Museums and Higher Education Working Together

Challenges and Opportunities

Jos Boys, Anne Boddington, Anne Boddington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317092919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Over the last twenty years the educational role of the museum has come to be central to its mission. There are now far more educational opportunities, new spaces, new interfaces - both digital and physical, and a growing number of education and interpretation departments, educational curators and public engagement programmes. Despite these developments, however, higher education has remained a marginal collaborator compared to primary and secondary schools and to other forms of adult learning. This has meant that the possibilities for partnerships between universities, colleges, museums and galleries has remained relatively unexplored, especially in relation to their potential for generating innovative patterns of research and learning. This book addresses the key issues which are preventing such partnerships and examines how to enable more effective and creative connections between museums and higher education. The authors identify conceptual and practical barriers and explore whether current academic models are fit for purpose. They argue that as pressures mount on public educational resources around the world, there needs to be an urgent increase in the exchange of knowledge across these sectors and the forging of world-class scholarly partnerships. Examples of research undertaken internationally offer best practice models for collaboration and integration. This book will be compulsory reading for museum and educational specialists and those interested in engaging in museum/higher education partnerships. It will also be of interest to those involved in policy and decision-making in education, the museum sector and national and local government.

Part I Policy, Pedagogies and Possibilities

Introduction

Catherine Speight, Anne Boddington and Jos Boys

DOI: 10.4324/9781315596471-1

The educational role of the museum is becoming increasingly central to its mission. There are now far more educational opportunities, new spaces, new interfaces (both digital and physical) and a growing number of education and interpretation departments, educational curators and public engagement programmes. However, despite these developments in the UK at least, higher education (HE) has remained a relatively marginal collaborator compared to primary or secondary education sectors and other forms of adult learning. Consequently, this has meant that partnerships between universities, colleges, museums and galleries have remained relatively unexplored, especially with respect to their potential for generating new and innovative patterns of learning, research and scholarship.

In this book we aim to explore the opportunities to bring together different forms of complementary knowledge and to address the key issues that limit or discourage such partnerships. We want to examine how we might enable more effective connections between these two scholarly sectors, which are long-term, robust and impactful. In this first chapter we identify some of the challenges to museum and university partnerships including conceptual and practical barriers, and then examine whether our current academic frameworks and learning models are fit for purpose.

From the mid 2000s, as the global financial crisis took hold, pressures were already mounting on public educational resources in many countries, yet battles over funding were also identified as enabling new kinds of opportunities for shared scholarship and research. In our current economic circumstances, we believe it is imperative to rethink how this might be undertaken, whilst continuing to support the core missions of both museums and universities as collaborative spaces for dialogue and learning. All the contributors to this volume address aspects of this issue. We will examine what kinds of spaces might evolve as blended models of learning – particularly centred around the power of object-based learning – and the potential benefits these could offer museums and universities. To do this the editors and contributors to Museums and Higher Education Working Together: Challenges and Opportunities will:

• reflect on international policy issues, opportunities, institutional identities and challenges;
• explore potential future changes in education at HE level across both sectors;
• examine examples of research undertaken nationally and internationally and to share experiences, so as to better understand the barriers to collaboration and consider methods for enabling enhanced integration;
• offer current examples of contemporary practice in this changing context.

We aim to both bring together work by experts in policy-making and education across the museum and HE sectors, and to offer an up-to-date and critical overview of changing approaches. We aim to conclude with some innovative suggestions about how valuable, relevant and resource-effective forms of partnered scholarship can be established between museums and universities. The ultimate aim therefore is to provide insights and opportunities for future development.

Despite their intertwined histories, the formation of productive partnerships between museums and universities has been uneven and has often occurred in a piecemeal fashion. Many museums have moved far away from their academic origins, when their collections were considered as central to teaching and learning as laboratories or studios. Museums were once seen as public resources for the education of adults but with the growth of formal education institutions this role has diminished such that the curatorial and educational functions of the museum became increasingly separated. It has only been in the late twentieth century that museums have re-focused on their educational role, through the growth of education and interpretation departments, particularly concerned to open up collections to wider audiences, to extend their reach and to demonstrate their cultural and social importance (Speight 2010).

This has led to an emerging field of scholarship (e.g. Hooper-Greenhill 1994, 1999, 2007, Hein 1998, Sandell 2002, Falk, Dierking and Foutz 2007, Cook, Speight and Reynolds 2010, Jandl and Gold, 2012a, 2012b). It has also begun to create a new generation of curators, museum educators and academics who are more confident in transferring their knowledge between formal university educational models and the more self-directed and informal learning spaces of the museum. In the UK, recent imperatives for collaboration, often through government-funded initiatives (some of which are described in this volume) have enabled a number of opportunities for scholars to move between sectors. For museum professionals, educators and students, navigating this institutional permeability can extend their own knowledge, skills and capabilities for independent learning. It also means that together, museums and universities can offer complementary resources that have the potential to enhance the services that students require for their learning and research.

In addition, broadening learning opportunities beyond the lecture and seminar offers a richer, more blended and more experiential approach, centred on engaging with tangible objects which has been shown to have potential for enhancing deep learning (Dewey (1938) 1997, Kolb 1983). In both sectors there is a growing need to examine and understand the particular forms of effective learning that museums and collections (including archives) enable. This includes learning to interrogate artefacts and exhibits, conceived not purely as objects but as ‘portals’ of knowledge through which to examine the different ways knowledge is constructed. This includes further examination of ‘pedagogic stances’ and ‘unspoken interactions’ (Savin-Baden 2000, 2007, 2011, Austerlitz 2008) acquired by students and tutors, which arm them with the tools to navigate complex and integrated forms of knowledge within any given domain.

However, despite the benefits, emerging collaborative practices between museums and universities have remained one-off project-based examples and marginal compared to museums’ involvement in schools. While this impact varies from country to country, the policies and strategies enabling effective collaboration have been adversely affected in many places as a result of the global financial crisis. Thus, the potential benefits of enhanced learning through museum and university collaborations have remained unrealized. Throughout the remainder of this introductory chapter, we will examine the background to the current situation, concentrating primarily on England (since other parts of the UK and the rest of the world have taken different trajectories) to briefly explore some of the opportunities and barriers to collaboration.

Background — The English Context

As outlined above (and explored further by Sarah Ganz Blythe, Chapter 5) museums have almost always had some kind of educational mission. In the UK in the recent period, a renewed interest in stimulating relationships between museums and universities stemmed from the New Labour government (1997–2010). The first comprehensive review of museum education in the UK was by David Anderson, whose seminal report A Common Wealth: Museums and Learning in the United Kingdom (1997) raised the profile of education in museums, but also highlighted the omission of universities and their potential roles. The New Labour government looked favourably on collaborations between museums and universities and called for stronger links to be made between both sectors (DCMS 2003, DCMS 2005). This call formed part of wider concerns about the role of the public sector, which drew publically funded institutions like museums and universities into political debates surrounding their purpose, value and affiliation to the communities they serve and those they represent (Chatterton 2000, Sandell 2003). The requirement for museums to demonstrate their success in ‘meeting local, regional and national objectives’ in terms of ‘healthier communities’, ‘safer and stronger communities’, ‘economic vitality’, ‘learning’ and ‘quality of life for local people’ of course also generated tensions within the sector as to what success meant for a museum when such objectives failed to acknowledge the museum's ‘traditional services’ (Gray 2011: 48) such as their duty of care to their collections and safeguarding these for future generations.

A series of government reports demonstrating the value of museums as responsive institutions for learning (DCMS 2000, DCMS and DfES 2004, DCMS 2005; DCMS 2005, DCMS and DfES 2007) signalled a heightened interest in brokering collaboration across the education and cultural sectors; emphasizing the specific value of links between the further and HE sectors and museums (DCMS 2003, DCMS 2005, Dawson and Gilmore 2009) but also acknowledging their role in contributing to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. This was a critical part of the New Labour philosophy that conceived knowledge as a form of currency that could be shared, distributed and acquired. Although New Labour directly acknowledged the relationship between museums and universities in a number of reports, these were strategically positioned alongside other policies which emphasized the importance of the HE sector in driving forward the nation's economy (Lambert 2003, Cox 2005), and a closer relationship between universities and the creative and cultural industries (DCMS 2003).

Within this context, museums (and libraries and archives) were encouraged to work with universities as a way of bringing together complementary knowledge, sharing insights into working methods and capitalizing on the resources and expertise of participating institutions. Partnership working was also seen as strengthening the cultural offer and creating opportunities for exceptional public and financial benefit (Cutts 2010). In addition, it proved a practical way for an institution to achieve reach and impact beyond its immediate geographical location (Falk and Dierking 2008). However, as New Labour pursued something of an expansionist policy in government with public policy addressing many major societal changes related to work, leisure, families, communities, globalization and technology (Scott 2003), the ways in which museum–university – and other public sector – relationships were pre-dominantly articulated changed considerably. The framing of these policies led to increased public accountability, growing costs and competition for funding within reduced public sector budgets and was characterized by:

the presumption of instrumental effects in a sphere of activity largely associated with intrinsic value; the introduction of a target culture and accountability by quantitative performance measures; the predominance of economic value in a field often described as one characterised by market failure, and the use of economic indicators as proxies for social impact.

(Selwood 2010: 4)

But in 2010, New Labour were replaced by a Coalition government and there then followed a global financial crisis and economic recession. The UK government moved towards an austerity programme. Through a Comprehensive Spending Review, it announced the closure of the Museums Libraries and Archive Council (MLA) as part of a major reduction in the number of publically funded bodies, subsuming its specialist role within the Arts Council of England (ACE). This occurred alongside a series of strategic long-term fundamental and transformational changes to the HE landscape across the UK. Both public cultural institutions and HE thus face the challenge of a shifting government agenda and the reduction and reframing of what constitutes their futures. For example, increased tuition fees for students studying in England requires that universities consider how they can provide valuable and innovative learning opportunities that will offer distinctive benefit for their students.

While acknowledging the role of HE and HE-related activity as vital investors in the arts and as major players in cultural provision and development (ACE 2006), ACE's longer-term historical role in HE funding for the arts also did little to bridge with the museums and galleries sector, except in relationship to university-run museums and galleries. The emphasis in its 2006 HE strategy, ‘Arts, Enterprise and Excellence: Strategy for Higher Education’, was on supporting universities by providing funding for teaching experiences, student placements and performance opportunities. At the same time, it also recommended that universities undertook audits of their current and potential cultural activities as a way of demonstrating their impact and their ‘cultural footprint’ by helping institutions identify where collaboration most added value and quality:

Over 2 million people attend public lectures and performance put on by higher education providers, UK academics provide over 30000 working days in support of museums, galleries and related education activity. Our new ‘university challenge’ initiative also emphasises that higher education providers make a real difference to the cultural life of towns, not least through the facilities which benefit students and communities.

(ACE undated, unpaginated)

Cross-sector partnerships between the museum and HE sectors are thus not dealt with explicitly or strategically in these policies. Current ACE strategies continue this approach, by focusing investment on ‘excellent, forward thinking and enterprising museums and libraries best able to drive innovation, care for their collections and share learning’ (ACE 2011: 19) but with collaborations still assumed only in their...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Preface: Museums – Reaching Higher by Roy Clare CBE
• Acknowledgements
• PART I POLICY, PEDAGOGIES AND POSSIBILITIES
• PART II STRATEGIC ALLIANCES, KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE AND OPPORTUNITIES
• PART III CURATING, COLLECTING AND CREATIVE PRACTICES
• PART IV EXPECTATIONS, ASSUMPTIONS AND OBSTRUCTIONS
• Afterword by David Anderson
• Index