Transforming Education Through Creativity: A Lesson from Verona’ s Palazzo Maffei Museum
Are our current forms of educating people really effective?
Do systems that organise young people arbitrarily by age, teach knowledge through a fixed curriculum of isolated subjects, and assess with uniform testing, optimise human potential?
Is education as we know it the most engaging way to develop the skills with which we are born?
Or is our natural capacity to learn and create more often than not dampened or even erased by mass education systems which treat everyone as if they were the same?
Our education systems construct a relationship with learning and expertise where we are taught to accept that some people hold the knowledge and expertise, and other people do not. It is for this reason that almost all formal education is a transactional relationship. The student is reverently waiting for the knowledge to be bestowed upon them so they can regurgitate it for the next transactional step, the next stage of education, a qualification, or a job.
We first learn to be passive through our education systems, even accepting things that are contrary to our core values, and we learn to take this through the rest of our lives by remaining passive in many other forums, and especially our workplaces. Our education systems and working lives lead many of us to spend a lot of our time sitting passively, waiting for the presentation or workshop to begin. In so much of our lives we listen, watch, consume, and occasionally make notes.
This is what the education system is for – to teach us to stick to boundaries, to not ask too many difficult questions, to accept the limiting nature of our workplace culture in order to be compliant employees. The origins for this go back to the need for compliant factory workers.
It is no coincidence that some of the most creative and innovative people in our society have been school or college dropouts.
I have talked before about how the education system too often fails to engage the learner. Students should be stimulated creatively in their learning whilst at the same time being able to take ownership of the learning space for themselves. Increasing levels of disengagement from school pupils and university students suggest this is a growing problem which is seriously impacting education. To maximise the potential for learning we need to develop an engaging curriculum for all learners.
But what could the experience of this truly immersive creative learning feel and look like? How can we create an approach to learning which is stimulating, engaging and positions the student at the centre of their own learning?
I was lucky enough to visit Verona for the first time recently, to see a performance at the city’s spectacular Roman Arena. The following day I went sightseeing and visited the Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo, an art gallery inside a historical palace, which opened in 2020. What had drawn me to the space in the Piazza Erbe was a balcony which offers a wonderful view of the city.
The organisation of the building was quite different from conventional galleries. Instead of dividing the objects exhibited by linear chronology or artistic movements, each space in the museum was designed as a ‘themed’ room.
The museum’s creator, Luigi Carlon, a successful entrepreneur, explained in a video shown at the end of the exhibition, that the intention was to design spaces which reflected the kind of room an individual collector might create and for the visitor to share this experience.
The gallery placed eclectic works side by side, some ancient and others modern, whilst also reflecting a myriad of complex interrelationships between the various works. Carlon explain how the museums spaces were deliberately designed to explore how artists utilising painting, sculpture, instruments, and other forms, explore key ideas in different ways, but also with artistic connections that can be conscious or unconscious.
There were many quotations printed on the walls of the museum from artists and art critics considering ideas and concepts reflected by the works, which offered different perspectives of how the viewer might interpret the art.
Each of the spaces in the gallery were the size of room you might find in a large house, rather than the cavernous areas common in larger art museums. These rooms had chairs with signs that encouraged you to sit and take time to consider the works presented and the relationships between them. Interestingly, when I was there a group of young people were taking photos and selfies and were engaging with the eclectic combinations of artworks with enthusiasm.
Being more familiar with conventional galleries, I found the experience to be unsettling at first. I had never encountered what I was finding in this museum before, and I was not sure how to respond to the unusual way in which the artefacts had been arranged. Unlike the majority of museums which usually lead the viewer through a coherent narrative, this gallery left it to the visitor to make connections between the works in each space.
The attempt to create an experience similar to sitting in your own room surrounded by beautiful and eclectic pieces of art positioned the individual in a role more akin to being a curator, judging for yourself what made the works worth including. Each room was organised around a range of artistic and social concepts that encouraged you to draw your own conclusions about the relationship between the various art forms.
For example, one room considered how the female form has been represented in artistic genres at different moments. The space brought together ancient pottery and stone sculptures with historical paintings alongside contemporary interpretations of the female figure seen through the male gaze and other works which challenged this perspective. The pieces were presented as a dialogue of different ideas with which the museum visitor was encouraged to engage.
This method of arranging the artefacts presented a perspective on how historical, social and artistic ideas have changed over time, but also how artists have interpreted ideas in dialogue, either consciously or unconsciously, with fellow creators in a range of forms and across epochs. The museum created the sense that any work of art can be unique in its own right but is also in some way a product of specific artistic traditions, and that the subject can be reinterpreted by both artist and audience at any moment in time.
The result was to create an experience where art was presented in a cultural, historical, social and sometimes political context which sat alongside the particular nature of the work within its own form. Art is a product of its culture, just as the artist is a product of their culture. The way the pieces were presented together made you think about these interrelationships and stimulated an open dialogue between the art and the museum visitor, who is themself a product of a cultural moment as well as being an individual in their own right.
It was a fascinating and novel experience for me, despite having visited many museums and art galleries in my life. Some larger galleries, such as the Prado in Madrid or the National Gallery in London, sometimes place works of art from different eras next to one another when an artist may have taken inspiration from an earlier piece and reworked it in an interesting way. However, the majority of the works are presented within established traditions of historical and artistic periods.
The approach taken by the Palazzo Maffei Museo created a uniquely stimulating experience because it made you think about the complex ways that pieces interacted with each other and encouraged you to form your own thinking about the works outside of traditional boundaries. It also made you more conscious of the fact that you brought your own values as a visitor to the process of ‘seeing’ the art works, and you were encouraged to consider what these values were and where they came from in your own life.
The other thing that interested me was that the gallery was relaxed, with intimate rooms that created a sense of shared cultural dialogue, rather than generating the feeling that I often have when visiting a larger museum – as a lesser mortal paying homage to greatness.
This openness was reflected in the reactions of the young people in the gallery. They were not just enjoying the work but were taking videos and pictures of themselves in certain locations and against certain objects, interacting and probably Instagramming or creating some sort of visual diary of their interactions in the museum. They were enthusiastic, they were relaxed, laughing and joking, and they were clearly enjoying the experience. They were neither irreverent nor in awe of the work, but they were engaged and making meaning from it for themselves.
I thought about the contrast between how these young people were responding and what I have seen when large school groups visit one of the ‘great’ museums. The young people often look bored, disengaged, and if they do exhibit any exuberance, they are usually told to be quiet either by their teachers or by watchful museum staff. The expectation of an uncritical reverence for ‘great’ works can often be off-putting for those who go through this experience, as it was for me when I was younger.
This experience in the Palazzo Maffei Museum led me to think about the first encounters that students have with their learning spaces, in school and in university. How we could make these learning moments more stimulating for the student from the outset, so they see themselves at the heart of the educational experience? Using the approach adopted by the gallery in Verona could help educators to create a learning environment where the student is positioned at the centre of their own learning, by offering an opportunity for the student to put themselves inside the experience, as was the case with the young people at the Palazzo Maffei Museum.
Thinking about this experience reminded me of something I did over 30 years ago when I started teaching undergraduate degree and teacher training students. At the time I was in my 20s and often mistaken for being a student by colleagues and senior members of staff in the university. In my first lecture with a new undergraduate group, I sat in the lecture theatre seats. I did not give any indication that I was leading a class, instead I just sat amongst the new students as if I were one of them.
And after a few minutes, I stood up I went to the front of the class, and the students had a range of responses, unsettled by this unexpected start. This led to a discussion about why they came to the space, sat in rows, and waited largely in silence, expecting someone at the front to lecture them.
What is about our relationship to the educational learning experience that leads us to position ourselves as passively sitting, consuming, with the teacher, lecturer or speaker standing at the front, as a dispenser of expert knowledge? Why do we not think that education system should be far more interactive than it is? Why is it that we trust the person at the front of the stage to be the one who leads us into a journey of learning and discovery?
I used a different engagement technique when I was teaching a class for a play by the Renaissance dramatist Ben Jonson called The Alchemist, which starts with an argument between the main characters.
For the first class I would enlist the help of a student to stage a fictitious argument between us. We would wait a minute or two after the class was due to start, and the students were all present, and we would come into the room halfway through an argument where I was accusing the student of cheating on an essay, and they were arguing back that this was not the case. I had prepared the student to rigorously defend themselves, not to take any nonsense from me, and agreed that they could swear if they wanted to, as the characters in the play do.
This was one of the most engaging classes I taught because of the impact on the other students. We would come in the room with slightly raised voices but not too aggressive at first. The argument would gradually get worse, and the other students would invariably sit in silence staring at us or at the floor until about five minutes into the argument. I would then stop suddenly and say thank you to the student and turn to the group and ask them why a dramatist might start a play with an argument.
It was an incredibly effective dramatic tool for a class. The students would be staring at me for a few seconds and then laugh or exhale, realising that what they were seeing was not real. The interactive nature of the exchange and the way the students had been drawn into it led to a very fruitful discussion. We would look at why it is that an argument could be so effective as a dramatic device that you feel a part of as an embarrassed observer. We talked about how this approach draws people in, how it is something you cannot really look away from and how you are absolutely riveted, as an opening dramatic device. It is a brilliant start to the drama, which Johnson uses to excellent effect.
The activity was an interesting exercise in that it positioned the other students differently from the status of being passive observers. As they were witnesses to the argument, they were also active participants in an event. They were not in the conventional educational relationship as the audience for the teacher’s communication. They were engaged in something that became part of the development of their own learning about a dramatic device used in the play.
But one other factor of the experience was particularly interesting to me. At no point in any of the arguments I reenacted over the several years that I taught the play did any student in the group speak out to support the victim or challenge me. Discussing the possibility of a student cheating on an essay in front of other students was entirely inappropriate and unprofessional had it been a real event. I could not present any evidence for cheating and the student themselves had been trained to give a reasoned case for their innocence.
Despite this, in the years I used this approach no other student interceded on behalf of the one I was arguing with or challenged me for my inappropriate behaviour. This is an indicator of how rare and difficult it is for someone to challenge authority, and our structured education systems inculcate this culture and depend on it for their existence. This is at odds with creating an open approach to learning where students are free to express their views and develop both their critical and creative imaginations and it is stifling our humanity.
Education should be as engaging, inclusive and as immersive as the experience I had at the Palazzo Maffei Museum. What is laid before the student should be a stimulus for their own engagement, for them to explore in a way that leads them to create something for themselves.
If you are a teacher or lecturer, consider creating an opening session with your students that is similar to this museum experience, where instead of the conventional classroom or lecture room you create an open ‘gallery’ type experience, where the student is encouraged to interact with an open group of sources and artifacts. The student could also be encouraged to bring something that is of particular meaning to themselves to share in the space for others to engage with and interpret.
The students could then be asked to interact with the objects placed in the room, designed to stimulate response and creative engagement, or to set their own objects in the space for all the other students to walk around and witness together. Then the students could be asked to think about ideas they may have and any connections that they have made across the objects they are observing in the space.
This communal engagement enables students to stimulate their imaginative learning responses but also to listen and engage with others as an essential element of learning development. The engagement would therefore be both personal and communal. Understanding that others think differently to yourself is a crucial skill of empathy and the basis of human cooperation.
Students could then be encouraged and supported to reflect on the learning they have gained from the experience and consider how they might apply that and the way they then engage subsequently, in the learning journey that their educational experience takes them on.
This would be an exercise that can stimulate the imaginations of the students, but also position them not as passive consumers who rely on external sources for critical interpretations, be that teachers or technology, but they learn from the start to both believe in the value of their own thinking whilst also understanding that different interpretations are valid.
Students should be encouraged from the outset of any educational stage in their lives to understand the benefits of their own interactive personal engagement with core ideas, and also the limitations that can exist within one’s own cognitive capacities. Through this they would learn that the best examples of human learning come from a combination of individual creative thought alongside cooperation with the minds and imaginations of others.
This could stimulate a creative interaction as the premise for encouraging students to think critically for themselves, but also empower them to understand and question the knowledge offered to them by such tools as Generative AI. If the students have developed a confident sense of their own critical thinking, they will be able to comprehend the status of AI generated knowledge derived from the existing thought of others and recognise the limits in the answers offered by technology.
If we start from the position of the student as a confident, independent thinker then Generative AI can itself be the stimulus for a critical engagement with the derived knowledge of the past that the student can subsequently challenge.
This is why our education should focus on developing the critical thinking of the student first and teach them about the technology afterwards.
In this way, we can start the educational journey on the right foot, with the student at the heart of it, not dependent on the interpretations of ideas of others, be that the educator or the technological source. Instead, students could take ownership of the learning experience, supported and guided by external sources, but not subservient to them.
For students to achieve their learning potential requires them to become confident and independent critical and creative thinkers first and informed users of technology second.
In that order.
This should be the future priority of our education systems.
