Integrating museum objects across campus disciplines

Objects have always been associated with knowledge. Their contradictory nature of immutability through observation and measurement, and variability through a capacity for recontextualisation, gives them power and poignancy as tools in education. Their central role in teaching and learning is a higher education tradition that extends back to the Renaissance and beyond particularly for academic disciplines historically grounded in observation methodologies. The capacity for re-contextualisation, however, gives most objects innate cross-disciplinary characteristics. Our pilot Learning and Teaching project at Macquarie University has shown much untapped pedagogical potential for objects in the university’s own museum collections. This presentation outlines the new uses of collection objects from the Faculty of Arts two museums across the university’s five faculties. New digital technologies mean that these new applications for museum objects in teaching programs (both face to face and on-line) can be captured and shared among teaching staff, thus integrating museum collections into the central university business activity. The project can be extended beyond the pilot phase to incorporate all material collections on campus. This model of maximising the potential of museum collections is readily transferable to any higher education institution that maintains material collections.