Conceptions about the educational role of the museum between curators and museum educators

Since the middle of the previous century, the appearance of the ‘new museology’ has started to strengthen the educational role of the museum. Once marginal museum activity has become one of the central functions of the museum. New profiles of the museum workers appeared, among others the profile of the museum educator which has reached the status of an independent museum profession also in Slovenia. In the master’s thesis, I study how the curators and the museum educators understand education in the museum. These are two different types of museum experts who are – each in a way – involved in the educational mission of the museums. However, the dividing line between them and their work is pretty unclear in practice. Planning and the performance of educational activities in museums are problematic from several perspectives. Curators, the caretakers of museum collections, form the cognisance and the knowledge, which is later passed to the visitors of the exhibitions, directly already in the phases of keeping records, assembling, classification and systematization of the museum materials. In the first place, the curator is dedicated to studying artifacts and collections. On the other hand, the museum educator takes care of the most intensive bringing together the museum artifacts and the visitors and bridges the discipline and the needs of various groups of visitors. The subject of this research is what personal conceptions and beliefs of ones and the others there are behind these operations. By means of in-depth interviews with curators and museum educators, I tried to gain insight into their conceptions of the educational role of the museum. The master’s thesis contributes to the development of the museum pedagogics in the Slovenian space, as there has been no research so far which would discuss the educational role of the museums through the perspective of the employees in the museum. Qualitative research has shown who and in what way is involved in the process of forming and passing the knowledge in the museums, what are the relationships between museum workers as the essential actors and how the latter influence educational activity of individual museums.