Expanding Our Vision of Museum Education and Perception: An Analysis of Three Case Studies of Independent Blind Arts Learners

Abstract

In this study, Simon Hayhoe investigates the experiences of blind museum visitors in the context of the relationships between the artworks they learned about in museums, those they experienced when younger, and the social, cultural, and emotional influences of their museum experiences. The three case studies he presents support his hypothesis that, for blind visitors, proximity to works of art is at least as important as perceiving the art itself. This finding questions Gombrich's theory of the economy of vision and Jay's theory of scopics and supports the notion that exclusion from art in this context is more passive than active.

A practice report of students from a school for the blind leading groups of younger mainstream students in visiting a museum and making multi-modal artworks.

“…This article also informs and contextualizes more recent case study research on museum education by visually impaired visitors (Hayhoe, 2012(Hayhoe, , 2013, which establishes that visually impaired visitors and students can learn from non-touchable artworks if they are described in combination with proximity to them; as the symbolic inclusion of a person in a museum can develop cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2010) and self-esteem in the participants, as well as foster an understanding of so-called visual culture.…”

“…For example, in his book Psychology and the Art of the Blind, Révész (1950) These assumptions are so ingrained in the dialect of the education of visually impaired students that the models of study and their accompanying theorization are observable in both museum and school teaching, as well as in literature, in the twenty first century (Hayhoe, 2008a(Hayhoe, , 2013). For example, the philosopher Hopkins (2000) argues that blind people who have no visual memory cannot understand what are considered to be visual concepts such as perspective.…”

The Present and Future of Museum Accessibility for People with Visual Impairments

“…All participants were familiar with navigation apps and eigh teen of them mentioned that an indoor navigation system would be important (M=4.68, SD=0.75) to enable an indepen dent museum experience (e.g., "I would be more motivated to visit museums, if some museums have a navigation app" (P2)). Prior formative studies do not refer to navigation assistance [3,6,7,13], as they focus on the past and current experiences of PVI in museums, which do not support independent naviga tion. However, not being able to find the location of accessible collections and artworks is often referred as an obstacle [6].…”

“…People with visual impairments (PVI) are interested in visiting museums and enjoying visual art [6,7]. In addition, laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act [1] state that museums should be accessible to people with disabilities.…”

The epistemological model of disability, and its role in understanding passive exclusion in eighteenth and nineteenth century Protestant educational asylums in the USA and Britain

“…Given this lack of methodology, the epistemological model of studying disability 4 (shortened to the epistemological model of disability in this and previous investigations) was designed to examine these processes of creating knowledge on impairments. The model first evolved from observations on the effect of philosophical assumptions about impairments (Hayhoe, 2000(Hayhoe, , 2013a(Hayhoe, , 2013b(Hayhoe, , 2014. This model was then extended to provide a link to an ethical conception of disability, by providing a link to Popper's (1966) notion of ethical positivism.…”