Learning Museums 101

In 5th grade, I stepped up a craft exhibition in my living room. I’d spent my summer break making bookmarks with pressed flowers, painting cards, and making homemade candles. It was my mother’s idea to do an exhibition, invite our friends and family over and sell things I’d learnt over the summer. I was thrilled! Not because people bought what I made, but because I was able to see 2 months of work in front of me and share it with people.

Decades later, this memory is as fresh as new. As an 11 year old who taught herself new crafts that moment meant something to me. It’s something that no exam or no score could ever capture.

This is my story, but what do you think is more important -

What you know
What you can do with what you know

My guess is you picked the latter.

Traditional ways of measuring learning focus on the end result or what you know. But learning is so much more than that! How do you capture that?

Here is where learning museums can help!

Learning Museums make learning 👁️ Visible 👋 Tangible ♥️ Shareable. Let us unpack these -

👁️ Visible

Documenting learning brings alive the output and the process.

For a learner, this helps in deepening learning
For a facilitator this helps look at the learning process holistically

Here are some examples:

Exploring new recipes and teach others to cook on my Instagram page by capturing and annotating each step in the process
Asking students to make memes based on a chemistry topic they studied
Putting together a presentation for my team after attending an online course

👋 Tangible

Creating an artefact helps in applying the learning.

For a learner, this leads to better retention while building learning lateral skills like communication and problem solving
For a facilitator, this helps gauge competency & how well learners are able to apply their learnings

Here are some examples:

Creating a narrative of a foot soldier in the Mughal army as part of a history homework I got in 7th grade
An 8th-grade student reimagining Memories by Coldplay to remember science formulae
Workbooks at a live session to guide the breakout room discussion with peers

♥️ Shareable

Sharing learning with people helps in getting diverse perspectives on the same thing.

For a learner a celebration of their learning makes them feel proud and accomplished
For a facilitator, this helps in getting feedback on the learning experiences they created

Here are some examples:

The last year of design school requires you to display the work you have done over 4 years in one place
Openhouse student portfolios - a place where parents and teachers could have a look at what students were doing in class
Writing in public - a 30-day atomic writing challenge I took last year where I wrote and published an article every day for 30 days