Editors: Karen Brown (University of St Andrews); Alissandra Cummins (Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society); Patoo Cusripituck (Mahidol University); and Sarina Wakefield (University of Leicester)

Contact:

Karen Brown: keb23@st-andrews.ac.uk

Alissandra Cummins: alissandra.cummins@gmail.com

Patoo Cusripituck: patoo.cus@mahidol.ac.th

Sarina Wakefield: Sarina.wakefield@leicester.ac.uk

The need for museum studies training is burgeoning worldwide, with over 250 courses now in existence and new museological courses emerging, particularly in regions experiencing museum growth, e.g., the Gulf States, China, and more. This growth has challenged the dominance of Western-centric approaches to museum studies training. In addition, professionals teaching museum studies are increasingly facing opportunities and challenges in a landscape of shrinking budgets, limited access to research funding, censorship, and varied governmental agendas. Through this Handbook, we are seeking to capture this landscape, highlight best practices and challenges, and provide a rich and comprehensive study of museum pedagogies in the 21st Century.

The internationalisation of both the museum and the higher education sectors has brought increased attention to transnational exchange and cross-border work. Transnational education is creating opportunities for academics to develop new curricula and build relationships with partner universities and museums in diverse locations around the world. These transnational frameworks – both presential and virtual - create new power-knowledge frameworks that are challenging and reshaping how museum trainers support skills development and research in new locales and interdisciplinary frameworks.

Continuing professional development, internships, apprenticeships, and placements are also key aspects of many of today’s museum studies programmes and have traditionally been offered both within and outside academia. Yet these professional development learning pathway frameworks are underexplored, and important cross-sector collaboration landscapes need to be highlighted. In these contexts, generative collaborations are developed between learning providers such as universities, colleges, and cultural organisations, including museums, heritage organisations, archives, and galleries. These collaborative learning spaces operate virtually and in person, across local and transnational spaces. They offer unique laboratories for understanding how the cross-sector relations are embedded within contemporary pedagogical practice.

This publication therefore seeks to understand how museum studies is taught in diverse cultural contexts. In doing so, the handbook understands museum pedagogies not only as approaches to teaching about museums, but also as pedagogies embedded within museum practice itself. Activities such as collecting, collections management, conservation, and object care are increasingly recognised as sites of ethical, environmental, and social learning. These material and practice-based pedagogies shape how values, responsibilities, and forms of care are transmitted within the sector and are therefore central to contemporary museum education and training.

This handbook explores how these pedagogies are shaping and shaped by the sector, calling for critical thinking on the theoretical and methodological approaches to museum pedagogies - a criticality that speaks at once to decolonial approaches and a re-centring of the powerknowledge frameworks that remain deeply entrenched within the academy. Through the agency of this international handbook, we seek not only to understand and challenge current practice, but also to drive change and new ways of thinking about museum pedagogies in the 21st Century.

International Handbooks aim to provide a benchmark for the discipline, including fresh perspectives on established topics and insights into emerging and cutting-edge areas. The range of contributions from across the globe to be captured in this new edition will introduce researchers, research students and practitioners to pedagogical approaches to transnational museology from a breadth of perspectives.

Themes/Structure

The handbook recognises interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration as a core pedagogical competency for future museum professionals. Contemporary museums increasingly operate at the intersections of culture, science, medicine, social care, and environmental action, functioning as sites of knowledge co-production, public engagement, and social intervention. Museum pedagogies must therefore equip learners to work across disciplinary boundaries, collaborate with professionals beyond the cultural sector, and navigate ethical, methodological, and institutional complexity. These pedagogical shifts reflect changing expectations of museums as civic, caring, and socially engaged institutions.

We invite chapter proposals from academics, heritage/museum practitioners and creative cultural thinkers that engage critically with pedagogical approaches to museum studies. We particularly welcome contributions from scholars and practitioners from geographic and interdisciplinary areas that are underrepresented in current museum studies literature. The form of each chapter can vary, with academic contributions up to 8000 words.

Possible approaches include (but are not limited to):

• Histories of museum pedagogies
• Case studies exploring innovative teaching approaches / active learning/museum-based learning
• Digital pedagogies
• Student experiences of pedagogical approaches
• Shifting HE landscapes and their effects on teaching
• Transnationalism and shifting global dynamics
• Transnational Education (TNE)
• Local, national and transnational partnerships
• Knowledge and power frameworks
• Co-curation and community-led pedagogies
• Pedagogies emerging in or with museums and cultural organisations
• Pedagogies of collecting, conservation, and collections care
• University museum pedagogies
• Museums for well-being, social impact, and activist pedagogies
• Equalities and diversity
• Censorship
• Anti-colonial approaches
• Cross-sector and transdisciplinary pedagogies (e.g. museums working with health, medicine, science, or social care)
• Pedagogies building museum resilience
• Continuing professional development (CPD)
• Internships and apprenticeships
• Placements
• Object based learning
• Community/local museum pedagogies
• Self-reflective practice and teacher viewpoints
• Skills analysis for the 21st century
• Future pedagogies

Together, these perspectives highlight the diversity of pedagogical practices shaping museum studies today, while also foregrounding the evolving roles museums play within broader social, environmental, and interdisciplinary contexts.

Proposal submission by Saturday 28 February 2026

Please submit proposals to Sarina Wakefield sarina.wakefield@leicester.ac.uk and Karen Brown keb23@st-andrews.ac.uk. Please include the following:

• 500-word proposal including images where appropriate
• Short biography
• Contact details

Draft chapters of 6,500 words will be due by Friday 29 January 2027.