Interpreters, docents and educators, ways of knowing, ways of teaching in a history museum, an art gallery, and a nature centre

grantor: University of TorontoMuseums have increasingly recognized the need to encourage museum visitors to make their own decisions, to become their own interpreters of what the institution has to offer. Some contend that the aim of museum education is to enable museum visitors not only to learn better on their own but also to teach one another within a community of learners. Yet little is known about museum teaching as it is currently practised. Few have considered what it means to teach in the museum or the significance that teaching has for teachers themselves. This dissertation is about museum teachers (docents, interpreters, and gallery educators) and their ways of knowing and teaching. It is an interpretive inquiry that documents and analyzes the nature and experience of teaching within the museum setting from the perspective of the teacher. Eight teachers from three settings, a community history museum, an art gallery, and a nature centre, participated in the study. Qualitative research methods of participant-observation, conversational interview, and reflective practice were employed. The research suggests that face-to-face teaching in a museum setting requires knowledge of the discipline base of the institution as well as of the nature of museums. Although instructional strategies are important, equally significant are the skills of comprehension and reflection by which museum teachers transform and combine these dual subject matters through pedagogical reasoning. A key factor in this process of reasoning is the comprehension of purposes for learning and teaching. Museum teachers conceptualize learning in the museum as a pleasurable lifelong process and, in response, most often provide acts of teaching that support and strengthen the learner's own attempts to learn. However, they remain "on call" to teach at an intellectual level that aims to produce in the learner an awareness of the intent of the teaching and the reasons why the subject is taught. This understanding of the complexity of teaching is seen by museum teachers to emerge from a combination of prior knowledge and situated, on-site teaching experience rather than from the orientation and continuing professional education provided to them by the museum.Ph.D