Learning Environment Design: the Penn Museum's Imagine Africa exhibit

Yesterday I had the fortune of tagging along with my supervisor, chair of the Sociology Department Dr. Tukufu Zuberi, as he led a tour of the Imagine Africa exhibit at the Penn Museum.  Imagine Africa is an interactive project about African culture and traditions that includes multimedia aspects visitors can engage either in the exhibit at the museum or online.  The video below explains it more:

Dr. Zuberi led the tour for 4th, 5th and 6th grade students who are in the Bright Lights Intitiative. This program’s mission is to enhance educational outcomes for marginalized African American students in the city. They specifically study African culture and traditions, so this trip was perfect for the children.

Dr. Tukufu Zuberi with the Bright Lights at the Penn Museum

As I walked through the exhibit with the students and got to talk to a few of them, I realized how much the design of the environment of this exhibit encouraged learning.  

One of my big study interests is learning environment design.  I want to look into what ways can we design formal and informal learning environments to best serve students of all ages.  This stems from my belief that too many classrooms still use the “Teacher/Professor talks in front of the class to rows full of students” method.  I believe that there was a time when this method was the right way to go, but from what I notice, students today (of all ages) are apt to get distracted by anything (especially technology) when the learning environment is shaped this way.

Imagine Africa creates a learning environment about some of the culture and traditions of Africa that serves as an alternative to the traditional method of museum exhibition.  Instead of going the traditional museum exhibit route and having pieces of art on the wall or in cases with brief descriptions, Imagine Africa aims for a truly rich, interactive multimedia experience.  From allowing visitors to write questions on large display dry-erase walls that are integrated into the exhibit, to enabling the viewer to watch videos or control images that are displayed on mini flat-screen monitors, Imagine Africa essentially flattens and expands the learning environment.  Visitors can engage with every station, creating their own spin on a theme introduced by, for example, articles of religious clothing that people in Africa used to wear. And throughout the exhibit, there are questions for the visitors to see to prompt their imaginative thinking.   There are also display monitors where visitors can type in their feedback; and one consistant message throughout the exhibit is that it’s not “done” and the visitors are helping to “complete” it. To further all of this learning, the Imagine Africa website provides another area for the discussion to continue around the themes examined in the exhibit.

Now imagine (pardon the pun) if a grade school or college classroom was designed in the same way.  Every day would be an interactive learning experience where the environment would stimulate the learning, and the teacher would supplement this with his or her knowledge and expertise.  At this point, the pressure is not so much on the teacher who speaks in front of the rows of students.  Instead, the responsibility of information distribution comes from the design of the classroom, the multimedia components littered throughout the classroom, student questions, answers and dialogue, and finally a well-versed teacher or professor who can wrap it all up. After all of this, the class can continue their learning at home through a website which asks additional questions and provides more multimedia resources. 

In this case, knowledge is not just received passively by the students, but it can also be discovered, created, molded and shaped. I do understand that for this type of learning environment to become more normal in the classroom, more of today's scholars would have to study the design of formal/informal and online/offline learning environments and actually put those studies into applicable practice. At the moment, I do not know many scholars that do this, but I plan to do some research and looking around to find out.

If you are interested in education and specifically, how the classroom environment may evolve in future years, I recommend checking out the Imagine Africa exhibit to see just how the Penn Museum turned an exhibit into an extraordinary learning environment. I actually recommend everyone in GSE take a quick look at the exhibit if you can - this could be a template of sorts for the normal classroom of the future.