Oglethorpe Hosts Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies Graduate Students

Johns Hopkins graduate students hear from OUMA Director Elizabeth Peterson and Collections Manager John Tilford.

Johns Hopkins graduate students convened in the OU Museum of Art to hear from Director Elizabeth Peterson and Collections Manager John Tilford about objects in the museum’s permanent collection.

IMG_8305For two weeks in June, Oglethorpe hosted a group of Museum Studies graduate students from Johns Hopkins University. Led by Oglethorpe professor Dr. Jeffrey Collins, the students were in Atlanta to complete an intensive seminar, “Some-things: Objects as Social, Spiritual, and Historical Constructs,” as part of their final graduate program requirements.

Dr. Collins has been assisting JHU in building their museum studies program and expects that partnership to be beneficial in developing a potential undergraduate museum studies concentration at Oglethorpe.

Each day, the group toured a different museum in the Atlanta metro area selected by Dr. Collins, including the High Museum, Atlanta History Center, Fernbank Museum of Natural History, Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory, and the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art. At each location, they went “behind-the-scenes” and met with the museum officials and developed creative projects in museum management and displays. During the two-week seminar, Dr. Collins was able to sync the JHU grad students’ activities with his Oglethorpe Art and Culture summer course, so the OU students could learn from the graduate students and accompany them to some of the museums.

The group visits Fernbank Museum.

The group visits the Fernbank Museum.

During the seminar, students examined objects and artifacts in an attempt to “see” them through the lens of the “five I’s” for museum visitors: interdisciplinary, interactive, immersive, investigative, and interpretive. They explored how to construct exhibits with an interdisciplinary format; how to construct an arrangement of objects to make them more interactive for public engagement; how to build an immersive environment to enable visitors to feel, hear, and experience what once surrounded the objects; how to allow visitors to museums to investigate on their own any object observed; and finally, how to allow visitors to interpret first with their own ideas, questions and hypotheses before hearing a lecturer, seeing a tag, or listening to an audio talk.

Carlos Museum_African exhibit

The Carlos Museum at Emory was just one of the 10 metro Atlanta museums selected by Dr. Collins for the students to visit. Curator Amanda Hellman, who has taught as an adjunct at OU, led the group through the newly redesigned African galleries.

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