Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee (review)

Successful in its investigation of the mission, history, practice, and future prospects of museum education, Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience speaks beyond the scope intended, addressing the wider audience of aesthetic education in a compelling way. Through the use of rich examples of interactions between groups of museum visitors and works of art in the context of gallery dialogues, the authors present a view of aesthetic education rooted in the philosophy of John Dewey. Yet this text goes further, extending Dewey’s theory through educational application, addressing a vital dimension of aesthetic experience that Dewey does not discuss in Art as Experience:¹ how to engage with others in order to facilitate an experience.

Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee offer a wealth of experience in museum education at distinguished institutions such as the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Frick Collection in New York City, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their collective insights into the history, practice, and theory of museum education offer an invaluable contribution to the field of museum education—a field that typically lacks formal preparation for gallery teaching and whose practitioners come from a wide variety of backgrounds. This text offers a field that is often fragmented a conceptualization of its past and a distinct vision for its future. The chapters can each stand on their own, although reading them together as an extended argument offers a relevant and robust view of aesthetic education.

Despite the fact that education has always been a key part of the mission of most art museums, the history of these endeavors has not previously been recorded. This has left educational practitioners in art museums in the precarious position of continually reinventing without awareness of what has already been tried and proven successful in addition to what has been tried and dismissed along the way. In the second chapter, Kai-Kee addresses this void. In doing so, Kai-Kee discloses the tension that has long existed between various constellations of educational approaches in the art museum ranging from formal educational styles such as lectures in art history and formalism to the less formal realm of discovery and meaning making.

Chapters 3–8 provide an extended argument for a vision of gallery teaching that is simultaneously hermeneutic and experiential. Accordingly, Burnham and Kai-Kee draw on the hermeneutic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer and propose a model that is firmly rooted in Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience. While not advocating a fixed curriculum or systematic methodology, the dialogic model of gallery teaching that the authors articulate aspires to enable visitors to create their own meanings for artworks and provides an environment supportive of what Dewey referred to as an experience.

Burhnam and Kai-Kee make some important distinctions in the fifth chapter that are significant for understanding their vision for gallery teaching. The authors provide detailed descriptions and examples of three different modes of gallery teaching that lay the groundwork for their model of gallery teaching to emerge. In sum, conversation is the most loosely structured of the three modes and is a free-flowing exchange occasioned by works of art with no particular direction or end in mind. In contrast to conversation, discussion has a definite focus and is geared to lead students through the use of questioning to predetermined conclusions. The conception of dialogue that the authors propose is a midway point between conversation and discussion. Dialogue shares the improvisatory quality of conversation but is more tightly focused on artworks. The teacher’s role in dialogue is of crucial importance, as the teacher guides and shapes the exchange, but not toward a predetermined end as is the case with discussion. In dialogue, teacher and participants alike explore a work of art together in a cooperative pursuit of understanding. The teacher offers background knowledge of the work when it will contribute productively to the exchange, but...