David Bell

Many cultural institutions invite visitors to interact somatically with artefacts or displays, in hands-on games and activities, listening to soundtracks, responding to olfactory phenomena. Handling collection objects increasingly supplements, or replaces, floor talk or worksheet approaches. Exploring 'discovery worlds', tropical forests, or Egyptian temples, or assuming the roles of forensic archeologists or curators, learners can see, smell, taste, touch, wear, or hear properties of objects, or enjoy kinetic spatio-temporal experiences in multi-sensory environments. These explorations can embrace learner knowledge, provoking curiosities, igniting discussions, inviting inferential responses. The pleasure of engaging with objects in these ways can be especially intense when learners are investigating aesthetic phenomena. Drawing on extended research and case study analyses of education practices in cultural institutions, this chapter focuses on how visitors experience the sensory worlds of two culturally rich constructs: Japanese-style gardens in Canadian settings. It examines how multisensory and aesthetic experiences can mediate first-hand learning with culturally significant phenomena. It argues that this learning has important implications for enhancing aesthetic and intercultural learning, and for how visitors might value these phenomena. It argues further that “aesthetic engagements constitute special instances of interactive learning” that invigorate learning dispositions (Bell, 2011, p. 42) and enhance rich learning power (Claxton, 2005), planting the seeds of interests that can persist through a lifetime of holistic sensory engagements in museums.

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) in Wellington is New Zealand's national museum. In recent years its diverse educational programs have been re-invigorated with the introduction of new learning experiences for visiting school groups. This article describes a qualitative, formative research evaluation of the activities of Te Papa's innovative Hinatore Learning Laboratory digital facility initiated at from 2107. Researchers from the University of Otago conducted an abductive inferential evaluation of participant experiences in the Museum and its digital learning setting. Gathering data from visit observations, questionnaires, and interviews, and analyzing this against Museum priority learning competencies of collaboration, communication and cultural engagement, they confirmed innovative practices and positive learning experiences, but also tensions between the excitements of digital engagement and the agendas of class curriculum and thematic inquiry. Two school classes were observed, working in existing Museum natural history or art display areas, then extending their thematic learning using 3D imaging, augmented reality, virtual reality and digital animation media. Researchers found that, situated against the conventional applications of digitally enhanced museum experiences, Hinatore learning 'challenges' broke new ground in the synthesis of digital technologies into museum-based learning, in ways that complemented existing school access to digital technologies, or informed aspirational strategies for future adoptions. Tracking Hinatore activities a year later, researchers found the commitment of Museum educators to reflexive practice and innovative problem solving had generated engaging and satisfying ways of melding display experience, content learning, and ways of using the digital toolbox as a transferable, sustainable, and classroom-friendly learning medium.

This ethnographic study describes how an in-depth preschool learning pathway developed around children's investigations into a contemporary artist. It found that learning with Yayoi Kusama's art favoured habits of exploration, reflection, revisitation and development of ideas, and enriched children's visual awareness, inclusive art-learning conversations and their learning in mathematics, literacy and visual art. It argues that sustained learning pathways, scaffolded media investigations, first-hand engagements with real artworks and well-informed teachers can enhance curiosities, independent inventive dispositions and confident art experiences in the early years.

This article discusses how museum settings can provide opportunities for sensory and aesthetic encounters and learning. It draws on research into museum education programmes that included examinations of curatorial construction and display, observations of teaching and open-ended interviews with museum educators. The examples selected here focus on themes of display and learning to illustrate how aesthetic experiences can emerge as incidental adjuncts to learning in other fields. They also acknowledge how museums draw on aesthetic judgements to categorise or present objects and employ aesthetic artefacts and practices as representative devices of cultural engagement, especially in learning themes in the humanities. The studies show how museums can offer opportunities and skills, and cultivate dispositions to the examination of challenging ideas about aesthetic status, sensibility, interpretation or value. Examples of purposefully constructed sites for aesthetic learning show how museum educators have rethought ways of facilitating affective sensory experiences, and raising questions of aesthetic status, response and the social and cultural functions of the arts. The studies discussed here suggest that museums can provide dedicated opportunities to cultivate independent aesthetic thinking and debate about aesthetic ideas as lifelong skills and pleasures.

This article addresses the activation of aesthetics through the examination of an acute sensitivity to melancholy and time permeating the literary and pictorial arts of Japan. In medieval court circles, this sensitivity was activated through a pervasive sense of aware , a poignant reflection on the pathos of things. This sensibility became the motivating force for court verse, and through this medium, for the mature projects of the ukiyo-e 'floating world picture' artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai reached back to aware sensibilities, subjects and conventions in celebrations of the poetic that sustained cultural memories resonating classical lyric and pastoral themes. This paper examines how this elegiac sensibility activated Hokusai's preoccupations with poetic allusion in his late representations of scholar-poets and the unfinished series of Hyakunin isshu uba-ga etoki , 'One hundred poems, by one hundred poets, explained by the nurse'. It examines four works to explain how their synthesis of the visual and poetic could sustain aware themes and tropes over time to maintain a distinctive sense of this aesthetic sensibility in Japan.

This article establishes a rationale for learning about art in early childhood settings through rich conversational engagements with artworks that can inform lifelong dispositions and skills. It presents one exemplary conversational learning sequence provoked by a child's own interests in a real early childhood setting. It suggests seven different questions as 'windows' on artworks that can encourage different kinds of rich talking, feeling and thinking about the art objects that attract childrens' attention.

The term ukiyo-e refers to a distinctive phenomenon in Japanese art. Ukiyo-e can be defined temporally, geographically and socially; most importantly, it developed its own distinctive stylistic character. Most studies of ukiyo-e have been founded on a descriptive mode: they have sought to define its principal characteristics, and to describe the different projects of its various schools and artists. Recent research has shifted into a more explanatory mode, locating explanations of ukiyo-e's distinctive pictorial character in descriptions of the socio-cultural context to which it pertained. This project seeks to establish richer explanations for the pictorial character of ukiyo-e. It argues that appropriate explanations may be found through a critical appraisal of the conditions which constrained and stimulated the enterprises of ukiyo-e artists. It finds these conditions to be manifest in the conceptual foundations that informed its artists; in the ways artists learned the knowledge and skills of their craft; in the sorts of function ukiyo-e pictures were required to perform; and in two conditions of the artists' medium: pictorial devices or conventions and the spatial constraints of their media, and the material conditions with which they worked. No matter how closely works of ukiyo-e artists conformed to a pictorial character common to the school as a whole, each individual also followed an independent pathway. The final chapter acknowledges the ways individual artsists were disposed to work differently within the auspices of the broader enterprise.