In 2024 the Grainger Museum hosted a major collaborative Teaching & Learning engagement, which utilised the Museum's physical spaces, collections and staff expertise, culminating in a public showcase.
Graduate students enrolled in MULT90064 Industry Core and Project, a capstone subject shared by the Master of Art Curatorship and Master of Arts and Cultural Management programs in the School of Culture and Communication, worked collectively throughout Semester 2 to conceive and deliver a public exhibition and programs, using 35 artworks selected from the Museum's diverse collection. Students studying in their first year of Bachelor of Music (Interactive Composition) collaborated with the MULT project to create 21 new sonic works in response to the displays, heard at listening stations throughout the exhibition. Many staff from the Museums & Collections Department and Grainger Museum were involved in the project, as expert guest speakers, and expert museum collections and exhibition installation support for the students, over the 12 weeks of semester. The opening of the exhibition, titled Hands On, and associated programming on 14th October 2024, was attended by 130 visitors and students. The public display continued into Semester One 2025.
Dr Matthew Martin, one of the subject coordinators involved in the project, described some highlights:
The Grainger, in many ways is ideal: it's on campus; it's a manageable scale, the size of the spaces; and then it has those extraordinarily diverse collections. It's ideal for providing these sorts of hands-on practical, practically-focused engagement exercises for students. Dr Matthew Martin
"[The project] was interdisciplinary, because we had students from the Curatorship cohort, students from the Arts and Cultural Management cohort, [and] Interactive Composition [B.Mus] students as well...certainly the potential for interdisciplinary learning was really powerful there. The setting of the Grainger and this particular project provided excellent opportunities. I’m working primarily with Curatorship students, where they actually have an opportunity to engage with collections, to work in exhibition spaces. They’re opportunities [that are] fundamental to curating, but remarkably enough Curatorship students get so little in the way of opportunity to undertake these sorts of practical engagement exercises. So the Grainger, in many ways is ideal: it's on campus; it's a manageable scale, the size of the spaces; and then it has those extraordinarily diverse collections. It's ideal for providing these sorts of hands-on practical, practically-focused engagement exercises for students. Like any Object-Based Learning, it's that haptic material engagement with objects, which, you know, really reinforces learning for students, and so it's summative. It's bringing together all of that theoretical knowledge that the students have learnt over 18 months, and they're actually getting an opportunity to put it into action."
"There was a really important learning experience for the students who were engaged in the curatorial aspect of the project. They were provided with a pre-selected group of objects that they were going to make a selection for the exhibition display out of. But the actual opportunity to engage with a range of objects [requires] discernment. How do you select objects from a group of works with an exhibition rationale in mind, but also that interplay that goes on, the rationale may change depending on what objects are available? That's a really important learning experience that actually, probably for most curators, really only ever happens the first time that they're in a professional context. I think, for me, that was a learning experience of fundamental importance that this particular project provided for those students working in that area. The Grainger is a fantastic location. For many of [the students], this was an outstanding part of their learning experience in the Masters Programme.”