Journal Entry #16

Blog 16: Describe your most meaningful learning experience in a museum or art gallery. What elements made it so. Relate this experience to Dewey’s notion of a “good” experience.

My most meaningful gallery experience happened this past summer when I took the kids of the camp I was running to the Barr Colony Museum in Lloydminster. The Barr Colony is a small museum, but the two other instructors and I took the kids there for a tour. The tour guide was excited to teach a large group of kids about local art.

In terms of Dewey’s criteria, the kids were given structure but were still allowed to experiment. We allowed the kids to have free time to look around at paintings by a local artist after the museum tour guide had given them a short history lesson. The kids loved this part of the experience because they found that they were able to apply their own interpretation to the art. The other instructors and I wandered with the kids, going from group to group and pointing out things that they may not have noticed (color scheme, shadow, etc.).

The next part of the tour was a taxidermy wing. Again, this was not a very structured activity, but the kids loved it. They were so excited to see different animals (and, of course, the boys were psyched about insects). They had a lot of fun learning about how large the animals were (particularly bears and cougars). This was successful in terms of Dewey because we used our insight into what the kids were interested in to help them learn things about animals and about how this was art.

The last part of the tour was a wing on the local history of the settlers who had come to Lloydminster as pioneers. The kids were split into groups with an instructor to each group and led around the wing. The tour guide explained to them the history of the pioneers and the technical aspects of a few of the more foreign objects (for example, an iron lung). The kids had a lot of fun exploring the artifacts and asking questions about the history of the city they lived in. There was a lot of collaborating, where one kid would ask a question and another would try to answer it. Since one instructor stayed with each group, the experience was led by the instructors but allowed the kids to make discoveries on their own.