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March 15, 2001
Return to Museum-School Connections in the Digital Age
Museums and Schools as Partners in Learning
While it's great to visit museums and science centers, and it's wonderful to tap into their abundant resources either online or through professional development channels, an emerging trend is out-and-out partnerships between schools and museums. The ultimate expression of this is the museum school, which places museum-based learning at the center of its curriculum.
The benefits of these collaborations are many. For resource-starved schools, museum collections represent a true wealth of learning materials. For museums challenged to prove their relevance and increase visits, the partnership offers a chance to cultivate lifetime museum patrons. For students, the interactivity that comes through museum education stimulates learning in new ways, which is hugely beneficial to children who struggle in traditional classrooms. It also allows kids to work with concrete items while encouraging higher-order thinking skills-a perfect developmental approach for upper-elementary and middle school levels, where these programs tend to be most robust.
One such partnership grew between the museum education division at MoMA and the Monmouth County Vocational School District in New Jersey. The partnership began when Barbara Wilcoxen approached MoMA's education staff for help with her students in the Monmouth County Youth Detention Center. Working with the museum, Wilcoxen was able to tailor a curriculum to her kids' needs while factoring in New Jersey state standards. The result has proven so successful-Wilcoxen reports that her students have greater confidence in learning and are better able to listen to one another's viewpoints-that it served as the model for other schools in the district. The district focuses on cutting-edge vocational education, and MoMA has worked closely with teachers to integrate objects from its collection into different facets of this specialized curriculum.
The creation of virtual museums is another avenue where museum-school partnerships thrive. A virtual museum, as defined in online community expert Jamie McKenzie's piece, "Building a Virtual Museum Community," (fromnowon.org) is one in which the collection is housed in digital form and accessible to the world via the Web. It could contain objects of all sorts-databases, digitized images, and documents-all grouped around a theme.
While schools can certainly undertake such projects on their own (and many do), there are real gains when museum personnel become involved. As students sift through artifacts, museum professionals can lend their expertise in helping kids formulate interpretations and develop appropriate "displays." Museum experts can also suggest themes or point students to resources within their collections that will assist in making a particular point more forcefully.
The opportunity for museum-school collaboration has always been rich, but today's powerful and pervasive technology is making these partnerships more viable than ever. Access to digitized versions of the world's great art, artifacts, and documents, as well as live scientific data, makes this an incredible boon to classroom learning.
"I would like to see educators and museum professionals learn from one another," says MoMA's Lichtendorf. "There's a natural synergy here, a real opportunity."
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