Investigation of Guided School Visits: Focus on Professional Museum Educators’ Perspectives, Practices and Roles

Abstract

This case study examines six professional educators’ perspectives towards learning in museums during a school visit. Museum educators are understood as the mediators of both individual and institutional knowledge. Therefore, further implications of their approaches used are investigated. This study focuses on researching educators’ pedagogical practices as well as how they perceive learning and how they structure their visits. In addition, it explores educators’ perspectives towards their role and functions. Finally, the profession of museum educators is discussed. Semi-structured interviews were held with six museum educators from different museum settings. Findings in this study suggest that museum educators employed conversation and questions to identified prior knowledge and interest. However, even though prior knowledge and interest consider to be im-portant factors for learning they do not lead always the visit but educators focus on content based knowledge. Furthermore, data demonstrated that there is no professional training for museum edu-cators.