This definitive volume provides proof that museums make a major contribution to education in the broadest sense. It provides a framework for defining learning and reflects the literature related to learning in museums. The authors explore all aspects of educational theory, museum education practice, and visitor studies in straightforward, concise, and readable manner. Useful in relating the educational contributions of museums to the wider educational issues of society and to public service, this book is a must-read for every museum board and staff member. In addition to books and articles, the reference list contains conference proceedings and unpublished studies.

At the beginning of the 21st century museums are challenged on a number of fronts. The prioritisation of learning in museums in the context of demands for social justice and cultural democracy combined with cultural policy based on economic rationalism forces museums to review their educational purposes, redesign their pedagogies and account for their performance. The need to theorise learning and culture for a cultural theory of learning is very pressing. If culture acts as a process of signification, a means of producing meaning that shapes worldviews, learning in museums and other cultural organisations is potentially dynamic and profound, producing self-identities. How is this complexity to be ‘measured’? What can this ‘measurement’ reveal about the character of museum-based learning? The calibration of culture is an international phenomenon, and the measurement of the outcomes and impact of learning in museums in England has provided a detailed case study. Three national evaluation studies were carried out between 2003 and 2006 based on the conceptual framework of Generic Learning Outcomes. Using this revealing data Museums and Education reveals the power of museum pedagogy and as it does, questions are raised about traditional museum culture and the potential and challenge for museum futures is suggested.

The landmark survey that celebrates all the places where people hang out--and is helping to spawn their revival A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "Third places," or "great good places," are the many public places where people can gather, put aside the concerns of home and work (their first and second places), and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation. They are the heart of a community's social vitality and the grassroots of a democracy. Author Ray Oldenburg portrays, probes, and promotes th4ese great good places--coffee houses, cafes, bookstores, hair salons, bars, bistros, and many others both past and present--and offers a vision for their revitalization. Eloquent and visionary, this is a compelling argument for these settings of informal public life as essential for the health both of our communities and ourselves. And its message is being heard: Today, entrepreneurs from Seattle to Florida are heeding the call of The Great Good Place--opening coffee houses, bookstores, community centers, bars, and other establishments and proudly acknowledging their indebtedness to this book.

The goal of this book is to cull from the last NSF conference, the "best ideas about how children interact with objects & through that interaction acquire new understandings, attitudes, and feelings."

Programming for People with Special Needs: A Guide for Museums and Historic Sites will help museums and historic sites become truly inclusive educational experiences. The book is unique because it covers education and inclusion for those with both intellectual and learning disabilities. The book features the seven key components of creating effective programming for people with special needs, especially elementary and secondary students with intellectual disabilities: Sensitivity and awareness training Planning and communication Timing Engagement and social/life skills Object-centered and inquiry-based programs Structure Flexibility In addition, this book features and discusses programs such as the Museum of Modern Art‘s Meet Me program and ones for children with autism at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn as models for other organizations to adapt for their use. Its focus on visitors of all ages who have cognitive or intellectual disabilities or special needs makes this title essential for all museum and historic site professionals, especially educators or administrators, but also for museum studies students and those interested in informal education.

The science museum field has made tremendous advances in understanding museum learning, but little has been done to consolidate and synethesize these findings to encourage widespread improvements in practice. By clearly presenting the most current knowledge of museum learning, In Principle, In Practice aims to promote effective programs and exhibitions, identify promising approaches for future research, and develop strategies for implementing and sustaining connections between research and practice in the museum community.

Cultural institutions must reimagine their roles as education facilities for their communities and address the public need for conversations in safe and fair places, thereby renewing their essential place in democratic society. This book explains how. Open Conversations: Public Learning in Libraries and Museums is a provocative book, one that is designed to offer courage to cultural institution administrators and staff even as it opens their eyes to the possibility that their facilities can offer more than they are. Rather than offering prescriptive answers, the author invites readers to consider museums and libraries in fresh ways. Author David Carr believes professionals in libraries and museums need to think more broadly. He challenges them to address communities, national social change, psychology, and learning, and to think about ways to frame their institutions, not as repositories or research chambers, but as instruments for human thinking. Now is the time for these institutions to recover their integrity and purpose as fundamental, informing structures in a struggling democracy. Based on lectures and previously published writings by the author, and drawing on new scholarship and research, the essays here will inspire professionals to understand their collections and institutions as instruments of personal, social, and cultural change.

Slow Looking provides a robust argument for the importance of slow looking in learning environments both general and specialized, formal and informal, and its connection to major concepts in teaching, learning, and knowledge. A museum-originated practice increasingly seen as holding wide educational benefits, slow looking contends that patient, immersive attention to content can produce active cognitive opportunities for meaning-making and critical thinking that may not be possible though high-speed means of information delivery. Addressing the multi-disciplinary applications of this purposeful behavioral practice, this book draws examples from the visual arts, literature, science, and everyday life, using original, real-world scenarios to illustrate the complexities and rewards of slow looking.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is the second edition ofJohn H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking’s ground-breaking book, Learning from Museums. While the book still focuses on why, how, what, when, and with whom, people learn from their museum experiences, the authors further investigate the extension of museums beyond their walls and the changing perceptions of the roles that museums increasingly play in the 21st century with respect to the publics they serve (and those they would like to serve). This new edition offers an updated and synthesized version of the Contextual Model of Learning, as well as the latest advances in free-choice learning research, theory and practice, in order to provide readers a highly readable and informative understanding of the personal, sociocultural and physical dimensions of the museum experience. Falk and Dierking also fill in gaps in the 1st edition. Falk’s research focuses increasingly on the self-related needs that museums meet, and these findings enhance the personal context chapter. Dierking’s work delves deeply into the macro-sociocultural dimensions of learning, a topic not discussed in the sociocultural chapter in the first edition. Emphasizing the importance of time (and space), the second edition adds an entirely new chapter to describe the important dimension of time. They also insert findings from the burgeoning field of neuroscience. Latter chapters of the book discuss the evolving role of museums in the rapidly changing Information /Learning Society of the 21st century. New examples and suggestions highlight the ways that the new understandings of learning can help museum practitioners reinvent how museums can and should support the public’s lifelong, life-wide and life-deep learning.