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Literature Review/Recommended Readings

  • Writer: Joy Mistovich
    Joy Mistovich
  • Apr 22, 2023
  • 10 min read

Updated: May 26, 2024


Literature Review 


As I read through the literature to enhance my findings, a few significant themes emerged including: the role museums foster concerning children’s learning, how docents affect visitors’ learning and engagement, and finally, how technology and the use of other senses including or excluding vision can continue to provide a unique incorporation of art making and traditional museum visits. Some of these themes emerged after my own research, but they mostly emerged while combing through the literature. As my research took shape, I encountered the themes of docent engagement and learning in children’s programs that I hadn’t considered prior to my initial research.


Docent Engagement 


My first major theme in the literary research, as well as collecting my own data, pertains to docent engagement within the museum field. This proves as a vital piece of educational philosophy concerning engagement for children and adults alike. In the articles “Art Museum Docent Coordinators’ Perceptions: A Difficult Kind of Balancing Act” by Jennifer Schero, and “Museums as Avenues of Learning for Children: A Decade of Research”, by Lucija Andre et al combine the significance of learning and docent-led interactions within a museum setting. These two articles pave the way for future research in the Museum Education field. What sets them apart from my other research sources was the lack of research on these topics.


Fewer articles existed on the topics of children’s art education and docent coordinators educational learning outcomes. Schero’s dissertation follows a research pattern of museum history from antiquity to the 21st century, detailing key findings from prominent American museums, along with the American Alliance of Museums and then progressing to a dozen coordinators’ experiences teaching the docents. Schero focuses on the Qualitative, Constructivist and Narrative methodology as she lays the foundation for her research questions and further chapters. She engages the reader from differing docent educational perspectives during the early 20th century and beyond with the following quotation. Schero (2021) refers to the triad: gardent (to preserve), monstrant (to exhibit), and docent (to teach).

This triad highlighted the growing understanding of the need to facilitate educational experiences within the Art Museum, but who would conduct these experiences, and how, remained uncertain. Furthermore, the move to create adult educational offerings acknowledged the “newly articulated belief that humans learn throughout life” (Buffington, 2007, p. 13 qtd in Schero, 2021. p. 34).


This statement combining her own experiences along with the study by Buffington aids to encompass the growth and challenges that transpires in Museum Education, docent training, and learning as an educator in general. As Schero discusses the challenges museum educators faced during the early 20th century, she specifies the numerous key studies within the Museum Education field that oscillate between docents engaging all visitors and docents not matching the key demographics of specific communities. To this end, the American Alliance of Museums changed their focus incorporating diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and most specifically for these guides to serve as a cross section of the community and the “face of the museum.” (Schero, 2021).


Docents Engagement and Children’s Learning 


The aspect of children’s engagement in a museum setting proves crucial to my data collection and research since I focus heavily on Preschoolers. Within museum education, children are often seen in a museum with their families. Therefore, in the following section, I’ll discuss how docent engagement impacts children’s learning within the Art Museum. In the “Museums as Avenues for Children: A Decade of Research”, Lucija Andre et al explore the integration of docents and learning, but instead of diving into the history of art museums and learning in general, the authors further their studies through some of the most significant research conducted within the first decade of the 2000s. Traditional studies they underscored focused mostly on high school students, and little focus on elementary students. (Andre et al, 2016) They use qualitative, constructivist research incorporating the interview methodology.


Prior to reading this article, I didn’t realize research within the preschool and elementary school grades was limited.


Children represent one of the major museum visitor groups and not just in children’s museums. For example, in the United States, about 80% of museums provide educational programs for children (Bowers 2012) and spend more than $2 billion a year on education activities (American Alliance of Museums 2009). Although a surprisingly high number of museums offer educational programs for children, there is no review focusing mainly on children’s learning within museums. In particular, very little is known about preschool and elementary school-aged children learning in museums. In order to create museum environments that are conducive to children’s learning, there is a growing desire for museum professionals and researchers in museum education to know more about children’s learning in museums. To move this process forward, there is a need to form a foundation based on previous research efforts, identifying issues and present directions for future research on children’s museum learning (American Alliance of Museums 2009; Andre et al, 2016, p. 3; Bowers 2012).


Blind Persons Using Technology in Museums 


When it comes to experiencing museums, blind persons traditionally use a combination of alternative techniques including their other senses, as well as Assistive Technology that is becoming more popular within museums. The following few articles combine to illustrate how blind persons use a combination of technology and other methods to further engage in art appreciation in museums. When it comes to differing art appreciation methods between the blind and sighted, numerous aspects exist to offer accessibility and understanding. Two works mentioned here are vastly different in comparison to traditional studies due to them not only being a documentary and a nonfiction work respectively, but also due to how they devise and propel the ideologies of blindness forward, since they have been created by blind Artists themselves. Rodney Evan’s documentary Vision Portraits tells the stories of four blind Artists, and Evans himself, who is both blind and the director of this film. His documentary opened the world of possibilities for future blind documentarians. He experienced uncertainty, heartbreak, and a deeper understanding of his blindness while producing the film. Though it doesn’t include perceptions in a museum itself, these Artists take a deep dive into eliminating barriers for all within the Art community through multiple senses. Evans describes this best in the following monologue:

You don’t have to stop doing what you love and what you’re passionate about. I think each of the Artists said in various ways, the idea of seeing with your eyes, but you also see with your heart and with your head, that those things are– are in constant combination. That it’s not just an ocular thing. It’s not just about shot composition or spectacle. Sometimes, it’s about the idea and about the imagination and how those things get put together to form vision (Evans, 2019, 1:11:32).


The book entitled More Than Meets the Eye by Georgina Kleege, “Expanding Our Vision of Museum Education and Perception: An Analysis of Three Case Studies of Independent Blind Arts Learners” by Simon Heyhoe, and “Walking with Janet Cardiff, Sitting with Massimo Guerrera, and Eating Apples with R. Murray Schafer” by Elizabeth Sweeney, provide the foundation for art engagement, education, as well as more accessible methods. Kleege uses Qualitative Constructivist methods by capturing a combination of interviews and photography of various blind Artists as well as weaving this into a Narrative format. Initially, she devotes the first section of her work to detailing the various perceptions of blindness from antiquity to the present exploring philosophies and literature. Following this she continues by focusing on the museum space and documenting docent tours, audio description, tactile replicas, and more to facilitate a discussion around the evolution of methods for blind museumgoers. Unlike most of the other works I read previously, blind individuals wrote few. Kleege’s background and outward interest for writing this book arises, since both of her parents were Artists themselves, and after researching and visiting museums worldwide, she decided to write specifically for persons within the museum field.


The following quote combines the perspective of Museum Education along with the comprehension of various types of blindness, which the docent is aware of. Kleege also combines multiple philosophies and epistemologies into this passage by separating knowledge of philosophers and the Hypothetical blind man—(otherwise known as an individual who is totally blind). When someone who isn’t familiar with blindness or blindness philosophy thinks of blindness itself, they will consider only blackness and nothing else in between usable vision.


I wanted my docent to know that she didn’t have to start from scratch. We also touched on my visual impairment. Unlike philosophers who limit their speculations to the total congenital blindness of the Hypothetical, and the cognitive scientists who seek out this ideal as the subject of their inquiry, my docent had a grasp of the complexities of actual visual impairment. She knew that the degree of sight loss along with the age of onset were all relevant factors. Since I have been legally blind since childhood, I am comfortable with what I can and cannot see, and do not strain after visual perception the way an adult who has recently acquired the same degree and type of impairment might (Kleege, 2018, p. 62).

Similar to Kleege, Sweeney and Heyhoe combine the experiences of blind museum visitors, but Sweeney’s perspective ventures toward the combination of blind and sighted visitors in one study while Heyhoe’s focus draws on a cluster of blind persons from various age groups and art familiarity. In the following excerpt, Heyhoe discusses the similarities and differences between blind persons receiving early intervention in the visual arts. Thus, these experiences provide them the ability to engage more fluidly with the visual arts. Sweeney, on the other hand, illustrates the challenges that exist within the museum field when other sensory experiences are eliminated.


Second, students with no visual memory had a completely different understanding of paintings than did those with a visual memory, who would often evolve a different narrative of learning about paintings either for their own historical understanding of political, cultural, and social eras or by developing a more academic relationship with an exhibit. This analysis also identified three particular themes to be taken forward to the axial coding phase, as they provided particularly rich data: first, almost all the participants and visitors had early experiences of museums (only one did not); second, audio lessons were largely booked by older people; third, older visitors did not want to use the Web to learn about images (Heyhoe, 2012b). Thus, during the axial coding phase, I decided to follow a line of inquiry that would initially allow older students with early experiences of museum visits to be compared to younger students who had little experience. (Heyhoe, 2013, p. 72)


When it comes to visitors who are blind or partially sighted, many art galleries are left scrambling to find ways to provide quality programming and access to their all too often “untouchable” art collections (Sweeney, 2009, p. 234).


These two perspectives illustrate the beginning of considering blindness as a unique condition compared to the sighted, nondisabled visitors, and to further enhance these musings, Sweeney and Heyhoe discuss multiple technologies to navigate museums, such as beacons, tactile displays, maps, etc.


Along similar lines as the two latter works, the dissertation “Art for the Visually Impaired and Blind: A Case Study of One Artist’s Solution” by Lauri Reidmiller uses qualitative constructivist epistemology with the structured interview methodology to discuss art making while incorporating blind students from The Ohio State School for the Blind. At the outset, she provides a concise literature review of previous research containing a comparison of blindness education art perspectives and the similarities and differences of educating blind students at a typical school for the blind versus mainstream education. Later, she enhances her study with a plethora of description surrounding the students, art teacher, sighted artist, and administrator at the school who all played integral roles with the implementation of the project within a local Columbus gallery. I found this dissertation most insightful due to gaining further knowledge concerning teaching art to blind students, and this, in itself, is not a new tradition. Reidmiller places Viktor Lowenfeld’s findings at the core of her research, and


I was most intrigued because aside from teaching sighted students in Germany, he taught blind students for 15 years in Austria (Reidmiller, 2003). Reidmiller emphasizes the challenges teachers face in schools for the blind, as well as traditional public schools. In this former instance, Reidmiller uses Lowenfeld’s evidence to support the instances where blind students aren’t taught art in a typical school for the blind.


It is difficult to conceive that during an era in which art education – especially in the elementary classroom – is considered an integral part of the total curriculum, most of the schools for the blind still think of art as a preparatory stage for professional art training and therefore out of the question for the schools for the blind (Lowenfeld, 1957, p. 431 qtd. In Reidmiller, 2003, p. 21).


These findings were based on experimental and comparative studies of drawings, paintings, and sculptures created by normally sighted and visually impaired individuals. Lowenfeld observed and documented these two approaches during the fifteen years he worked with the students at the Hohe Warte Institute for the Blind in Vienna. It was during this time, that he initially documented and began building his own set of developmental stages for examining and understanding children’s Artwork (Reidmiller, 2003, pp. 49-50).


In this review, I’ve discussed the significance of docent engagement, children’s educational learning through docent engagement, as well as blind persons’ use of Assistive Technology and other multisensory approaches that are used within the museum itself. These themes contribute to the most significant aspect of the literature itself, which demonstrates that anyone, whether blind or sighted, can successfully navigate and experience art museums through ingenuity, creativity, and the “nothing about us without us” approach. This outcome provides the basis for the latter portion of my research as I combine my own findings to support this thesis.


References


Andre, Lucija, et al. Museums as avenues of learning for children: A decade of Research. Learning Environments Research, vol. 20, no. 1, 27 Oct. 2016, pp. 47–76, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-016-9222-9.




Kleege, Georgina. More than meets the eye: What blindness brings to art. New York, Oxford University Press, 2018.




Reidmiller, Lori. Art for the visually impaired and blind: A case study of one artist’s solution. 2003, pp. 72, 234, etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1054144608&disposition=inline.


Schero, Jennifer. Art museum docent coordinators’ perceptions: A difficult kind of balancing act. 2021, pp. 13–34, scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7813&context=etd.



Stokas, A. G. (2016). Letting all lives speak: Inequality in art education and Baumgarten’s Felix Aestheticus. Studies in Art Education, 57(2), 139–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2016.1133194 


University of Florida. “The importance of art education in the classroom – UF Online.” MA in Art Education Program Online at UF, 28 Jan. 2020, arteducationmasters.arts.ufl.edu/articles/importance-of-art-education/.


 

 
 
 

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