ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rich stew of current thinking about exhibition as an educational medium from three perspectives: museum history; the well-established but still-evolving field of museum education; and the relatively new area of visitor studies. It explores three examples: educator and scholar Lisa Roberts's focus on interpretation as narrative; George Hein's approach to constructivist educational theory; and John Falk and Lynn Dierking's work in visitor studies. Lisa Roberts, who trained as a museum educator and became a museum director, analyzes challenges to the nineteenth-century canon in From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum. The chapter focuses on the presumption that exhibitions should display a body of expert knowledge acquired through scholarly research and transmitted intact to all visitors through the curator's selection of objects and text, with some limited assistance from a designer. The new focus on individual interpretation converged with changing notions of authenticity, of what constitutes the 'real', and thus of what exhibitions are about.
