Agile Objects: collaborative, interdisciplinary, democratic learning at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Agile Objects: collaborative, interdisciplinary, democratic learning at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Lecture and workshop by Dr Jim Harris, Andrew Mellon Foundation Curator at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology programme at Oxford University.
The experience of learning in a museum is almost inevitably constructed and mediated by the curatorial and interpretive teams. The museum provides a lens through which objects are seen and understood, which leaves the viewer the task of admiring, enjoying, and locating each object within the framework/strategy offered by the displays.
However, over the past decade at the Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford, there has been an experiment in museum-based teaching taking place, in which that curatorial/interpretive lens is removed. In this model of academic engagement, based in small-group interactions with objects, the collections can be subjected to whatever interrogation meets the needs of the teacher and students, whatever their discipline.
In the first part, using examples from his experience at the Ashmolean, Dr Jim Harris will discuss the mechanics of this mode of teaching, and in particular the capacity of the 'agile object' to align and re-align itself to differing interests. He will argue that a mode of inquiry based in knowledge creation and exchange rather than transfer is able to redefine the museum as a place of democratic, collaborative learning which centres the diverse voices of students rather than the curatorial eye.
In the second part, we will undertake some object-based learning to see what might happen in practice.