Pedagogy and Play: Testing Ideas in Exhibition Design
Presenter: Aida Ali, Senior Manager, Education, Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art
Join Aid Ali as she shares learnings from the testing of play-based activities as tools for visitor dialogue at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto, ON.
In this session, participants will explore how the Gardiner Museum created an exhibition anchored in play and multi modal learning to test out new interpretive approaches during a period of renovation. Co-curated with the Education team, the exhibition featured hands-on activity stations as tools for visitor dialogue, which also helped us gather real-time feedback to inform our permanent gallery redesign.
This session will be a 20 minute presentation with 40 minutes of small-group dialogue.
The session is ideal for museum professionals looking to bring more experimentation, collaboration, and visitor voice into exhibition design.
Attendees will leave with: A framework for treating exhibitions as iterative rather than fixed final products; a model for cross-departmental collaboration; strategies for designing activity stations and label-writing processes that surface multiple institutional voices; approaches for building visitor feedback loops that can inform future programming and space design.
Presenter bio:
Aida Ali (she/her) is an educator who has held positions in teaching, teacher training, community engagement, and leadership development in schools and museums across four countries, with a focus on creating educational spaces that foster a sense of belonging. Aida has an M.Ed. in Art and Art Education with a concentration in Museum Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a B.A. with honors in Classical Archaeology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently the Senior Manager of Education at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, and serves as co-chair of the professional organization Gallery and Museum Engagement (GAME).
Cost to attend:
- IC Members: this event is free, but we invite you to choose to donate $10 to help IC cover costs of planning our professional development sessions
- Non-members: $60
Cancellation policy:
If you wish to cancel your registration and are a non-member who has paid for a ticket, please note that refunds are only offered if the cancellation is made 72 hours or more in advance of the event. No refund will be issued if you cancel within the 72-hour period. Refunds can only be offered via e-transfer and may take 1-2 weeks to be processed. To request that a refund, please email info@interpretationcanada.ca. Non-attendance at an event does not qualify for a refund.
