From the classroom to the museum: understanding faculty-designed assignments in an academic museum created Martin Trondle, Stephanie Wintzerith, Roland Waspe and Wolfgang Tschacher

A renewed interest in shaping academic museums into sites for multidisciplinary learning has created a need to involve faculty members and academic administrators in the pedagogical work of museums. Providing new insight into these efforts, this article examines patterns in museum-based assignments from a wide range of disciplines. These patterns reveal how the assignments direct students to engage objects, ideas, and texts through four types of commonly used exercises in college teaching: observation and interpretation, analysis and synthesis, research, and organization. Using these exercises as categories and providing detailed descriptions of more than 20 assignments to serve as models, this article presents a framework that will benefit academic museum professionals working to build curricular engagement with their companion academic institutions.