for
art museums, as they are traditionally regarded as the treasure houses of the intellectual elite.
However, according to Stephen E. Weil, senior emeritus scholar in the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Museum Studies, the traditional elitism of the art museum is under siege
today. An increasingly diverse and global community is challenging art museums to be more
aware of demographics and cultural change. Weil maintains that ‘nobody familiar with the art
museum can possibly deny that it may frequently serve as a site for snobbish display and social
ambition but both the museum and its art can and do function in a variety of other and more
important ways as well’.2
What are some of these ‘other and more important ways’? Looking at the case studies of the
Denver Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art we see how some art
museums are responding to their democratisation. Research conducted in the late nineties by
the Denver Art Museum showed that over 70 per cent of their visitors were novice viewers,
leaving 15 per cent as advance amateur and 15 per cent as art professionals. Novice visitors are
characterised as having no prior academic artistic or art historical knowledge. The Board of
Directors of the Denver Art Museum realised that in order to serve this audience they had to
give equal emphasis to their novice visitors along with their academic obligations.
Following this they re-prioritised their core educational goals, promoting the visitor experience under the headings stimulation instead of admiration and choice.
The learner controls the learning
Stimulation or motivating the learner to control their learning is a main tenet of informal education. (The author uses the following definition for Informal Education: short-term or lifelong, non-credential-based education, centred on the learner as opposed to the teacher, with a
focus on environment and community.)3 Learner-centred museum education is principally in
debt to the research of Howard Gardner and his theory of Multiple Intelligences. This theory
promotes that each individual has eight intelligences, each of which offers the ability to solve
problems and create products. They are as follows: linguistic, logical, musical, spatial, kinaesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal and naturalist intelligence.
1. American Association of Museums, Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of
Museums (Washington DC: American Association of Museums, 1992).
2. Ibid.
3. P.E. Fordham, Informal, Non-informal and Formal Education Programmes in YMCA George
Williams College (London: YMCA George Williams College, 1993).
With this consideration in mind, art educators have developed specific visual approaches to
stimulate visitors when looking at a work of art. These approaches free the visitor from traditional dependency on art-historical information and facilitate learning through observation.
Object-based learning works directly with objects by asking basic questions about physical
features, construction, function, design and value, for example, what is it made of? Is the
object complete or is it only a fragment? Has it ever been repaired? How would you describe it to
a friend who isn’t here? Have you ever seen anything like this before? Visual Thinking Strategy
takes this a step further and is based on three questions that aim to help beginner viewers
become more observant and more thoughtful about what they are looking at: What’s going on
in this painting? What do you see that makes you say that? Is there anything more you can
find? It involves no art-historical information and when it is orchestrated effectively, participants learn to acknowledge that every idea is important when it is backed up by physical
elements present in the work they are observing.4
These methods give the novice visitor a choice in how they approach an artwork, and adhere
to the teachings of Gardner. The Denver Art Museum promotes the integrity of its art-historical research and mission but it also acknowledges that a variety of different visitors and learning styles enter the museum. The Education Department at DAM focuses on ‘in-gallery’
learning tools specifically for the novice visitor. Seven Master Teachers (museum educators/
content specialists) work directly beside seven curators of the seven collections of Asian Art,
Native Arts, New World Art, European Painting and Sculpture, Textile Art, Modern and
Contemporary Art and Architecture Design and Graphics. This pair develop discovery
libraries, family backpacks, artstops, highlight labels, kids’ corners, which offer a range of
experiences for visitors to enjoy. Within the Discovery Library the visitor can read books rele4. Philip Yenawine and Abigail Housen (VUE): www.vue.org.
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A View of the Discovery Library, Denver Art Museum
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vant to exhibits, conduct searches of the museum’s online catalogue, look at stored objects
temporarily on display in pull-out drawers, pick up some ‘take-home’ materials about movies
or cooking that relate to paintings in the collection. Within the Kids’ Corner families can be
creative with art materials relevant to specific exhibits or just sit and answer some open-ended
questions about works in the collection. According to the Dean of Education, Patterson
Williams, all visitor interaction in the museum environment is important, whether they visit
the shop or interpret works of art. She emphasises the importance of the visitors’ ‘choice’ in
how they wish to spend their time in the institution and this is reinforced by the different services (practical and intellectual) provided within the museum, which meet different needs of
visitors – shop, family bathroom, Kids’ Corner, Discovery Library.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened its Koret Center for Education on 12
October 2002. Very different from the Denver Art Museum this institution had very little
education/curatorial cross-over evident in the galleries before this. However, much to everyone’s surprise the Board of Governors and Guardians passed the recommendation that the
centre be placed on the main first floor at the entrance-way to the permanent collection. This
was on specific advice from other institutions, who stressed how important it was that the centre be located prominently, be accessible and also within visual distance of the artworks.
This centre excels in its offerings of a variety of activities for visitors to pursue their personal
explorations of art and the artwork in the collection. The Learning Lounge is a ‘drop-in’
facility for visitors and is one of the first of its kind. It contains catalogues, computer kiosks,
comfortable couches for adults and seating for children to do art activities. This shows that the
centre is a place for all ages. It also provides a teacher resource room containing various
curriculum and teaching materials developed in-house by the Education Department.
The most exciting thing about the space is that it is multi-functional – it can be transformed
into a lecture theatre or audio-visual room and can change shape and sound easily with stateof-the-art technology. It also offers computers for visitors to access the SFMOMA digital
catalogue, called Making Sense of Modern Art – a multimedia project that is interdisciplinary
and really quite amazing.
In my opinion, the elitism of the art museum is not necessarily under siege in America or anywhere else for that matter. It is the change in attitude to education and learning, brought
about through new research on informal learning, that is demanding more from museums as
educational institutions. Museums must inform themselves of this new research and align
themselves with these new approaches, from teaching to learning, from the artwork to the visitor. We must, as museum professionals, inform ourselves of how visitors choose to spend their
visits in our museums and appreciate the process of learning that they are engaging in while
they are here. Instead of disseminating information we need to facilitate the search for knowledge. It is then that our collections will truly be enjoyed, admired and, most importantly, preserved for the benefit and enrichment of future generations.
Caroline Carr
Research Assistant, Donegal County Museum
Donegal County Museum’s most successful in-house temporary exhibition in 2001 was
‘Before I joined the Army I lived in Donegal – Donegal and The Great War 1914-18’.
Donegal County Museum, located in Letterkenny, is a local authority-run museum, co-funded
by Donegal County Council and Letterkenny Town Council. There is no admission fee. It has
a full-time staff of four: museum curator Judith McCarthy, museum technician Mervyn
Whyte, receptionist Jackie Abbas, and Caroline Carr, research assistant, acting curator and
education officer. Saol agus Saoithiúlacht – Strategic Plan for Cultural Services, which
includes the County Museum, was launched in December 2001. Through our mission statement, the museum aims to enrich the lives and sense of identity of every person in County
Donegal.
The museum first opened in 1987 in what was the warden’s house of Letterkenny Workhouse.
In 1989 it was renovated and extended. Then disaster struck in 1995 with the discovery of dry
rot and the renovations were not completed until 1999. DCM has two exhibition galleries – a
permanent exhibition gallery on the first floor which tells the story of County Donegal from
prehistory up until the twentieth century, and a temporary exhibition gallery downstairs. It
has quite a progressive temporary exhibition programme; since 2000 there have been over
twenty exhibitions, ranging from travelling exhibitions such as ‘Guns and Chiffon’, ‘War and
Conflict’, ‘Languages of Contemporary Ulster’, ‘Japanese woodcut prints’, ‘Pre-Columbian textiles’, to in-house exhibitions such as ‘Recent Acquisitions’, ‘The Concrete Cup’ and ‘HOME’.
The World War I exhibition
I took up my post in February 2001 and by the end of the first week discovered that one my
principal duties was to research, design and mount an exhibition on Donegal’s involvement in
the First World War. This was a topic that had not previously been covered in any great detail.
There are a number of boards and cases on this topic in the permanent gallery but they are of
a very general nature.
Where to start? For those who regularly commemorate the war dead, the twenty-first century
represents the end of an era. Virtually all the veterans are now deceased and the Battle of the
Somme is no longer ‘living history’ but a battle that was fought in the last century. Yet, the fact
that a terrible event occurred a long time ago does not necessarily lessen its impact.
From the outset it was decided to concentrate on those Donegal men and women whose stories had never been told before, sometimes not even to their own families. Contact was made
with various people through press releases and personal contacts to see if they were willing
firstly to talk to me and then possibly exhibit their relatives’ stories and material. Many were
wary at the start but eventually accepted the exhibition idea and some gave me other names
and addresses.
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Getting it Right: World War I, Exhibition and Learning Materials
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Two elements were considered vital to the atmosphere of the exhibition: a video and a lifesized cross-section trench. The video was important because, apart from the fact that Donegal
County Museum never had a specially produced video to accompany any of its in-house exhibitions before, it was felt that the sights and sounds of war would add reality to the exhibition.
Room 101, a Northern Ireland-based multimedia production company with a special interest
in World War I, produced the video. The life-sized trench, on the other hand, would allow the
visitors to experience the conditions in which so many men had lived and died.
Armed with a diagram and a 1912 field training manual, we contacted the commandant of our
local army base and attempted to persuade him that this was a serious project. The officers and
engineers arrived on site, took measurements and left. The following day a phone call told us
that the earth-moving equipment was on its way. Eventually the first-ever life-sized cross section First World War trench was built by the Irish army, complete with sandbags, razor wire,
mud, ammunition and scaffolding. It was completed in four days. The trench was darkly lit
and the sandbags filled with a mixture of sand and diesel, which gave off a very earthy smell.
Scattered on and around the trench were 1,000 poppies, kindly donated by the British Legion,
to commemorate the number of Donegal people estimated to have died in the war.
We contacted the Somme Heritage Centre in Newtownards and the Royal Irish Fusiliers in
Armagh to see if the museum could borrow from their collections. Craig McGuckian and
Amanda Moreno were more than helpful. This was the first time that the Somme had lent
cross-border items from their collection.
The display boards covered a great range of topics, including the causes of the war, joining up,
life in the trenches, battle accounts, personal stories, all against the backdrop of life in Donegal
during the war. The boards comprised text panels, photographs (many originals), diagrams,
drawings and newspaper articles.
Donations and loans from the public began to arrive in and eventually the exhibition was
opened on 31 August 2001. During the exhibition run, the display cases were changed three
times to allow the display of all the donations and loans.
The video turned out to be a very emotive project, with many visitors commenting that it
bought home the true horrors of war and allowed them to see for themselves the conditions in
which their relatives had fought and died. The majority of visitors watched the video. It
reached a stage where our receptionist had to have a box of tissues at the reception desk. The
trench provided a visual impact as soon you walked in the museum door and was very successful with all visitors, young and old. We also used the opportunity to explain the significance of
the poppies.
The title of the exhibition was taken from a poem by Patrick McGill, who came from Glenties, County Donegal and is otherwise known as the ‘Navvy poet’. He also wrote of his experiences in the trenches in a work entitled The Great Push, which describes the major British
offensive at Loos in September 1915, where he was a stretcher-bearer. The first two verses of his
poem serve as an Introduction to the video.
While politics was not the issue, it did provide an opportunity to explore the reasons why men
joined the army and it explored the Easter Rising in the context of the First World War – how
the men heard about the wars and uprisings in the trenches, their reactions and options, and
how attitudes towards them had changed by the time they returned home.
A series of guest lectures were held: ‘Donegal, Ireland and the first world war’ by Niall McGinley,
a local historian; ‘Ballyshannon, Belcoo and Bertincourt’ by Bill Canning on the Donegal regiments of the Inniskilling Fusiliers, and ‘Francis Ledwidge and other war poets’ by Liam
O’Meara. All were well attended by young and old.
During the month of October, over 1,000 primary school children visited the exhibition. A
decision was taken not to produce worksheets to accompany the show as it was felt that they
would distract from the history and events on display. It was hoped that the exhibition would
help visitors, young and old, to understand that World War 1 was a European event and that
Donegal had played its part, not just by sheltering the British Fleet in Lough Swilly, but to
Donegal men making a major contribution to the war effort, and to welcoming countless
homeless refugees, evidenced by the many stories of Belgian refugees housed in Letterkenny.
The museum received a wide range of visitors not just from Donegal but from all over Ireland,
Northern Ireland and England. The British Military Attaché visited, along with Irish Army
generals and other senior officers. Locals brought their visiting friends and relatives and there
were numerous repeat visitors.
In conclusion, the first lesson learned was that the exhibition should have been kept on display
for a much longer period. The strong points included the fact that it was informative and
interesting, combining the personal, visual (taking up a full gallery) as well as the interactive.
A key element of the exhibition was the video clips containing interviews with Liam Ronayne
the County Librarian; Craig McGuckian of the Somme Heritage Centre; Judith McCarthy,
the museum curator; Maeve Sweeney, History and English teacher, and visitors Jack Harkin
and Billy Watson. In conclusion, this exhibition gave Donegal County Museum much greater
prominence within the county, in addition to creating a greater level of interest within the
local community and it is a pleasure to speak about it at this symposium.
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Getting it right?
This was the first major exhibition for Donegal County Museum. The timing of the exhibition
was appropriate due to the peace process taking place in Northern Ireland and also due to the
building of the Peace Park at Messines in Belgium (which had a Donegal/Derry connection).
It was the most successful opening for the museum and the exhibition proved extremely popular. It provided a platform to describe the lives of Donegal men and women, not all of whom
were decorated, whose stories had never been told before. It also offered their relatives a sense of
pride and pity for the men who endured the unimaginable but who had the courage to see it
through and it provided an opportunity to commemorate and acknowledge their contribution.
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Group for Education in Museums (GEM)
74
Robin Clutterbuck,
Convenor, GEM Freelance Network
GEM is a UK-based association for everyone concerned with learning through museums
and galleries and it has many members in Ireland. At the heart of the association is the
belief that learning is a core function of museums. GEM exists to support those delivering
learning and to advocate the cause to the museum profession at large, to Government and
funding bodies and to visitors. In recent years education has moved up the social and political agenda and GEM has taken an active role in advising on Government policy and contributing to initiatives such as the Campaign for Learning through Museums and Galleries
and the Government-funded Museums and Galleries Education Programme.
GEM’s members cover a wide geographical area, not only in the UK but internationally.
Originally the association mainly represented education officers in museums but in recent
years membership has expanded to include curatorial staff, managers, consultants, designers
and students. GEM is not only concerned with museums and galleries; members also work
in archives, historic houses, heritage sites, science and discovery centres, libraries, schools
and universities.
GEM membership includes:
GEM News – a quarterly magazine of news, views and reviews;
JEM – the annual Journal of Education in Museums, with research reports and in-depth
articles;
Annual conference and national training days;
Area groups for local networking and regular training events;
A network for freelancers and consultants;
A lively e-mail discussion list;
Travel and research bursaries.
For further information about GEM contact:
Robin Clutterbuck, GEM Freelance Network Convenor
Juliette Fritsch
What is the Visitor Studies Group?
VSG is an international organisation that provides a framework for thinking about the needs
of visitors to museums and heritage sites. It represents the opinion and expertise of museum
and heritage professionals, providing forums for debate that impact policy and strategy.
Who is the Visitor Studies Group for?
VSG is for museums, galleries, related institutions, natural and cultural heritage sites and professionals. Members include: Head of Interpretation, Marketing Manager, Visitor Services
Office, Museum Development Office, Audience Advocate, Freelance Evaluator, Interactives
Designer, Education and Outreach Officer, Head of Gallery Education.
Why do visitor studies?
Visitor studies is fundamentally a consultation process. It supports funding applications, identifies competition, increases likelihood that project goals will be met, assesses the effectiveness
of the project, and facilitates responsive, informed decision-making.
Methodologies
Methodologies include questioning assumptions about understandings, attitudes, beliefs,
learning processes, attraction to the proposed project. Quantitative statistical information:
clarifies profile of existing visitors; identifies gaps in visitor profile. Qualitative attitudinal
information: assesses likely enthusiasm for projects and identifies barriers and how to overcome them. Front-end evaluation is the first stage of concept development and provides information about the intended audience. Formative evaluation is when the project design and
development is underway and ongoing feedback is provided to show appropriateness and pinpoint problems and bugs. Summative evaluation is the final assessment of the effectiveness of
the project and determines the extent to which project goals were met.
Why join the Visitor Studies Group?
You can meet other people who are committed to the same audience-orientated objectives in
their work. You can share case studies and methodologies. You are part of a professional organisation that is raising the profile of this important aspect of educational and interpretative
work in museums, galleries and heritage sites.
We would be interested in learning about any visitor studies taking place in Ireland.
Contact Information: www.visitors.org.uk
Anne Pennington, Treasurer and Membership, VSG
NMGM, P.O. Box 33, 127 Dale Street, Liverpool L69 3LA, UK
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Visitor Studies Group, UK
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The National Gallery of Ireland
Raymond Keaveney, Director
Education: Liz Coman, Sheena Barrett, Lynn McGrane, Ruth Mulhern,
Interns: Geraldine Molloy and Emma McDonnell
Finance: Vivienne Lynch
Photography: Roy Hewson
Friends of the National Gallery: Maureen B. Ryan
IT: Niamh Gogan and Gavin Hand
Development: Criona Cullen
Press & Communications: Valerie Keogh
Visitor Services/Security: Alice Cooper/Tony Walsh
Education Department Volunteers
The Heritage Council
The British Council
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
The National Gallery of Ireland and Roy Hewson
Botanic Gardens,
Natural History Museum,
National Touring Exhibition Services
Royal Hospital Kilmainham
Chester Beatty Library
W 5, Belfast
Muckross House, Killarney, Co Kerry
Hunt Museum, Limerick
Denver Art museum
Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Co Down