Explorative Experience
multiple activities of interpretation and meaning making among visitors, they also open up for transactions between the cross-disciplinary perspectives as represented by museum objects.
The pilot we report from here (Design and Build Your Own Boat), has reminded us of Dewey s distinction that quality of experience should not be confused with the educational quality of the experience (Dewey 1938) and that museum learning experiences are closely related to personal continuum and the transactions that take place between the individual and what constitutes his environment (Dewey 1938, Ansbacher 1998). We will focus on how these transactions not only contain multiple activities of interpretation and meaning making among young visitors, but also open for transactions between the cross-disciplinary perspectives represented by museum objects. Based on the pilot we ask how such transactions may enable students meaning making and learning.
Seeing a museum object as inscribed with many layers of historical and scientific issues, we designed a programme that would present the visitors with many gates of entry to the object in question. Embracing all scripts embodied by an object, we decided to utilize a limitless wealth of information to contextualize the purpose of the learning programme and the cross-disciplinary aspects it opened up. In our quest for a museum learning design that would enhance visitors object-based learning and understanding, we designed a multi-layered experience mirroring the multitude of meanings inscribed in an object. In the pilot Design and Build Your Own Boat, the museum object (boat) was approached from several angles that all represent a different phase – a layer – of the learning programme. These angles consisted of narratives, of encounters with the original boats (i.e. the historical objects), of moulding model hulls, of building, rigging, launching, ballasting, of sailing boats, of after-museum discussions and studies.
We ask how a museum educational programme can enhance students´ interpretation of the complex meaning inscribed in a museum object. How can a museum learning program designed in multiple layers meet students learning trajectories and transactions across the diverse contexts involved in the museum visit (Falk and Dierking 1992)?
Object-based learning in museums and school field trips
The focus on object-based learning in museums involves a development in museum learning theories away from a transmission-absorption model towards a highly interactive learning that results from … experience and encounters with objects Falk and Dierking 2000). The shift from an object-based epistemology dominant in the late 9th century museum, to today s object-based discourse centering on the participation of the object in the cultural or lived history of the visitor, opens up for new learning activities that emphasises explanation which could be that of the expert, or that of the visitor, or both…. Evans et al. 2002). This understanding of museum learning and learning related to objects requires that the theoretical claims posed to understand learning with objects should be related closely to the particular sociocultural setting in question (Wertsch 2002). Students encounter with museum objects should be based on interpretations and explanatory activities to scaffold their meaning making and learning.
Three key aspects into school field trips to museums has been in focus of the last 10 years of research; the overall educational value of the trips, the impact of preparing for field trips and the complexity of elements that influence students learning during field trips. The wide range of Proceedings of The Transformative Museum page 97
research has involved a closer investigation into the learning of the individual students within school groups, emphasising the sociocultural aspects of learning in museums and comparing students learning with childrens` learning in the setting of family visits (Griffin 2004). The special interest in research into school field trips to science centres, states the importance of a clear learning framework for the visit, a clear indication of how the information is to be used following the visit and an understandable purpose of the learning (Griffin 1998) providing students some authority of their learning (Griffin 2004). In a study of science educational programmes from museum educators` perspectives, five elements have been found to influence school student learning in museums; a alignment with accepted science curriculum standards and benchmarks; b) extension of all contacts through pre-and post-activity connections; c) integration with other subjects and disciplines; d) connection of classroom experience to science center experience; and e) insistence on student production through problem solving, construction, collaboration, and use of creativity Lebeau et al. : . While our learning program was designed for a cultural historical museum, these five elements seems relevant for a cross-disciplinary approach to museum objects as well.
To a museum educator, the historical object in the museum provides a learning context of multiple epistemic approaches. This is a cross-disciplinary resource that can give visitors multiple choices when forming their personal and social engagement with objects in the expanding development of experience, where learning experiences presents new problems that grows out of the experience and that it arouses the learner an active quest for information (Dewey 1938). These perspectives informed our development of a museum learning programme as based on multiple layers of learning activities, such as reading/listening, observing different shapes of objects, making and using boat models, and finally telling narratives about the boats produced. Each layer of activities provide a new perspective on the museum object, a new entry point, such as the cultural history stories about people using specific boat types and activities such as ballasting the boats to understand the physical relation between weight and function of boats on the water. The layers and phases of the learning activities in the program are inherently interdisciplinary, and will be further explained below.
Maritime museums do represent an interesting interdisciplinarity in the museum landscape;
they contain museum objects such as boats, ships and maritime equipment from oil and gas production. They contain scientific knowledge about weight, speed, resistance etc. But they also contain the history of societal and urban processes, international influences, workers history, coastal cultures and industrial development related to the fishing-industry for instance and they draw on disciplines such as maritime archaeology, ethnology, history, craftsmanship, engineering, physics and so on. These characteristics make maritime museums an interesting context for an interdisciplinary approach to object-based learning and legitimate the need for learning activities that involves students in interactions that embodies the diverging perspectives of maritime objects.
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Design and Build Your Own Boat – a cross-curricular program for school field trips to museums
The objective of the pilot Design and Build Your Own Boat (at The Norwegian Maritime Museum in Oslo, September 2011 and forthcoming at the Stavanger Maritime Museum, October 2012) was twofold: One was related to museum subject - to create children s interest in ship construction technology and its history. The second was related to museums role in society – we aimed at building a multilayered learning programme that would link museum learning to a diversity of school curriculum subjects and provide an educational programme that would contextualize interdisciplinarity.
Basing our learning design on Falk and Dierking s Contextual Model of Learning (Falk and Dierking 1992, Falk and Dierking 2000), we see museum learning as resulting from the transactions that take place in the cross-section of the personal, social and physical contexts.
Placing our learning design within this cross-sectional context, we built a layered trajectory of interlocking activities, a chain of many phases. To scaffold the students interpretation of the complex meanings and cross-disciplinary perspectives inscribed in a museum object, learning method, learning tools and learning content were layered and varied throughout:
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Activity (method)
Materials (tools)
Context (personal, social, physical)
Content (cross-disciplinary)
When studying boats we can read activities such as building, sailing, fishing etc. We may also read narratives about people from former times using boats for transportation and work, we can read old knowledge of wood building materials and wool sails, we can read signs of collaborative processes in fishing and we can read the historical development of cities and of Norway as a seafaring nation. To build children s conceptual understanding of the many layers of knowledge embedded in the boat-objects, we chose different types of activities i.e. reading, listening, talking, making, testing, exploring and playing, to form a chain of experiences that each mirror the layers inscribed in the museum objects. Materials such as wood, plastic, fabric, glue, pebbles and water are tangible tools enhancing the experiences and aiding the activities of unlocking the embedded scripts.
The programme Design and Build Your Own Boat was given a tripart layout and was designed as a series of many phases, each phase focusing on different layers of content;
I pre-visit activities that focused on the historical context of the four boats that the students would come to meet in the museum.
II the museum visit itself split into many phases and which focused on the same four types of boats through creative activities
III post-museum activities that focused on students telling about the visit and about what they had learned about boats and sailing
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I Pre-visit activities: Reading fictional historical narratives
In school, children were to read 4 short stories about the different four boats or ships chosen to represent different hulls and also different stages in Norwegian boat building history.
All 4 narratives focused on a fictional child the same age as the target group:
The dugout boat dated to 200 BC, is introduced through a nine year old boy called Wiwaz.
His family has several dugouts and as we meet him, he and his parents are on their way up the river in the family s largest dugout to visit his cousins. Descriptions of his clothes and the presents they are bringing give life to an everyday scene more than two millenniums ago.
The Viking ship is presented through a ten year old girl called Tora. Tora is the youngest of three, she is the only girl and her father s favorite and she manages most days to avoid all daily chores expected of her. As we meet her, it is the year 955 AD and she and her father is sailing down the Oslo fjord to a market town where her father sells furs. He has promised to buy her a buckle for the new leather belt her brother gave her.
The small freight boat from 1595 (excavated by Norwegian marine archeologists in 2008 and reconstructed and christened Vaaghals in is owned by nine year old Anne s father who makes his living by freighting heavy goods around the Oslo harbor area. Anne, who is named after the Danish princess who married James 6 of Scotland in Oslo just before she was born, is a strong little girl who often helps her father load and unload. Descriptions of their living quarters extend a picture of early 17th century local life.
The rescue boat RS1 Stavanger built in 1901as the first of many, saves the life of Simon, age 10, and his father as they are caught in the February storms when out fishing. Simon, who is terrified and frozen to the bone, is allowed on board the rescuer when they come to harbor. He regains his body temperature by drinking hot coffee swathed in a large wool blanket.
Albeit the stories and characters are fictional, the facts are historically correct and based on research and archeological finds. All boats but the Viking ship, are in the museum collection. The Viking ship is represented through an exhibition model but can also be seen in a neighbor museum.
After the boats were introduced such, the children were to pick out their favorite and the teachers were to send a list of boats they wanted to build to the museum where volunteer staff would prepare for their visit.
II The Museum Visit
The museum visit was planned as a trajectory of phases, a series of closely linked activities:
1. Introductory session
After welcoming the children, the museum educator would introduce the museum volunteers (i.e. retired sailors and engineers) and then initiate a conversation about boats in the olden days . The children would be asked to look at exhibited boat and ship models and link these to the different modes of transportation today, i.e. a small row boat would be today s car or bicycle, a large passenger ship would be today s train or airplane and so on.
2. Guided tour – giving a framework
A walk through the exhibitions would show the children the dugout boat exhibited in a large glass cage and a minute-short film on how to build a dugout as well as a model of the Gokstad Viking ship. All children in Oslo visit the neighboring Viking ship museum so we believed the model would suffice. They would then be taken to the museum s boat building workshop where boat builders were building a full size copy of the 1595 freighter (Vaaghals). It was hoped that the live environment with its smells of tar and wood, the sounds of hammers pounding and the sight of human hair used as insulation
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between the boards would give life to a historical object. The children would finally look at the rescue boat Stavanger anchored up in the museum harbor.
3. Model hull making – focusing on form
This session would introduce the models. The model hulls were to be molded in plastic by museum staff prior to the visit. The class would be taken to the volunteers work shop which incidentally was next door to their designated work shop. A museum volunteer would demonstrate to the class how their plastic hull models had been created by heating and softening a sheet of plastic in a Vacuum Press Machine and by the use of vacuum fold it around one of the four small wooden copies (plugs) of the designated hulls. This layer would be concluded with the children being handed a model hull each of the boat they wanted to the build. It would also be stressed that the hulls were not the entire boat but simply a part of it, otherwise a common misconception.
4. Building boat - understanding boat type and function
The class and its teachers would then proceed to their designated work shop area where they would be introduced to the materials they needed to build the model boats:
Wooden sticks for masts and spars, pieces of fabric for sails, clay dough as mast fish, lines for the rigging, glue, colorful markers and so on. Teachers and retired sailors and engineers were all supposed to be at hand.
5. Ballasting boat – understanding weight and floating
The first test station was a small inflatable pool where the children would have to try out and to learn to master the art of ballasting. Using garden pebbles, each child would have to balance their model boats correctly before they could move on to the next phase;
6. Testing&sailing boat – understanding weight and stability
When the staff was satisfied with the stability of the model boats, children would be allowed to move on to the second test station – a large stationary museum pool where a mechanical pull test would take place. Museum staff would attach two and two model boats to a simple pulling device in the hope that the young students could compare the boats seaworthiness.
7. Taking boat home – telling and remembering
The museum visit would end with every child leaving with his or her own boat.
III Post-visit activities; Creating narrative
The teachers were expected to follow up any of the subjects that the museum visit opened up for, preferably science subjects as there is national concern for the future recruitment of students of science. In addition, the museum educator would visit all the classes and converse with the children about the experience.
Structuring the multilayered learning programme
In short, our educational framework consisted of a multilayered scaffold with each layer representing a meaning making activity that facilitated the interpretation of the museum object.
However, the richness of the structure required structuring and we chose to see the learning trajectory as a piece of dramaturgy: By allowing the planned interactions to follow a chronological time line, i.e. the young students would read about the boats, see the original boats, see the models they were to build, make their own boats, test them, play with them, take them home and finally create their own narratives about them, this multilayered experience
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would progress naturally, providing a sense of narrative order with a beginning, a middle and an end.
To sum up, we aimed to allow students to investigate any scripts embedded in the object and teachers to utilize whatever aspects they deemed beneficial to teaching by facilitating an evolving journey within a multilayered scaffolding of embodied transactions. By introducing the children to the concept of boat/ship through a trajectory of different phases each providing the child with varied and different learning techniques, we hoped to enable young students to grasp
the conceptual understanding of boats and ships.
Experiences from the pilot
In September 2011, a total of 160 children and 10 teachers divided between 5 school classes from 3 schools in Oslo took part in this pilot study. Four of the school classes were third graders, i.e. 8 years old, the last was a sixth grade class, i.e. 11 years old. The empirical material is based on field notes taken during the museum visits, transcribed interviews with both the young and the adults as well as on personal conversations with the teachers. We have used qualitative methods based on observations of the children during their museum field trips. Two weeks after the field trips, we conducted a group interview with the teachers. After a period of 3-5 months the museum educator visited all 3 schools and recorded semi-structured group interviews with the school children (in groups of five) as part of a post-museum closing session. Each interview lasted 20-25 minutes. The teachers were interviewed separately at the same time. These sessions lasted 30-60 minutes. Furthermore, both children and teachers answered a written questionnaire at this point. The interviews was transcribed and analyzed in accordance with the themes of this paper.
We will focus our empirical discussion of the results from the pilot on two of the phases in the educationally chain; on the phase where the children had finished making their model boats and were to ballast them and test their seaworthiness and on the last phase, the conversation between the museum educator and the children reminiscing about the experience. These two phases illustrate how the interconnected trajectory of activities in the diverging phases gives important contextual information that students use to capture the content of the next phase.
Guided Tour Hull Demo Building Boat Ballasting&Testing Sailing Boat Take boat home
Intro Narrative
Guided Tour Hull Demo Building Boat Ballasting &
Testing boat Sailing Boat
Intro School/home:
creating narrative Take boat home
creating narrative Take boat home