ABSTRACT
When trying to understand and improve a practice, such as learning from objects, it
makes sense to look to practitioners. Historians, scientists, curators, educators, exhibit
developers, and designers are all concerned with the interpretation of objects. Each
belongs to a community that uses objects in its work and each community has developed
a disciplinary “toolkit” filled with established modes of inquiry, evidentiary criteria, and
accepted patterns of analysis to help in their object-related work. The different
perspectives of these communities are reflected in the relative strengths and weaknesses
of their toolkits. A disciplinary toolkit of an educator, for example, may have pedagogical
strengths that contrast with the visual explanation strengths of an exhibit designer.
Considering the ways practitioners situate and use objects in their work, therefore,
prompts us to reconsider ways we might help learners use objects their learning.
