Marianne Achiam

A Content-oriented Model for Science Exhibit Engineering

Recently, science museums have begun to review their educational purposes and redesign their pedagogies. At the most basic level, this entails accounting for the performance of individual exhibits, and indeed, in some cases, research indicates shortcomings in exhibit design: While often successful in prompting visitors to carry out intended actions, exhibits do not necessarily promote the intended interpretations of these actions among visitors. Here, the notion of praxeology from didactics research is suggested as a model to remedy this shortcoming. The suggested role of praxeology is twofold: as a means to operationalize the link between exhibit features and visitor activities; and as a template to transform scientists’ practices in the research context into visitors’ activities in the exhibit context. The resulting model of science exhibit engineering is presented and exemplified, and its implications for science exhibit design are discussed at three levels: the design product, the design process, and the design methodology.

Objects prompt authentic scientific activities among learners in a museum programme

ABSTRACT Although the scientific disciplines conduct practical work in different ways, all consider practical work as the essential way of connecting objects and phenomena with ideas and the abstract. Accordingly, practical work is regarded as central to science education as well. We investigate a practical, object-based palaeontology programme at a natural history museum to identify how palaeontological objects prompt scientific activity among upper secondary school students. We first construct a theoretical framework based on an analysis of the programme’s palaeontological content. From this, we build our reference model, which considers the specimens used in the programme, possible palaeontological interpretations of these specimens, and the conditions inherent in the programme. We use the reference model to analyse the activities of programme participants, and illustrate how these activities are palaeontologically authentic. Finally, we discuss our findings, examining the mechanism by which the specimens prompt scientific activities. We also discuss our discipline-based approach, and how it allows us to positively identify participants’ activities as authentic. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings.

The Diorama as a Means for Biodiversity Education

Natural history museums were first to register and document biodiversity, and today, they continue to do so. However, their perspective has changed from research to education, leading to a concomitant development of the exhibition: From being collections of research objects, exhibitions became educational environments, resulting in the genesis of the diorama. We discuss the development of the notion of biodiversity from its earliest museum representations to today, where dioramas remain a popular and effective way of disseminating biodiversity. We discuss modern dioramas and the potentials and challenges of presenting biodiversity. Finally, we discuss dioramas as educational devices.

Affordances and distributed cognition in museum exhibitions

Exhibitions are the primary medium for the public communication of science in museums. Recently, there has been an interest in explaining the educational mechanisms of exhibitions in terms of meaning making, interaction and space; however these concepts have not yet been integrated into one consistent framework. Here, we invoke the notions of affordance and distributed cognition to explain in a coherent way how visitors interact with exhibits and exhibit spaces and make meaning from those interactions, and we exemplify our points using observations of twelve visitors to exhibits at a natural history museum. We show how differences in exhibit characteristics give rise to differences in the interpretive strategies used by visitors in their meaning-making process, and conclude by discussing how the notions of affordance and distributed cognition can be used in an exhibit design perspective.

Nine meta-functions for science museums and science centres

ABSTRACT Science centres and science museums face challenges such as increased accountability, increased demands for accessibility, and growing competition from leisure experiences. On their own, the traditional museum practices of preservation, communication, and research are insufficient to address these challenges. Accordingly, we use the framework of eight museum meta-functions, presented by Dubuc [2011. “Museum and University Mutations: The Relationship Between Museum Practices and Museum Studies in the Era of Interdisciplinarity, Professionalisation, Globalisation and New Technologies.” Museum Management and Curatorship 26 (5): 497–508] and further developed here, to understand how these institutions respond to calls for change. We analyse the presentations of staff members from 21 science centres and science museums, given at the 2013 Ecsite conference, to map out how these institutions address modern-day challenges. This analysis generates a new framework of nine meta-functions for science centres and science museums that can guide and help qualify discussions about their present and future activities. We discuss the new meta-functions as evidence of a turn away from the self-referential museum functions of the past, towards a more complete externalisation of purpose.

A framework for understanding the conditions of science representation and dissemination in museums

Museums are in a unique position to engage the public in conversations about science topics that matter. However, when we attempt to systematically study the representation and dissemination of science in museums, we are confounded by the numerous and diverse conditions and constraints that influence those processes. As a response, we adapt a framework from the field of science didactics, the framework of didactic co-determination, to the museum context. We illustrate how the framework can be applied to a case of exhibit development to understand the influences that shape the final product. We then offer our perspectives on the framework, and suggest how its utility may go beyond the local application described here.

Dragons and dinosaurs: directing inquiry in biology using the notions of ‘milieu’ and ‘validation’

This article describes how inquiry teaching can be directed towards specific content learning goals while allowing for student exploration and validation of hypotheses. Drawing from the Theory of Didactical Situations, the concepts of ‘milieu’ and ‘validation’ are illustrated through two sample biology lessons designed to engage and challenge students in scientific inquiry. The article proposes that these concepts may help teachers design rich learning environments wherein students may pose and test their hypotheses against scientific data. This may in turn help overcome several challenges relating to open-inquiry teaching. Such challenges include divergent student learning outcome or time issues and practical constraints of facilitating inquiry in large classes. The presented approach can help teachers design directed inquiry teaching sequences that can lead to more frequent use of inquiry in teaching thanks to the efficacy of such designs.