Abstract:

The tradition of university museums, present in many contexts, has always been linked to the didactics carried out by universities themselves in the various fields of knowledge. However, in many cases, the care of ancient collections and the strategies for their preservation and display take precedence over the activation of heritage for teaching and research purposes. In this contribution we would like to describe the strategy that MuDIB, the diffuse museum of the University of Milan-Bicocca, is implementing with the aim of enhancing the value of its collections, but at the same time of initiating a path of increasingly aware participation in its heritage, in particular by involving students from different degree courses. The occasion for this new path arose from the exhibition “Birth: being born is not enough” organised by the university and curated by Franca Zuccoli, Rita Capurro, Elena Gemma Brogi, which was open to the public from 9 October 2023 to 14 January 2024.

On the occasion of the exhibition, two proposals were launched, the first dedicated to students in the second year of the MA course in Tourism, Territory and Local Development, and the second to students of Primary Education Sciences [three-year BA or MA], in particular students in the third year of the Image Education course.

The activities were oriented towards a didactic experimentation that fielded a form of learning by doing, in the context of curricular courses, proposing innovative participatory paths.

The activity designed for the students of the Tourism and Cultural Heritage course aimed to study public engagement methods for a temporary cultural event such as the museum exhibition. Through the observation of visitors and the use of social communication channels linked to the exhibition, the students experienced some practices that were only known theoretically or through case studies prior to the museum's creation.

The activity for students of Education Sciences, on the other hand, focused on the potential of creating personalised pathways in museum fruition. The exhibition, developed around different narrative cores, was the testing ground for experimenting practices on different visiting styles.

Both projects contributed to the diversification and field-testing of curricular teaching activities.

The idea of the Bicocca's diffuse museum is therefore to become a didactic mediator, an opportunity to reflect, thanks to the individual exhibitions organised, on disciplines, on ways of communicating, on interpretative possibilities.

In this sense, the university museum may succeed, albeit in a different way, compared to its origins, in fulfilling a didactic task. Another extremely significant aspect is that of being able to develop an ever closer link with the territory in which the university is located. One of the objectives of the first exhibition realised was precisely to show objects from the other cultural spaces and to organise thematic visits to these places.

Keywords:

Museum, heritage, education, didactic experimentation.