CECA 2009 - Day 6
10 October 2009
On our final day of the conference, we started of with a presentation from Piet Hagenaars and Marjo van Hoorn reporting on trends in museum education in the Netherlands from a study in 2007, which was compared to results from a similar study in 1995.
Cultivating aesthetic experiences and being part of the local community was considered more important than before, since infotainment and edutainment had been introduced as new concepts. Partnerships and collaboration had a stronger focus on cooperation with institutions for ethnic minorities and senior citizens. The summary of the report can be downloaded in English from: cultuurnetwerk.nl/english/index.html.
Following this, Prof Anne Marie Edmond and Dr Colette Dufresne-Tassé (both from Canada), both presented research projects based on the “Thinking Aloud” methodology, a form of accompanied visit where visitors are encouraged to voice aloud their thoughts, reflections, conclusions etc which are recorded by the researcher accompanying them. The responses are then coded and analysed. Both speakers were happy to be contacted for copies of their research.
I then gave my own presentation on the impact of exhibition evaluation on setting priorities for museum education, based around the case study of ‘Extremes - Life in Subarctic Canada’, an exhibition which ran at the National Museum of Scotland last year. The evaluation showed that the exhibition encouraged visitors to think not only for themselves (a step on from the traditional approach of just transferring facts and knowledge to visitors), but also about themselves.
Finally, we had a presentation from Emma Nardi (Italy) on the museum as a tool to improve reading comprehension, and then Gina Koutsika (UK) had the last word, so to speak, and rounded off the conference with a summary of some good recommendations for carrying out audience research.
The very last thing on the agenda was a look towards next year’s conference, which will take place during the ICOM triennale, and will be held in Shanghai in November 2010. The Chinese delegation set the scene with a video presentation of museums and culture in China.
