SOCIOLOGY

Active Learning in the Museum Context

Active Learning in the Museum Context

Introduction

Museums play an important role in education and learning of children, young adults and discovery lovers. The learning in museums and art galleries has taken considerably growing importance over the past 2 decades across the globe and particularly in the United Kingdom. The learning in museums are significant and growing number of museums of U.K are concerned about designing learning which could be effective as well as engaging and active. This is because visitors of museums despite the fact that some come for passive and some for active learning embodies what is what worth learning and showing the meaning of historical materials, artworks, objects and the like which provides the hindsight into the lives of ancestors and culture of the society. Even something which is not placed in museums but part of museums like things such as wall texts, architecture and exhibitions contain something attractive and enlightening where learning happens (Amburgh et al, 2007). In addition, museums itself should be designed with the effective learning otherwise the very purpose of museums to provide edification in the mind would be defeated. Though the importance of learning approaches and techniques in nothing new in museums education departments, it take significant concerns when museums are going to design the exhibitions for different purposes and sorts where visitor learning is explicitly considered despite the fact that some kind of learning is happening and present in museums at all stages (Phillips, 2005).

The increasing concern of learning approaches thus in last few decades have seen incredible changes in museums contexts. With this museums have considerably broaden their mission statements and consequently looking for new constituencies. As a result learning in museums has become more engaging, fresh, motivating, and also to achieve the learning outcomes of many sociological courses of undergraduate and graduate students. This has also impacted the change in museums as whole which has changed the methods of working from designers, curators and directors. This has therefore caused effective change across all the departments of museums and now museums are seeing themselves as one of most important settings of learning theory in the action. Researchers therefore greatly emphasis on choosing the right approaches of learning in museums contexts (Salemi, 2002).

The growing importance of learning theories have thus gave birth to “active learning” which widely popular in different fields of education. Active learning also known as machine learning technique can be defined as meaningful learning obtained as result from learning when experience arouse the mental activities towards learning something worthwhile. The active learning is found in diverse fields of education, philosophy, cognitive science, website content, and many other areas where mental active learning is taken place through stimulating activities. The basic motive of active learning is to actively engage in learning of skills and ideas that can lead to direct learning such as learning ideas explained in lecture, classroom discussion, book, radio show, television, web-page and the ...