‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums

Public engagement has become a central theme in the mission statements of many cultural institutions, and in scholarly research into museums and heritage. Engagement has emerged as the go-to-it-word for generating, improving or repairing relations between museums and society at large. But engagement is frequently an unexamined term that might embed assumptions and ignore power relationships. This article describes and examines the implications of conflicting and misleading uses of ‘engagement’ in relation to institutional dealings with contested questions about culture and heritage. It considers the development of an exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto in 2009 within the new institutional goal to ‘Engage the World’. The chapter analyses the motivations, processes and decisions deployed by management and staff to ‘Engage the World’, and the degree to which the museum was able to re-think its strategies of public engagement, especially in relation to subjects,issues and publics that were more controversial in nature

PJER 2(1) Full Issue

PJER 2(1) Full Issu

Archival education and outreach: promoting communal identity through education

Archival outreach programs serve a key role in the preservation and promotion of public history. Community based educational programs sponsored and implemented by archival repositories allow actual, as well as potential, patrons to learn about their local history and to familiarize themselves with archival materials. It is the purpose of this thesis to explore the postmodern archival perspective and to propose universal program models which can be adapted to facilitate educational outreach in archival repositories of various staff sizes and organizational affiliations. This study will appraise the similarities and differences of a variety of current public outreach programs with a focus on three distinct areas: how an archival organization chooses which target audiences will be best served by public outreach initiatives; how an archives can most efficiently fund and market these outreach projects; and how local communities can utilize archival repositories to build and strengthen their communal identities

Enacting Disciplinary Literacy Instruction: Essential Practices in Action

In this paper, we will explore elements of the Essential Instructional Practices for Disciplinary Literacy: Grades 6-12 , a statewide initiative in Michigan designed to support exactly this kind of teaching. In particular, we will discuss key instructional implications of the Essential Practices for both social studies and ELA instruction and highlight important commonalities and distinctions across these two content areas. We provide concrete examples of these practices in action as we share activities and reflections from a curricular project we undertook with US History and ELA teachers called Equitable Futures. In this initiative, teachers engaged their students in inquiry-driven learning that involved the development of a range of disciplinary literacy practices and tools

A Checklist to Publish Collections as Data in GLAM Institutions

Large-scale digitization in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) created the conditions for providing access to collections as data. It opened new opportunities to explore, use and reuse digital collections. Strong proponents of collections as data are the Innovation Labs which provided numerous examples of publishing datasets under open licenses in order to reuse digital content in novel and creative ways. Within the current transition to the emerging data spaces, clouds for cultural heritage and open science, the need to identify practices which support more GLAM institutions to offer datasets becomes a priority, especially within the smaller and medium-sized institutions. This paper answers the need to support GLAM institutions in facilitating the transition into publishing their digital content and to introduce collections as data services; this will also help their future efficient contribution to data spaces and cultural heritage clouds. It offers a checklist that can be used for both creating and evaluating digital collections suitable for computational use. The main contributions of this paper are i) a methodology for devising a checklist to create and assess digital collections for computational use; ii) a checklist to create and assess digital collections suitable for use with computational methods; iii) the assessment of the checklist against the practice of institutions innovating in the Collections as data field; and iv) the results obtained after the application and recommendations for the use of the checklist in GLAM institutions

Problematised History Pedagogy as Narrative Research: Self-Fashioning, Dismantled Voices and Reimaginings in History Education

A growing disturbance with history’s identity in the New Zealand schooling curriculum disrupted my educational socialisation (curriculum, professional, academic) and inheritance of educational policy decisions. In turn, this disturbance shaped a critical stance in my research and practitioner work. Accordingly, problematised history pedagogy [PHP] emerged as the phenomenon and method of my doctoral study and was activated as a counterpoint to my experiences of normalised discourses of history curriculum and pedagogy. The PHP as narrative research was situated in my history curriculum programme in a postgraduate year of secondary teacher education. The research aimed to engage my history class (research participants as preservice teachers) in pedagogy that involved critique of and reflection on the things we do as history teachers in the secondary curriculum. The PHP was nested within my historicising and theorising of educational experience. Conceptualised as a reciprocal research process, the PHP involved the participants and me in theorising pedagogies, fashioning pedagogic identities, and engaging critically with curriculum conceptions of history. The PHP sought to reimagine history curriculum and pedagogy and identify pedagogic spaces of possibility. The narrative research was layered as a bricolage of storying that reflected the interdisciplinary nature of my educational socialisation. Experiences as a teacher educator, curriculum and assessment developer and researcher, meant many voices, discourses, and theories were woven into the narrative. This complex conceptual work focused on understandings of narrative; policy, curriculum and pedagogy; critical pedagogy; history; history education, and notions of space. The narrative research was constructed in three parts. Firstly, my narrative selves and shifts to a critical pedagogy stance were historicised and theorised through an autobiographical approach. An original dimension of this storying has been the use of vignettes that illuminate the convergence of educational experience, theorising, and reimaginings as an aesthetic and critical narrative device. The second part of the research narrative arrives at the point of praxis whereby experience and theory came together to activate the PHP. The PHP was placed in the context of the national history curriculum, a review of history education literature, and situated in my teacher education work. The PHP has been represented as a system of meaning through its distinctive research processes of phenomenological inquiry, genealogical disclosure, and discursive self-fashioning. An original form of analysis was conceptualised to deconstruct the participants’ history thinking and their experiences of the cultural politics of the history curriculum. This was conceptualised as a dismantling analysis [DA]. The third part of the narrative recounts the history class’s year of reflexive engagement with PHP. Participants’ pedagogic identities, historical thinking and critique of history curriculum and pedagogy as PHP ‘cases’ in secondary classrooms were dismantled and discussed. Emergent PHP findings of the participants’ thinking as beginning history teachers include such features as: discourses of embodiment (fears, failure and fraud) prior to practicum; uncertainties about historical knowledge that includes doubt and discomfort about dealing with ‘difficult’ knowledge; disillusionment with familiar historical narratives; scant exposure to Aotearoa New Zealand histories and limited engagement with historical research methods in school and university study; observations of uncritical teacher modelling of history pedagogy; questioning of a strong masculine focus in historical contexts and a recurrent theme of history as violent; history practicum experienced through the dominant orientation of history as inquiry. These findings illustrate the public, accountable and discursive production of the national history curriculum. Reimagined history curricula are glimpsed in the participants’ seeking of counter-orientations of history’s purpose and desired history pedagogy as inclusive and democratic, as social reconstruction, and as an evolving critical project. A reflective critique of the narrative research brings the writing to a close

Institutionalism Ancient, Old and New: A Historical Perspective on Institutions and Uneven Development

institutions, structural change, uneven development, ancient institutional school