At the Wolfsonian

Having an amazing time at the Wolfsonian Museum, Miami Beach which is a design museum and part of Florida International University (FIU). Been invited to give a talk on learning spaces, together with Anne Taylor, who is director of the Institute for Environmental Education at the University of New Mexico.

The collection here is that extraordinary combination you get with a private collector - important everyday artefacts from America and across Europe (mainly from the 1880s - 1940s), together with much which can only be called 'miscellaneous'. We have been talking a lot about how collections like this can support both conventional scholarly study and other kinds of creative activities, through the unexpected juxtapositions they enable. This, of course, raises tensions around accessibility, curation and conservation - similar to the ones that CETLD researchers found on projects like Behind the Scenes at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Wolfsonian is planning some new educational spaces and already discussing just what kinds of access and what kinds of learning can be best supported here.

As the two main CETLD learning spaces researchers, Hilary and I have been talking a lot recently about what is already available, in terms of appropriate conceptual frameworks, research methods and taxonomies. Hilary has been reviewing the many good practice case studies of contemporary learning spaces in post-compulsory education. There are lots of interesting examples but also some on-going problems: potential citation distortion (where the same examples are referenced again and again without much checking on the validity of the data proffered); difficulties of finding out what is happening across the sector, intersecting with varying degrees of promotion by individual universities and projects; and – because of the recent focus on technology-rich and informal learning spaces – a tendency to ignore (or fail to effectively classify/compare and contrast) the range of developments taking place across the variety of learning spaces from lecture theatres, to labs, to studios to research centres.

In the latter area, for example, Woods Bagot have done an interesting ‘study tour’ of advanced learning institutes, aimed at bringing together researchers from different disciplines; of which the MIT Stata Center (pictured above), designed by Frank Gehry Associates, is probably one of the most famous/infamous.

These are very relevant to CETLD because it brings together HE institutions with non-university partners. Who, for example, is analysing and comparing museum education spaces with HE versions? Well, us I hope!

Adult learning beyond the campus

In response to its Learning Revolution white paper, the Government has a £20m Transformation Fund to support informal adult learning - learning for pleasure, self-development and community development - which has been awarding money to a wide range of projects "all with the objective of seeing creative learning flourish across the country." These funds are enabling collaborations between museums, galleries, universities and colleges to offer particular schemes for adult learners. The emphasis, I guess, wil be on social empowerment and cohesion, which is already central to how museums (but not so much universities) think about their role.

In fact have recently been re-visiting the Museum, Libraries and Archives (MLA) Inspired Learning for All website, which lists the various learning frameworks put together by different quangos for schools and adult education; why do I feel that these groups - rightly or wrongly - are much more willing to give explicit definitions of what learning is than any university academic...


Image of Turner Contemporary, designed by David Chipperfield Associates and currently under construction in Margate, which has won one of the transformation awards for a project bringing old and young people together under the title Teenage

Engage with Engage!

Had a fantastic time last week at the Engage International Summer School in Kilkenny (with a trip to Dublin thrown in), entitled Shifting Perspectives - positioning learning at the centre of the gallery. Engage is a membership organisation representing gallery, art and education professionals in the UK and worldwide. Gallery educators, curators and artists explored both where 'learning' sits within the wide range of institutional step-ups represented; and what learning means or should mean in a gallery/museums/collections/archives situation.

It was very stimulating for me to be working and talking with people who share many concerns but must also engage different audiences and have other sorts of cultural baggage and a very different history around, and context for, their various ideas, attitudes and practices. It throws a kind of useful questioning look at the assumptions we have in art and design in higher education. The amount of energy discussing the problems and sucesses of a variety of institutional frameworks was also insightful - something again that seems to me to be less explicitly considered in the university sector.

Image shows workshop underway in Kilkenny Castle photo: Jos Boys