Back to the Future?: Emergent Visions for Object‐Based Teaching in and beyond the Classroom

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue of Museum Anthropology devoted to innovative strategies for teaching with objects. Although a century ago anthropology, museums, and objects were intimately entwined, trends in many museology and anthropology courses have drifted toward focusing on ideas and people rather than objects. The contributors to this special issue have cultivated new pedagogical approaches that complement or realign literaturefocused classroom canons that can distance students from the very objects under study. In keeping with recent theoretical approaches to objects that highlight the sensory dimensions of material culture, many of the articles in this special issue examine the challenges and potential rewards when educators foster physical engagement with objects in and beyond the classroom. Taken together, the articles also underscore how object-based teaching can yield new theoretical and practical insights, enhance the social relevance of classroom activities, and facilitate meaningful benefits for local communities. [material culture, praxis, pedagogy, embodied practices, object-based teaching]

Instructing students in history museums: A systematic literature review

“…Combining the framework of 'object-based learning', frequently used in higher education literature in various domains such as anthropology and science teaching from both cognitive and affective viewpoints (e.g. Adams et al, 2008;Adams, 2015;Schultz, 2018), with disciplinary insights about reasoning with and about historical sources and historical empathy would also be a fruitful way forward. Historical objects in museums, for instance through interrogating their provenance or their (emotional) significance in past and present, are particularly suited to mediate students' historical learning (Bain & Ellebogen, 2002).…”

Decolonizing Collections‐Based Learning:Experiential Observation as an Interdisciplinary Framework for Object Study

“…This attention is crucial. As Adams (, 89) reminds us, “the recent ‘material turn’ in anthropology has shown that classrooms and exhibition spaces must engage more rigorously and inventively with the fact that humans interact via material things.” Yet, new materialism threatens to “[reintroduce] the binarism between materiality [more specifically, matter] and culture that much work in science studies [and the social sciences] has helped to challenge. Matter becomes a fetish object” (Ahmed , 35).…”

“…The “materialogical imagination” is a material literacy that is simultaneously critical and creative. Many anthropologists recognize that “the teaching of anthropology is enhanced when it embraces sensorial engagement with materiality” (co‐generative human/thing relationships; Adams , 89). The sentiment should extend to collections‐based teaching across disciplines and collection types.…”

“…Echoing commonly recognized twenty‐first‐century skills in a globalizing world (Association of American Colleges and Universities ) and considering the relevance of anthropology to those skills (Adams ; Bender and Smith ; Kamp ), this pedagogy imparts: Cultural competency (via multiplicity of meaning in past and present), Critical thinking (via evaluation of multiple forms of evidence and connections to present social issues), Communication and collaboration (via consideration and dissemination of multiple standpoints in and outside the classroom), and The application of theory to practice. …”

A Common Thread: Recognizing the Contributions of the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology to Graduate Training with Anthropological Museum Collections

“…If access was the first hurdle SIMA sought to address, methodology, or “what to do when you're there,” was the second. Using objects to teach anthropology has recently received renewed attention, as anthropologists seek to bring object‐based methodologies and analyses into the anthropology classroom (see Adams ). Acquisition of techniques for working with objects relies not only on conceptual tools (Caple ) but also on interactions guided by experts.…”