School At The Museum Improves Confidence, Communication, Social Skills

What if there was a way to fix this through co-location?  Instead of day or night at the museum, what about school at the museum?

How many of you recall how fun it was when you were in school to have a field trip?  And what an amazing experience when students have the opportunity to have asleep over at a museum.  For those that don’t know, it’s not just a movie.  There really is a night at the museum for students (and adults) at various museums all over the world!

Night at the Museum

Day at the Museum

For children going to school today, culturally enriching field trips are in decline, and are in danger of disappearing from American schools. Museums across the country report a steep drop in school tours. For example, the Field Museum in Chicago at one time welcomed more than 300,000 students every year. Recently the number is below 200,000.  A survey by the American Association of School Administrators found that more than half of schools eliminated planned field trips in 2010–11.

The decision to reduce culturally enriching field trips could be due to two main factors.

1. Financial pressures since field trips are increasingly seen as an unnecessary frill.
2. The increased focus on raising student performance on math and reading standardized tests and belief that student time would be better spent in the classroom preparing for the exams.

When schools do organize field trips, they are increasingly choosing to take students on trips to reward them for working hard to improve their standardized tests scores rather than to provide cultural enrichment. So instead of museums and historical sites, class trips will be to amusement parks, sporting events, and movie theaters.

But US research shows that class trips offer educational value, and that students learn much from field trips that they can’t get from lectures or textbooks.

What if there was a way to fix this through co-location?  Instead of day or night at the museum, what about school at the museum?

School at the Museum

That may be possible!  A new report, published by King’s College London, shows the findings of four projects that for the first time in the UK placed preschool through elementary school students at their local museum for extended residencies. The groups undertook many of their daily lessons and activities at their local museums for a period of between two weeks and up to a full term.

The reason for this study was to explore co-location due to the shortage of nursery and elementary schools in the UK. The findings are also pertinent to the debate about how schools can nurture creative, flexible and confident thinkers at the same time as ensuring children are ready for tests and exams.

The findings demonstrate that not only is co-location possible but that the resources of a museum have the ability to enhance and enrich that delivery, suggesting that the co-location model has the potential to revolutionize education.

“The museums are under phenomenal threat of closing all the time… The museums are full of treasures that belong to us all anyway, children are our treasure, so let’s put the treasures together.  If there could be such a thing as a museum school from which you can learn everything maybe this could become an alternative model.” ~ Wendy James who conceived the project,  Architect and Partner at Garbers & James Architects.

My Primary School is at the Museum

Groups of pupils from two primary schools and a nursery, from Tyne & Wear, Swansea and Liverpool, were based at their local museum for up to a term between January and June 2016.

The report outlines the benefits for museums, schools, and children and their families, including:

• Children became more confident and effective communicators, developing new social skills.
• The pilots fostered deeper relationship between schools and parents, contributing to greater community cohesion with parents actively supporting the projects and visiting their local museums for the first time as result.
• Children enjoyed memorable learning experiences with the potential for greater learning retention.
• The immersion of children in museum and gallery collections led to a growing enthusiasm for the opportunities that their local cultural organisations can offer.
• Museums developed their understanding of formal education audiences and extended their use of their spaces and collections.
• Teachers became more confident in using out-of-the-classroom resources, in a creative way, to deliver much of the curriculum.

The pilot projects did demonstrate some challenges around understanding between the partners and the logistics of running a school program in a non-school building. These findings will inform future collaborations and recommendations.  Following the publication of the report, King’s College London makes a number of key policy recommendations, namely:

• Support for extended school residencies in cultural settings.
  Dissemination of the evidence for using cultural resources in education.
• Specialist training for teaching in museums, heritage and cultural organisations.
• The creation of a practical toolkit for organisations interested in cultural residencies.
• More exploration of potential partnerships and development of networks to share best practice and opportunities for co-locating schools and museums.

The live project took primary school classes directly into museums for their day-to-day school program. It aimed to create and evaluate a potentially symbiotic relationship between primary schools and museums that could develop into a new model of educational delivery.

The museums’ collections were used to provide context for a range of school subjects. Facilities at the museums were arranged to enable children to absorb these local collections directly and indirectly with constant connections being made between objects and the curriculum.

Resources

• The Educational Value of Field Trips
• My Primary School Is At The Museum
• My Primary School Is At The Museum Public Report

LISA GENG