Immersion in well-designed outdoor environments can foster the habits of mind that enable critical and authentic scientific questions to take root in students' minds. Here we share two design cases in which careful, collaborative, and intentional design of outdoor learning environments for informal inquiry provide people of all ages with embodied opportunities to learn about the natural world, developing the capacity for understanding ecology and the ability to empathize, problem-solve, and reflect. Embodied learning, as facilitated by and in well-designed outdoor learning environments, leads
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katherine GillJocelyn GlazierBetsy Towns
This article transcribes remarks given by Willard L. Boyd at the Visitor Studies Association Annual Conference in Orlando on August 3, 2001. Boyd discusses the complexities and challenges of museums as centers of public learning based on his experience as the director of the Field Museum in Chicago.
This paper is part of a the presentation that Hermann Schafer, Director General of the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and Hands-Joachim Klein, of University of Karlsruhe, gave at the Visitor Studies Conference in St. Louis. The researchers present the idea of making comparisons and appraisals of other exhibitions which have similarities to the exhibit which is being planned, as a systemic approach of evaluation which is supplemental to current procedures, known as "ACE"--Analogous Comparative Evaluation.
In this paper, evaluator Marilyn G. Hood of Hood Associates examines 70 years of audience research and what we know about frequent visitors versus occasional visitors. Hood recommends broadening evaluators' perspective of visitor research to include literature from the fields of sociology, leisure science, consumer behavior, and psychology.
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Marilyn Hood
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This paper presents a transcript from a panel discussion at a VSA program gathered to explore issues of concern related to the life of the "in-house evaluator." Three panelists, experience in-house evaluators, discuss their personal solutions to these issues and contradictions raised by this unique position, in the hope of helping professionals new to the task.