Class museum visit

The Denison Museum presents exhibitions and creates tailored class experiences that enhance student learning across the disciplines. Museum staff work closely with faculty members to understand their needs, generate ideas for collaboration, and create unique activities designed to promote specific learning goals. Activities range from casual visits designed to introduce students and faculty to the resources and possibilities offered by the Museum, to collaboratively curated exhibitions and rigorous lesson plans that integrate object-based learning into the core curriculum of a course.

Over one hundred classes engage with the Museum’s collections and exhibitions each year. Regular users include faculty members from the departments of Anthropology & Sociology, Art History & Visual Culture, Data Analytics, Education, Geosciences, Global Health, History, Journalism, Modern Languages, Women’s & Gender Studies, and Studio Art.

Object-Based Learning

Object-based learning (OBL) is an experiential pedagogy that focuses on close, tactile interaction with physical materials (including works of art, cultural artifacts, documents, specimens, etc.) and sensory experiences. As an approach to learning “about, with, and through objects,”1 OBL promotes intellectual discourse and exploration. It prompts inquiry into complex socio-political or scientific issues; it helps cultivate valuable skills in visual literacy, critical thinking, teamwork, and written and oral communication.

Faculty members do not need previous knowledge of or experience with OBL to connect with the Museum. Each visit or series of visits is developed specifically to meet the needs of the instructor and their course. Whether students are responding to exhibitions or interpreting items in the Museum’s collection, the experience places them in conversation with objects, prompting learning through discussion, labs, textual analysis, and guided research.

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