Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education

The use of museum collections as a path to learning for university students is fast becoming a new pedagogy for higher education. Despite a strong tradition of using lectures as a way of delivering the curriculum, the positive benefits of ’active’ and ’experiential learning’ are being recognised in universities at both a strategic level and in daily teaching practice. As museum artefacts, specimens and art works are used to evoke, provoke, and challenge students’ engagement with their subject, so transformational learning can take place. This unique book presents the first comprehensive exploration of ’object-based learning’ as a pedagogy for higher education in a broad context. An international group of authors offer a spectrum of approaches at work in higher education today. They explore contemporary principles and practice of object-based learning in higher education, demonstrating the value of using collections in this context and considering the relationship between academic discipline and object-based learning as a teaching strategy.

Helen J. Chatterjee is a Senior Lecturer in Biology in the School of Life and Medical Sciences and Head of Research and Teaching in UCL Public and Cultural Engagement at University College London, UK. Leonie Hannan is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queen’s University, Belfast. For four years, between 2011 and 2015, she was a Teaching Fellow in Object-Based Learning at University College London, UK.