In the Finnish basic education, art museums are important learning environments and partners in Visual Arts education for all. Both the school and the art museum strive to involve children as active learners and actors and develop their own working culture in this direction.

The Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki city, as part of the Finnish National Gallery, has a very long tradition of cooperation with schools in Finland. Schoolchildren are a central target group. Therefore, the University of Helsinki, as a leading teacher education unit in Finland, has a long experience of cooperation with the Ateneum Art Museum in art education in primary teacher education.

With the support of the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland, The Ateneum Art Museum expanded its regional accessibility and fostered children’s sense of participation by implementing an art learning programme ‘My Ateneum’ with online workshops. The programme name refers to values familiar to social justice art education. It celebrates the idea that the Ateneum Art Museum, as part of the Finnish National Gallery, belongs to all citizens in Finland. The aim of the programme was to bring the Ateneum Art Museum close to the child, to make it their own.

My Ateneum programme as a learning path consisted of five stages. The concept provided online art learning materials and ready-made lesson plans for primary teachers.  Teachers could work with their students with those materials before and after two distance guidance sessions with the museum guide. Almost 400 classes and their teachers from different parts of Finland participated in My Ateneum programme.

This research paper examines students’ conceptions of art museums in primary school and art museum multimodal cooperation.The theoretical framework examines current theories and concepts of participation in school and art museum contexts. The study is part of a larger reserach project, which has published two peer-reviewed articles.

The study in hand focuses on the 5th–6th graders who participated in the Ateneum Art Museum's My Ateneum programme in 2021–22. After participating in the art learning programme, the students were asked for their feedback on the Ateneum Art Museum website. This online survey serves as data in this research.

In the online survey, the students were asked to reflect on their conceptions of art museums by open questions such as What kind of art museum would you particularly enjoy visiting? What would you like to do in a museum? The students’ open responses (1294 in total) to the anonymous online survey on their conceptions of art museums were analysed using a phenomenographic research approach.

According to the preliminary results, the students' reflections on art museums emphasised their own activity in their participation in the museum. Students described art museums as enjoyable if they can do a number of different things by themselves, in addition to making art. However, even though the students had just worked actively with digital collections and remote access in the art museum in a modern, multimodal way, enjoyable museum visits were described as very concrete things and activities on physical environments, happening in many cases in quite traditional ways by viewing and discussing on pieces of art. The qualitative analysis will be finalized during spring 2025, so more detailed results will be published at the conference. The results will be critically reflected in relation to theories of student participation in the school context and discussed in the light of current thinking on art museum pedagogy.

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