For two weeks in June, Oglethorpe hosted a group of Museum Studies graduate students from . 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 . At each location, they went “behind-the-scenes” and met聽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.
During the seminar, students聽examined objects and artifacts in an attempt to 鈥渟ee鈥� them through the lens of the “five I’s” for museum visitors: interdisciplinary, interactive, immersive, investigative, and interpretive. They explored聽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.
