What is it that we see in museums? The collections? How is the museum designed to make us see the collections? What are we expected to see? This paper attempts to describe what in the practice of museum education we (can) actually see. In order to contextualise my discussion, and by way of a very brief history of museum education, I shall bring to the fore the constructivist approach. This approach emphasises in particular the practice of meaning-making in the development of understanding in the museum. I have come to wonder, however, what ‘meaning-making’ means. In so doing, my purpose is not to contest the constructivist approach as such but to submit their terminology to a phenomenology. In doing so, I try to track down each moment of what I see in the museum. I attempt to describe my experience of visiting the Korea Room (known as The Korean Foundation Gallery, or Room 67) at the British Museum. The experience involves a double-edged distancing, even a repeated doubling of distance. This is expressed as a sense of “being at home and not at home” of Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness).

Derrida, J. (1998) Monolingualism of the Other, Or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. P. Mensah (New York: Stanford University Press). Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell).