Abstract
The educative function of art museums is accepted as commonplace yet it remains an underexplored topic in arts education or arts in education in the Philippine context. For the most part, art museums are assumed to be educational because it offers access to concrete objects of study, from artworks and documents to learning materials such as video presentations and text panels, to simulated environments. Lectures and workshops, walking tours, and the publication of learning aids are some prevailing practices that reinforce the museum’s education function. Discussions on formal and informal education in museums elaborate these. On the one hand, the museum can be viewed as a place for self-instruction and a learning environment distinct from other venues of formal education like the classroom while the other strand proposes that the museum can in fact be the classroom. This chapter will present the initiative of the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum in rethinking its education mandate by producing a bilingual Education Guide for students from primary to tertiary levels. This paper will discuss the process of making the guide from outlining its philosophical underpinnings to dialoguing with collaborators in the field. It will assert the importance of arts education in Basic Education and reflect on the museum’s decisive role in initiating such intervention in the wake of a changing art scene and a challenging education program.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper subscribes to the term “arts education” to acknowledge the “multiplicity of art genres” as Gadsden (2008) and other researchers on the field have suggested.
- 2.
P21 or Partnership for 21st Century Learning is an educational organization comprised of members from the business community, leaders in the educational sector, and policy makers in the USA. Founded in 2002, the organization “brought to the forefront a comprehensive set of skills that along with content mastery, are what all sectors can agree are essential for success.” The framework, which suggests the integration of twenty-first-century skills into respective subjects has also been cited in the local context, particularly in textbook production.
- 3.
Formal education is characterized by classroom and curricula-based learning led by teachers, where students receive a degree or official recognition upon completion. Informal education transpires beyond the classroom through daily experience and exposure to after-school programs, museums, libraries, media, and even at home; it entails less structure and requirements such as exams and learning is often self-directed. Non-formal education shares characteristics with informal education. It is often facilitated by professional organizations or collectives that employ innovative and creative learning methods outside of the school context.
- 4.
The Department of Education had its official name changed several times since its founding in 1863. From its beginnings as Superior Commission of Primary Instruction, its most recent name change was in 2001 to reflect its mandate of administration of Basic Education at the national level.
- 5.
According to Fajardo, PETA also offers workshops for marginalized communities “which focus on advocacies for social development.” PETA’s People’s Theater has regular workshop offerings for specific audiences, from children to adults. It also has workshops intended for teachers titled Theater in Education, which attempts to “bridge the gap in the training of school teachers.”
- 6.
Art educators such as Alice Pañares and Alma Quinto facilitated a National Workshop for K + 12 Teachers at the Vargas Museum titled “Teaching Out of the Box” last 26–28 October 2016. The workshop introduced museum exhibitions as teaching material for subjects other than art and suggested the possibility of using the museum as a teaching venue.
- 7.
In his unpublished essay for a conference at Taipei University, Flores describes the Vargas Museum as “a workplace and at the same time a laboratory where reflection and invention happen.” Citing the context of the museum within the university, he reflects that his work as curator of the Vargas is inclined “towards a museum program that is responsive to the requirements of criticality and interdisciplinarity in the university, aware of the context of the collection and the research capacity of its library and archives, and open to the interventions of contemporary artists within the space of the collection and in individual projects involving archival material.”
- 8.
This is a term used by Leilani Duke in the article “Mind Building and Arts Education.” Duke writes that art educators such as Rudolf Arnheim, Elliot Eisner, and Howard Gardner have argued for the role of art in building the cognitive capacities of a child. Their studies counter the notion that the arts “appeal to our emotions, feelings, and sensibilities” and requires “little exercise of discrimination, interpretation, and judgment” (2000, p. 15).
- 9.
See Pasig River Art for Urban Change project: https://www.britishcouncil.ph/programmes/arts/visual/urban-change/map.
- 10.
Quinto‘s remark also pointed to the need to integrate in the lessons activities involving various forms of media, most notably social media. Some activities in the guide were a response to this comment.
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I am deeply grateful to Dr. Patrick Flores for his guidance as I wrote this article.
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Salas, L.A.M. (2019). Museum Education as Arts Education: Enhancing Museum Experience and the Learning of Art Through the Vargas Museum Education Guide. In: Costes-Onishi, P. (eds) Artistic Thinking in the Schools. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8993-1_14
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