The student-curated exhibition - A new approach to getting in touch with science

Abstract

Exhibitions provide a great variety of opportunities for shedding light on a scientific topic. By visiting an exhibition, and even more so by curating an exhibition, students gain great insights into scientific topics. Developing an exhibition offers students multiple ways of engaging with a topic, and presents a multifaceted learning environment, in which skills believed to be highly relevant for individuals’ development into active, well-educated citizens can be developed. These skills support individuals in their private and working life, as well as enabling them to participate in a global society – with some of them (such as project management) being rarely addressed at school at all. To empower teachers to unfold this potential and create professional-like exhibitions within the tight time and budget frame of today’s school life, a simple exhibition framework (EXPOneer) is presented in this article. Its design will be used in the EU-funded project IRRESISTIBLE. Using IKEA shelves, the system allows students to build their own professional-like exhibitions at school based on available knowledge and everyday resources, without distinctive craftsmanship or special tools. The incorporation of student-curated exhibitions (SCEs) into school practice will also be discussed, based on examples of current exhibition projects. After briefly sketching the theoretical background in the first part of this article, the second part aims to enable teachers, as well as other people working with students, to start their own professional-like exhibition project.