TP
Mirrors, Windows and
Treasures on Excursions
Two learning activities can enliven a museum excursion and inspire students to explore
exhibitions as gateways to history.
Lucy Honan
St Albans Secondary College
One of the most dispiriting sights I know is a pile
of teenagers slumped on the floor at the exit of an
institution, scrolling through phones to google answers
for crumpled worksheets, exhausted by the ten minutes
they spent gliding past objects.
I know the stink of mutual resentment that passes
between that heap of students who had actually been
looking forward to the day out, and the teacher who
has wrangled for weeks—chasing up notes, making sure
the government’s Camps, Sports and Excursion Fund
payments have come through, arguing with admin
over dates, begging for discounts, and horse-trading
with daily organisers for staffing to make the excursion
happen—only for it to culminate in a sullen, ‘Is it time for
Melbourne Central yet, Miss?’
This spectre of excursion disappointment set me on
the hunt for learning activity designs that energise and
engage students. I chose to focus on the free exhibitions
at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) because art
galleries and museums can give us a dynamic and
unexpected sense of history. Fragments and stuff of
the past can be windows into societies, reminding us of
our own historicity and jolting us into thinking through
what social organisation produced such things, and
why. Artists can also be self-consciously subjective, and
in doing so help us understand historiography—the
deliberate construction of history.
But the reverse can also be true. Museums and galleries
can reify extraordinary social movements into bits of
leftover propaganda, reduce complicated cultures into
costumes, and give the impression that cooking pots
were the only social product of entire dynasties. Things,
rather than people and their stories and struggles,
can dominate. When I see my students slide their eyes
across the glass cabinets, or swing floppy-bodied from
a cushioned seat, or fiddle absently with the buttons at
the interactive station, I sense that they feel like another
object in a room of objects.
Lucy Honan, ‘Mirrors, Windows and Treasures on Excursions,’ Agora 55:2 (2020), 38–40
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But seeing the moments of connection and of awe and
fascination are instructive. How can I make sure more
students return, spellbound, to reflect on an image or
object, or to read, unprompted, the labels of an exhibit,
hungry for more context? I’ve devised two learning
activities to apprentice students in the art of actively
exploring museums as gateways to history.
Constructivist Approach:
Mirrors and Windows
I put a premium on creating meaning, so my first
instinct is to plan excursions on a constructivist basis.
Constructivist educators theorise that learners actively
create their own meaning through experiences.
Constructivist History teachers will use students’
social backgrounds and interests as a starting point to
investigate history that is outside their experience. We
will try to create opportunities for students to critically
and actively interact with the historical knowledge our
society has accumulated.
With this theoretical framework in mind, I took a group of
Year 10 Rights and Freedom History students to the NGV’s
‘Colony: Frontier Wars’ exhibition last year. We were
investigating the history of anti-colonial movements in
both Australia and the many countries from which my
students have migrated, including Vietnam, Samoa and
India.
I asked students to find an artwork that for them was a
'mirror' that helped them to reflect on their own history
or their understanding of anti-colonial struggle. They
also had to find an artwork that was a 'window' revealing
something about a worldview or historical experience of
which they knew little or nothing.
This very multicultural group of students found much
to connect with. Two Sudanese students gazed for a long
time at 'If I Was White' by Vernon Ah Kee. The text-based
work speaks to racism, and the division between black
and white people. I watched as one student photographed
55:2 (2020) agora

a panel: ‘If I was white I would have nothing
to fear from police.’ He had told me that he
was reluctant to come on the excursion into
the city because he has been targeted so
often on public transport and in the city. I
was glad that at the very least his experience
was affirmed in this gallery.
Other students connected with artworks
that reflected on a complicated relationship
between religion and colonisation. Some
very religious students stopped by Julie
Dowling’s ‘Goodbye White Fella Religion,’
a confronting piece alluding to Christian
missionaries outlawing customary practices
and rituals. Later, when we shared our
reflections in class, one of these students
led a discussion about the way religion has
been used as both a vehicle and an obstacle
to anti-racist resistance in history. We
discussed Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King Junior, but also the repressive role of
churches, as depicted in Dowling’s artwork.
She wondered about how religion could play
such contradictory roles.
Rich as these reflections were, the drawback
of my student-led activity was that it didn’t
agora 55:2 (2020)
TP
Reliquary Casket, France,
Limoges, c 1200. The
National Gallery of
Victoria is a treasure chest
of medieval European
artefacts, but Year 8
students can require some
convincing of their value.
National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1936.
This image has been made
available on NGV Collection
Online through the generous
support of Digitisation Champion
Ms Carol Grigor through Metal
Manufactures Limited.
scaffold students into interpreting artefacts
or artworks that are outside their immediate
comprehension. Tellingly, all the students
had a difficulty finding ‘windows,’ or they
reported that they also saw windows in the
artworks that were mirrors.
By taking more time looking at the
breastplates given by European colonisers
to Aboriginal people they perceived to
be faithful servants, I wanted students to
consider equivalent processes of co-option
in other places we had studied. I had also
hoped they would think critically about the
curator’s decision to describe the artists
of some works as ‘Once Known’ instead of
‘Unknown.’ I wanted them to investigate
further the hanging of Tannerminnerwait
and Maulbouyheener.
Although I did some impromptu gallery
guide talking, questioning and group
interpretation to try to build a bridge for
students to see the insights these artworks
could provide, I realised that the stepping-
stone activity, from teacher-led discussion
to student-led investigation, was missing.
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 TP
Behaviourist Approach:
The Medieval Treasure Hunt
The NGV is a treasure chest of medieval
European artefacts, but Year 8 students
can require some convincing of their value
because it takes patience and a curious,
investigative disposition to decode the
symbols. A close analysis of the works can
give students a rich sense of the beliefs,
rituals and social tensions in medieval
societies, but how do we encourage students
to look closely, to read labels, and to observe
with quiet concentration?
At our school, across 2 weeks at the end of
Term 2, ten Year 8 classes were booked in
to march through the NGV’s exhibition of
medieval Christian art of the fourteenth
to sixteenth centuries. Awkward school
policies meant that we had to take the
students right at the end of the Medieval
unit, so it was not possible to build the
excursion into a bigger inquiry assignment.
In the lead-up, my fear of ten piles of
disinterested students, slumped or, worse
still, wreaking havoc, escalated. I could not
see the source analysis worksheets that I was
drafting engaging anyone.
At the eleventh hour, I changed tack. I
decided to work with the mysterious sense
of codedness that shrouds the gallery to
create a treasure hunt. Rather than sliding
past ‘too many words’ written on artwork
labels, students had to investigate the labels
as sources that were secreted with clues.
For the treasure hunt, each student worked
in a team of four or five to find information
in the gallery that would help them crack the
code I handed out. To succeed, they needed
to read labels and think about the curation of
the objects, look closely at the composition of
pieces, and immerse themselves in the rituals
and beliefs of medieval Christians.
The treasure hunt successfully absorbed
almost every student for a little over an hour.
I observed students scouring the gallery for
details and pointing them out to each other.
There was excellent collaboration and focus.
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The security guards commented on how
engaged and disciplined the students seemed!
After students had cracked the codes, we
had brief class discussions about medieval
beliefs, and about evidence of class divisions
that we could observe in the artefacts.
Teachers raised questions about the themes
of violence, death and sacrifice, and students
hypothesised about why these featured so
heavily in the artworks of these societies.
The truth is, the treasure hunt was not
devised to elicit critical or creative source
analysis responses. Stripped back from the
playful design, it is an elaborate fill-in-the
blanks worksheet, with closed questions and
a carrot for compliance—we gave chocolate
to all teams that cracked the code.
In this way, it was almost the exact opposite
of the constructivist-style ‘mirror and
window’ activity I’d used previously.
Behaviourist educators rely on positive
and negative reinforcement to shape the
desired behaviour in students, and are less
concerned with how students are making
meaning from the cultural knowledge.
What was gained in this behaviourist
approach was structured collaboration,
deeper immersion in the historical
ephemera, close reading of sources and
labels, and active decoding of the foreign
signs and symbols of the past. What was lost
were the more profound connections—the
moments of revelation and soul-searching I
had observed with Year 10 students.
Both of these approaches let students
understand that galleries and museums
are hunting grounds for meaning and
history that can be actively explored. They
encourage students to adopt a disposition
of openness and inquiry so that they can
engage with some of the incredible sources
available for History students in our public
institutions.
You can download the activities described
here from http://www.htav.asn.au/agora
55:2 (2020) agora
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