FEW VISITORS TO art museums walk in expecting to find thirty-plus middle school students acting as their own docents, leading their peers through discussions of what they see and wonder about in works of art from abstract expressionism to wood turnings, to sculptures by Rodin. But for close to ten years, we led seventh and eighth grade students through patterned close-viewing and dialogical sharing exercises culminating in small-group, kinesthetic responses that have moved parents and college professors alike. This essay will recount the process and products stemming from these patterned, experiential learning activities. Grounded in research on embodied cognition, the phenomenology of looking, on teaching with objects, and on multi-modal learning, the essay will also detail the manner in which the teachers involved in this project—at both middle-school and college level—prepared students for these visits and how this preparation led to some of the most memorable and meaningful moments in these educators’ and students’ lives.

For most visitors, walking into an art museum is an exercise in self-control. We enter a headspace of quiet observation as the works around us “speak,” and we, in turn, listen or walk on. The space of the art museum is designed for just such encounters, from the sacred groupings of The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia to the eclectic collections of Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, the art museum has primarily been a space devoted to the primacy of the gaze and its silent, contemplative learning, often with the didacticism of a docent or audio-led tour. While many museums are engaging in activities that shift this perception, introducing more participatory interactions with the artwork to promote understanding and meaning-making, many visitors still perceive the experience of an art museum through the traditional, more passive, receptive lens.

In contrast, we herein reveal an almost decade-long practice of participatory, kinesthetic experiences with art exhibitions that offered an alternative to the traditional quiet, contemplative, ruminative pattern.