Nurturing Talents through Visiting Heritage

In education, the learning curve is always steep. There are those who fail to actually contextualize what they learn in class and are most likely to fall short of ideas in academics. This calls for auxiliary learning institutions which can enable a reader to be fully equipped in class work while far away from class.

That is the like of education that students derive from institutions like museums whenever they happen to visit them. Museums and other learning environments outside the school setup can offer greater opportunities to students and they usually form a basis of sustainable education and learning in situations where student make successive visits to the museums.

It was back 2005 when I took my daughter to a museum. It was kind of a family outing and in never expected that she would fall in love with the museum. As a matter of facts, prior to then, she had shown some interest in artistic work, but in was never keen enough to let her explore more of it. I had this assumption that she was just doing undergoing the childish development stage. However, during that maiden visit, she exhibited a lot of maturity as she desired to know much about what was happening around her.

The Beauty of Learning in Museums

The artifacts of art which adorned the place seemed to mesmerize her and she would often ask a question or two about what she saw. This was unlike a seven year old. She seemed to have a lot of interest especially when dealing with paintings and sculptures. Her continuous questioning about the names of the artists, their places of origin, their other works etc made me figure out that she was in fact connecting with the works in there. She was trying to explore and understand the perceptions behind the thinking of the artists.

This is the same situation that many children feel when they go to learn in places like museums. There is the feeling of independence outside the classroom setup that they enjoy which enables them to exercise their creative personality which revolves around various works of arts. They try to resonate with the work and understand the feeling behind the works.

The museums enable the children of her age to stimulate their informal learning experiences and also expose to children those interactive exhibits that are specifically designed to be manipulated by them.

My daughter was too attracted to the various artifacts and exhibits that were available that she was able to identify her talent in the museum and also choose a career path.

Through the various visual arts, drawings and paintings that were at display in the different museums that we would visit every time she requested for a visit, she had slowly grown fond of the various artistic collections. I had not noticed that every time we went back home from a particular visit, she would lock herself in her room and draw every single item that she could have seen either on our way or inside the museum. She was secretly keeping an album of her own drawings without my awareness.

Achieving and Actualizing Ambitions

When she joined college, I was surprised when she insisted that she wanted to pursue a career in exhibit designing. She was so convinced of it that I could not change her mind. I had no idea that she had all along been keeping a collection of her artistic drawings, and that all she needed was to learn the professional way of exhibiting her work.

During one school exhibition she presented some of her childhood work and most of them were immediately recognized and applauded by both tutors and fellow students. This greatly inspired her and instantly boosted her desire to reach greater heights.

She embarked on reviewing most of her work in her album whereby she identified several drawings that she could do only a little review on and she could exhibit them in the on-coming national art exhibitions.

I was so delighted when most of her work was identified by some of the best publishers and she was approached for partnership. However, since her dream was way larger than most of our expectations, she decided to go through the various difficulties of establishing her own art gallery.

I came to realize that it was one of the bravest decisions she could ever make since I had no idea that she had acquired and refined such great potential. Her talent and inspiration could not have been recognized were it not for the constant visits to the museums.

We should take time to identify and recognize those instances when children are in pursuit of a yet to be recognized talent since it could be inside them only lacking exploration.