Museums need to become public learning spaces - Museums Association

Conference 2024: The Joy of Museums booking open now – Book before 31 March 2024 for a 10% discount

Conference 2024: The Joy of Museums booking open now – Book before 31 March 2024 for a 10% discount

Museums need to become public learning spaces

Fresh perspectives can seem a luxury when the immediate concern is with hard choices about what to preserve and safeguard, …
Tom Schuller
Share

Fresh perspectives can seem a luxury when the immediate concern is with hard choices about what to preserve and safeguard, as public spending slithers down the cliff.

So when a small group of us met at the invitation of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to discuss ideas for the future under the “leading museums” rubric, we knew the challenge in front of us.

We tackled, among other things, new forms of governance, the place of museums as part of a cultural economy, and the sometimes fraught relationship with local authorities. Most of the group did not want the outcome of our discussions to be “another report”. But that, however succinct, is what we produced (see link below). The test is whether it strikes chords.

As an adult educator, I have spent many years arguing that education is not something that stops when you leave school or college. People go on learning in many different ways throughout their lives, but they could be doing so much more if more opportunities were available.

Museums encapsulate this: many already provide a fine array of learning opportunities, but there’s room for more. And museums need to understand better what, how and why people actually learn when they visit.

Our report concludes that, primarily, museums are about interactions between people (individually and in families and groups) and collections. Museums must become increasingly open – physically, psychologically and virtually.

They should share their buildings, knowledge and resources to turn them into true public learning spaces; one of the few places in Britain where diverse members of different communities can meet and converse.

This contains several challenges. There is a general worry that the country is losing its public spaces. We are retreating into communities with little interaction between the different segments, but almost everyone agrees that we need more ways in which people can communicate across divides. Will museums play their full part in enabling this?

What are the implications of greater “openness”? There are some great examples of museums which present a physically welcome face to the outside world, and to visitors once they are inside the doors. But there is more to be done.

Museums could learn from others whose commercial survival depends on attracting people in and guiding them round successfully; for example, museum staff could learn from retail store professionals. Is the sector open to this?

Digitisation offers wonderful new opportunities for people to access museums as learning repositories. Some of this will be simply making the resources available for those who want to use them. But the digital offer has to be structured in a way that will help people to make coherent use of it as a learning resource, rather than the museum equivalent of random channel-hopping.

The notion of museums as public learning spaces raises questions about staffing and skills. Staff will need new skills to enable them to anticipate and respond to learner needs. These include commercial and entrepreneurial capabilities. How far is the sector truly committed to developing those skills?

The combination of demographic and economic changes is transforming the way we look at the needs of adult learners, and therefore of the way museums can and should respond. Despite everything, we are in a hopeful phase, one full of potential for the future.

Tom Schuller is the director of Longview and a visiting professor at Birkbeck and the Institute of Education, London

www.mla.gov.uk/what/strategies



Leave a comment

You must be to post a comment.

Discover

Advertisement