Teaching and learning in the museum space : Developing a model for transformational partnerships in teacher education

Museums offer valuable opportunities for school students to learn about the Humanities and Social Sciences learning area of the Australian Curriculum in interactive and participatory ways. Despite the opportunities that exist in museum learning, teachers may lack knowledge of ways to engage pedagogically with museum spaces. This paper reports on a partnership with a museum designed to foster the opportunity for pre-service teachers to learn about using museums to support teaching in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Using a case study approach, we, the three authors in this paper - a teacher educator, a museum educator and a pre-service teacher - explore our lived experience of the partnership, and the ways it transformed our learning. In this paper we provide insights into the way that such partnerships can develop connections and learning between pre-service teachers, teacher educators and museum educators. We develop a model for transformational teacher education partnerships with museums and cultural institutions and we argue that through these models all stakeholders can engage in meaningful and transformative learning. [Author abstract, ed