Page 111 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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have strong pedagogic aims, as the directors’ statements I have cited clearly
suggest, and in subscribing to certain experience-oriented display strategies,
they are subscribing to variants of experiential learning. Experiential learning
includes a wide range of otherwise opposed educational approaches. Behavi-
ourist education involves learning through experience, but what one learns is
very tightly circumscribed and education takes the form of training. We can see
a parallel in the use of psychological methods to stimulate certain moods and
emotions in visitors. However the concept of learning through experience
is also associated with the tradition of hands-on, object-based education
developed by theorist–practitioners such as Friedrich Froebel, Jean Piaget and
John Dewey, and the techniques they advocated differ greatly from behaviourist
techniques.
Froebel designed educational toys intended to instruct very young children
with little intervention from the teacher and through the child’s own capacity
for reasoning. ‘Forms of nature’ (mimesis), ‘forms of beauty’ (aesthetics) and
‘forms of knowledge’ (such as mathematics) could be learnt through playing
with simple, unpainted wooden building blocks placed on tables marked with
grids (Brosterman 1997: 37). To some extent, Froebel shared with the Romantics
a belief in natural symbolism. If paintings could ‘speak to the soul’ or a land-
scape was endowed with a spiritual significance, so symbolic meanings could
emanate directly from the visual and tactile manipulation of simple materials
and objects. This is very different from the understanding of symbolism
commonly used in cultural and media studies, which derives from semiotics. In
semiotic theory, meaning does not arise naturally from things – it is culturally
and socially attributed. Yet Froebelian education does share the materialist
approach of the cultural studies tradition, insofar as it sees understanding and
ideas as emerging from material interactions.
Though Froebel’s understanding of symbolism would be rejected by later
educational theorists (such as John Dewey), his approach to learning through
play would be hugely influential. For many years the concept of learning
through play was a staple part of the training of primary school and kinder-
garten teachers in many parts of the world. Other educationalists adapted
Froebel’s approach, but like him emphasized interaction with an environment
(people and things) through play as fundamental to learning and understand-
ing. The content of learning comes from this material and social interaction,
not from formal instruction, so that education becomes a means to enable the
child’s self-realization through activity (this concept is similar to the Marxist
notion of realization used by Lissitzky – see Chapter 2). In the later work of
Froebel, and in Dewey and Piaget we find the view that what is learnt through
certain experiences cannot or should not be predetermined (Imai 2003: 117,
120). In kindergarten education there develops a model in which mimesis,