Re-Imagining Museums from the Screen: The Challenges and Opportunities of Pandemic Learning

Dalia Habib Linssen and Martina Tanga

Art museums are at a point of inflection under pressures from the global pandemic, economic crisis, and renewed calls for social justice. Examining the unique challenges and opportunities museums face, we taught the undergraduate seminar, “Museum Practice Today,” fully remotely in spring 2021. As we invited students to reimagine our cultural organizations to function better and serve more widely, we also re-design the content and communications to be delivered only through online platforms. Remote teaching challenged us to modify our methodologies and take advantage of the evolving virtual world. 

Two assignments exemplify how students capitalized on remote learning. In a critical analysis of museum architecture as a typology of space through “armchair travel,” remote learning offered an unprecedented opportunity for students to visit museums across the globe and consider how architecture creates frameworks for inhabiting, perceiving, and shaping knowledge. Likewise, as museums turned to digital engagement with audiences, another assignment centered on this expanding field as a site of critical inquiry. By researching and attending online programs, students evaluated how museums engaged with audiences remotely through an IDEA perspective and in alignment with institutional missions. The course’s goal was to prepare students for the museum field and equip them to reimagine our cultural institutions of tomorrow. As such, it was paramount that it remains responsive to our present both theoretically and practically while allowing flexibility for students to conceptualize museums of the future. Remote learning forced us to critically examine learning practices we would have otherwise taken for granted, invent pedagogical alternatives, and foster a hyper-awareness of our teaching methods that, ultimately, made us better teachers. This paper explores this unusual semester and evaluates the pedagogical approaches we will take with us and those we will leave behind as we re-integrate in-person learning and physical experiences together.

Published in Cempellin, Leda, and Pat Crawford, eds. 2024. Museum Studies for a Post-Pandemic World : Mentoring, Collaborations, and Interactive Knowledge Transfer in Times of Transformation. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003393191.