Practice-led Research in the Art Museum

As art museum education practices get more ambitious in form and content, and to a higher degree inform the overall audience strategies, the need for a research framing is required. The art museum is facing new and high expectation from society and policy makers in terms of being a relevant social and democratic platform inclusive for everyone. To manifest the changes, the institution must draw on all the different museal knowledges, not least the one about the audience. There has been a history of professional hierarchy and knowledge hegemony inside the art museum, where the object-based knowledge has trumped the practice-based. An important reason for this imbalance has been the lack of adequate practice related research methods and a theoretical framing within art museum education. Research in art museum has to a large extent operated within the classical art historical field, but more and more museums are looking to and are drawing on other models outside the museum disciplines to develop new adequate research standards. One of the museums that have undergone a profound change much due to a change in how they think about practice and research, is Tate with research leader Emily Pringle in the lead. Inspired by models within the arts and school system, they have developed a practice-led research method. In this article I will reflect on how and why it is important for art museum educators to do research on their own practice, drawing on both the Tate model and my own experience from working at the National Museum for over ten years.

Teaching and Learning in the Art Museum

Activities that actively and deliberately support museum visitors’ engagement with art and promote learning occupy a distinct, though contested, place in the history and current framing of the art museum across the globe. Despite its many benefits, educational work in art museums has grown erratically, frequently without formal structures, systems, or strategies, and it has been critiqued in the past for lacking a robust theoretical framework and consistent methodological principles. It remains the case that the field is broad, diverse, and continually evolving; in the early 21st century, the boundaries are shifting, for example, between what constitutes curatorial practice and learning practice in contemporary art museums. This fluidity and heterogeneity has enabled the emergence of creative and responsive practice that encourages visitors to learn with, through, and about art, but it poses challenges when the goal is to present a coherent overview. Therefore any summary of this complex domain will necessarily be selective. Nonetheless, taking the practice as it has been developed in the United Kingdom and the United States, where this work has been theorized and communicated to the greatest extent (and with reference to the practice in Europe, Canada, and Australia), it is possible to identify common historical developments, shared philosophical and pedagogical principles, and collective challenges and opportunities that contribute to a comprehensible picture, albeit one that is replete with contradictions. As a field, art-museum education continues to define itself. And although valuable research and theorization have been undertaken, in part by practitioners drawing on their own experiences, further work is required, not least to broaden the understanding of the practice as it is manifest globally and to make explicit the increasingly important role of art education within the art museum.