 Hello and welcome to NIMO's second webinar in 2019. My name is Mira Höschler from the NIMO office. NIMO is the network of European Museum organizations connecting national museum associations as well as individual museums and interest groups from over 40 countries. Being an ever-growing network so far, we have over 90 members. NIMO represents European museums towards policymakers on the national and EU level. Moreover, we share knowledge and trained professionals in Europe through our training courses, learning exchanges and webinars. NIMO usually hosts around four webinars per year, facilitated by different museum experts in Europe, but diverse topics in the museum field. The topic of today's webinar is from museum education to public engagement, trends and practices in European museums, and we are happy to welcome the facilitator, Margarita Sani. This webinar is an online version of a workshop facilitated by Margarita in Georgia in March 2019 in the course of the EU-funded project BEAM Museumer, a cooperation between the Museums Association, the Academy of Cultural Management in Amsterdam and NIMO. Margarita Sani works at the Instituto Vincutorale of the Region Emilia Romana in Italy and is involved in many EU projects. Currently, she is a NIMO board member as well as the leader of NIMO's working group LEM, the Learning Museum. Margarita's works focus and also matter of the heart is the education and lifelong learning in museums. Please feel free to ask questions with the chat function during the webinar. We will have a Q&A round at the end of the webinar, around five or two minutes towards the end. Soon after the webinar is finished, you will find the video on our YouTube channel and I will now pass things over to Margarita and wish you all an inspiring and fruitful session. Good afternoon, everyone. As Mira said, this webinar originates and takes place within the framework of the European Project BEAM Museumer, for which I delivered a workshop in Georgia a couple of months ago. Now, I was asked to concentrate in 45 minutes what I presented during two days recently in Georgia. So, this is, for me, as you can imagine, a challenge. Of course, this webinar is meant for those who could not attend the webinar because there was a lot of participation, a lot of applications that could not be satisfied. So, here I'm trying to concentrate in a short time what was delivered in two days. And also because I know that some of the people attending this afternoon are from the group that I met in Georgia. I don't want to bore them with the same sort of format. So, I change it slightly and I will address the issue of museum education, public engagement from a different point of view. And I will concentrate, indeed, on some keywords that characterize museum learning nowadays. These are the keywords that we will go through together. The first one is learning about heritage and learning through heritage. Now, in museums, of course, we are used to deliver content. We are used to transfer facts and figures. But actually, something that characterizes today's museums and their educational departments is that learning is not only focused on the content that the museum is providing, but also on something else. Let's look, first of all, at the definition of learning, which is not, in fact, not such a new concept of learning as it dates back from the campaign for learning in the UK some years ago. But it is still, for me, very important to identify what we are trying to do when doing museum education. It says, learning is a process of active engagement with experience. It is what people do when they want to make sense of the world. It may involve an increase in skills, knowledge, understanding, values, feelings, attitudes, and capacity to reflect. Effective learning leads to change, development, and the desire to learn more. Now, as you see, this involves much more than conveying concepts, than teaching history or art history. This is really bringing about a change in the individual. So it is, in this sense, very challenging. Also for the museum professionals involved in museum education. And also another concept comes along, which is very relevant and has been very relevant ever since the Lisbon strategy, the EU Lisbon strategy in 2020. Well, actually not in 2020, it was 2010. The concept of lifelong learning, all learning activities and the taking throughout life with the objective of improving knowledge, skills, competencies in a personal, civic, social, or working perspective. And again, this draws a much bigger picture around learning and using learning as well. And in fact, this is also reflected in the ways in which we measure learning. I apologize for this picture being a bit blurred, but you can, as you will see during the course of this webinar, I will point to several websites and resources that you can look at later on because, indeed, there is a lot of ground to be covered. Now, these generic learning outcomes, which were developed in 2001, actually reflect this broad concept of learning in museums. So at the top, knowledge and understanding, which is the typical outcome of a learning activity in a museum, that you increase your knowledge about the subject, but also skills, so something more practical. Behavior, behavior and progression, so you change your behavior. Of course, you enjoy this is another outcome, learning outcome of museum educational activities that you enjoy yourself, that you have a quality time, that you are inspired, that you increase your creativity, and also attitudes and values. So also attitudes and values can be changed in a museum educational activity. And in addition to these, you will also find the equivalent in the social domain, so the generic social outcomes. Again, outcomes that the museum can achieve with its activities, health and well-being, strengthening public life, stronger and safer communities. So you're not going to dwell on these concepts, but you can go yourself on the websites and these two websites, and you will also find very practical materials, templates and so on that can help you organize your activities and assess them especially because these are tools that are meant to assess the learning outcomes, be they educational or be they social. So let's go back to this idea of learning about heritage and learning through heritage. I'm sure that you're familiar with learning about heritage. That's what you do in your everyday work. Learning through heritage is slightly different concept. How can it be achieved? You use the museum as an environment to teach something else. So something else is learned through the heritage, through the museum collections and so on. And I'm giving you a few examples. You might know the eight key competencies that the European Union delivered some years ago. These are transversal competencies that we should all have or pursue, of course, communicating in a mother tongue, in a foreign language and so on, but also digital competence, learning to learn interpersonal, intercultural and social competencies and civic competence, entrepreneurship and cultural expression. Now, these key competencies, for instance, were used by the institute for which I work to design a program which is called Ilock Cultural Heritage which provides funding for joint projects that schools and museums design together and whose objective is actually not that of transferring information about the museum collections or heritage, but that of transferring or encouraging, supporting the acquisition of transversal competencies. And for instance, digital competencies, cultural awareness, being aware of the heritage around you and also taking care of it because this is our common good. Social and civic competencies and the sense of initiative and entrepreneurship. For instance, these young people produced, as you can see, bags starting from the museum materials such as the banners that museums put up in the streets when they advertise an exhibition or something like that. Now, if you speak Italian and if you go back to the link I gave you in one of these previous slides, you will see this initiative described in detail and you will also find all the projects that were supported financially in the past years. But also, another outcome of learning in museums, another objective that a museum can try to achieve is that of increasing well-being in people. And here, of course, there is a lot of literature about this. Nemo also delivered a webinar and if you go on the Nemo webpage under trainings and webinars, you will find the recording of this webinar. I'm just adding here the picture of the National Gallery in Rome which does educational activities for people with Alzheimer and their caregivers, which again benefits both the ill person and the caregiver because it also creates a situation where the two have something to share, something to talk about. Increase self-confidence. This is another outcome that can follow from a museum activity and this example is the project In Touch which was developed by two museums in Manchester some years ago, the Manchester Museum and Imperial War Museum North. They decided they wanted to increase the number of volunteers and they invited people to attend a course at the museum which would at the same time give them content about the museum heritage in the area but also give them other skills that they could use in their practical life, in their everyday life like writing the CV, like presenting oneself and the outcomes were really extraordinary in the sense that some people went back to school, some people found a job and of course some of them remained in the museum as volunteers. Longer life expectancy can also be a surprising outcome for educational activities. This was an artistic educational activity delivered by the Irish Modern Art Museum in Dublin years ago and they did an extensive review and assessment of the outcomes and it was addressed to all people who probably also for the first time entered the museum and certainly for the first time were engaged in artistic activities and some of them replied that they got out of this in addition to an increased well-being also a longer life expectancy. Sometimes the outcomes that a museum activity can achieve are quite surprising, quite astonishing and creativity of course, lots of creative sessions both for adults and older people, younger people in museums. But also a museum can be used as an environment to learn a language and there are lots of materials also this is a project or a program rather that's been running in the UK museums for a long time but also in other countries there are similar programs to teach English to speakers of other languages so it's done in collaboration with schools or with adult education organizations and there's also if you search online lots of materials that you can draw inspiration from. And finally just finishing these examples of learning through heritage you can learn how to write creativity and this is a program of the Victorian Albert Museum in London which actually I think combines and catches two birds with a stone so to say in the sense that invites you to look closer at pictures closer at artworks in order to write creatively about them so your objective is that of learning how to write creatively but this also requires a more attentive look at the artworks so this is a sort of like the decalogue that they are providing to people who wants to achieve that goal so you see really the scope of what one can learn and what one can teach in museums is very wide audience development is another keyword and it is very current so to say one of the most important concepts that the European Union has tried to put across especially with its latest Creative Europe program and audience development is both something that should be an horizontal objective of all European funded projects or it could be one of the main objectives or the only objective of a project what does it mean? It means widening the audience it means deepening the relationship with the audience and diversifying the audience so not only widening the already existing audience but also finding new people that come to the museum among the non-visitors there is a lot, there was a project which is called Aveste that you can search for and also there is a website, this website where you will find toolkills you will find guidelines to achieve audience development and engagement as well basically the basic concepts of this is placing the audience at the center and also involving the whole organization in this objective of being visitor people centered audience how to develop the audience is a question that we should all ask ourselves first step is to get to know the communities of get out and establish a close relationship with it mapping the community, the communities who are the people, who are the groups of people who are out there doing non-visitor research using participatory activities to attract more people to engage them in our initiatives and also diversifying the staff so that the people find themselves reflected in our staff members I'm just giving you a story of an initiative in Rotterdam in the Netherlands which I got to know recently and this is the story house it is actually stuff in museum but I think that what they did it's a place now a community space that was so to say reclaimed or achieved from the municipality and it's a place where people go and meet and tell stories but I thought so it's not in museum itself but it's an important and very active lively cultural organization now I was very intrigued by the way in which they started going out and getting in touch with those communities there are as they say 155 different interest groups in the area this is the southern part of Rotterdam so they went out and they asked these people if they could take pictures and then they made the display in the streets that was the first initiative that they developed to get in touch with those people so that the people could find themselves they could give visibility and they could recognize themselves as stakeholders, interlocutors of this place another example and again I have this booklet the resources that I will provide you with at the end of this webinar this is a research that was conducted within the framework of the LEM project some years ago and in the appendix you will find an interesting the interesting form that the Gallo Roman Museum in Tonga and in Belgium used to do visitor research before they re-displayed the museum Museum is an archaeological museum and they asked the people questions on how of course this is not legible here but you can find it online the questions I have the book here with me where for instance are you more attracted by a museum which provides clear and concise information about new research or which involves you and fascinates you when you visit a historical museum you want to talk to your family or friends about what you see or do you prefer to explore on your own so lots of questions that would actually provide the museum a pointer in the direction of where they had to display the objects the way in which they should interpret them and so on so non-visitor research and research done before you initiate something is very important so this is also called the front-end evaluation participation is another very important keyword and very much used in the EU say jargon but also in general and especially after the year 2010 when this book was published the participatory museum by Nina Simon of course she gives us in her book and also in the publications that followed and also on the blog that she takes care of important definitions of what is participation basically participation is this for her in a traditional institution you have the museum that delivers the content top-down or information top-down and in the participatory institution you have the museum that provides information but also the people that react and provide their own messages suggestions, content and also in addition to relating to the institution they also relate to each other so it's also a way of connecting people with each other some years ago I conducted with other colleagues research on participatory governance of cultural heritage which was a European research and the mapping of case studies and we put these projects on a continuum Nina Simon also provides this classification of different participatory methods from informing we go from a minimum to a maximum on the continuum so the minimum is of course informing people and consulting people to ask for their collaboration contribution to sitting at the same table and deciding together acting together and hosting hosting is the maximum say participatory mode possible mode in the sense that the museum offers itself as a place where people can set up their exhibition, can develop their contents their narratives and so on and all these methods can be either initiated from top-down or from bottom up so with the colleagues who work with me we put some of these case studies that we researched on the continuum and we have for instance contributory collaborative projects for example at this Finnish museum which wanted to refurbish itself and actually submitted the sketches of the architects and the people of the community and said together and shared ideas and started a discussion now participatory initiatives can be very challenging because once you start you have to go along there's also the discussion whether all these talk about participation is rhetoric or is it really real because indeed once you see your authority as a little bit at least a little bit you have to go along and really listen to people and take into account their opinions, suggestions and so on but it is surely also museum education something which is very recurrent and very much present nowadays and again contributory collaborative project was the re-display of the Riverside Museum Glasgow Transport Museum which existed already in another building in an old building and when they moved to a brand new building architecture by Zaha did they consulted with the public and they in order to consult with the public they divided up and segmented the audience into these five different groups which were their key groups key audience groups and consulted with them so the community panel the educational panel, the access panel the team panel and the junior panel and each had the possibility to contribute to the making of this new museum and surely in some cases the museum had to review its plans especially with the access panel where accessibility when tested by people with some kind of disabilities turned out to be not exactly what it should be so again participation is important but it really requires changing the frame of mind and being open to modifying your plans what they did at Riverside is also documented on these booklets that are available online and that tell the story of these meetings with the different stakeholders of the museum and also includes the minutes of the meetings that they had so it's very interesting and a very nice example to look at always in Glasgow way of making people participate is the open museum which is a way in which the museum goes out to the community especially to areas that are disadvantaged and brings objects but also objects that people can use can see, can learn about but at the same time brings out to the communities the expertise of the curators of the stores and so on and indeed it leaves the freedom to communities to think of initiatives and the expertise of the museum people is put at their disposal what are the implications of participation for museum learning surely it means as I was saying encouraging visitors to complement the stories that the museum provides so this can be done very simply by letting people leave a message post it and so on or in a more engaging and challenging way actually inviting people to sit at a par with the curators with white gloves and interpret the objects and this has been done extensively for many years now by the Manchester Museum what they call collective conversations and they set up they of course invite people to look at their depot and to select objects sometimes objects are from different cultures this is a museum, a university museum the Manchester Museum which has also very important demographic collections so sometimes it is the people who come from the countries to which those objects belong that can add a new perspective new stories to those objects the museum puts it very clearly what they want to do is to make space for multiple voices and multiple visions and interpretations saying that the significance of the museum lies not only in its connections but also in the reflections and insights it is able to trigger around the objects so it is a bit of a revolution so to say and in George Hein's words acknowledging that the museum is not the repository of the truth but that its contents are arranged by fallible and culturally influenced museums leads to the suggestion that the messages emanating from museums are themselves stories, narratives to be read and understood by the visitor so this idea of creating multiple perspectives different narratives, different stories is again very crucial nowadays this is something that many museums practice or try to put into practice and of course this is important also when it comes to museum education a hosted project which I had the pleasure and privilege to visit at the National Museum Warsaw gave children 6 to 16 years old divided up into groups the total freedom to organize an exhibition in the main exhibition area of the museum they selected different subjects they went to meet the curators the restorers, they chose the objects they organized also the multimedia tools that were used and they did the media campaign they conducted the press conferences they wrote the captions and so on so this is very good and all this was recorded and assessed, evaluated by the museum this was a top-down initiative so it came from the director and it really had an impact on the organization at all different levels and all levels of the organization and the children and the facilitators in these workshops themselves were interviewed at the end so it was a big assessment for the museum another concept which I would like to explore is that of public and publics the idea that ever since Gardner came out with the concept of the multiple intelligences which makes us all feel clever in the sense that if I'm not good at mathematics, well alright I might be good in verbal linguistics or I might be good in music or in other physical activities so I'm also intelligent I have a different intelligence than what is normally the IQ tests so this idea of multiple intelligences and of multiplicity and of the different ways in which people perceive and experience the world also has many important implications also for museums and I would like to introduce the learning theory by David Kohl but there are others also Kohl's theory the experiential learning theory because it starts from concrete experience this is the circle of learning you start from the experience, you reflect on the experience so you reflect then you draw the concepts out of this observation and reflection and then you experiment again and the circle goes on and on and now actually you start anywhere in the circle and anywhere you can have a full experiential learning but experience but you have to complete the circle in order to really learn now yes you can enter the cycle at any stage so Kohl's learning theory what does it have to what does it mean for museums for museums it means that people have a preference of a certain style because what indeed comes out of this idea of the circle of the cycle is that on every say encounter of the different ways of learning of feeling of experiencing you have a different learning style so you have the diverging which is at the crossing of the concrete experience and reflective observation you have the assimilating you have the converging, the accommodating you can go along on this and on these diagrams you can go back to them but what is important is to well now this is not very readable maybe we can change the color of this link before we upload the webinar but anyway you can take the learning style questionnaire yourself and decide and find out what is your preferred or your preferred learning style what are the implications for museums some years ago the Dutch Museums Association published a book on Kohl's learning styles and its impact on museums because again it reinforces the idea that we are all different and we have different educational activities and also in displaying the collections we should try to encounter and meet the needs and expectations of different people so not just one we tend also very easy for us also to replicate what we are good at what our preferred learning style is also in museum education so they in several displays that would actually appeal to the different learning styles this is for the diverger who uses imagination feelings and creativity then there is the simulator this is the very logical type he or she likes the chronological presentation of events likes concepts numbers and rationality for the simulator there is a typical timeline with theory logic facts then there are the convergers who are problem solvers and use their learning to find solutions to practical issues and here you have a person who is invited to compare the theory with the facts and finally you have the accommodator the hands-on person who likes to learn practically and in any exhibition you should have or in any learning activity you should have something that also engages these people or something called practically again this is as in any theory is a simplification of reality is a model so we should take it and give us but for sure what it should give to museum educators is the idea that activities should be designed and carried out in ways that offer to each learning the chance to engage in a manner that suits them best so there should be something for everyone and in fact this is a very interesting telling diagram of the NEMO Science Center Museum in Amsterdam this is how they represent their visitor experience of course there is a lot of theory behind this the visitor experience is at the center and all around it the different ways in which a museum visitor can be engaged either by transferring the facts concepts and abstract insights so that's a knowledge and insight or by letting them participate or by engaging them in cognitive, social, emotional aesthetic activities or make them reflect so every time they start to think of a new exhibition they decide who do I want to address and this decision is very important to then shape the final outcome Emotions now this is something which has become recently very let's say fashionable I don't want to say but there is a lot of production on this and a lot of events also recently I participated in two of these events one in Italy and one in Berlin and I must say that there is a lot of attention to emotions why and what does it mean for museum education because again it is closely linked to what I've said before with regard to cold learning science people are a full of different things people are brain, soul and also emotions so in trying to cater to all these different facets of a person or a personality we should also consider the emotional aspect in addition to this all these events and seminars I attended recently or in the last years about museums and emotions established something which is undisputed that is that emotions are a good precondition for learning so you can actually effectively learn if you are emotionally involved so also as museum educators you should try to catch the attention around the emotions of the people and this is a quote by a colleague in one of these workshops that were organized in Italy in the last years why is this emotional aspect of learning changing because now that we are shifting the focus as it has happened in the last decades from museum collections to the visitor we also have to take into account emotional aspects of our visitors and offer them a varied scenario of possible cultural experiences again this idea of a plurality that it's not one audience a general say visitor an average visitor no it is a variety of different individuals can museum trigger emotions in all of its functions for me there are two main ways for museums to allow emotions now of course there are some museums that are themselves in themselves emotional or can actually allow strong and deep emotions for instance this is the reconstruction of a room in which people lived during the siege of Sarajevo and this is reconstructed in the museum of contemporary history in Sarajevo it's there with no caption nothing you don't need anything you just enter in the empathy for the people who lived there because you can see what it was like to concentrate in one room all your belongings all your life eating living sleeping and so on other very emotional museums are again in Sarajevo the World Childhood Museum which collects objects that belong to children or yes where the children toys or children belongings moved in the Sarajevo siege and the war in the Balkans or the museum of broken relationships which actually is staged in different museums started out in Zagreb and shows the objects of that characterized say iconic objects of relationships love relationships that that were broken that ended one object one story so the idea of storytelling storytelling is very important so arousing emotions I said in the museum can be done in two ways either through the displays and we have a variety I'm sure that you've also experienced a variety of museum environments that are immersive that really take you to a different world to a different period in time and so on and of course you can do it through educational activities these are two Dutch museums museum of the focused on the period of the Second World War which encourages young people to tell stories to invent stories using the object to first of all to hear the real stories attach the objects and then to invent their own story and the Tropal Museum Junior which actually recreates the environment of different countries according to the different exhibitions they could have it's very emotional because again it is very immersive you actually land in another place when you enter those exhibitions and storytelling as I was saying is very important because it is two stories that museums can engage people and also ask them to contribute with their own personal viewpoint the resistance museum Junior in Amsterdam is a museum which has chosen to do so by recreating the environment the living environment of four young people real character not fictional but of very different kinds young boy who lived in a family engaged in the resistance, Jewish girl and so on what you do the way in which the museum engages the public, the young public in this case is to let you go through the door into the house of these people look at their objects, look at their stories, read their the documents and so on so again it can be very emotional there is another tendency in addition to say arousing emotions in people there is also an important line of thought, of research that says that museums should teach emotions or should help people to become empathetic all of this because there is an empathy deficit this is very much North America the US and Canada this line of thought and so museums should actually use their collections and their initiatives, their activities to improve and to encourage, increase empathy in individuals, now this is something that maybe could be the topic for another webinar now because the time is up nearly up and it's going to be 10 minutes for questions, the questions that you send or that you want to send now in the chat I'm going to leave you with some resources because again there is a lot of ground that I didn't touch and that was touched upon during the workshop in Tunisi well for instance we didn't deal with the different kind of publics, the children, the adults the older people and so on so I'm just pointing to you some resources, one is this the NNPETR, a journey in the educational world of Dutch museums, this is a research I conducted last year which is published by NIMO you will find it online and these are also in short the main outcomes of the research what do children like what do Dutch museums use to engage children in education so it's two slides that I'm leaving you with but also the webinars past NIMO webinars where you will also find this NNPETR because I also delivered the webinar on this and it says to you there's also a webinar on museums and well-being and also a webinar in French on the role of emotions in museums the point of view of the scenographer and of course there are lots of publications online one is this, the lifelong learning in museums handbook which was the outcome of a European project and in Belize we looked at the different aspects and here I'm summing them up for you that encourage and support learning in museums, first of all the environment which is very important, the environment can be conducive to learning in a very, very relevant way also because many people visit the museum just by themselves without planned activity, without taking part in a workshop so the environment itself can really contribute to learning, adults and the old book is on adults, families young people, I'm just going through very quickly older people, so you will find ideas and also guidelines there in this publication and also outreach activities where the museum goes out and brings its objects and knowledge outside and then there are all the publications of the learning of the museum project and another list of resources that you can or you might want to look at yourself and study individually so this is for me the last slide