Tomorrow's Museum: Multilingual Audiences and the Learning Institution

Equity and the meaning of science learning: A defining challenge for science museums

“…In this context, equity initiatives in science museums have historically been treated as a sort of charity work that can be pursued when times are flush and external funders generous (Feinstein & Meshoulam, ). More recently, museum directors have turned a worried eye on shifting demographics, re‐framing equity in terms of “audience development” (e.g., Cerquetti, ; Martin & Jennings, ; Sandell, ). This new rhetoric positions the cultural diversification of societies as a threat, because it will cause museums’ core audience to shrink.…”

A moving story from Dhaka to London: revealing vibrant identities in young people’s intercultural encounters with mobile art, embroidery and artefacts

“…Museums tend to be extremely monolingual places, but the museum educators linked to our project were keen to facilitate the development of bilingual resources, including digital stories, around museum artefacts. Martin and Jennings (2015) in writing about 'Tomorrow's Museum' make the case for reaching out to multilingual audiences to keep a museum 'relevant, vibrant, and learning' (ibid: 92). In the following section of the article, we discuss the Bengali artefacts that became the inspiration for the three Bengali-English digital stories.…”

Museum education, cultural sustainability, and English language teaching in Spain

“…Interestingly, in many ways these analyses of museum education mirror problems still found in schools and in the rest of institutions of formal education. For example, just as there are traditional communication theories, and hence also traditional (and behaviourist) learning theories based on them, traditional approaches to museum education have tended to rely on content transmission and silent tours rather than on encouraging the audience to creatively interact with the artefacts and displays, or to participate in planning the exhibition from the outset, as would be expected from constructivist and participatory pedagogical perspectives (Hein 2011;Martin and Jennings 2015).…”

“…This elitist view of culture ends up manifesting itself in the semiotic choices that curators or exhibition designers make, ones through which the cultural and educative nature of museums are often narrowed to conform only to small and privileged social groups. For example, in their exhaustive account of the process of institutional transformation that the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose underwent to attract and engage ethnic minorities, Martin and Jennings (2015) reported how, before the mentioned steps were taken, the Latin and Vietnamese communities were dramatically underrepresented as museum visitors. The reality of this disparity in who attends and actually learns from museums betrays how these institutions are failing to fulfill their democratic aims.…”

“…At the end of the day, the same factors that make an exhibition successful can also contribute to making English education meaningful for all learners, regardless of their socio-economic and cultural backgrounds -far from being the case as is. Apart from Martin and Jennings' (2015) case study of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, described above, Pahl and Pollard (2010) showed how literacy development, multiculturalism, and museum education may reciprocally enrich one another. At the heart of their artistic and educational experience (Pahl is a prominent new literacies scholar; Pollard, a professional curator) was an exhibition at a local museum in South Yorkshire (United Kingdom) that displayed household objects coming from neighbourhood families of Pakistani heritage.…”