A Journey Unlike Any Other is an interactive museum exhibition that introduces visitors to the experience of being a refugee. First, the visitor is confronted with hostility from soldiers in the homeland, and later, after an escape, with all the difficulties derived from meetings with police and immigration authorities in the new country. The provocations visitors endure during the course of the exhibition enhance a high degree of perceptual awareness, reflectivity and memory. In the aftermath of their experience, visitors indicate an increase of empathic understanding and experiential knowledge, whereas their interest in information and further background knowledge seems to be unaffected.

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Art education is slowly but surely making its way into the school curriculum in a number of countries, posing new challenges to the role of the art museum in the community. However, the changing school‐museum partnership is not without problems, and fresh approaches will have to be devised to make it work effectively. The author is a psychology graduate of the University of Copenhagen and has worked as a research psychologist with projects at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and is currently carrying out a study on art education at the Esbjerg Museum of Art in Denmark.

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The Phenomenological Method in Museological Research The phenomenological method is closely associated with the study of human consciousness. In museum studies the phenomenological approach is essential for gaining an understanding of why museum collections are established and how they may influence the museum audience. This article introduces the structure of human consciousness and the principles of the phenomenological method. The various stages of the phenomenological approach are put forward starting from an experiment carried out at the Art Museum in Esbjerg concerning how people are influenced by different kinds of introduction to art. Introspection and retrospection are first laid out as phenomenological strategies for observing what is going on within consciousness. Some of the major difficulties in studying the living stream of consciousness or an experience as it is later recalled in consciousness, are discussed. The following interview is defined as an explorative approach to a specific phenomenon. It is presented as a dialogue meant to inspire a person to describe the experience he or she has had and to make it possible for the researcher to grasp this experience through empathy. The aim of the final phenomenological description is to define the basic characteristics of the phenomenon in question. Epoché or phenomenological reduction is used in this context as a strategy for describing the phenomenon as it appears in consciousness, and the eidetic variation as a strategy for identifying the fundamental characteristics of the same phenomenon. Finally, the phenomenological description provides a basis for evaluating the influence of a specific phenomenon on human existence.