Providing inquiry-based learning experiences: how?
Find this session's presentations here.
Learning is an active process; gaining any knowledge by yourself is favourable. This fits museums / sciences centres, too. Inquiry-based learning provides our organisations with a didactic approach that activates, motivates and enhances learning. This approach can stimulate scientific literacy and promote respect and love for living things and nature.
Inquiry-based learning starts with wonderment and curiosity, something that museums / sciences centres provide with abundance. But then how do you let visitors do their own investigation? Following the entire inquiry cycle takes time and a great deal of guidance, which are often in short supply during a visit. So in which way can museums / sciences centres provide a real inquiry-based learning experience? In this workshop, we show different ways of working in an inquiry-based manner: within exhibitions, during educational activities and outside our walls.
As a participant, you will be able to choose three of five possible mini-workshops, in which you are invited to bring your own ideas and experience and reflect with others.
Facilitator
Executive & Education Officer
Session speakers
Content developer and educator
We museum professionals have to be practical. Large groups of students go through our exhibition halls every day. They need structure: know what to do, when to do it and how to do it. How does this fact of life fit in with inquiry-based learning, where you build on the ideas of students and guide them towards finding answers themselves? Guided tours are no longer provided for school groups at Naturalis. Students work independently in the halls, with minimal guidance and maximum freedom. We faced the challenge to incorporate elements of inquiry-based learning in that set-up. You will experience what concepts we have come up with as an answer to that challenge.
Senior Project Manager Education
In 2015, NEMO Science Museum redesigned the first floor aiming at offering a more coherent story about science. Now, different aspects of science are addressed, including the way scientists work. ‘Conduct Research as a Scientist’ consists of two exhibits that fosters inquiry-based learning. A demonstration-like exhibit (falling balls) and a more open-ended exhibit (cylinders rolling down an incline plane). During our workshop-activity we will explore together how exhibit design choices and visitor learning experiences are related, in the light of inquiry-based learning.
Project Leader XperiBIRD.be
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
(Presentation in team with Pierre Coulon)
Operational Director Public Program
For 8 years, the Museum of natural Sciences runs a spectacular science truck, XperiLAB.be, through whole Belgium. The truck hosts 9 mini-labs aiming at experiencing the scientific method thanks to hands-on displays. A recent grant from Google.org allowed us to add the XperiBIRD.be project. A custom-designed “birdbox-camera” kit is distributed to schools. So pupils observe bird nesting behavior AND collect data in a scientific way. This engages pupils, with the help of RBINS professional scientists, to participate in a real science project, with all its excitement and uncertainties.
Director, The Tinkering Studio
San Francisco
United States
Making space for inquiry on the museum floor has been the focus of the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio since 2007; involving collaborations with artists, scientists and educators deeply committed to learning through direct experience and “thinking with your hands.” Making and tinkering can be exciting and invigorating for learners and facilitators alike, but it can also feel overwhelming or intimidating for some. We’ll share a few case studies – try activities, discuss design principles and strategies as well as highlight dimensions of learning associated with this approach. All of this will help us address the question, “making and tinkering look like fun, but what are people learning”?
