Storm of Emotions : Affective learning at museums

The emotional part of a museum experience is being debated and there is research pointing towards the affective part of learning. The purpose of this study is to examine how museum pedagogues reason about the usage of affective learning in their work and to investigate whether they consider affective pedagogy is a part of their work or not. Furthermore how they consider themselves working, or not working, with feelings in their pedagogy. A key factor in this study has been to work interdisciplinary with both museum pedagogy and social science with theoretical perspectives of feelings such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust and fear, and with theories such as Feelings & materiality and Pedagogy of Feeling. Methodologically a qualitative interview study museum pedagogues have been used together with observation of four Swedish state- and country museums. In this thesis it is shown that the interviewed museum pedagogues indeed have acknowledged the fact that the museum is an affective place, but the interviewed had different way of make use of feelings. They all agree on the fact that feelings can support the learning process, and that all the different feelings have their own effect on learning. Also that the museum pedagogues have some influence on the feeling that the exhibitions are to emit, which could be used in the pedagogues favor if the exhibition consists of hard and problematic feelings. However, in contrast to this it seems that few of the museum pedagogues discuss the affective influence of a upcoming exhibition or program, or evaluate a project in what feeling the visitors experienced during the visit. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies