Schools ! Culture Matters : Let's talk about Museums !

 

https://icom.museum/

On May 18th, Museums of the world are celebrating International Museum Day with free admission and other special activities. 

The objective of International Museum Day (IMD) is to raise awareness about the fact that, “Museums are an important means of cultural exchange, enrichment of cultures and development of mutual understanding, cooperation and peace among peoples.

Organized on 18 May each year or around this date, the events and activities planned to celebrate International Museum Day can last a day, a weekend or an entire week. 

The International Council of Museums (ICOM) established International Museum Day in 1977 to encourage public awareness of the role of museums in the development of society.

IMD was celebrated for the first time 40 years ago. All around the world, more and more museums participate in International Museum Day. Last year, more than 37,000 museums participated in the event in about 158 countries and territories.

https://icom.museum/

Theme 2021:

“The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine”

With the theme “The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine”, International Museum Day 2021 invites museums, their professionals and communities to create, imagine and share new practices of (co-)creation of value, new business models for cultural institutions and innovative solutions for the social, economic and environmental challenges of the present.

As per ICOM, the COVID-19 crisis has affected the museum sector and while there will be long and short term impacts, it also serves as a catalyst to discover innovative solutions.

https://icom.museum/

International Museum Day is also a fantastic opportunity for museum professionals to meet their public. At the heart of society, museums are institutions dedicated to its development.

Now is the time to power education by stepping up collaboration and international solidarity to place education and lifelong learning at the center of the recovery.

As the world continues to battle the pandemic, cultural education – as a fundamental right and a global public good – must be reimagined to help recovering from the generational catastrophe.

After so many months closed, museums - art and culture - could be an interesting aim to recover school education. 

However COVID19 is forcing yet again 43% of museums worldwide to close their doors.

Faced with alarming and extended closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s museums are of “fundamental importance” to reviving cultural life and preserving our shared heritage “in all its diversity”

UN cultural agency chief  

Young people are coming more and more at museums. Teachers could be good guides to help young people to enjoy Museums live or virtual visits.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Getty photography

@UNESCO

Education:

"Museums preserve heritage for future generations, promote lifelong learning, provide equal access to culture and spread the values on which humanity is based, said."

Their function in terms of social inclusion is also vital to help keep societies together, and they play a major role in the creative education. 

The authors also draw attention to traditional educational activities that are hosted by museums, such as school visits, guided tours and workshops. 

Don't forget as well virtual guided tours that some museums offer to teachers and students because many museums worldwide are forced to close their doors.

school visit

credits: unknown

via Choose Chicago

Teachers have an entire weekend to talk about art and culture visiting museums live or virtual and celebrating museums at school.

Check out some pedagogical ideas to explore and support activities at a museum and/or at school with your students:

• Visit a museum with your students. Please read Uma Aula no Museu  (Portuguese language) an interesting pedagogical project developing creative writing and artistic skills through Portuguese painter Paula Rego: cross-curricular Languages, Arts, History, IT;  
• Include Museum events into your school curriculum. Invite your students to a weekend on art and culture;
• Choosing different paintings and chef-d'oeuvres, students get inspiration to write stories and draw some interesting works;

• Explore a virtual school exchange to develop during the cultural week;
• Explore virtual museum tours. Invite your students to spend some time enjoying Google Arts & Culture, Google Street Art; museums forced to be closed.
• Visit different exhibitions at international museums using apps: For example Musée des Arts et Métiers (Paris); Thyssen Museum (Madrid); Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam); Art Legacy, bringing art to life; other;
• Another activity could be a #selfie at the Museum. During a visit to a Museum near your school, invite the students to snap selfies with an artefact of their choice.

Well, let us enjoy then a cultural adventure going at Museums that were closed so many months. Believe me, your students will be creative admiring art, and will develop incredible activities. Museums want to recover and are reimagining, by preparing fantastic activities to this big occasion. To have their public again.

This year, we needed art.

G-Souto

18.05.2021

Copyright © 2021-Souto'sBlog, gsouto-digitalteacher.blogspot.com® 

Schools ! Culture matters : Let´s talk about Museums  by  G-Souto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Schools: 150th Anniversary Alice in Wonderland at the British Library

Alice in Wonderland

credits: The British Library

https://www.facebook.com/britishlibrary

To celebrate 150 years of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the British Library (London) presents an exhibition marking the book’s 150th anniversary. 
The exhibition explores how Alice has captured our imaginations for so many years.

"Although the story has been adapted, appropriated, re-imagined and re-illustrated since its conception, we are still enchanted by Carroll’s original, much loved story, which continues to inspire new generations of writers and illustrators."

Alice in Wonderland

Tim Burton, 2010

http://www.imdb.com/title/

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 150th Anniversary Edition by Lewis Carroll from Princeton University Press on Vimeo.

Alice in Wonderland has had a remarkable run. From Salvador Dali to Walt Disney and Tim Burton, not to mention the best world’s illustrators, every generation has reinterpreted and put its stamp on Lewis Carroll’s nursery-surrealist masterpiece.

Alice in Wonderland

credits: The British Library

https://www.facebook.com/britishlibrary

It opens with a spiralling Op Art vortex pulling us into a trip “down the rabbit hole” of Carroll’s imagination and through the diverse visual phenomena it has engendered. 

screenshot: Alice in Wonderland/ ebook

credits: Apple

https://itunes.apple.com/

Alice in Wonderland video game

by Tim Burton

credits:Nintendo

http://www.nintendo.com/

It contains an extraordinary array of Alice-inspired material, from the original manuscript to ebook, computer games, designs by undergraduates at De Montfort University, via toys, tea caddies, Edwardian films and psychedelic posters.

The book’s genesis is as mythic, and the saga of the manuscript as surreal, as anything in the book itself. 

Alice in Wonderland

original manuscript copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, 1864

https://en.wikipedia.org/

An Oxford mathematics lecturer, Lewis Carroll (Charles Ludwidge Dodgson) dreamed up the story to entertain the daughters of the dean of Corpus Christi College – Alice, Lori and Edith Liddell – during a summer boat trip on the Thames. 

illustration: Mabel Lucie Attwell 

Alice and the White Rabbit before they fall down the rabbit hole
https://www.facebook.com/britishlibrary

Attwell first published this edition of Alice in Wonderland at the beginning of her career in 1910. The characters are depicted from a child’s point of view and the adults look rather child-like themselves.
The graphic presentation, with fragments of classic illustrations blown up on illuminated panels, and signs in mismatched type-faces telling us “Don’t go this way, go that way” (echoing the “eat me, drink me” injunctions of the book), make the exhibition something of a “happening” in its own right.

Alice with the Red Queen from 

illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 

by Charles Robinson (1907) 

credits: The British Library Board/ Charles Robinson

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Education:

Alice in Wonderland is  a lovely book but not a simple one. Well, we all know the kindergarten adaptation by Walt Disney! And better than Disney, the marvellous Tim Burton's adaptation. 

Lewis Caroll's novels are more complex than that! Some children's books are not easy. The exhibition will help students to understand better this masterpiece of children's literature. So many illustrations, to admire and following the book on a new approach.

Alice in Wonderland

credits: The British Library

https://www.facebook.com/britishlibrary

This exhibition celebrates the 150th book's anniversary. Teachers can't miss it!
You want to introduce the novel? You don't know how to motivate your students? 

And you are teaching in London or not far? 

• Organise a school visit and go with your students to see Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript with hand-drawn illustrations, alongside stunning editions by Mervyn Peake, Ralph Steadman, Leonard Weisgard, Arthur Rackham, Salvador Dali and others.

Alice with the White Rabbit, illustration edition

 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Leonard Weisgard, 1949

credits: The Estate of Leonard Weisgard

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

• Discover how Lewis Carroll’s story has been re-imagined, re-interpreted and re-illustrated over the last 150 years with newly commissioned articles, a selection of manuscripts, reviews and literature relating to Alice in Wonderland.

When you introduce a school visit (students love to go out of the school) at Museums, or Public Libraries, you revigorate your lessons. They're wonderful choices to include into the curriculum.

"A lesson at a Museum or a Public Library included into the curriculum will enhance the learning. Your students will enjoy the numerous interactive exhibitions, the daily hands-on activities and the monthly special events."

G-Souto

Alice in Wonderland
The British Library, London
http://www.bl.uk/

Activities (before & after):

Well, there are a lot of funny and engaging activities about the novel that you can create yourself and prepare before and after the school visit to Alice in Wonderland exhibition.

Believe me! You will have a great group of motivated students who will learn about the narrative, characters, vocabulary, grammar.

You, a different 'attitude' by changing methods, a creative mind to facilitate different learning activities to your young students!

http://londonbeep.com/

Resources:

British Library : Articles

http://www.bl.uk/events/alice-in-wonderland-exhibition

You still have the time. The exhibition Alice in Wonderland will be open until Sunday 17 April 2016.

Free entry!

"The exhibition’s real fascination lies in trying to pick apart what has made a book that should feel remote in time appear permanently relevant."

G-Souto

29.03.2016
Copyright © 2016G-Souto'sBlog, gsouto-digitalteacher.blogspot.com®


Schools : 150th Anniversary Alice in Wonderland at the British Library by G-Souto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

Schools : Take a selfie with a Painting

Junges Mädchen (Melancholie), von Théodore Chassériau (1835)

credits :  Kunsthalle Bremen

http://38.media.tumblr.com/

"Welcome to the Museum of Selfies. 

This is a project that started when my friend aka. right hand and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.

I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning."

Olivia Muus

credits: Forest_thicket

http://31.media.tumblr.com/

Of course, you read about the Olivia Muus project on the media a few days ago.

Art director Olivia Muus had the incredible idea while wandering through a museum and now she's curating the tumblr called Museum of Selfies .

"This is a project that started when my friend aka. right hand and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning."

credits : Michael Shoch

http://31.media.tumblr.com/

She was inspired to start the series after taking a photo of her friend Sophie Hotchkiss’s hand in front of a painting at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.

“I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning,” 

“I think it’s interesting how we get a whole new perception of a person, as soon as there is a smartphone in front of their face.”

Olivia Muus

credits: Olivia Muus

http://38.media.tumblr.com/

Anything that can be learned by a normal young people on a trip to a foreign country can be learned more quickly, cheaply, and easily by visiting a museum.

And museums are no longer lonely spaces without a new fresh air. People circulate, talk, ask, take pics hear music. Museums changed definitely. For good.

Watching the Museum of Selfies, we can understand that arts is no more 'untouchable' in the good sens of the word.

credits: Albertina Museum @albertina_museum

http://museumofselfies.tumblr.com/

Education :

Why not adapt this event to a pedagogical project into your lessons to enhance curriculum? Students will be so excited!

Art & Selfie coul be an interesting activity to motivate the youngest to admire classical painting, don't you think?

Cindy Sherman

credits: Serralves Museum

Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves

There are things that can happen in a museum that can’t happen in a classroom. Students love to visit museums with their teachers, believe me.

I can give you two good examples:

Students love pop art, I could explore an interesting exhibition The 80's : A Topology in 2006 at Serralves Museum in Porto. They learn incredible things about the 80's throught art and relating objects. It was a two hours lesson outside the school where students learned much more about the history of the 80's than a full day in the classroom.

Paula Rego exhibition | Serralves Museum (2004)

credits: Serralves Museum

http://www.serralves.pt/

Paula Rego's Exhibition was another good lesson at the museum, in 2004. This live lesson captivated the interest of the students and introduced the narrative text. 

A fantastic pedagogical project enchanced writing skills through Paula Rego's paintings  in cross-curricular activities:

• Languages, 

• Arts, 

• History, 

• ICT

Students were so excited! For the most part, it was the first time they went to a museum. They felt happy, curious about art, made a lot of questions, took incredible notes that we discussed after the school visit. It gave the students the chance to learn better by enjoying art.

They learned a lot, the creativity they expressed in the classroom was amazing. They developed awesome projects (storytelling, drawing) with the help of technology.

credits: Matthias Eichele

http://33.media.tumblr.com/

We can adapt the Museum of Selfies project . Moblie phones, tablets, are now allowed at the museums.  Yes, all the museums go digital. 

Activities:

• Invite your students to admire online the Museum of Selfies. Let them start a discussion on the theme. 

• Students must choose a 'selfie' to make some reseach ;

• Organize a school visit at a museum ;

• Check to see if photography is allowed. Ask for permission to take photos during the visit ; 

• Remember the students not to touch/accidentally fall into the painting and/or annoy the custodians or other visitors ;

• Invite the students to take a selfie in front of a painting. Let them free to choose one painting;

• Students must get some information about the painting they chose at the museum;

• After the school visit, students get their selfie in the classroom an make their own research on the painting : painter, title, year, collection/museum.

• Present an exhibition from your class at the school library. It will be a success! 

Of course you can develop some other activities:

• Storytelling;

• Biography;

• Diary.

Curricula : Cross-curricular - Languages ; Arts ; History ; ICT.

Level : Secondary Education, Further Education.

Finally, choose the best 'selfies' to submit at Olivia Muus Museum by email. Every student send the email in the classroom, and the teacher can help the youngest.

Young people are great on the internet, texting, chating, tweeting, but sometimes they don't have the digital skills to send an email.

Being involved in this Museum of Selfies help the younger generation to understand the painters of the past.

credits: Olivia Muus | National Gallery of Denmark

http://38.media.tumblr.com/

Some thoughts :

"Museums are wonderful for school groups because you get something that goes far beyond information transmission – the possibility of enthusiasm and motivation."

Daniel Willingham , Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia

There are things that can happen in a museum that can’t happen in the classroom, be sure. And you know it. There's a difference between seeing a great work of art at the museums, and looking at a picture in a book or online, or listening a teacher tell students about it.

There's something about being in the presence of a physical painting or object that is real. They can't touch, but they feel different at a museum. It's real interactivity.

Being in the presence of a palpable object and being told it's a 200 or 300 years old is really motivating.

We can make museum visits part of the curriculum, and have broader goals than particular content knowledge. For example, helping students understand what excites and motivates and interests them can be part of the curriculum.

So it’s really about how we are creating a curriculum that is going to meet standards and goals for a particular school. 
A lot of educators are worried that their goals for education are being overwhelmed by standards that are being set externally.

Well, face this special adventure. A wonderful learning experience to your students. 

Young people need to feel free to express own choices and opinions when creating and sharing digital media content.

You will feel happy with the enthusiasm of your students.

"If a child sees and gets excited about a work of art or a science demonstration, or discovers an interest in animals, the teacher will want to pursue that and figure out how to help the child continue to pursue that interest, and how that interest can be leveraged in other content areas."

Daniel Willingham , Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia

G-Souto

20.11.2014

Copyright © 2014-Souto'sBlog, gsouto-digitalteacher.blogspot.com® 

Schools : Take s Selfie with a Painting by G-Souto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.