Vitrinas abiertas, el Museo de la Educación Gabriela Mistral: como espacio para construir junto a las comunidades educativas

Abstract

The Gabriela Mistral Education Museum stands out for being one of the first institutions to be constituted from a critical and participatory museology in Chile. This is evidenced by its panels and display cases filled with questions and provocative data on the country's socio-educational processes, as well as its museography with a cross-cutting gender approach, but also by its way of relating to visitors. Precisely, its trajectory of work with the community motivated the generation of two educational projects carried out together with public schools near the museum. The first is called "The high school takes over the museum" and consisted of the intervention of the courtyard and the permanent exhibition of the museum, with heritage elements belonging to the first public high school for women in Santiago (1894), the Liceo N°1 Javiera Carrera. As part of this project, basic knowledge of museography and exhibition assembly was shared with the students, so that they could organise their own exhibition in dialogue with the museum's collections. The second consisted of working with the Doctor Luis Calvo Mackenna primary schools in the "School heritage workshop" project, responding to the need raised by the educational community to learn about their history and identity. To this end, we accompanied them in the creation of their own collections (class books, school texts, photographs, commemorative plaques, banners and flags, among others), workshops were held on the preventive conservation of bibliographic material, workshops for the teaching staff and heritage explorations in the school's neighbourhood. The results obtained in both projects, as well as the work with educational communities and their own heritage, allow the museum to become a relevant institution for its environment, disseminating its disciplinary knowledge to empower the surrounding communities.