The Anywhere Museum : Genres of Teachable Moments

A great teacher perceives and utilizes teachable moments in the classroom, that is, moments in which classroom activities, attention, and conversation come together to create an opportunity for conceptual change. The Anywhere Museum implements the teachable moment in the environment as an instrument that provokes and yet has the proper content to support inquiry. We enumerate the socio-technical characteristics of the genre, explain the relationship between the Anywhere Museum and other related genres (advertising, museum presentations), and give an in-depth description of the building of components of the Anywhere Museum on the Virginia Tech campus. The results of the research are a set of patterns that begin to suggest the opportunities and boundaries nascent in the genre.

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