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Benefits of Museum Field Trips as Real-World Learning

While taking students on a field trip to a museum might be a beneficial educational experience for them, this activity can also be considered as real-world learning because it involves acquiring relevant information in a practical environment. Most of the time, these school activities are seen by the students as enjoyable rather than educational, which creates a tension between independent inquiry needed by the students and cooperative learning activities demanded by the teachers.

Independent Exploration and Individual Interest

First off, because they want to spend more time participating in drama, perusing the galleries, and doing activities that are less goal-oriented, they prefer to tour the museum on their own and independently. They only like to visit areas of their interest (Davidsson, & Jakobsson, 2012).

Freedom of Choice and Personalized Learning

Students would like to dominate their choices of exploring objects, talk and engage in debates regarding what they see as they change space within their own time schedule with no restrictions. Besides, students see groupings to be slowing them down and are so restricted, on top of that make them visit areas which are not of their primary interests (Davidsson, & Jakobsson, 2012). For instance, some students would not like to see snakes, but love seeing things like music instruments, consequently this will just be wasting time and making get bored while visiting a collection of historical books as a group.

Social Interaction and Collaborative Learning

Social interaction takes place in several forms and in different environments in which human beings function, given the fact that we are brought up in social institutions such as families, schools, churches, among others (Davidsson, & Jakobsson, 2012). Therefore, living in such institutions gives people the ability to derive sense regarding communication, belief systems, and pictorial analysis. Hence, they are encouraged to share knowledge, experience, disagreement, and agreement while in a museum session. Such objectives can only be achieved when students are put into groups.

Enhanced Learning and Peer Collaboration

Additionally, grouping students is considerably more learning-oriented and gives students the opportunity to work together, test their ideas in the relative security of their peers before sharing the insights of Museum visits with the class as a whole.

Conclusion

To sum up, no matter what the students want, museum visits are school activities that are learning-oriented. Thus, they are supposed to be paired and assigned tasks or visit areas that best suit the objectives to be achieved.

Reference

Davidsson, E., & Jakobsson, A. (2012). Understanding interactions at science centers and museums: Approaching sociocultural perspectives. Rotterdam: SensePublishers.