This paper focuses on research conducted at Tate, a leading international art museum, which offers dedicated learning programmes for families and children, young people and for schools and teachers. Tate has just opened what is, to the best of their knowledge, the first research centre in an art museum dedicated to learning. The Tate learning research centre has invited some academics to partner with it.

I have been working with the Schools and Teachers team at Tate for nearly three years. The questions that we are jointly pursuing are:

1. What learning takes place in the art museum?
2. How does learning occur?
3. How can we research this learning and these pedagogies?
4. How can we theorise what is happening?

I have been conducting what I now think of as an intermittent/iterative ethnography. I have not been in the art museum every day, or even every week. However, over a three year period, I have been a participant in: three five-day summer schools for teachers and a six-day live art project. I have attended at least three meetings a term of the Schools and Teachers team plus other meetings associated with the summer schools and the project. I jointly supervise a PhD student which brings me into regular conversations with a Tate colleague, am a member of a Tate learning think tank (more meetings), am on the steering committee of the research centre (even more meetings), and have recently completed a joint Arts and Humanities Council funded research project which examined the ways in which filming might be used to shed light on young people’s experiences of live art. This project required several meetings, a five-day workshop in the art museum, and a series of film editing workshops and some public engagement events, including an exhibition of young people’s films at Tate Britain.

My periods of actual immersion in the ongoing conversation about learning in the art museum combined with the experience of participating in events and the subsequent reflective conversations and writing, have been key to progressing our research and to developing some shared understandings – for example, we now look for the ‘affordances ‘(e.g. Gibson & Pick, 2000) of ‘art learning events’ (cf literacy event, Heath, 1983); we understand learning as ‘movement’ (Ellsworth, 2005; Ingold, 2011); and we think about the pedagogical intent of contemporary art practices such as re-enactment (Blackson, 2007) and archives (Lippard, 1997).

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