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Museum Education for Today's Audiences: Meeting Expectations with New Models (American Alliance of Museums)

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Today’s museum educators are tackling urgent social issues, addressing historic inequalities of museum collections, innovating for accessibility, leveraging technology for new in-person and virtual learning experiences, and cultivating partnerships with schools, businesses, elders, scientists, and other social services to build relationships and be of service to their communities. Despite the physical distance the pandemic placed between museums and their visitors, museum educators have remained essential -- sustaining connections with the public through virtual or modified programming, content development, and conversations that they are uniquely qualified to execute. Educators require updated resources to guide their efforts in navigating these new challenges and building upon the opportunities presented by current events and changing audiences.

This book and its accompanying on-line resource share lessons from innovators in the field to support ongoing professional development efforts with essays about current issues. Additionally, it provides new models and tools to guide individual or group reflection on how today’s museum educators can adapt and thrive in a dynamic and ever-changing cultural sector. The additional resources include discussion prompts and adaptable templates to allow readers to customize the content based on current events, institutional discipline, size, budget, and staffing scenario of their organization.

The book’s essays are divided into three sections:

• Changing expectations of visitors - inclusion, participation, and technology
• Training and preparation for responsive, resourceful educators
• Models for the future
• ISBN-10 1538148609
• ISBN-13 978-1538148600
• Publisher American Alliance Of Museums
• Publication date February 15, 2022
• Part of series American Alliance of Museums
• Language English
• Dimensions 7 x 0.81 x 9.59 inches
• Print length 314 pages
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

One of the powerful things about Museum Education for Today’s Audiences: it feels as though it is written by friends and colleagues, by people you know well and who really understand what our work is like, by those who you would ask for advice from as you tackle some thorny issues. In being so, it works to uplift the reader and their practice through not just providing access to tools, but also giving us the opportunities to explore how best we might use them in our own settings and contexts.

Amidst an intense moment of crisis and upheaval, Porter and Cunningham have brought together a practical and hope-filled collection of writings that can guide museum educators—and the entire museum field—into a new future. All of the contributors to this important book make clear the vital role of museum education in leading the transformation needed right now within our institutions.

This book lands at a critical moment in the history of museums in the United States. It is equal parts manifesto on the power and potential of museums who center community needs and interests, and handbook for the education staff who have championed and led this work for decades, and are now uniquely equipped to help reshape their organizations’ relationship and value to communities.

Museum Education for Today’s Audience is more than just a book. It is an incredible tool that goes beyond program ideas to provide insight on lessons learned by practitioners in the field that are decentering systemic exclusion. More importantly, this book provides the spark for reflective practice to support continued innovation to meet the needs of all learners and increased self-awareness for museum educators.

About the Author

Jason L. Porter is the Kayla Skinner Deputy Director for Education and Public Engagement at Seattle Art Museum. Previously, he served as the director of education + Programs at MoPOP (Museum of Pop Culture) in Seattle, as director of education and public engagement at the San Diego Museum of Man (now Museum of Us) and associate director of education at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. His work focuses on experiential education and public programs that serve community, school, family, and teacher audiences and on using the arts as a vehicle for personal transformation and social change. Prior to entering the museum field, he was a public school teacher. He received a B.A. in English from Tufts University, an M.A. in Education from Seattle University, and an Ed.D from UCLA. His dissertation examined charter schools meeting the needs of special education students. Professional development activities have included presentations at conferences including AAM, CAM, and WMA, serving as a mentor to emerging museum professionals and teaching as a guest lecturer in a number of museum studies programs. He has been a board member of AAM’s Education Professional Network (EdCom) from 2014 through 2016, a jurist with the Excellence in Exhibitions competition in 2017 and 2018, a grants reviewer for IMLS in 2018, and a member of the peer review board of the Journal of Museum Education (JME) since 2016.

In the last 25+ years, Mary Kay Cunningham has served over 35 different cultural institutions or attractions in the diverse roles of consultant, manager, museum educator, volunteer coordinator, and docent. She founded Dialogue Consulting in 2001 to support institutions improving their visitor experience through inclusive and collaborative interpretive planning, programming, and professional development. Her passion for facilitating group learning that brings together staff, volunteers, and communities to navigate institutional change is the hallmark of her work.

Mary Kay is the author of The Interpreters Training Manual for Museums that guides front line staff in facilitating meaningful learning conversations with visitors. As a professed learning addict, she pursues and support professional development in the field by serving on the editorial board of The Journal of Museum Education since 2010, creating and instructing a graduate-level course on Visitor Experience design at the University of Victoria, B.C. since 2013, and presenting over 45 sessions or workshops in the last 20 years for professional meetings including AAM, APGA, ASTC, CAM, NAI, and WMA.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ American Alliance Of Museums (February 15, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 314 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1538148609
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1538148600
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.81 x 9.59 inches
• #172 in Museum Industry
• #477 in Museum Studies & Museology (Books)
• #50,683 in Unknown

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Museum Education for Today's Audiences

Meeting expectations with new models, edited by jason l. porter and mary kay cunningham.

Today’s museum educators are tackling urgent social issues, addressing historic inequalities of museum collections, innovating for accessibility, leveraging technology for new in-person and virtual learning experiences, and cultivating partnerships with schools, businesses, elders, scientists, and other social services to build relationships and be of service to their communities. Despite the physical distance the pandemic placed between museums and their visitors, museum educators have remained essential -- sustaining connections with the public through virtual or modified programming, content development, and conversations that they are uniquely qualified to execute. Educators require updated resources to guide their efforts in navigating these new challenges and building upon the opportunities presented by current events and changing audiences.

This book and its accompanying on-line resource share lessons from innovators in the field to support ongoing professional development efforts with essays about current issues. Additionally, it provides new models and tools to guide individual or group reflection on how today’s museum educators can adapt and thrive in a dynamic and ever-changing cultural sector. The additional resources include discussion prompts and adaptable templates to allow readers to customize the content based on current events, institutional discipline, size, budget, and staffing scenario of their organization.

The book’s essays are divided into three sections:

• Changing expectations of visitors - inclusion, participation, and technology
• Training and preparation for responsive, resourceful educators
• Models for the future

While a book can share ideas in the hope of inspiring change, the accompanying online resource ( www.EvolveMuseumEd.com ) provides a more flexible and responsive forum for sharing ongoing and evolving resources to encourage professional development for museum educators as they respond to the changing needs of today’s audiences.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Museums, Education, and Curriculum

Introduction, general overviews.

• National Reports and White Papers
• Associations
• Museum Field Trips—Structure and Management
• Learning from Museum Field Trips
• Museum-School Relationships and Teacher Training
• Museum Schools
• Planning for Education in the Museum

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• Curriculum Design
• Integrating Art across the Curriculum
• Science Education

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

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• Girls' Education in the Developing World
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Museums, Education, and Curriculum by Elee Wood LAST REVIEWED: 25 September 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 25 September 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0205

The relationship between museums, education, and curricula is complex. Many early museums—established in order to study, showcase, and preserve collections of art, artifacts, and specimens—typically had narrowly defined educational goals or purposes. Over time and particularly by the 20th century, museums reframed their focus as locations for informal and lifelong or life wide learning and catered to a range of audiences including school groups. The educational role of museums reflects an intentional approach in planning for learning through a variety of strategies including exhibitions, “live” and informal interpretation experiences, formal programming, field trip experiences and written lesson plans or study guides. The unique nature of museum environments as locations for learning provides ample opportunities to study the role of museums in formal education through field trips, study collections, partnerships and outreach; training of teachers and teachers in training; the learning structures and strategies employed in exhibitions, programs, and curricular resources; and the establishment of formal schools within the museum setting.

The educational goals of museums have a long history grounded in their basic missions and museums have expanded the strategies and intensity of educational practice throughout the 20th century. Hooper-Greenhill 1999 is an edited volume providing an overview of museum education practices; it draws on a range of philosophies and practices that span multiple disciplines. Hein 1998 outlines educational philosophies contributing to the basic practices of museum education and offers discussion on the role and value of museum learning. Notably, the discussion on the relationship between the practices of museum education and curriculum have expanded in the past several decades as the field of curriculum studies became more established as in Lindauer 2015 . Considering the role of curriculum in the museum has become important discourse among museum educators, beginning with Beer 1987 examining whether museums have defined curricular goals to the more contemporary application of curriculum practices of knowledge production in Rose 2006 and the broader implications of intentionally designed experiences in Roberts 2006 . Both Vallance 2004 and Burchenal and Grohe 2007 explore the curricular role of museums stemming from the stance of art and art education, and Stocklmayer, et al. 2010 outlines the relationship between science education curriculum and schools. Garcia 2012 brings discussion on broader school learning outcomes to museum goals.

Beer, Valorie. 1987. Do museums have “curriculum”? The Journal of Museum Education 12.3: 10–13.

Example of the emerging discussions in the museum field on the role of curriculum as a function of museum spaces. Describes key ideas in broadening the idea of curriculum beyond formal education and into “nonschool” settings. Available online with subscription.

Burchenal, Margaret, and Michelle Grohe. 2007. Thinking through art: Transforming museum curriculum. Journal of Museum Education 32.2: 111–122.

DOI: 10.1080/10598650.2007.11510563

Develops a connection between needs of school children and the specific programming opportunities offered by art museums.

Garcia, Ben. 2012. What we do best. Journal of Museum Education 37.2: 47–55.

DOI: 10.1080/10598650.2012.11510730

Defines museum learning in contrast to formal educational systems and argues for new ways to ascribe learning in the museum setting.

Hein, George. 1998. Learning in the museum . London: Routledge.

Application of educational philosophies in the museum experience. Includes an examination of research methods in museums as well as strategies for developing exhibitions and learning experiences.

Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1999. The educational role of the museum . 2d ed. London: Routledge.

Edited volume geared toward museum professionals that incorporates a broad view of educational theory and practice as it plays out in the museum setting. Includes discussion on different museum audiences and approaches to learning.

Lindauer, Margaret A. 2015. Looking at museum education through the lens of curriculum theory. Journal of Museum Education 31.2: 79–80.

DOI: 10.1080/10598650.2006.11510534

Short overview of the concept of curriculum studies as it applies to museum education practices.

Roberts, Patrick. 2006. Am I the public I think I am?: Understanding the public curriculum of museums as “complicated conversation.” Journal of Museum Education 31.2: 105–112.

DOI: 10.1080/10598650.2006.11510537

Case study on a museum exhibition and the role of curriculum theory in museum education.

Rose, Julia. 2006. Shared journeys curriculum theory and museum education. Journal of Museum Education 31.2: 81–93.

DOI: 10.1080/10598650.2006.11510535

Explores the relationships between curriculum theory and museum education practices. Focuses on the role of knowledge production, democratization of the museum, and the role of museum interpretation in shaping knowledge.

Stocklmayer, Susan M., Léonie J. Rennie, and John K. Gilbert. 2010. The roles of the formal and informal sectors in the provision of effective science education. Studies in Science Education 46.1: 1–44.

DOI: 10.1080/03057260903562284

Article on the role of collaboration between museums and science education in formal education settings and how it can better support student learning. Examines critiques of formal science education and the role of informal learning approaches to augment learning.

Vallance, Elizabeth. 2004. Museum education as curriculum: Four models, leading to a fifth. Studies in Art Education 45.4: 343–358.

Describes classic curricular models in relation to art education practices in museums. Proposes a new model that integrates art museum practice with traditional curriculum theory.

Villeneuve, P., ed. 2007. From periphery to center: Art museum education in the 21st century . Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Edited volume that provides insight into the changing nature of education within art museums. Addresses theory and practice as well as current issues and emphasizes the role of art museum educators and approaching new audiences.

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Article contents

Teaching and learning in the art museum.

• Emily Pringle Emily Pringle Tate Gallery
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.399
• Published online: 20 November 2018

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.

• art education
• museum education
• art practice
• socially engaged art practice

Introduction and Terms of Reference

The 21st century has presented museums with extraordinary opportunities for growth, yet this has been coupled with significant challenges in maintaining their positions as authoritative yet accessible cultural institutions. Art museums are being expanded, renovated, and constructed across the world; attendance figures in the West rose from 22 million in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000 (McClellan, 2008 , p. 2). At the same time, in Europe and North America at least, museums exist in a climate of reduced public funding and intense competition for corporate sponsorship. This is coupled with global expectations of greater cultural participation and co-production, generated by new technology and social media. Moreover, as highly visible manifestations of sanctioned culture, art museums are implicated in the reality of a more divisive and polarized society, where gender and race politics are at the forefront of public debate. There is an urgent need for museums to address issues of social and cultural discrimination, as well as to attract new audiences and offer cultural experiences that are relevant and engaging.

The urgency to “grasp the opportunities presented by our changing society or lose relevance within a generation” (Black, 2012b , p. 7) finds form in the museum mission statements and statements by gallery directors that declare their ambitions to reach out, become more inclusive, and prioritize the visitor. No longer circumscribed exclusively by the accumulation and preservation of its collection, the 21st-century art museum is ostensibly defined by its social role as a public-oriented civic site, whose purpose is to stimulate debate, foster active participation, and work collaboratively with its audiences. The drive of art museums to reach out has fueled an expansion in education programming as a means to achieve these ambitions. However, teaching and learning activities have occupied an uneasy place in the history of the art museum, challenging those institutions from within, yet simultaneously offering innovative pedagogy and creative forms of artistic engagement with collections. At times overlooked or misunderstood, art-museum education would benefit from sustained and detailed analysis to more fully understand the contribution it has made and the value it brings to museums and their visitors across the globe.

This article begins by clarifying key terms and making the specific opportunities presented by the art museum clear, before outlining the historical development of art-museum education from the late 19th century onward. It then spells out the diverse agendas and ambitions for museum education, to help rationalize the diversity of practice found in the art museum in the 21st century (see the section “ Clarifying Terminology ”). Art-museum education is informed by a variety of disciplines and intellectual traditions, theories, and practices. The section “ Art Museum Epistemology and Pedagogy ” details these, drawing attention to the central role art practice plays in shaping the forms of teaching and learning taking place in the museum. The article concludes by drawing attention to the challenges facing art-museum education and the outstanding questions that would profit from further research.

Clarifying Terminology

To understand the field of learning in art museums it is necessary to clarify various terms, not least the descriptors “museum” and “gallery,” which tend to be employed interchangeably but are applied differently in the United Kingdom and the United States. A commonly accepted worldwide understanding of the museum is as a “non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education study and enjoyment” (International Council of Museums, 2007 ). Museums are thus characterized both by their social and educational responsibilities and by the curation of their collections (as suggested by the Latin origin of the term: curare , “to take care of”). These responsibilities are not commonly ascribed to galleries, particularly in North America, where the name “gallery” implies a commercial enterprise. However, in the United Kingdom, “gallery” can refer to public institutions with permanent collections (the National Gallery in London being one example). And increasingly, education activities are programmed in galleries, art biennales, and temporary art spaces. These practices adhere to and inform the principles and pedagogy of education work in the art museum, and at times work indivisibly with art museum education. Yet further confusion arises because the term gallery is also applied to art-exhibition spaces within museums, arts centers, and artists’ studios. For ease and clarity, the term art museum is employed here to refer broadly to collection-based art institutions in which education activities take place, recognizing, however, that teaching and learning occurs in art spaces more widely.

The terms learning and education are similarly used interchangeably in relation to pedagogic practices in art museums, and require contextualization. Although in the United Kingdom and parts of mainland Europe, the professional field is known as “gallery education,” since the early 2000s there has been a shift toward using the term “learning” to reinforce the process-driven and creative activity of gaining new or revised knowledge, skills, and values through engagement with art. This is in preference to “education,” which has come to be associated with structures, systems, and processes that are allied to formal instruction (Cutler, 2010 ). The term ‘teaching’ is rarely applied as a descriptor for art museum education, despite being evident in the gallery, in part because of the focus on constructivist pedagogy (see section “ Art Museum Epistemology and Pedagogy ”). This trend is most visibly manifest in the renaming of departments in individual museums from “education” to “learning” departments. In German-speaking countries, the term Kulturvermittlung covers a wide range of practices that broadly encompass the exchange of knowledge and ideas about the arts (Morsch, 2013 ); in the museum context, Kulturvermittlung embraces curatorial concepts and exhibition design, in addition to education (Richter, 2013 ). A similarly broad term— médiation culturelle —is gaining popularity in France. This refers less to the pedagogic practices of knowledge transmission and more to “the act of forming relationships of mutual exchange among publics, works, artists and institutions” (p. 7). Neither term has an exact English equivalent, although the term “cultural mediation” is most commonly substituted for both.

A third designation that requires qualification concerns learning in the art museum, rather than in museums generally. The former shares many of the epistemological, pedagogical, philosophical, and practical characteristics of learning in science, natural history, and ethnographic and historical museums, yet there are some fundamental differences, which are not always recognized in the museological literature. Hooper-Greenhill, for example, differentiates between “museum” education and “gallery” education in the title of her widely cited 1991 text, yet outlines a common educational philosophy and methodology to be applied across both (Hooper-Greenhill, 1991 ). This generalization owes partly to the lack of writing on art-museum education specifically; however, perceived variations in the approaches taken by artists and educators, the nature of the learning experience, and the expected outcomes of the learning process have been identified (see, e.g., Allen & Clive, 1995 ; Burnham & Kai-Kee, 2011 ; Xanthoudaki, Tickle, & Sekules, 2004 ).

Historic formalist conceptualizations of the art object positioned it as uniquely capable of facilitating transcendent contemplation in the form of an “aesthetic experience” that, as described by Clive Bell in 1914 , is visceral and embodied ( 1993 ). This experience instills in the viewer an appreciation of beauty and a love of “art,” and it sets the art object apart from all other material artefacts. This view has subsequently been challenged by, among other concepts, the view that looking at art is essentially a cognitive activity, analogous to deciphering a text (Barthes, 1977 ). Although the notion that the art object can and should be appreciated in and of itself without reference to its historical and social context has also been critiqued (for an introduction to this “new art history,” see Harris, 2001 ), the specificity of the art work, its relationship to its maker (the artist), and the theoretical discourses surrounding it continue to shape the distinctive pedagogic practices and content knowledge employed in the art museum.

Even in art museums, ontological differences exist between the modern and contemporary art work and the historic object that play out in the forms of teaching and learning that are adopted. A number of contemporary art galleries in the United Kingdom and internationally adopt a pedagogic model that draws on concepts associated with what has been described as “conceptual art,” in that it asks questions, not only of the art object—“Why is this art? Who is the artist? What is the context?”—but also of the viewer, “Who are you? What do you represent? It draws viewers’ attention to themselves” (Godfrey, 1998 , p. 15). Conceptual art by its very nature proposes a complex relationship between form and content, and the meaning of a work is not always easily accessible through viewing alone. Furthermore, the inevitable instability of meaning and the “shifting consensual process of determination” of contemporary art allow, if not require, diverse narratives to be held simultaneously (Sitzia, 2017 ). Teaching and learning in relation to these works is thus characterized by criticality and self-consciousness; it seeks to actively interrogate the ontology of the art object and the viewers’ relationship to it in ways that are not necessarily foregrounded in the study of historic art (Pringle, 2006 ).

Historical Development

Early formulations.

Learning in art museums has its roots in the 19th-century philanthropic drive, coupled with a belief in the power of art and culture to improve the individual and society at large. Ideas originating in the 18th-century Enlightenment shaped the perception held by early museum founders that the arts could enable the individual to transcend everyday concerns and emotions (Hooper-Greenhill, 1991 ). Visual art was considered to be intellectually, emotionally, and ethically beneficial, elevating the tastes of the working man, the museum providing an ideal space for self-improvement (Newson & Silver, 1978 ). In their early formulation, art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and Museum of Modern Art in the United States and the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Gallery in London, were understood to be intrinsically educational; their function being to enable individuals to “improve” themselves through access to art. Educators were employed in U.K. museums, first at Tate, in 1914 (Charman, 2005 ); and the first “docents” (trained volunteers) made their appearance in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1907 , their function being to act as “intermediaries” in the galleries, guiding and assisting visitors (Kai-Kee, 2011 ).

However, in the early 20th century , competing understandings existed as to whether visitors benefited most from learning how to appreciate the finer qualities of art through visual engagement with the art work alone or from being informed of its history and the processes of creation. This dialectic between aesthetic pleasure and education continues in art museum teaching and learning, manifest in debates ranging from whether there should be interpretation labels in the gallery (Roberts, 2012 ) to the content of talks and workshops in the gallery (Rice, 2003 ) to the role of the museum in society (Dewdney, Dibosa, & Walsh, 2013 ).

Mid-20th-Century Tensions

Despite the educative ambitions ascribed to museums at their inception, from the early 20th century onward curators, which as Cameron noted in 1971 were drawn largely from a middle-class academic elite ( 2012 ) tended to focus on the development and preservation of collections, occupying themselves with scholarly research instead of engaging with a visiting public. Education activities grew erratically and were increasingly centered on support for a wide range of schools provided by specialist educators, commonly in the form of lectures and guided tours through the galleries. In the United Kingdom, some museums even housed schools providing general education during the First World War (Hooper-Greenhill, 1991 ). In the United States, there was a growth in museum-based practical art classes that were extracurricular to school provision for children in the 1920s and 1930s. Influenced by the work of John Dewey, museum educators allied themselves with the ideals of progressive education and sought to instigate nonauthoritarian, cooperative, and informal learning and greater active participation on the part of the learner (see, further, Kai-Kee, 2011 ). It was during this period that key individuals, including Arthur Lismer , who worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Canada, from 1927 to 1938 , were instrumental in establishing education programs in art museums in North America. Basing his work on democratic principles, Lismer saw art as a form of vision and understanding, and education as a fundamental responsibility of the museum. Likewise, over a long career ( 1937–1969 ) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Victor D’Amico implemented wide-ranging programs for adults and children at the museum and exerted a profound influence on the emerging professional field of art-museum education. Yet notwithstanding these innovations at key institutions, education provision for adult visitors declined in both the United Kingdom and America during the mid- 20th century .

Overall, this period saw a repositioning and relegation of education programming, which museum directors and curators perceived to be secondary to the collection and preservation of art works (Charman, 2005 ), despite the robust arguments being made at the time for the value of education (Low, 2012 ). Although the status of learning departments has improved since the 1960s, this hierarchical dilemma, arguably, remains in place for education professionals working in art museums today, and it plays out in institutional systems, structures, and funding allocations that locate education as a subsidiary function (Ebitz, 2008 ; Morsch, 2011 ). This is despite the popular discourse of greater museum inclusivity (Serota, 2016 ) and growing calls for museums to be more relevant (Black, 2012b ) and participatory (Simon, 2012 ).

Late 1960s Onward

During the period of social and political unrest in the 1960s, art museums came under pressure from both artists and the broader public, who actively critiqued institutional exclusivity and elitist structures, policies, and practices (Cameron, 2012 ). Shaped by the discourses of the civil rights movement, postcolonialism, feminism, and gay liberation, artists sought to interrogate and reveal the dominant exclusionary practices within cultural organizations (Marstine, 2017 ). Art museums in Europe and the United States, concerned about their social relevance, responded in part by reaching out to artists, inviting them into the institutions to make explicit the hidden hegemonies, a practice that became known as “institutional critique” (Fraser, 2005 ). Simultaneously, yet not always symbiotically, art museums expanded their education programs, introducing or foregrounding teaching methods intended to attract and engage audiences new to the institution.

It is during this period that a split can be identified between two strands of practice that operated concurrently in the United Kingdom and United States. One response to the critiques of museum exclusivity was to focus on expanding education provision and widening audiences, drawing on pedagogic methods devised to encourage participation, creative expression, and skillful looking (Kai-Kee, 2011 ). However, particularly in the United Kingdom (although also in North and South America), educators aligned themselves with the mid-century discourses of liberation (Allen, 2008 ) and developed pedagogic practices informed by critical pedagogy, most notably, the writings of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. In Britain, these practices were, in turn, informed by the burgeoning community arts movement, which was itself driven by an ambition to democratize art practices and address issues, challenge societal structures, and bring about change (Dickson, 1995 ). In the United States, the Works Program Administration in the 1930s—in particular, the Federal Arts Project, which employed artists as teachers—provided a historic legacy for artists to draw on in reframing the social and political role of art-museum education.

Informed by artists including Joseph Beuys, Alan Kaprow, Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Jo Spence, this more radical and democratic strand of gallery education developed in the 1970s and 1980s in the United Kingdom and the United States and, subsequently, in mainland Europe (see Morsch, 2011 ). Art museum education became a means by which artists and educators sought to agitate with and advocate on behalf of those members of the public who were unrepresented in mainstream art institutions by surfacing hidden histories and lobbying for change. Led by practicing artists working in the museum, teaching and learning was characterized by a belief in the cultural potential of everyone and empowerment through participation in a democratic creative and critical process (Pringle, 2006 ). Thus, though the general motivations for the practice, on both sides of the Atlantic, came from a desire to demystify the art museum as an institution and enable broader audiences to learn from art and generate new meanings and understanding, one strand of the discourse was more overtly concerned with using art for critical and emancipatory purposes.

During this period, the ambition to open up the cultural institution and democratize art and culture was realized outside the museum, notably through television programs. These included John Berger’s 1972 series Ways of Seeing , which broadcast initially in the United Kingdom on BBC2, went on to be shown around the world, and then was reformulated as a book (Berger, 1972 ). Informed by Marxism, the program was intended in part to be a response to the BBC’s earlier and more traditional series Civilization that had set out to present a canonical view of art history. As such, Ways of Seeing adopted a critical perspective toward art and aesthetics, in dialogue with the field of visual culture and what was being called the “new art history” (Harris, 2001 ). Its impact was felt in the art-museum sector, where it helped shape, for example, the structure and philosophy of workshop programs for schools at Tate (Charman, Rose, & Wilson, 2006 ) and provided the visiting public with critical tools for deconstructing the visual image.

The relationship with television has continued, and the one with digital technology has become increasingly reciprocal. Museums, operating much as broadcast media, have exploited television and the Internet to raise the profile of their collections and communicate with their audiences. Not all of these activities are necessarily designed or implemented by education departments in museums, but they are among the strategies museums employ to connect with, engage, and, to some degree, educate their visitors.

Pedagogic Agendas and Ambitions

Over the last 100 years teaching and learning in the art museum has embraced a plethora of agendas, each of which continues to shape contemporary practice. On one level, the history of art-museum education can be understood as a dialogue between collection-centered pedagogy, where the remit is to help the public understand the curated displays, and exhibitions and learner-centered practices, where the responsibility is to enable visitors to generate their own meanings of the art works. Yet within this dialectic exist multiple more-nuanced ambitions, including, on the one hand, the desire to invoke a largely unmediated aesthetic experience centered on the formal qualities of the art, contrasted with, on the other hand, the ambition to transmit predetermined art historical information.

Morsch ( 2011 ) attempted a categorization of the four dominant discourses of art museum education, based on how it fulfills various institutional “functions.” In the first of these, museum education is identified as “affirmative” when it services the museum’s mission in terms of promoting cultural heritage to an already informed and interested audience. It functions in a “reproductive” capacity when it brings in children, young people, and others unfamiliar with the institution, replicating the skills and knowledge the museum specialists consider necessary for understanding the exhibits and engendering a broad interest in art. Morsch and others are critical of both approaches for their perceived lack of self-reflexivity, for reinforcing existing relationships of power, and for entrenching art museums as social and “political” institutions carrying out ideological functions (Duncan, 1995 ). In the context of the art museum, education is thus cast as a means of inculcating the other into a middle-class habitus (Bourdieu, 1979 ). Pedagogy amounts to no more than enabling individuals to “make the correct (posh) noises . . . a kind of etiquette which will allow us not to make fools of ourselves in the appropriate social circumstances” (Harrison, 1984 , p. 10). This process, in which the scope for challenging the institution and dominant discourses is limited, can be seen as coercive, akin to Bourdieu’s ( 1979 ) concept of “symbolic violence,” which describes the nonviolent imposition by a dominant class of its systems of meaning, or culture, onto a subordinated group, who, by perceiving the dominant class’s actions as legitimate, become complicit in their own subordination (Pringle, 2011 ).

An alternate formulation frames these competing ambitions as a tension between “democratizing culture,” the art museum’s drive to communicate its knowledge and values in forms that neither expect nor invite debate, and “cultural democracy,” which sees the museum as seeking to enable individuals to develop creative and critical skills and articulate their own cultural expressions in ways that may not align with those sanctioned by the cultural institution (Kelly, 1985 ). In practice, museum educators negotiate between the institution and the collection and simultaneously respond to the needs of audiences by drawing on a range of methodologies and disciplines. For example, with audiences very new to art, the focus might be on teaching skills that build confidence and can be applied beyond the context of the gallery, such as visual awareness and critical thinking. Yet this arguably more culturally democratic approach would not preclude the same educator from communicating the sociocultural and art historical specificity of art works as embodiments of aesthetic, historical, and cultural values should the pedagogic context require it.

Cultural democracy can be allied with the third of Morsch’s “functions” for gallery education. “Deconstructive” museum-education practices work to enable participants to question embedded and frequently invisible assumptions in art and art museums (Morsch, 2011 ). Associated with critical museological practice, in that it is characterized by a critique of objects and institutional practices (Vergo, 1989 ), and with critical pedagogy, in that it fosters a self-reflective understanding of education, teaching and learning practice, this scenario includes a reflexive examination of power relations to promote critique and self-empowerment. In this, it seeks to transform the institution into a space in which those who are not at the center of the art world can generate their own meanings and representations of art.

This critical practice has itself been subject to criticism, in part by art-museum-education professionals who are conscious of the extent to which the cultural institution is genuinely open to critical deconstruction, given that it sets the agenda for these practices (Morsch, 2011 ; Pringle & De Witt, 2014 ). Further criticism has addressed the question of who benefits from the processes of institutional critique. Ebitz ( 2008 ) and Cutler ( 2013 ), for example, recognize that critical practice can help reveal institutional hierarchies and enable education to define itself within the institution. Cutler, however, warns that a focus on discourses of power can overwhelm a discourse of learning and does little to provide meaningful and more productive alternatives. Critical practice in her view also firmly locates education at the margins of the institution, thereby limiting its scope to bring about “the possibility for new and different articulations” (Cutler, 2013 ).

Despite the obvious contradictions that are present in these agendas, underlying them all is the awareness that art museums have a responsibility to support everyone (from the art novice to the expert) to learn with, from and about art, and that this learning brings about positive intellectual and emotional changes in individuals that can also benefit society. This idea was originally manifested in the paternalistic view that art “improves” people, both morally and intellectually. Arguably, the residue of this questionable discourse of “improvement” remained throughout the 20th and continues into the 21st century . It is apparent in the language used by programs that seek to address issues of social exclusion or to transform “problem” young people through access to art (see Buckingham & Jones, 2001 ). This is despite efforts on the part of art-museum-education professionals and academics to challenge language and practices that reinforce traditional relations between the museum and “others” (Sandell, 2002 ).

At the same time, this “transformational” discourse, which equates to the fourth and final of Morsch’s “functions,” can be seen to inform critical and liberatory education programs that seek to address inequalities and bring about social and institutional change. Education departments have a strong history as agents of change and sites of debate and experimental practice in art museums, underpinned by research. Tate Exchange, for example, is a three-year initiative, instigated at Tate in 2016 under the auspices of a learning department, that seeks to examine the role of art in relation to broader societal systems and structures, and specifically, to better understand how art makes a difference in people’s lives and, through that, to society more widely (see https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/tate-exchange ). Likewise, the MASS Action (Museum as Site for Social Action) initiative convened by learning staff at the Minneapolis Institute of Art asks how the museum can be used as a site for social action. And programs including the Edgeware Road project, instigated by the education department at the Serpentine Gallery in London are challenging institutional modes of knowledge production. These initiatives raise questions about whether it is the responsibility of the education department alone or of the art museum as a whole to effect social change (Black, 2012b ). And though the shift toward art museums becoming more community centered, “representing multiple perspectives, and exploring the relevance of the past to people’s lives today” (Black, 2012a , p. 267), has, in theory, positive implications for the role of education, the question arises, if the museum is framed in its entirety as a learning organization, should education departments be disbanded (Cutler, 2010 )? Art-museum educators, and their colleagues in the institution and beyond, need to further investigate how pedagogy working alongside curatorial programming and interpretation can contribute to a culture of dialogue and debate. How can learning departments act as drivers for ethical change in the museum and beyond? What role should education play in a 21st-century art museum committed to inclusivity and toleration?

Contemporary Practice

Shaped by these agendas, and frequently manifesting more than one of them concurrently, contemporary teaching and learning practice in the art museum takes a multitude of forms. These include informal visits to galleries by schools, families, and community groups, supported by learning resources that range from in-gallery interpretation wall texts, paper-based worksheets, and bespoke objects that can be handled in the gallery to audio guides and digital interventions and materials.

The offer to school groups includes professional development programs for teachers that take shape as lectures, workshops, and courses, some of which provide academic accreditation. However, the most common provision for schools involves one-off structured teaching sessions in the gallery led by an educator or, frequently in the United States, a docent. In the United Kingdom, participatory, artist-led workshops in the gallery have been a staple of gallery education practice for the last 40 years. Longer-term projects with schools may involve a combination of gallery and classroom-based programs. These focus on developing specific learning skills and include the VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) program in the United States and creative learning initiatives in the United Kingdom that nurture ways of thinking and working that encourage imagination, independence, tolerance of ambiguity and risk, openness, and the raising of aspirations (Pringle, 2012 ). A strong tradition of schools-focused programs that directly address issues of racism or bullying, for example, also exist. And notably, given the current radically conservative sociopolitical climate in the United States and the United Kingdom, there are increasing calls from the art-museum-education sector for the profession to redouble its efforts to counter discrimination by working alongside individuals, schools, and communities. For example the Journal of Museum Education devoted an entire issue in June 2017 to ‘identifying and transforming racism in museum education’ ( Identifying and Transforming Racism in Museum Education, Journal of Museum Education ).

Structured programs for adults commonly range from lectures, conferences, and in-gallery talks designed with the specialist art audience in mind to courses and informal programming intended to attract a more-diverse public. Longer-term projects, in which artists work in and beyond the gallery with communities, frequently to address specific social issues, are common in the United Kingdom (Marstine, 2017 ), the United States (Finkelpearl, 2013 ), and across Europe, South America, and Australia. However, this practice appears to be relatively under-researched, particularly as it exists beyond the familiar art-world centers, and would benefit from a comprehensive survey. Recognition that the art museum can engender improvements in health and well-being (see the Engage , 39 : Visual Arts and Wellbeing , Spring 2017 ) has prompted the instigation of programs such as those for adults with dementia, a well-known example being the Meet Me at MoMA program. Moreover, the research-led imperative of art-museum education is evident in such projects as The Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts that has been established at the Minneapolis Institute of Art . These include a five-year study that researches practices that foster compassion and enhance related emotional skills, with the goal to inform the design of leaning and engagement programs.

Overlaps can be seen between what has become defined as “socially engaged practice” (see, further, Bishop, 2012 ; Finkelpearl, 2013 ; Kester, 2004 ) and artists working under the auspices of museum education, not least in a shared commitment to engagement through creative dialogue. Similarly, the so-called educational turn in art and curatorial practice has drawn attention to the pedagogic potential in both (O’Neill & Wilson, 2010 ). Yet it is noticeable that art-museum education has been conspicuously absent from these discursive fields, which to some educators is evidence of long-standing prejudices, misconceptions, and entrenched hierarchies (Mahlknecht, 2017 ).

The conflation of different museum-based practices, often to the detriment of education, reinforces the importance of articulating the histories, ambitions, and practices of teaching and learning and acknowledging the specificity of pedagogy in the art museum. Understanding whom it is for, how the pedagogic relationships are structured, and what constitutes success is essential for the development of the field. For example, programs targeted at young people or “teens,” aged usually between 15 and 25, are growing in popularity. Varying in scope and ambition, these initiatives range from those aiming for audience diversification and professional development and training to programs seeking to engender cultural empowerment and critical practice in their young participants. And while research has been undertaken on the nature of participation and the impact of teenage engagement with art museums (see, e.g., Hirzy, 2015 ; Sayers, 2011 ), further work is required.

Art museums are becoming increasingly adept at using digital media for education purposes. Social media platforms provide opportunities to break down formal communication barriers and share information. Podcasts of gallery talks are now a regular offering, and the larger institutions have gone further, in some cases providing online courses for the general public and professional development programs for teachers (Armstrong, Howes, & Woon, 2013 ). Designated spaces, such as the Taylor Digital Studio at Tate Britain in London, allow for targeted programming and the facilitation of courses and events utilizing digital technology in the gallery. Yet research has indicated that art museums are struggling to move beyond the one-to-many broadcast model and take full advantage of the many-to-many model of networked and distributed digital communication, whereby knowledge is generated and shared through less hierarchical channels (Walsh, Dewdney, & Pringle, 2016 ). This suggests that further research interrogating the specific affordances of the digital in the context of art-museum education would be of value.

Art Museum Epistemology and Pedagogy

Considering the range of activities and ambitions for learning in the art museum, it comes as no surprise that that the practice today is informed by a variety of disciplines and intellectual traditions, most notably sociology, cognitive and developmental psychology, critical pedagogy, progressive education, critical theory, art history, philosophy, and anthropology. Indeed, one characteristic of the art-museum educator is the ability to shift among disciplinary persona (being at certain points a philosopher, artist, art historian, or critic) in response to the needs of the learner (Rice, 1988 ). Art-museum educators draw on the work of a range of key thinkers and writers, adapting ideas and pedagogic techniques to work effectively in the gallery context. For example, John Dewey’s writings on the experience of art continue to inspire museum educators seeking to engender for visitors the intense and engaged encounter he described (Burnham & Kai-Kee, 2011 ). Dewey’s framing of education as experiential, social, and learner centered, driven by problem-solving and critical thinking to prepare the student for engagement in civic life (Dewey, 1897 ) also underpins education activity in museums today.

In the United States, research with practitioners has identified that museum educators reference psychological theories of learning, including Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow (Ebitz, 2008 ). Also influential is the work of developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, whose work in particular informed the widely used visual thinking strategies (VTS) model developed by psychologist Abigail Housen and former museum educator Philip Yenawine. VTS’s recognition of the centrality of the learner is allied to constructivist learning theory, wherein learners are identified as active and learning is constructed as a process of individual sense-making in which learners build on their existing knowledge and experiences to generate new understandings (Watkins, 2003 ). Constructivism locates the museum object as devoid of inherent meaning; instead, the meaning is generated through the visitor’s engagement with the artefact (Hein, 1998 ). Teachers are positioned as expert facilitators, whose role is to ask questions and facilitate the learner’s connection to art. In the VTS model, teachers refrain from sharing their own knowledge and experiences, so as not to disempower the learner. The emphasis in VTS on developing critical thinking skills through attentive looking seeks to enable visitors to develop the skills necessary to generate their own understandings. The model has, however, been criticized for failing to draw viewers’ attention to the historical or social conditions of a work and for denying the expertise of the curators and educators, thereby promoting a sense that every interpretation is of equal value (Rice & Yenawine, 2002 ). Further criticism centers on the need to acknowledge the social and cultural frameworks that shape individual interpretations, instead of focusing exclusively on the individual (see Kai-Kee, 2011 ; Hooper-Greenhill, 1999 ; Rice & Yenawine, 2002 ). Nonetheless, the VTS model is perceived to be particularly effective in supporting younger students and those who have less familiarity with art to engage with art and develop confidence in connecting with the art museum.

Notwithstanding a focus in recent years on constructivist teaching and learning, “traditional” (Hein, 1998 ) or transmissive models of teaching and learning can be found in art museums across the world. In the traditional scenario, learners are identified as passive and are given knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values by an expert (Watkins, 2003 ). The content of learning exists independently of the learner and is transferred to him or her through a process of assimilating facts, information, and experience, most commonly in the art museum in the form of talks or lectures, or through texts, such as exhibition catalogues. In practice, educator-led sessions in the gallery frequently combine both constructivist and transmissive elements. Educators guide learners using a combination of questioning to support individual meaning making and deploying their knowledge at key moments to enrich the overall learning experience (Burnham & Kai-Kee, 2011 ; Pringle & De Witt, 2014 ; Rice, 1988 ; Thomson, 2014 ).

In the United Kingdom, art practice is perceived to be central to teaching and learning, particularly in the modern and contemporary art museum. Art practice (instead of constituting a particular pedagogic model) is where artists, participants, and issues meet; and though it is not widely documented, there is evidence that the principles of the community-arts movement remain at the center of much education work today (Allen, 2008 ; Pringle, 2006 ). Community artists located artistic practice as a means to enter into productive dialogue with nonartistic constituents. However, this is not artistic practice as espoused under a particular understanding of modernism, wherein art is perceived as synonymous with the rebellious antagonist existing in “romantic exile” (Gablik, 1995 , p. 5). Rather, community arts promoted communication, interaction, and engagement to enable participation in the creation of culture, characteristics that are still central to the art-museum learning experience.

Furthermore, artists working as educators are perceived to be central to learning in the U.K. art museum because they are steeped in a largely conceptual—that is, creative, analytical and reflective rather than craft-based—art process, which corresponds with a creative learning process (Pringle & De Witt, 2014 ; Sekules, 2003 ). Attributes these artists are seen to possess include the ability to facilitate active questioning and open-minded inquiry, playfulness, and risk taking; they can accommodate the unexpected, and they value curiosity, imaginative response, and the freedom to explore concurrent strands of interest. They recognize that productive failure occupies an important place in their practices and are comfortable with not knowing (Pringle, 2009 ). It is important to note that these qualities are not the exclusive preserve of artists; skilled art-museum educators consistently draw on creative questioning and reflective techniques in their work (Burnham & Kai-Kee, 2011 ). What is specific about this scenario is that learning is perceived to come about through direct engagement with works of art in the context of the museum via an artistic process modeled by a practicing artist. This process has been described as a “pedagogy of encouragement” (Thomson, 2014 ), one that commits to dialogue, questioning, and reflection and recognizes the agency of learners to adopt elements of the process that are most relevant to them in a trusting and safe environment.

Artist educators in the art museum aspire to collaborate to educate, and their practice and pedagogy necessarily become one, as learning emerges through shared processes of facilitated dialogue and making activities. Their work continues to be informed by artists, such as Beuys and Kaprow, alongside educational theorists, notably, Paulo Friere, bell hooks, and Maxine Greene. Museum educators and artists align their practices more to a critical, “co-constructivist” theory of learning, wherein knowledge is socially constructed and meaning making is a collaborative, communal process (Watkins, 2003 ). As with constructivist learning, the focus is on dialogue and the asking of questions to enable the learner to both share and question knowledge. However, in this scenario the teacher functions as a co-learner, instigating dialogues and voicing and reordering their own knowledge in collaboration with others. Learning in all constituents requires that all participants, including the educator, work and learn together and that all must benefit, not only in terms of cognitive development but also in the social and cultural domain.

Co-constructivist learning is not only found in the United Kingdom; multiple examples of collaborative, socially grounded teaching and learning can be found in the literature on U.S. practice (see, e.g., the work of researchers Kevin Crowley, Karen Knutson, John Falk, and Lynn Dierking, who all identify learning as active, collaborative, and social, and that of museum professionals who advocate participatory approaches, such as Nina Simon). However, in 2001 , Ebitz found little evidence of U.S. educators’ interest in critical pedagogy or other critical theories that problematize the museum. Elsewhere, Griffin ( 2011 ) described the growing popularity of dialogic practices in Australian art museums, and Sitvia ( 2017 ) has provided insight into European practice, citing a range of educational theories that are gaining interest in art museums in the Netherlands, in particular, Kolb’s experiential learning model and Mezirov’s “transformative learning sequence.” Sitvia identifies the latter’s focus on learning as coming out of a “disorientating dilemma,” followed by self-examination and the construction of new competencies, as particularly well suited to the exhibition context. This resonates with research conducted with art-museum-learning professionals in London, who described learning as a moment of rupture that comes about through instances of disruption (Pringle & DeWitt, 2014 ). Aligned with the concept of the “learning event” as articulated by Atkinson ( 2011 ) drawing on Alain Badiou, learning is here conceptualized as a shift from a state of familiarity to one that is new and previously unknown. In the museum, this “event” occurs through encounters with art and with ideas, both of which can serve to interrupt visitors’ existing emotional and cognitive states of being. In this framing, the educators’ role is to scaffold learners, as they become aware of what they do not know or the unfamiliar nature of something they have encountered, and to steer them through this unpredictable event, so that new knowledge is generated and learning happens.

Teaching and learning in the art museum is therefore characterized by diverse theoretical underpinnings. There is not a fixed body of disciplinary knowledge that predetermines and circumscribes the field. Instead, practitioners draw on ideas from varied disciplines according to their needs and to fulfill their pedagogic ambitions. These ambitions include enabling participants to gain greater understanding of and knowledge about art; developing learners’ critical, analytical, and reflective skills; encouraging participants to engage with artistic practice to develop their own creativity and empowering learners to articulate their own views and cultural formulations. And though this theoretical capriciousness has exposed the field to criticism (see Dobbs & Eisner, 1987 ), arguably, it is a logical response to the varied contexts in which educators work and the multiple agendas and audience needs they negotiate (Ebitz, 2008 ; Rice, 1988 ). Educators, as practitioners, continuously draw on their practitioner knowledge, or “know how,” learned through experience and expressed through practice. At the same time, their actions are informed by their considerable propositional-theory-based knowledge, although the value of this is determined by the extent to which it can usefully inform and improve their practices (Charman, 2005 ; Pringle, 2009 ). Therefore, it is praxis, rather than discipline-bound theory in and of itself, which can be seen as one of the defining characteristics of art museum pedagogy.

Challenges and Further Questions

In 1986 , the Getty Center for Education in the Arts in Los Angeles commissioned a national study of art-museum education. Museum educator Stephen Dobbs and academic Elliot Eisner interviewed a number of museum directors and educators in America to try to better understand the current state of the profession. Their findings regarding the mission of art-museum education, and the status, role and professional training of museum educators; program resources; the quality of research and evaluation; and the relationship to the community were largely damning (Dobbs & Eisner, 1987 ). Notably, they identified that, alongside the lack of a solid theoretical foundation within art-museum education:

Scant attention to museum education as a professional field of study in the nation’s universities, a peripatetic literature; the paucity of well-established journals or even a primary text; a widespread perception that museum education lacks a map of its terrain and may not even be certain of its destination. (p. 78)

Needless to say, the response to these findings was mixed, some in the sector criticizing the authors’ methods and results, and others acknowledging the difficult truths their report exposed (Kai-Kee, 2011 ). And while much has changed since the report was published—there are recognized and well-established post-graduate university courses on museum education, for example, and a growing body of literature addressing the field—challenges similar to those identified in 1987 persist. The relationship of theory to practice remains complex, and there is still no overarching theoretical framework that explains the practice. Morsch’s ( 2011 ) model of the four functions of art museum education has provided an interesting starting point, and the visual thinking strategies model is readily applied in many art museums in the United States; yet it would appear that the field is resistant to the development or imposition of a grand theoretical metanarrative. There have been attempts to rationalize this. Researchers have drawn attention to the heterogeneity and diverse epistemic foundations of the practice, while also acknowledging that the working conditions of museum educators make theory development challenging (see Charman, 2005 ; Ebitz, 2008 ; Rice, 1988 ). For example, programming pressures and a lack of time are cited as major factors that prevent education practitioners from reflecting and writing on their work (Ebitz, 2008 ). However, art-museum education is a field dominated by women, typically young, who often work part-time in relatively poorly paid positions, and there remains little or no research on the impact of the gendered nature of the profession or on the professional motivations of educators, recognizing the implications of this for theory formation. Similarly, concern is growing regarding the narrow sociocultural and racial make-up of museum education staff, dominated as the sector is by white middle-class professionals. Yet this unease has not been accompanied by detailed research implications of these trends for theory and practice.

Further research on the epistemological hierarchies present within the art museum and their bearing on the status of teaching and learning would also be valuable. For instance, the relative undervaluing of the more ludic, process-based forms of teaching and learning, which underpin much art-museum education activity with children and young people, compared to more academic programming, such as talks or lectures, requires interrogation. Charman ( 2005 ) drew attention to the legacy of the 20th-century privileging of collection-based scholarship, arguing that it resulted in a “denial of the nature of scholarship in art museum education” (p. 4). Others have not gone so far in pitting art history against education; however, there is broad agreement that the nature of art-museum-education scholarship and educators’ expertise is still not widely understood, even in the art museum, let alone in the wider academic community.

As noted, this lack of understanding of art-museum pedagogy is also manifest in its absence from the discourses of socially engaged art, the “educational turn” in art and curatorial practice, and in writings on “relational aesthetics.” One way of framing this oversight is as a form of epistemological elitism that sanctions existing power relations and resembles the dilemma faced by education when compared to art history (Morsch, 2011 ). An alternative is to view the omission as a strategy by curators and theorists to circumvent the complex, critical, but also at times mundane and “unglamorous” task of engaging with learners to be able to focus exclusively on the “great collective possibilities of curatorial knowledge production” (Sternfeld, 2010 , p. 20). In either case, it is clear that a deeper understanding of shared and divergent practices, historical trajectories, modes of engagement, and desired outcomes is needed.

Dobbs and Eisner reserved some of their most pointed criticism for the lack of adequate training of art museum educators in professionally relevant research and evaluation methods. They recognized that this failure had negative implications, not only for the validation of individual programs, but also for the overall development of the profession. Despite the history and the current emphasis on research-led programming at larger institutions, including Tate, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MoMA, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, it remains true that greater professional development for educators on research methods is needed. Informed debates on how best to research and evaluate art-museum teaching and learning are also necessary, not least because funders and policymakers require evidence of the positive impact of museum-based learning. In line with discussions across the cultural sector, there are widespread and unresolved views on how best to account for the value of creative and cultural engagement and, in particular, which methods will generate the most robust findings (see Crossick & Kaszynska, 2016 ). For some, using quasi-scientific approaches, including randomized control trials, can provide a means of demonstrating improvements in, for example, critical thinking skills (see Greene, Kisida, & Bowen, 2014 ). However, this has raised concerns among practitioners, who argue that this method fails to capture the richness and complexity of the pedagogic process in the art museum and does not represent the practice authentically. Ethnographic approaches have also been employed in the museum, alongside case studies and action research, yet it is safe to say that there is considerable room for further research, not only on the practice itself, but also on how best to capture and account for it.

A review of the development and characteristics of teaching and learning in the art museum makes it apparent that this diverse field is rich and dynamic but can seem eclectic and unsystematic. This has led some to argue for a more structured and regulated approach and the formalization of an agreed overarching theoretical framework. Yet practitioners working in museums consistently argue for the value of different theoretical and practical approaches that can accommodate the range of audiences and variety of institutional contexts they face. This article has sought to provide as comprehensive an overview as possible, but without question, there are important geographical areas of practice that have not been addressed in depth. In part, this is because the field is so far-reaching that it is simply not possible to cover everything. Yet is also true that accessing information on art-museum education beyond the art world centers is a challenging endeavor. Within the field, ideas and innovations are generally disseminated through professional networks and conferences. This is invaluable for those working in the sector, but it limits the possibilities for debate and dissemination in wider academic, education, and policy contexts. Without question, further research is required, and far more knowledge sharing in and beyond the sector, particularly across international boundaries, would be hugely beneficial.

In the more enlightened art museums of the 21st century , where dialogue, participation, civic engagement, and creativity are seen to be central, education plays a crucial role. Yet there remains a sense among some in and beyond the profession that art-museum education needs to justify its existence. At a time when social and political divisions are growing, and economic and ecological pressures are ever more pressing, art museums need to be proactive in reaching out to diverse communities and committing to equitable and sustainable practice. Museums across the world have demonstrated that education can play a key role in achieving these ambitions. What is needed, therefore, is recognition of the value of this long-standing practice on its own terms; acknowledgment of the specific contribution it can make; and support for its intellectual and creative development from the sector, the academy, funders, and policymakers. The challenge facing practitioners and researchers is to ensure this recognition comes about.

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Recommended Museum Education Books

A blog post about books written for the museum education field the author wanted to read in 2017 caught my eye. The list of 9 books includes a one-paragraph description of what each book is about and an explanation of why it’s on the list. Some of the books are more appropriate for museum professionals, but some of them look like they would be of interest to docents/guides as well. For example, the first book on the list, “The Manual of Museum Learning,” offers advice for creating successful learning experiences in museums and other institutions including galleries, zoos, and botanical gardens. You can find the post at:

Books I Want to read on Museum Education in 2017  (original blog post by Lindsey Stewart)

Jan Thorman, Walters Art Museum, March 2018

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Propositions for Museum Education

International art educators in conversation.

Edited by Anita Sinner , Patricia Osler , and Boyd White

448 pages | 75 color plates | 6.69 x 9.61 | © 2024

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Propositions for Museum Education (Book)

International art educators in conversation.

Examines the ways international art educators are engaging with twenty-first-century challenges in museum education. Organized into five sections, this collection reconceptualizes the role of museums via new technologies, socially just practices, accessibility, differences in lived experiences, and pedagogic pivots to create impactful change. 75 colour illus.

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From the perspective of art educators, museum education is shifting to a new paradigm, which this collection showcases and marks as threshold moments of change underway internationally. The goal in drawing together international perspectives is to facilitate deeper thinking, making and doing practices central to museum engagement across global, local and glocal contexts.

Museums as cultural brokers facilitate public pedagogies, and the dispositions and practices offered in 33 chapters from 19 countries articulate how and why collections enact responsibility in public exchange, leading cultural discourses of empowerment in new ways. Organized into five sections, a wide range of topics and arts-based modes of inquiry imagine new possibilities concerning theory-practice, sustainability of educational partnerships and communities of practice with, in and through artwork scholarship.

Chapters diverse in issues, art forms and museum orientations are well-situated within museum studies, enlarging discussions with trans-topographies (transdisciplinary, transnational, translocal and more) as critical directions for art educators. Authors impart collective diversity through richly textured exposés, first-person accounts, essays and visual essays that enfold cultural activism, sustainable practices and experimental teaching and learning alongside transformative exhibitions, all while questioning – Who is a learner? What is a museum? Whose art is missing?

Anita Sinner is a professor of Art Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She works extensively with stories as pedagogic pivots, with emphasis on creative geographies in education.

Boyd White is an associate professor (retired, August 2023) from the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, Faculty of Education, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of philosophy and art education, with a focus on aesthetics and art criticism.

Trish Osler is a PhD Candidate and researcher in Art Education and Concordia University Public Scholar. Her transdisciplinary practice aims to deepen understanding and awareness of arts-based approaches through embodied engagement with the environment and through artistic inquiry. Research interests draw upon the neuroscience of creativity and museum education.

Table of Contents  Preface- ing   Anita Sinner, Boyd White and Patricia Osler The Promise of Museums: An Introduction  Dónal O’Donoghue I: Decolonizing Museums  Displays of Inhumanity and the Inhumanity of Displays: Dialogue at the Junctures of Contemporary Art, Museum Collections and Hate Speech  Raphael Vella and Shaun Grech Museums as Intersectional Spaces for Artivist Solidarity  Riikka Haapalainen, Anniina Suominen, Tiina Pusa, Jasmin Järvinen and Melanie Orenius Decolonizing Benjamin Franklin House Through Comics: Reflections and Potential  Kremena Dimitrova Community Museums: Dialogical Spaces for Knowledge Creation, Mobilization and Income Generation for Marginalized Citizens in Brazil  Bruno de Oliveira Jayme “Becoming Ecological” for Nature Conservation: Insights from Two Museums in the Island State of lutruwita / Tasmania, Australia  Abbey MacDonald, Annalise Rees, Jan Hogan and Benjamin J. Richardson On the Possibility of Reconstructing a Contested Past Through Memory Museums in Turkey Esra Yildiz II: Museums of Purpose  Disrupting Museum Education: Counter-Monument as a Pedagogical Space  Susana Vargas-Mejía Korundi Recreated: Participatory Experience Creates a Dialogue Between Past and Present  Anniina Koivurova and Tatiana Kravtsov Be the Nature: Enhancing Nature Connectedness Through Art Museum Pedagogy  Timo Jokela, Maria Huhmarniemi and Tanja Mäkitalo Interpretation Design at a Crossroads with Museum Education  Richard Lachapelle The Portuguese Contemporary Art Museum Today  João Pedro Fróis Museum-School Partnership: Synergizing Paradigmatic Engagements  Attwell Mamvuto Every School is a Museum: The Case of “Art for Learning Art” in Tegucigalpa, Honduras  Joaquín Roldán, Andrea Rubio-Fernández and Ángela Moreno-Córdoba III: Pedagogic Pivots  Not Knowing: Creating Spaces for Co-curation  Deborah Riding Children’s Voices: Making Children’s Perspectives Visible in Gallery Spaces  Lilly Blue and Sue Girak The Art of Learning Art  Paloma Palau-Pellicer, Maria Avariento-Adsuara and Paola Ruiz-Moltó Out of the Museum into the Art  Lise Sattrup and Lars Emmerik Damgaard Knudsen Thinking Ahead in Art Education....  Rolf Laven and Wolfgang Weinlich Social Functions of Museum Education in Double Peripheries: Between Museology and Sociology  Dominik Porczyński The Role of the University Museum in Museum Education: The Example of the University of Tartu Museum  Jaanika Anderson IV: Sites of Sensorial Practice  “You Have to Form Your Mediators. It’s a Series”: On Mediation, Encounters and Deleuze in the Art Museum  Marie-France Berard Learning Changes the Museum Ricardo Marín-Viadel and Joaquín Roldán Encounters on the Fringe of a Museum Tour – Trailing Behind as a Site of Affective Intensities Keven Lee, Melissa Park and Marilyn Lajeunesse The Educational Turn and A/r/tography: An Interplay Between Curating, Education and Artmaking Jaime Mena and Guadalupe Pérez-Cuesta Redescribing Territories: Inhabiting the Continuum of Art Production and Education  Lene Crone Jensen and Hilde Østergaard Senses and Sensibility: Finding the Balance in Sensory Museum Education Emilie Sitzia Towards a More Human-Centred Museum: A Narrative of an Imagined Visit to a Trauma-Aware Art Museum Jackie Armstrong, Laura Evans, Stephen Legari, Ronna Tulgan Ostheimer, Andrew Palamara and Emily Wiskera

V: Virtual Museums  The Art of Teaching in the Museum: A Proposition for Pedagogy of Dissensus  Lisbet Skregelid The Virtual of Abstract Art: Museum Educational Encounters with Concrete Abstraction  Heidi Kukkonen Projection-Based Augmented Reality for Visual Learning and Creation in Contemporary Art Museums  Rocío Lara-Osuna and Xabier Molinet Co-imagining the Museum of the Future: Meaningful Interactions Among Art(efacts), Visitors and Technology in Museum Spaces  Priscilla Van Even, Annika Wolff, Stefanie Steinbeck, Anne Pässilä and Kevin Vanhaelewijn Immersive Museum Technologies in Turkey and Future Projections in the Field  Ceren Güneröz and Ayşem Yanar A New Pedagogy of Museology? Innovative Changes in Museum Education for Cultural Heritage, Social Communication and Participation: A Case Study Renata Pater

Biographies Index

Propositions for Museum Education , is a most timely and thought-provoking collection of scholarly perspectives essential all museum professionals seeking to understand and harness the social political and educational changes that are occurring in our societies and institutions. The book champions and proposes hopeful possibilities for museums as contiguous sites of learning for the present day and future realities of institutions who are embedded and connected with communities, from diverse global perspectives. I strongly recommend this book to all seeking to make a positive difference to their museological practice and greater influence on and within the communities in which their museums are embedded.  Professor of museum and science education, The University of British Columbia David Anderson

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The American Alliance of Museums, representing the entire U.S. museum field, advocates on behalf of museums as critical partners in education and experiential learning.

• Museums spend more than $2 billion a year on education activities. The typical museum devotes three-quarters of its education budget to K-12 students.
• Each year, museums provide more than 18 million instructional hours for educational programs such as guided tours for students, staff visits to schools, school outreach through science vans and other traveling exhibits, and professional development for teachers.
• Museums help teach the state, local or core curriculum, tailoring their programs in math, science, art, literacy, language arts, history, civics and government, economics and financial literacy, geography and social studies to meet state, local and national standards.

Museums and Education Policy

Despite their central role in the system, federal policy often neglects to consider museums’ contributions to the field of education. The Alliance’s Government Relations and Advocacy team   works   to make sure museums are at the table, pushing to retain a wide range of core academic subjects, encouraging greater interagency collaboration, and seeking to give museums more direct access to teacher training funds, among other goals. Our  issue brief  on elementary and secondary education has further details.

Museums and the Future of Education

In response to forecasts that the United States is on the cusp of transformational change in the educational system, the Alliance’s  Center for the Future of Museums  recently launched a national dialogue about the future of education and how museums can be integrated with schools and other educational assets into a vibrant learning grid.

Building the Future of Education: Museums and the Learning Ecosystem  (2014) summarizes the content and shares ideas coming out of a convening organized by the Alliance and The Henry Ford. Essays by educators, students, researchers and reformers explore how leaders from the worlds of education and museums can work together to create immersive, experiential learning opportunities for youth.

The Alliance and its network of partners plan to take the following steps to better integrate museums into the U.S. educational system:

• Compile and disseminate case studies of successful projects that integrate museum assets into the larger educational landscape.
• Share information with policymakers about museums’ work in the field of education.
• Identify and evaluate high-performing digital platforms that can aggregate and distribute museum educational content, and devise ways to encourage museums to make use of them.
• Foster innovative experimentation by individual museums or consortia of museums.
• Research museums’ contribution to education to fill in knowledge gaps.
• Advocate for museums’ rightful place at the table with regards to education policy, both year-round and during  Museums Advocacy Day .
• Organize local convenings of museum staff and education providers to identify ways for communities to integrate museum resources into the local learning ecosystem.

Additional Resources

Center for the Future of Museums: Future of Education

CFM explores the role can museums play in the next era of learning through a series of reports and papers.

Legislative and Policy Issues

The Alliance’s Government Relations and Advocacy team tracks a wide range of policy issues. See more of our work on education in the “Elementary and Secondary Education” section.

Education Professional Network

The Alliance’s Education Professional Network (EdCom) advances the purpose of museums as places of lifelong learning, serves as an advocate for diverse audiences and educators, and promotes professional standards and excellence in the practice of museum education.

An Alliance of Spirit: Museum & School Partnerships

The classic text on how to build successful partnerships between museums and schools,  An Alliance of Spirit: Museum and School Partnerships  (2010) brings together the latest thinking and instructive case studies on how museums and schools can better understand each other’s goals as they work together to provide school children the most inspiring educational experience possible inside the museum.

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The Moscow Metro Museum of Art: 10 Must-See Stations

There are few times one can claim having been on the subway all afternoon and loving it, but the Moscow Metro provides just that opportunity.  While many cities boast famous public transport systems—New York’s subway, London’s underground, San Salvador’s chicken buses—few warrant hours of exploration.  Moscow is different: Take one ride on the Metro, and you’ll find out that this network of railways can be so much more than point A to B drudgery.

The Metro began operating in 1935 with just thirteen stations, covering less than seven miles, but it has since grown into the world’s third busiest transit system ( Tokyo is first ), spanning about 200 miles and offering over 180 stops along the way.  The construction of the Metro began under Joseph Stalin’s command, and being one of the USSR’s most ambitious building projects, the iron-fisted leader instructed designers to create a place full of svet (radiance) and svetloe budushchee (a radiant future), a palace for the people and a tribute to the Mother nation.

Consequently, the Metro is among the most memorable attractions in Moscow.  The stations provide a unique collection of public art, comparable to anything the city’s galleries have to offer and providing a sense of the Soviet era, which is absent from the State National History Museum.  Even better, touring the Metro delivers palpable, experiential moments, which many of us don’t get standing in front of painting or a case of coins.

Though tours are available , discovering the Moscow Metro on your own provides a much more comprehensive, truer experience, something much less sterile than following a guide.  What better place is there to see the “real” Moscow than on mass transit: A few hours will expose you to characters and caricatures you’ll be hard-pressed to find dining near the Bolshoi Theater.  You become part of the attraction, hear it in the screech of the train, feel it as hurried commuters brush by: The Metro sucks you beneath the city and churns you into the mix.

With the recommendations of our born-and-bred Muscovite students, my wife Emma and I have just taken a self-guided tour of what some locals consider the top ten stations of the Moscow Metro. What most satisfied me about our Metro tour was the sense of adventure .  I loved following our route on the maps of the wagon walls as we circled the city, plotting out the course to the subsequent stops; having the weird sensation of being underground for nearly four hours; and discovering the next cavern of treasures, playing Indiana Jones for the afternoon, piecing together fragments of Russia’s mysterious history.  It’s the ultimate interactive museum.

Top Ten Stations (In order of appearance)

Kievskaya station.

Kievskaya Station went public in March of 1937, the rails between it and Park Kultury Station being the first to cross the Moscow River.  Kievskaya is full of mosaics depicting aristocratic scenes of Russian life, with great cameo appearances by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.  Each work has a Cyrillic title/explanation etched in the marble beneath it; however, if your Russian is rusty, you can just appreciate seeing familiar revolutionary dates like 1905 ( the Russian Revolution ) and 1917 ( the October Revolution ).

Mayakovskaya Station

Mayakovskaya Station ranks in my top three most notable Metro stations. Mayakovskaya just feels right, done Art Deco but no sense of gaudiness or pretention.  The arches are adorned with rounded chrome piping and create feeling of being in a jukebox, but the roof’s expansive mosaics of the sky are the real showstopper.  Subjects cleverly range from looking up at a high jumper, workers atop a building, spires of Orthodox cathedrals, to nimble aircraft humming by, a fleet of prop planes spelling out CCCP in the bluest of skies.

Novoslobodskaya Station

Novoslobodskaya is the Metro’s unique stained glass station.  Each column has its own distinctive panels of colorful glass, most of them with a floral theme, some of them capturing the odd sailor, musician, artist, gardener, or stenographer in action.  The glass is framed in Art Deco metalwork, and there is the lovely aspect of discovering panels in the less frequented haunches of the hall (on the trackside, between the incoming staircases).  Novosblod is, I’ve been told, the favorite amongst out-of-town visitors.

Komsomolskaya Station

Komsomolskaya Station is one of palatial grandeur.  It seems both magnificent and obligatory, like the presidential palace of a colonial city.  The yellow ceiling has leafy, white concrete garland and a series of golden military mosaics accenting the tile mosaics of glorified Russian life.  Switching lines here, the hallway has an Alice-in-Wonderland feel, impossibly long with decorative tile walls, culminating in a very old station left in a remarkable state of disrepair, offering a really tangible glimpse behind the palace walls.

Dostoevskaya Station

Dostoevskaya is a tribute to the late, great hero of Russian literature .  The station at first glance seems bare and unimpressive, a stark marble platform without a whiff of reassembled chips of tile.  However, two columns have eerie stone inlay collages of scenes from Dostoevsky’s work, including The Idiot , The Brothers Karamazov , and Crime and Punishment.   Then, standing at the center of the platform, the marble creates a kaleidoscope of reflections.  At the entrance, there is a large, inlay portrait of the author.

Chkalovskaya Station

Chkalovskaya does space Art Deco style (yet again).  Chrome borders all.  Passageways with curvy overhangs create the illusion of walking through the belly of a chic, new-age spacecraft.  There are two (kos)mosaics, one at each end, with planetary subjects.  Transferring here brings you above ground, where some rather elaborate metalwork is on display.  By name similarity only, I’d expected Komsolskaya Station to deliver some kosmonaut décor; instead, it was Chkalovskaya that took us up to the space station.

Elektrozavodskaya Station

Elektrozavodskaya is full of marble reliefs of workers, men and women, laboring through the different stages of industry.  The superhuman figures are round with muscles, Hollywood fit, and seemingly undeterred by each Herculean task they respectively perform.  The station is chocked with brass, from hammer and sickle light fixtures to beautiful, angular framework up the innards of the columns.  The station’s art pieces are less clever or extravagant than others, but identifying the different stages of industry is entertaining.

Baumanskaya Statio

Baumanskaya Station is the only stop that wasn’t suggested by the students.  Pulling in, the network of statues was just too enticing: Out of half-circle depressions in the platform’s columns, the USSR’s proud and powerful labor force again flaunts its success.  Pilots, blacksmiths, politicians, and artists have all congregated, posing amongst more Art Deco framing.  At the far end, a massive Soviet flag dons the face of Lenin and banners for ’05, ’17, and ‘45.  Standing in front of the flag, you can play with the echoing roof.

Ploshchad Revolutsii Station

Novokuznetskaya Station

Novokuznetskaya Station finishes off this tour, more or less, where it started: beautiful mosaics.  This station recalls the skyward-facing pieces from Mayakovskaya (Station #2), only with a little larger pictures in a more cramped, very trafficked area.  Due to a line of street lamps in the center of the platform, it has the atmosphere of a bustling market.  The more inventive sky scenes include a man on a ladder, women picking fruit, and a tank-dozer being craned in.  The station’s also has a handsome black-and-white stone mural.

Here is a map and a brief description of our route:

Start at (1)Kievskaya on the “ring line” (look for the squares at the bottom of the platform signs to help you navigate—the ring line is #5, brown line) and go north to Belorusskaya, make a quick switch to the Dark Green/#2 line, and go south one stop to (2)Mayakovskaya.  Backtrack to the ring line—Brown/#5—and continue north, getting off at (3)Novosblodskaya and (4)Komsolskaya.  At Komsolskaya Station, transfer to the Red/#1 line, go south for two stops to Chistye Prudy, and get on the Light Green/#10 line going north.  Take a look at (5)Dostoevskaya Station on the northern segment of Light Green/#10 line then change directions and head south to (6)Chkalovskaya, which offers a transfer to the Dark Blue/#3 line, going west, away from the city center.  Have a look (7)Elektroskaya Station before backtracking into the center of Moscow, stopping off at (8)Baumskaya, getting off the Dark Blue/#3 line at (9)Ploschad Revolyutsii.  Change to the Dark Green/#2 line and go south one stop to see (10)Novokuznetskaya Station.

Check out our new Moscow Indie Travel Guide , book a flight to Moscow and read 10 Bars with Views Worth Blowing the Budget For

Jonathon Engels, formerly a patron saint of misadventure, has been stumbling his way across cultural borders since 2005 and is currently volunteering in the mountains outside of Antigua, Guatemala.  For more of his work, visit his website and blog .

Photo credits:   SergeyRod , all others courtesy of the author and may not be used without permission

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The Most Beautiful Stations on the Moscow Metro

You might have heard that there are some beautiful metro stations in Moscow. Soviet decorations, chandeliers, mosaic painting and statues are common in many of the stations. The good news is that the Moscow Metro does not cost a lot of money and many of the most beautiful stations on the Moscow metro are on the same line, so you can almost get on and off at each station to visit these. Over the New Year holidays, I had a free afternoon and decided to visit some of these stations. Check out what I found below…..

The main stations that you will want to visit are on the Number 5 line, also known as the Circle Line. An advantage of this line is that you can get to it very easily and quickly no matter where you are in Moscow. The announcements on the metro are in Russian as well as English so you don’t need to worry if your Russian language skills are not good.

If, like me, you arrive in Moscow via train from Kyiv , then you will arrive at a metro station which many Muscovites believe to be the most beautiful of them all…..

Kievskaya metro station was opened in 1954 and features white marble walls which curve upwards and have with large mosaics surrounded by a gold trim in a very classical style. The mosaics depict life in Ukraine and was designed by a Ukrainian who wanted to display Ukraine’s influence and contribution to Soviet Russia.

Kievskaya, one of the most beautiful stations on the Moscow metro

Soviet era artwork between the arches

Mosaic with golden trim

People carrying flags is a common theme

Going into battle

Belorusskaya

If you look at a map of the metro , you will want to go in a clockwise direction on the circle line. So you will want to get on the train going in the Barrikadnaya direction and not Park Kultury. Stay on this line until you reach the 2nd station, Belorusskaya. This station was built in 1952 and like Kievskaya also features white marble pylons and a plaster ceiling.

The ceiling features 12 mosaics in an octagonal shape depicting Belarusian life, while the tiling on the floor is said to resemble a Belarusian quilt. One of the passageway exits of the station has a statue called ‘Belarusian Partisans’ of three men wearing long coats, holding guns and carrying a flag.”

Belorusskaya metro platform

Soviet artwork on the roof

The hammer and sickle features prominently in the metro artwork

Three men carrying guns, holding the flag…

Mayakovskaya

To get to the next station, we need to change onto the green line (line 2) and go just one stop to the station of Mayakovskaya. This station has an art deco theme and, for some, resembles an elaborate ballroom. The columns are faced with stainless steel and pink rhodonite while the marble walls and ceiling have 34 mosaics with the theme “24-hour Soviet Sky. Apparently, Stalin resided here during the 2nd World War as the station was used as a command post for Moscow’s anti-aircraft regiment.

Mayakovskaya metro

24-Hour Soviet Sky mosaic

Bomber planes

It looks like planes flying over Red Square

Novoslobodskaya

It’s time to get back on the metro and return to Belorusskaya. At Belorusskaya, change to the circle line again and continue clockwise to the next station, Novoslobodskaya. With its 32 stained glass panels, this station reminds me of a church. The panels were designed by Latvian artists and are surrounded by a brass border.

Novoslobodskaya metro

The platform of Novoslobodskaya metro

Stained glass artwork

The golden trim around artwork is also very common

Prospekt Mira

Back on the metro and again just one stop until our next station, Prospekt Mira. This station was originally called Botanichesky Sad after the nearby Botanical Gardens of the Moscow State University. The pylons are covered in white marble and decorated with floral bas-relief friezes. The ceiling is decorated with casts and several cylindrical chandeliers.

Prospekt Mira metro station

Notice the floral decoration

Komsomolskaya

On the metro once more and once more we are going just one stop to the next station – Komsomolskaya. This station is famous for its its yellow ceiling. The chandeliers in this station are huge. The photos below do not do this station justice.  For me, this station resembles a presidential palace.  You hace to see it for yourself to truly appreciate it.

Because of it’s location, this is one of the busiest stations in the Moscow metro as it serves three of the main train stations in the city – Leningradsky, Yaroslavsky, and Kazansky so be prepared for a lot of people.

Komsomolskaya metro

The yellow ceiling seems to go on forever

Yellow ceiling and artwork

One of the ceiling mosaics

Elektrozavodskaya

When you are ready to leave Komsomolskaya metro station behind, then get back on the circle line and go one stop to Kurskaya and change to the blue line (line 3) and go to two stops to the Elektrozavodskaya station. This station gets it’s name from a nearby electric light bulb factory and has a somewhat industrial but also futuristic style, with 6 rows of circular lamps (there are 318 lamps in total). I think this is one of the most beautiful stations on the Moscow metro for how unique it is. The station was opened in 1944 after a delay because of the 2nd World War and features 12 marble bas-reliefs of the struggle on the home front during the war.

The Komsomolskaya metro station

The struggles of war at home

Fixing machinery

Hard at work

Making weapons

Building a tank

Even the station sign is elaborate

Ploschad Revolyutsii

Back on the metro line 3 (but in the other direction), getting off at the 3rd stop – Ploschad Revolyutsii (Revolution Square). This is located underneath the square in Moscow of the same name and is a short walk from Red Square in the city centre. It is the perfect place to end a visit around Moscow’s metro. The station features red and yellow marble arches with a total of 76 sculptures in between each arch. The sculptures are supposed to represent the people of the Soviet Union and include soldiers, farmers, industrial workers, children etc… I noticed a lot of people touching the golden chicken in the photo below as well as the show of the woman. I am assuming that this is for good luck.

Industrial worker

Touch the chicken for good luck

Sculpture of the people of the Soviet Union

Woman reading a book – touch the shoe for good luck

In education

Parent and child

These are some of what I think are the most beautiful stations on the Moscow metro. Which ones are your favourite? Would you add any to this list?

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19 comments.

Kievskaya definitely caught me off guard. Didn’t know Moscow metro stations were THIS extravagant! Mayakovskaya is gorgeous too with the marble walls and mosaics. I might just need to book a flight over to admire all of these!

Do it! Kievskaya was my first introduction to the Moscow metro as I got an overnight train from Kyiv.

You know, in the States, all we ever hear is bad stuff about Russia. It’s nice to see other (and lovely!) dimensions of such a controversial place.

It’s the same in the UK which is why I prefer going to see somewhere and making up my own mind. It’s all ‘politics and bullshit’ as I say

I went to Moscow about 13years for Christmas and went to train stations, so I can see these amazing mosaics and chandeliers. I agree with you that are beautiful Stations for sure and I could of wandered around for days. I think Kievskaya is definitely my favourite out of them all and I even have some similar pictures as you.

I imagine Moscow would have been a little different 13 years ago but these stations have probably always looked beautiful

Food and Footprints

You chose some great stations for this write up! Beautiful details in these stations and would love to visit them sometime. Particularly like the Komsomolskaya station with that yellow ceiling!

Thank you very much. Komsomolskaya seems to be a lot of peoples favourite stations too

Sumit Surai

Wow! Without the text I would have thought them to be some museum or gallery.

I know exactly what you mean!

Rosie Fluskey

Wow, it is just stunning! How does anyone get to work with so much to look at. I’m surprised at the very bourgeois-looking Komsomolskaya station. I would have thought it was all too Tzarist looking, but then I haven’t been to Russia yet lol. This has just made me want to go more!

Wow, that’s a lot of artwork. I wonder how old some of these pieces are?

Generally most of the stations are from 1940-1960 approximately. The later stations are more functional than style.

My mother-in-law was in Moscow fifty years ago and still raves about the metro stations. So far, I could not imagine much. But now! The pictures are great and I think it’s almost a pity that this splendor is underground. But for every user of the Metro can enjoy a free trip to the world of art. Susanne

True. It is like having a free trip to an art museum/gallery. I hope that you can one day visit Moscow and see for yourself.

Oh wow, I would never have known that these were metro stations. The ceilings remind me of how you need to look up sometimes, even in the commuter rush!

It is true about life in general, we just go from A to B looking directly in front of us instead of around us

Wow, I would have never guessed that these were stations. The decor is so pretty and not one I’m used to seeing at metro stations. Love the ceiling at The Komsomolskaya metro station.

They certainly don’t look like metro stations. The ceiling there is one of my favourites too!

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40 facts about elektrostal.

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

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