Palmyre Pierroux

• PhD
• Head of Research Professor at University of Oslo

This chapter examines ideas of museums as sites of participatory democracy and design, with a focus on historical and contemporary developments in museum practices in Norway and Sweden. Relationships between research, policy, and practice frame our investigation of the ways in which participatory practices may or may not work in democratic ways. We...

Background Studies of group creativity have focused on adults acting in professional settings, with less attention paid to how adolescents collaborate in groups in creative activities. Building on sociocultural perspectives on imagination as a complex capacity in adolescence, this study examines students’ creative-imagining processes and the role o...

This book provides a framework for understanding how participatory modes in natural, cultural, and scientific heritage institutions intersect with practices in citizen science and citizen humanities. Drawing on perspectives in cultural history, science and technology studies, and media and communication theory, the book explores how museums and ar...

Collaboration between partners in universities and museums is increasingly viewed as important for demonstrating how research can make real contributions to innovation in the public sector. Frequently, as in the case presented in this chapter, university-museum collaborations center on experimentation with exhibition-making. A particular challenge...

Increasing demands on museums for visitor insights, theoretical shifts in the learning sciences, the embeddedness of multimodal media in museums and society, and advancements in data visualisation tools and web-based applications are all clear calls for innovating visitor research in museums. In this article, I describe how concepts from multimodal...

Through the collection of digital media and engagement with underrepresented groups, memory institutions aspire to preserve and interpret a range of contemporary perspectives on culture and identity. These institutions simultaneously seek to provide experiences that foster civic identities and cultural citizenship. This article explores the potenti...

The contributions to this volume are organized according to shared ‘big themes’ we have identified in the research on Citizen Science and Citizen Humanities: Democratization, Divides, Drives, and Developments. This chapter reviews the contributions in each theme, noting the disciplinary domain, considering the approaches and outcomes, and relating...

Collaboration between partners in universities and museums is increasingly viewed as important for demonstrating how research can make real contributions to innovation in the public sector. Frequently, as in the case presented in this chapter, university-museum collaborations center on experimentation with exhibition-making. A particular challenge...

In this article, we examine how creative making is framed in a public library setting. We pursue this topic by focusing on the trajectory of a group participating in “The Inventor Course” during a school trip to a library. Video recordings of the maker activity comprise the primary data for analysis, supplemented by ethnographic notes. Analysis of...

The contributions to this volume are organized according to shared ‘big themes’ we have identified in the research on Citizen Science and Citizen Humanities: Democratization, Divides, Drives, and Developments. This chapter reviews the contributions in each theme, noting the disciplinary domain, considering the approaches and outcomes, and relating...

Citizen science (CS) and citizen humanities (CH) are increasingly engaging people in participatory and contributory activities that support research conducted by universities, museums, and archives. These relatively new terms describe different types of public interactions with tangible and intangible cultural, natural, and scientific heritage, oft...

Citizen Science (CS) and Citizen Humanities (CH) are increasingly engaging people in participatory and contributory activities that support research conducted by universities, museums and archives. These relatively new terms describe different types of public interactions with tangible and intangible cultural, natural, and scientific heritage, ofte...

Citizen science (CS) and citizen humanities (CH) are increasingly engaging people in participatory and contributory activities that support research conducted by universities, museums, and archives. These relatively new terms describe different types of public interactions with tangible and intangible cultural, natural, and scientific heritage, oft...

This chapter examines ideas of museums as sites of participatory democracy and design, with a focus on historical and contemporary developments in museum practices in Norway and Sweden. Relationships between research, policy, and practice frame our investigation of the ways in which participatory practices may or may not work in democratic ways. We...

Traversing disciplines, A History of Participation in Museums and Archives provides a framework for understanding how participatory modes in natural, cultural, and scientific heritage institutions intersect with practices in citizen science and citizen humanities.Drawing on perspectives in cultural history, science and technology studies, and media...

Studies of education practices in science centers have found variation in how conceptual learning is supported, or scaffolded, on school field trips. This paper investigates the implications of scaffolding variations for how students make sense of a game-based exhibit that was designed to trigger interest and develop knowledge of scientific phenome...

This chapter explores the role of software used to teach composition in music education in two different musical domains, described as interval-based and sound-based, respectively. Affordances and constraints of digital composition tools, and how these relate to models of creative processes, are examined. Three questions frame the investigation: Wh...

Taking the wall text in art museums as point of departure, this article investigates developments in museum media and communication practices in the exhibition room. We first present findings from a recent study of types and functions of wall texts used in permanent collection exhibitions in twelve Norwegian art museums, including a national museum...

This paper presents a multisensory perspective on art interpretation, with a focus on touch as interpretive resource. The context for the study was an art museum exhibition curated to allow touch-based interactions with modernist sculptures. In the first part of the study, visitors’ interactions with the sculptures were analysed to identify ‘sensin...

Today, the museum visit is studied as a complex social experience encompassing “a series of embodied performances, such as entering galleries, scanning, perusing, walking, talking, photographing and pointing at exhibits and labels” (Christidou and Diamantopoulou 2016, 12). A growing body of sociocultural research thus examines the ways in which vis...

Videogames are included among the wide array of digital resources available to teachers to foster student engagement and teach domain-specific content. In this study, we analyze how two teachers in two countries used the commercial videogame The Walking Dead™ to teach ethical theories in upper secondary citizenship education. In both cases, student...

Visitracker is a newly launched tablet-based research tool and online portal developed for museum curators to conduct and analyze real-time observations of individual and group interactions in exhibitions. Informed by sociocultural research on learning in museums (Crowley, Pierroux, & Knutson, 2014), which studies how conversations, gestures and in...

The public’s growing interest in archaeology in recent years is reflected in increased visits to excavation sites, part of a trend coined in the research as Public Archaeology. Public visits are often sponsored through museum outreach and education programmes for schools and families, offering diverse activities and encounters with archaeologists i...

This chapter focuses on how aspects of a design process changed for different partners (university researchers and lab members, museum curators, innovation consultants) involved in developing a prototype from a research project into a commercial product. This is the design story of VisiTracker, a tablet-based research tool developed for museum staf...

In this paper we present a study of master students working with the concept of gamification (Deterding et al., 2011; Bonenfant & Genvo, 2014; Sanchez, 2014) to design an informal learning activity in a natural history museum. The teaching unit was a project-based course covering fundamental concepts related to the use of games for educational purp...

This paper presents the design and implementation of an interactive application-TACTEC-for multi-touch tables in art museums. With focus on visitor participant experiences we propose an application that promotes visitors engagement through the development of creative activities using interactive technologies.

Multi-touch tabletops have noteworthy and promising affordances for co-composition as an activity in co-located and collaborative learning. In this paper we describe the use of co-composition as a guide in design of a multi-touch application for a museum's touring two-day workshop on architecture. The goal of the application is to support groups...

In this paper, we review recent developments in technology-enhanced posing activities in art museums. We present a sociocultural perspective on the intertwined cognitive and social aspects of gesture and posing in meaning making, and we discuss how these relate to visitors' interpretive processes in encounters with art. We present two cases in whic...

In this article we empirically investigate the ways in which curators’ expert knowledge and intentions in a national art museum’s exhibition of works by Edvard Munch are made relevant in young people’s interpretative activity. In which ways do adolescent visitors notice and comprehend the curator’s meaningful arrangement of paintings? What are the...

During the 19th century, educators began to see museums as environments where people might learn. Curators made collections available for public viewing to enlighten the public and to instill the values of the state (Bennett, 1995; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992). During the 20th and 21st centuries, there has been a dramatic increase in the number and type...

This article presents a discussion of approaches to learning and teaching computer music, with a particular focus on pedagogical design and the use of learning technologies among nonspecialists and young people in secondary and upper secondary school levels. This article begins with a framing of computer music as a discipline taught at secondary an...

As museums’ public images become increasingly intertwined with architecture and tourism on a global scale, spectacular museum buildings have come to have a presence both in local, urban landscapes and online. We analyze the website presentations of two new national contemporary art museum buildings, the Tate Modern Museum in London and the National...

This article investigates the development of conceptual understanding in adolescents as a trajectory that spans physical and institutional boundaries. The study follows a group of secondary school students as they engage in a series of museum-led workshop activities related to architecture. A sociocultural approach frames our analysis of the struct...

In this study of art museum field trips by high school students, we investigate the ways in which features of different social and mobile technologies, specifically blogs and mobile phones, are able to bridge and support meaning making in young people’s encounters with contemporary art. Empirical material is presented from Gidder, a web-based learn...

Research indicates that young people rarely initiate visits to art museums. Field trips arranged by schools are thus an established and important means of mobilising students’ interest in art. The contribution of this article is to provide an example of how upper secondary students on an art museum field trip interpret contemporary art within and a...

Contemporary art theory operates with the tenet that artworks are open to multiple interpretations and that different strategies may be employed to draw out and reflect on a work's meaning. At the same time, interpre-tations produced by scholars, curators, critics, and artists are deeply root-ed in perspectives on how people experience and learn ab...

This symposium explores central themes related to the design of specific wiki features to support collective cognition, and presents analyses of wiki use in authentic educational settings. Through the presentation of four different projects, the symposium will take up issues related to the significance of iterative design approaches for aligning so...

In this paper I present the design rationale for a work-in-progress mobile learning project titled Gidder: Groups in Digital Dialogue. The design challenge is to support upper secondary school students as they collaboratively interpret artworks across classroom and museum settings using a combination of wiki and mobile phone technologies.

This workshop focuses on two interrelated themes; knowledge advancement and design. The knowledge advancement theme explores the educational use of wikis in different institutional settings and the challenges that arise as the open architecture and shared authorship features of wiki software meet practices grounded in concepts of individual learnin...

In this paper, we discuss our emerging approach to museum learning involving the use of new technologies in museums. Our approach is shaped by the experiences of the multidisciplinary EU Kaleidoscope MUSTEL team (Museums and Technology Enhanced Learning), which includes researchers with experience in art history, cultural studies, IT development, i...

Museum and culture studies traditionally approach social issues related to national museum narratives by critically analyzing the historical development and orderings of collections and their functions. Studies may investigate museums' representational practices in interpretations of the 'other,' for example, or the role of official and state narra...

This article investigates how high school students master and appropriate concepts in aesthetics and modern art in art history classes and in art museums. It is argued that distinctions between schools and museums as places of formal and informal learning, respectively, are not useful analytical categories for understanding complex meaning making p...

This paper proposes that studies of social interaction as situated activity may shed light on processes of meaning making in contemporary art museums and inform the development of new museum technologies. It is argued that a sociocultural perspective on the pervasive 'meaning culture' in museums makes apparent the interplay between situated discour...