Object based museum application: You have a message from the past!

Yasemin Er Tuna

African Educational Research Journal
Published: September 25 2023
Volume 11, Issue 3
Pages 513-521
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30918/AERJ.113.23.078

Abstract

One of the most popular places for out-of-school education is undoubtedly museums. In addition to ensuring permanent learning, the lessons, practices, and activities performed in museums provide a rich learning and fun environment, where students can see and examine first-hand evidence. Students can feel like historians or archaeologists here. Museum education provides opportunities for them to connect with and understand the past. Object based learning in museums is a useful method to understand the past and the human communities who lived in the past and to find out about them. Thus, it increases students' understanding and comprehension. This research was conducted to determine how students connected with individuals who did not exist in the past through objects using a message from the past to the future activity in the object based museum education application. The students participating in the research were asked to assume themselves an imaginary person living in the past, to choose an object, and to write the story between this object and themselves as a short message to a future person. A qualitative research method was used in this study, which was conducted with 9th grade students, and the study data were analyzed using the content analysis technique. According to the results of the research, it was concluded that the stories of the people whom the students identified with, the objects they chose, and the message they wrote may have been influenced by their perceptions about traditional male-female roles. The fact that the historical narrative is focused on political history and male heroes may have affected the differences between the messages of male and female students. The identification of participants with individuals from different cultures and societies can be seen as a positive result of object based education. It is one of the results of this research that almost half of these messages written for the future included anachronistic elements.

Keywords: Object based museum education, anachronism, history education.

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