Education and Learning are at the heart of society’s efforts to respond to the challenges of the future. Issues ranging from economic inequalities to climate change are seen as calls for educational intervention and for changed learning practices. Despite this central role of education in society’s adaptation to changing conditions, however, there is no institution that is able to act as a repository for the artefacts, research, histories and traditions of education across Europe to ensure that we act with memory of and draw on the resources of what has gone before. Nor is there an institution that can serve as a vibrant home for contemporary debate about the choices that face policy makers, parents, adult learners and children in the educational arena. We might argue that one of the reasons educational policy making is often so ill-informed, is because there is no cultural repository for ministers of education to learn from.

There are, around the world, a number of museums of education or learning that are attempting to provide resource for public understanding in this area. Small scale, often under-funded, and focused on localised historical education traditions, these museums play an important role in preserving local archives and materials. They are not, however, adequate to the urgent contemporary challenge of building a better public understanding of education – its different historic and cultural traditions, its contemporary research and practice, its underpinning philosophical, political and ethical debates. A traditional, place-based museum, moreover, may not be adequate to the highly diverse forms of expertise that might be required for this agenda, an agenda that would need to draw insights from cognitive science and social policy, from professional practice and the sociology of childhood. The development of digital technologies that enable crowd-sourcing of educational heritage research, that enable the interconnection of materials from diverse settings, opens up the possibility of re-imagining the activities, institutions and practices of a museum today.

How might we, then, create a public institution capable of addressing this challenge, capable of both preserving the multiple histories of education and mobilising and informing contemporary debate? This workshop will address the following questions with participants:

1. What are the broad disciplinary fields that would be needed to curate a ‘museum of education’ adequate to its historic and contemporary complexity?
2. What archives and collections might be brought together to populate this new museum?
3. What opportunities do digital technologies offer to create connections between existing museum collections and in fostering public debate?
4. What would constitute the basis of a programme of ‘public understanding of education’?

Vavoula, G.N., Sharples, M., and Rudman, P.D. (2002). Developing the 'Future Technology Workshop' method. In Bekker, M.M., Markopoulos, P., Kersten-Tsikalkina, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the International Workshop on Interaction Design and Children, Aug 28-29, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, pp 65-72.