Educational museums and public history

Abstract

Museums are perfect examples of the fact that public history involves the conjunction of different fields and techniques. They procure the acquisition of objects, take care of their conservation, organize collections, promote research, educate, produce narratives and are, or should be, experts in communicating to large audiences. Museums are especially propitious spaces for public historians to make history for and with large audiences. We start from the hypothesis that public history and pedagogical museums have many elements in common; the parallels and points of coincidence are so many that we can affirm that pedagogical museums are dynamizers of the public history of education. To defend this hypothesis, we have divided the paper into three parts. The first introduces the concept of public history in general and applied to museums in particular. The second briefly reviews some concepts and ideas already known about educational museums in Spain. The last section describes current practices of pedagogical museums that can be interpreted as public history practices.