Ilona Kroon

The aim of this Master’s thesis was to create a collection of activities to be carried out prior to and following school lessons held in art museums so as to make such excursions more meaningful for both teachers and students.
Preparatory and follow-up activities are designed to be carried out independently at school ahead of and after a visit to a museum.
At the time of writing, no Estonian museums offer activities on their websites that are referred to in any way as supplementing excursions. Research into museum-based education previously carried out in Estonia has indicated the need to offer supplementary activities for museum visits, but no steps have yet been taken to compile such activities for use in practice. In view of the objective of the thesis, the main question of the development study was how to plan preparatory and follow-up activities for museum-based lessons at Stage II of school studies so that they are more meaningful for students.

In order to plan the preparatory and follow-up activities, I implemented the development studies method, which enabled the collection of activities to be created in the best possible way. I carried out the development study in two stages: the first involved the creation of a theoretical and didactic basis, while the second focused on the conducting of the applied part of the research. The latter involved two phases of assessing the preparatory and follow-up activities, with data being collected via a survey and interview and analysed using the quantitative content analysis method. Six art teachers were involved in the development process, with one fulfilling the role of expert in assessing the activities. The result was the creation of a collection of activities for use both before and after museum visits that in future could be taken as an example with the aim of improving the educational programmes of museums. The importance and necessity of the development study were reflected by the fact that teachers place importance on the use of preparatory and follow-up activities in school and have indicated their interest in such activities being made available on museum websites.