During the brief time students come together for a group tour, museum educators have the opportunity to create a culture of thinking: a place where the group's collective as well as individual thinking is valued, made visible, and actively promoted as part of the ongoing experience of all group members. Creating such a culture is facilitated by…

This article addresses an arts-integrated social studies curriculum for grades three through five entitled Artful Citizenship, designed by The Wolfsonian-Florida International University. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination Grant program, the design and implementation of the program…

A suburban art museum, forced to rely on an outdoor environment for a middle-school collaborative program, discovered that in fact, this large and varied landscape was the ideal setting for students to learn not only classroom curriculum, but also about themselves, their peers, and their relationship with nature. In developing and teaching this…

In 1978, the Michigan State University Museum and Michigan 4-H Youth Development teamed together to develop Folkpatterns, a program to engage youth across the state of Michigan in cultural heritage educational activities. With support from National Endowment for the Humanities grants, 4-H education and museum-based humanities specialists, along…

The human condition in the post-modern world is increasingly nomadic. A sense of displacement and alienation is pervasive. Schools emphasize abstracted knowledge removed from the experience of students. Many people feel detached from the places where they live and have no particular sense of belonging or responsibility toward their communities.…

The medium of artist Fred Wilson is the museum. He delves deep into museum collections to expose unexamined assumptions about power, place, privilege, and history. His installations include wall labels, educational materials, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects. His work is not only about the objects on display, but about how the…

Place is an important factor in museum education, yet describing what the museum is as place is often difficult. This article introduces the idea that museums consist of multiple physical and virtual place "domains" where interactions between people and objects occur: the origin domain, creation domain, display domain, and the experiencer-object…

Is your museum on the periphery of your community or at the heart of what matters? This article provides a rationale and model for situating your museum at the heart of the community through place-based study. Drawing on an interdisciplinary project in Kansas entitled Seeing Our Community with New Eyes, the authors provide pedagogical options and…

Eco-visualizations are artworks that reinterpret environmental data with custom software to promote stewardship. Eco-visualization technology offers a new way to dynamically picture environmental data and make it meaningful to a museum population. The questions are: How might museums create new projects and programs around place-based information?…

The use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) units has exploded in recent years along with the computer technology to access this data-based information. Geo-caching is an exciting game using GPS that provides place-based information regarding the public lands, facilities and cultural heritage programs within the Virginia Parks and Museum system.…

While place-based education has its roots in the school system, ideas and techniques of the theory are easily adaptable to the museum community. This article showcases the efforts of three museums to apply place-based learning to their programs and exhibits. Innovative approaches to museum learning have enabled the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska,…

This article tells the story of the author's invitation to teach at the Barnes Foundation, and her transformative experience as a teacher in this extraordinary place. The author comes to realize that the Barnes is the physical realization of a philosophical dream, and progresses to an understanding of how Albert C. Barnes collected and assembled…

This article describes a teacher development program that engages history and social studies teachers in making connections between learning and the well-being of places in which people actually live. "Our Place in History" is a three-year, federally-funded professional development institute for twenty teachers from diverse communities in…

The National Science Museum (NSM) in Japan has recently completed a project using different types of visitor-oriented digital technologies. With sponsorship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), the NSM team carried out a four-year study to examine how digital technologies can be used to enhance as well as educationally…

Many Japanese museums and other cultural institutions have been exploring ways to enrich visitors' experiences using new digital devices. This paper briefly describes some examples in Japan, ranging from a PDA, a mobile phone, podcasting, and an audio guide speaker-equipped vest to a Quick Response (QR) code on a brochure for downloading a short…