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K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

Alternative discussion formats: Museum exhibit design

Designing museum exhibits encourages students to think creatively and to use a wide range of thinking skills.

By Kathryn Walbert

Handouts for the museum exhibit discussion

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Alternative discussion formats
Class discussions often take one of two forms — either question-and-answer sessions, in which the teacher throws out questions and students answer them, or debates. Both of these formats are useful, but adding a few more ideas to your teaching repertoire can make for more variety in the classroom and provide more opportunities for engaging discussions. This edition explains how to manage dicussions in the form of a public relations campaign, a trial, a talk show, or the design of monuments, memorials, and museum exhibits.
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Museum exhibits are usually designed to educate and inform the public about the subject of the exhibit in a balanced and usually unbiased way. Similar to the monument activity above, students could work in groups to develop an informative museum exhibit about the topic at hand. Groups could all work on the same exhibit, developing different strategies for exhibits about, for example, the nineteenth amendment or Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, or each group could work on a separate part of a larger exhibit. For example, if the class were studying turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, one group might be responsible for technology during that period, another group for politics, another for industrialization, another for immigration, and so on.

Designing the exhibit

As they develop their ideas for museum exhibits, groups could consider:

  1. What are the most important aspects of this time period or topic? What major themes should we try to convey with this exhibit?
  2. What do we want people to walk away from this exhibit understanding? How do you want people to interact with your exhibit? Should they just walk through? Look? Pick up objects? Listen to recordings of voice or music? Participate in some other way?
  3. Will this exhibit be controversial in any way? How will you present a balanced view if the subject is controversial?
  4. What artifacts, images, and interactive features would help us convey those ideas?

Groups could sketch out their plan, and then come together to share their findings.

Wrap-up and extensions

The class could then brainstorm the full exhibit together, based on the ideas developed in groups. In a summary discussion, students could determine what key themes they believe are most important for the museum-going public to understand about the subject of their exhibit, and which strategies seem most effective for presenting that information to visitors.

For a project that lasts longer than an in-class discussion, students could actually do further research and develop their exhibits, complete with replica artifacts, visual aids, and text for visitors. The museum exhibit could also incorporate artwork, performance, documentary film, or educational websites if the students were inclined toward artistic or technologically-oriented projects. These options would also allow for collaboration between history or literature teachers and art, music, or information technology teachers as well. Guests to their museum could include parents, other classes, or invited guests such as the curator of a local museum who could give them feedback!