Adult Interactions with Artworks in Museum Settings: A Multi-cultural Study
This project emerges out of studies Boyd White has pursued over the past fifteen years with undergraduate students in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. Initially he was looking for a teaching strategy that would enable him to know the details of, and respond to, students’ evanescent, sometimes inchoate internal monologues as they interacted with artworks. He developed a process for mapping the encounters. The maps provide a basis for dialogue between instructor and student, a self-teaching device, and have evolved into a substantial component of a research protocol for ongoing study of aesthetic experience as a source of meaning making, albeit an under-used source in many of today’s classrooms.
Currently, as part of a three-year project funded by The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Higher Education, three researchers investigating the parameters of meaning making within the context of encounters with artworks. Participants are substantially but not exclusively pre-service teachers, from three separate linguistic and cultural groups—Portuguese, English and French. We are interested to see if interpretive, meaning making strategies vary across languages and cultures, albeit cultures that share a Western canon. In particular, we are tracking and analyzing the discrete experiential moments involved in what Dewey described as an experience, that is, an experience that participants deem to have significance, a sense of completion and fulfillment—in other words, an aesthetic experience.
The pedagogical relevance of aesthetic experience has been, for much of the past century, and despite Dewey’s grounding breaking work, a contested topic. We expect our study to contribute to an increased understanding of the phenomenon through a study of the range and manner of synthesis of the moments involved in meaningful encounters with artworks. In turn, we hope to provide a better understanding of the educational worth of aesthetic experience for its capacity to foster meaning making, especially within the context of an increasingly globalized world that nonetheless retains particular cultural perspectives, languages and ways of processing information.
Research Team: Joao Frois (project director) Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal; Anne-Marie Emond, Université de Montréal; and Boyd White, McGill University.
Contact:
Boyd White, PhD
(514) 398-4527 Ext. 00730
Department of Integrated Studies in Education
3700 McTavish, Room 351
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec H3A1Y2
