This year's International Museum Day (May 18) has the theme "Museums for Education and Research", emphasising the role of museums in providing comprehensive educational experiences, and being centers that encourage learning, and promote exploration and creativity for visitors. This is also the goal and direction of activities of museums in Da Nang in recent years, aimed at creating a learning and experience environment that is useful, interesting and rich in information value.
Diverse experiential activities
Since 2014, the Da Nang Museum has pioneered organising educational activities for pupils and students citywide, including the "I love history" and "Extracurricular hours at the museum" programmes, plus historical education activities at relics and schools in remote areas.
Since then, the museum has always maintained and expanded its scale, and enriched the content of activities in a bid to increase interactivity and create excitement for pupils.
In May, the Da Nang Museum in collaboration with the Trung Vuong Junior High School organised the experiential educational programme themed "Dien Bien Phu - Rendezvous in May".
During the programme, children were informed about the scale, role and meaning of the Dien Bien Phu Campaign by historical witnesses. Additionally, they had the opportunity to experience interactive activities such as making rubber sandals from broken tires and playing the role of soldiers pushing bicycles across the battlefield.
Nguyen Thi Khanh Ngoc, a 8th grader of the Trung Vuong Junior High School, said "I really like these activities which not only give me vivid and intuitive knowledge about history, but also help me gain more teamwork skills, collective spirit and sharper thinking ability”.
As the only museum in the South Central region operating in the field of fine arts, the Da Nang Fine Arts Museum has focused on orienting aesthetic thinking to children. Therefore, the museum has regularly coordinated with a number of units to organise useful contests for children, such as printing Dong Ho paintings, drawing on paper mache masks, and educating art heritage for pupils at all levels.
Since early 2024, the museum has organised more than 10 extracurricular activities, and fostered knowledge and artistic talents for more than 7,000 pupils and students across the city.
On May 15, the museum hosted a drawing contest entitled "Da Nang Summer Colours", attracting 62 pupils from primary and junior highs schools.
Deputy Director of the Da Nang Fine Arts Museum Nguyen Thi Trinh shared "Unlike other museums that focus on historical documents and artifacts, we aim to raise awareness of fine arts heritage among pupils and students in an effort to foster their talents and their love of arts, thereby contributing to building and creating a society with people who always aim for the values of truth - goodness - beauty".
Create a comprehensive learning and research environment
Preserving a collection of precious Champa statues dating back hundreds of years, the Da Nang Museum of Cham Sculpture not only attracts tourists, but is also a place to study and learn about culture for researchers, pupils and students.
Since the beginning of the year, the museum has supported 4,838 visitors, students and pupils to visit and study with dozens of experiential educational activities such as a thematic educational programme for pupils at all levels in the city.
Deputy Head of the Education - Communication Department under the Da Nang Museum of Cham Sculpture Nguyen Thi Khanh Tam said that the museum has organised the educational programme to learn about Champa religious art for students majoring in history, culture, architecture, and tourism since 2023.
Through academic sessions and exchanges with leading experts at the programme, students have access to fundamental and in-depth knowledge about Champa religious art, as well as research and accumulate practical knowledge to serve future careers.
“Educational activities at the museum contribute to supplementing and expanding information and visual knowledge for lessons at school, hereby raising the awareness of students in preserving, conserving and promoting heritage values," Ms. Tam added.
To mark this year’s International Museum Day, the International Council of Museums encourages museums worldwide to enhance digital transformation in cultural heritage education and communication activities, with a focus on using online platforms to share with visitors about new points in the museum's research results. This content has been quite synchronously implemented by museums in Da Nang, bringing high efficiency.
For example, since 2022, the Museum of Cham Sculpture has carried out a heritage education programme in online form to meet the learning needs of junior high school pupils.
Similarly, the Da Nang Museum organises cultural heritage lessons online, connecting to schools in the area.
Deputy Director of the Da Nang Museum Ngo Thi Bich Van said that online platforms and social networks are always fully tapped by the museum to reach and meet the tastes of young people.
For topics that have little documents or artifacts, and are difficult to organize experiential educational activities, the museum makes podcasts and posts them on its YouTube and Facebook channels. In addition, the unit coordinates with museums across the country to organise online learning sessions, helping pupils understand more about the cultural heritage of the nation and other provinces and cities, she noted.
Reporting by X.Dung - Translating by M.Dung