The Open Museums - a developing learning environment for adult project has been launched in the beginning of 2010. The project is beeing co-ordinated by the Finnish Museums Association. Contributors to the project include Pori Art Museum, Satakunta Museum, the educational unit of Tampere museums TAITE, the Finnish Labour Museum Werstas, Museum of Technology and the CICERO Learning network/University of Helsinki.
Museums provide an open and informal context where the idea of lifelong learning can be put into practice. Like all cultural services, museums increase people´s well-being. The purpose of the Open Museum project is to develop museums into more accessible and interesting sites of learning for various groups of adults.
The main target group of the project are museum staff members, whose adult-education skills the project aims to improve. Consequential target groups include various groups of adults, for whom the project partners will develop new operating models and services. Consequential target groups are:
Pori Art Museum and Satakunta Museum: senior citizens
Museum educational unit of Tampere museums TAITE: immigrants
Finnish Labour Museum Werstas: the unemployed
Museum of Technology: company employees
The project will organise events, workshops and training in addition to developing new operation models for adult visitors of museums. Operation models are evaluated and further developed based on feedback from adult visitors. New knowledge and good practices achieved during the project will be conveyed nationwide to museum professionals and even more widely to various actors in the field of cultural heritage and arts. The results of the project will be disseminated through the project website, three seminars organised during the project and the final report of the project.
The project has been allocated funding from the ESF development programme entitled "Fostering active citizenship through open learning environments" and which is administered by the Ministry of Education. The funding authority is the State Provincial Office of Lapland.
