ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses three specific ways in which museums enhance K-12 students' understanding of, and engagement with, the past, including: developing historical empathy; promoting a critical and reflective stance toward the past; and connecting the past and the present. Museums offer the potential to support the authentic history pedagogy and more critical and place-based pedagogies that are at the forefront of history education—a distinct change from past practices in history class rooms. Museums are constructed with artifacts, objects, reconstructed structures, and other materials that are interpreted and organized in particular ways and in particular contexts. Given the visual- and narrative-rich exhibits of museums, and the powerful stories they tell, students can be engaged in affective and more analytical forms of historical empathy. The roots of the public museum in the Western world were those of public education and engagement, and a way to maintain cultural reproduction and social order as nations industrialized and diversified in population and economy.