Museum Education in Times of Radical Social Change

Journal of Museum Education 37:3 Thematic Issue

Asja Mandic, Patrick Roberts, Asja Mandic, Patrick Roberts

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315424071
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Archaeology

Sponsored by the Museum Education Roundtable, this is volume 37, Number 3 of the Journal of Museum Education (JME) on Museum Educators and Technology Expanding Our Reach and Practice, published in the fall of 2012. This edition includes articles on museum education in times of radical social change, international perspectives and problems, the Hungarian Patient museum education, art museum education in Slovenia, cross-border collaboration in the Western Balkans, Innovating from conflict to community in public art engagement in Israel, exploring the educational future and online collaborative learning.

From the Guest Editors

Museum Education in Times of Radical Social Change: International Perspectives and Problems

Asja Mandic and Patrick Roberts

Introduction

Museum educators in the United States and Canada are no strangers to controversy and challenge: tight budgets and limited resources, economic recession, the politics of cultural heritage and exhibition development, debates over public value and accessibility, and the challenge to remain relevant in a media saturated world. Challenges such as these engage the attention of museum workers around the globe daily. Yet many international museum professionals also contend with challenges far beyond the experiences of most US or Canadian museums. How does a museum survive the transition from communism to capitalism? How does a museum survive war and the collapse of a nation? How are museum partnerships built among former wartime enemies? What challenges do museum educators face in post-conflict societies? And perhaps more importantly, how are such challenges met?

This issue of JME explores the ways in which museums in zones of conflict and regions marked by radical and rapid socio-political change perform their public service role and educational mission. Through a rich variety of museum concepts and practices shaped by local/national/regional histories, contexts, and dilemmas, readers are introduced to educational activities in nine countries that have witnessed dramatic social change and/or violent conflict over the last few decades—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Israel, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.

Perhaps the most radical examples of how museums experience socio-political transition and post-conflict recovery followed by the economic recession are found in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Asja is a professor of art history at the University of Sarajevo and where Patrick spent five months studying museum education. With the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia in 1991, the newly independent Bosnia and Herzegovina suffered a tragic war that killed more than a hundred thousand people and displaced millions. The capital city of Sarajevo, home to a variety of well-established museums, suffered a terrible siege that left more than 10,000 dead. By the time the Dayton Peace Accords ended the war in 1995, Sarajevo, its people, and its museums had endured tremendous devastation. In establishing the foundations for Bosnia’s complicated post-war government, the Dayton Accords failed to address the legal status of national museums, and this has resulted in scarce or non-existent funding for even the most basic of museum functions - paying the utility bills and paying the staff- and a limited ability to apply for non-governmental funding. This dire financial crisis has forced some museums in Sarajevo to close their doors to the public, such as the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina which closed in September 2011.

Journal of Museum Education, Volume 37, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp. 9-14.

©2012 Museum Education Roundtable. All rights reserved.

How might international perspectives inform our work as museum professionals working in the more stable social and cultural settings? We believe that deepened understanding of the challenges associated with this work can help museum educators in the US better articulate a case for how museum education is necessary for and vitally important to the health of a democratic society. We believe museum professionals everywhere can benefit from learning how dedicated, creative museum educators working in difficult environments (re)adjust to new circumstances and overcome obstacles that may be inconceivable to some readers. We also hope these articles will spark information-sharing across international boundaries and encourage international partnerships and collaborative exchanges.

Overview

This issue represents a collection of individual voices rather than common authorial narrative. By inviting scholars and specialists from different museum-related disciplines and backgrounds, those who have direct experience working in or with museums, we opted to present a range of perspectives on the topic of museum education and to identify broader questions and concerns facing museums in the contemporary world. The contributors discuss the educational function of very different museum institutions—varying in terms of size, subject matter, management and funding arrangements, geographical and socio-political contexts - and sometimes education is understood in the broadest sense, through the practices demonstrating the museum’s social role. The articles presented in this issue can be grouped into two categories: (1) those that examine museum education practices and museum functioning in times of dramatic social, political, and economic change, specifically the transition from socialist/communist to capitalist/democratic systems of governance; (2) those that analyze the specific educational and socially-oriented approaches of various museums and centers in recent war zones and areas of conflict.

The article by Tamás Vásárhelyi of the Hungarian Natural History Museum provides an historical overview of museum education in Hungary and describes relationships and tensions between past practices and more recent projects, i.e., how past approaches are rearticulated or set aside in current museum practices. He leads us through the story of museum growth and development in his country in a way that reflects the complexity of European history, for example the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the effects of the World Wars, the consequences of the Cold War and Soviet domination, and freedom of the country that was, for several decades, isolated by the so-called Iron Curtain from the rest of the world. Throughout Vásárhelyis article, we get a comparative sense of how museums functioned under two different political and economic systems: On the one hand, the centralization of the museum system and control of museum programs and exhibition content by the Communist party, and on the other hand, the paradox of democratic freedom, in which institutions lost the full support of the state or municipality and entered into a highly competitive cultural market. For museums, this transition towards a free democratic state marked the beginning of a period of financial instability that had a particular effect on museum education. However, his examination of the most recent museum approaches reflects significant changes in the ways museums perceive their relationship towards the public in terms of visitor services and educational programming.

Adela Železnik, the author of the second article, also reflects upon the transition from a communist system to democracy through the example of the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna galerija) in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Formerly one of the six republics that made up the socialist Yugoslavia, Slovenia, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, became an independent country with the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991. Unlike Hungary, which was under the control of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had a more open society in which citizens could travel freely and where Western influence was not tightly controlled. As a result, artists enjoyed more creative freedom; hence contemporary art in the socialist Yugoslavia was closer to Western models than to other socialist countries. For Železnik, understanding the socialist doctrine in the context of the educational frameworks and programs of the past becomes essential in examining the current programming strategies in Slovenia.

The authors of our third and fourth articles, Diana Walters and Ziva Haller Rubenstein, write about museums in regions of conflict. In illustrating the role museums and arts-based institutions can play in overcoming geographic, national, ethnic and religious borders and conflicts, each article suggests new perspectives on thinking about the challenges and opportunities offered by collaborative projects that work to establish a common platform for defining concepts, content, target groups, objectives, and educational approaches.

Diana Walters provides a valuable perspective as the only “outsider” among this issue’s contributors in that she is a museum professional who is not native to the region she discusses. She describes the challenges of coordinating a collaborative project among eleven museum institutions from six different Balkan countries. The countries involved in her project are still going through the process of transition (from communism/socialism to capitalism/democracy) and all of them (except for Albania) witnessed the collapse of their common state, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and became independent. It is important to emphasize that her role as a leader in the project required mediation between nations recently at war with one another: Bosnia and Herzegovina; Kosovo, where US troops had to intervene in the conflict between Serbs and Kosovo Albanians; Serbia and Montenegro, which were directly involved in aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project Walters describes was directed towards initiating more socially-oriented, inclusive dialogical approaches to exhibition development and educational programming, with the potential of leading towards conflict resolution in the Balkan region. Walters’s examination is particularly significant for building awareness of the social role and function of museum institutions and their need to engage in more inclusive approaches in relation to their publics-to focus more on their educational function and potential to contribute to the learning process, which can be viewed as a significant strategy in improving the image of museum institutions in the region.

Writing from Israel, Ziva Haller Rubenstein adds significantly to discussions on the ability of cultural institutions to generate social and political improvements, especially in the realm of conflict remediation. Haller Rubenstein’s study of the Centre for Digital Art in Holon, Israel, highlights the centre’s ability to be responsive to community needs and to be engaged in social service activities. Throughout the description of the centre’s efforts to understand the needs of its immediate social surroundings and audiences, Haller Rubenstein shows how the centre develops community-oriented and art mediation activities that lead to the empowerment of marginal and disempowered social groups and which actively involve open, dialogical processes about burning political issues. In striving for these goals, the Centre for Digital Art in Holon goes far beyond what other museums in Israel have achieved. Haller Rubenstein’s essay provides a significant contribution to understanding the importance of a social orientation of museum functioning and its potential to transform modes of thinking and perceptions of contemporary Israeli society. Her contribution not only highlights the potential value of creating hybrid museum practices responsive to particular socio-political settings, but it also raises questions about the tension between an art museum’s institutional responsibility and its social responsibility.

Conclusion

Museum educators in the United States currently face difficult programming and funding decisions brought about by economic uncertainity and political change. At almost every level, museum workers, particularly educators, must make the case for their own social relevance and public value. Why are robust museum education programs important to democratic life? What can they contribute to reconciliation between opposing points of view? How can they promote civic pluralism? Why is it even necessary that they do so? By giving voice to international perspectives on questions such as these, we hope this issue of JME will help inspire and facilitate a global conversation on the role museums must play in promoting peace, reconciliation, civic pluralism, and democratic citizenship.

About the Authors

Asja Mandic is assistant professor in the Art History Department, University of Sarajevo, teaching courses in modern and contemporary art and museum studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. She worked as a curator of the Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo. She curated over twenty exhibitions, edited a book, Artefacts (Sarajevo: Ars Aevi, 2007), and is the author of five exhibition catalogues.

Patrick Roberts is associate professor at National-Louis University, in the Department of Educational Foundations and Inquiry. Dr. Roberts is a recent Fulbright Scholar who studied museum education in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Western Balkans. He is the former Director of Education at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.

The Hungarian Patient: Museum Education in Hungary and the Challenges of Democratic Transition

Tamás Vásárhelyi

Abstract This article outlines the changes, developments, activities, and challenges faced by Hungarian museums over the last few decades. It shows that there was life behind the “Iron Curtain,” with museums enjoying relative financial stability. While the political and economic changes associated with the transition from a communist to a democratically elected government and capitalist economy did bring more international connections, collaborations, and freedom in choosing exhibition topics, the changes also brought exposure to the harsh rules of the cultural market. This article reflects on these issues and presents some of the most recent museum approaches in terms of programming, education, and audience development.

Located in Central Europe, Hungary is a relatively small country (approximately the size of West Virginia) with a population often million people. From 1949 to 1989, Hungary was known as the Hungarian Socialist People’s Republic, a communi...