Perspectives on Cultural Context: The Use of an Online Participatory Learning Environment as an Expansion of the Museum Visit (open access)

Perspectives on Cultural Context: The Use of an Online Participatory Learning Environment as an Expansion of the Museum Visit

Technology offers opportunities for museums to expand the ways in which cultural perspectives relevant to objects on display can be exchanged and understood. Multimedia content offered online in an environment with user input capabilities can encourage dialogue and enrich visitor experiences of museums. This action research project using narrative analysis was an effort to develop the use of web technology in museum education practice, with an emphasis on constructivist learning. Concepts including the visitor-centered museum and multiple narratives led the researcher to collaborate with a pre-service art teacher education classroom and a local Hindu community to create content that might better develop understandings of one museum's Hindu sculpture collection that are personal, cultural, and complex.
Date: August 2010
Creator: Sreenan, Patrick N.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Mythic Archaeologies: The Impact of Visual Culture on the Art and Identity of Four Hopi Artists (open access)

Mythic Archaeologies: The Impact of Visual Culture on the Art and Identity of Four Hopi Artists

This qualitative critical ethnography examines how visual culture impacted the identity and art of four Hopi artists. Sources of data included a personal journal, artists’ interviews, group discussion, art work interpretations, and historical research of Hopi art, visual culture, and issues of native identity. In particular, my analysis focused on issues of power / knowledge relationships, identity construction, and the artist as co-constructor of culture through personal narratives. Implications for art education centered on the concept of storytelling through mythic archaeology situated in identities of past, present, and future.
Date: August 2011
Creator: Santos, Lori J.
System: The UNT Digital Library