Museums engage viewers of all ages, but it takes intentional planning to create a quality experience. Within the educational realm, you can think of a museum as the curriculum. This assignment establishes a working framework for this course-long project based on inquiry and problem solving. Museums are made up of exhibits. You can equate the Museum Exhibit with an instructional unit and the Displays that make up the exhibit, with lesson plans.
In this assignment, you will be dealing with selecting a museum exhibit/unit of study and designing a preliminary plan for incorporating the required new literacies into a display/lesson for Modules 2, 3, and 4. In subsequent modules, you will be providing detail on the displays/lessons for your museum exhibit/unit. Keep in mind, as you select your museum exhibit/unit, that you will want a theme that can incorporate all the new literacies, as well as a multidisciplinary lesson. Your theme should be a broad one that will allow you to incorporate visual and digital literacies, scientific and economic literacies and several content areas in the three displays/lessons that will comprise the museum exhibit/unit.
Directions:
The first step in this assignment is an important planning piece! Download the Museum Component Guide. This is going to provide you with a description of the final end product of the course, the final museum exhibit/unit with its displays/lessons. The guide will allow for Backwards Design for planning your museum exhibit. Study it carefully.
Create a Word or text document for your response. Use 12-point Arial or Times New Roman font.
Use APA format for the title page, references page, and in-text citations. NOTE: Follow this direction unless your professor specifies how the title page is to be formatted.
Follow these steps to establish the framework for your museum:
Step 1. Download the Museum Exhibit Planning Template. It is the preliminary planning guide for the three displays/lessons that you will be creating during the course. You can consider that this planning template is a draft for your displays/lessons. As your understanding of the course contents expands, you will likely modify your displays/lessons in the upcoming weeks.
Step 2. There are planning areas for the Module 2, 3 and 4 displays/lessons within the Museum Exhibit Planning Template. For the museum exhibit/unit, you will select a theme. That information goes in the Theme box in the chart. The theme is the unifying element that ties every lesson together! Entitle each module, indicate intended grade level and include the standards that will be addressed within the display/lesson for that module. Put in the simple and complex content concepts that will be incorporated into the display/lesson and its Essential Questions. Next, describe the activity that initiates the lesson and which new literacy(ies) are incorporated. How you will engage the learners? Then, describe the activity/ies that students will do to learn about the concept(s) being taught and indicate which new literacies are involved. Finally, describe the activity/ies that will allow for further exploration of the content through such things as research and projects, etc. If any new literacies are used, indicate them. You will find that the chart expands as you type. In addition, there are three other important planning elements below the chart. For the assignment, plans for all three modules should be completed and submitted.
Caution: Pre-design requires more thinking than performing. This pre-design process will be your preliminary plan for your museum exhibit/unit. Each display/lesson must include the literacies required by that module, but you certainly can add in additional literacies. For example, Module 2 requires visual and digital literacy. In your Museum Exhibit Planning Template for Module 3, you would have scientific and economic literacies, but you could also add in digital literacy, for example.
Step 3. Create a Word document. Following a title page, include an Introduction in which you identify and describe your theme for the exhibit/unit and why you chose it. Also include other pertinent discussion, relating concepts from the module to your display/lesson. Go to the Museum Exhibit Planning Template, copy, paste and insert it after the Introduction. The template should be double-spaced. A reference page should be at the end.
One of the attached documents in PDF is a sample of how the assignment should look