Not just ‘a book on the wall’: pedagogical work, museums and representing the sporting past

Abstract

Historians often evaluate sport exhibitions as simply transplantations from the pages of books to the walls of a museum. Not surprisingly, on this basis many sport exhibitions fall short of the criteria demanded by historians. This paper specifically explores this issue by examining the exhibition, Between the Flags, that traveled around Australia as part of the centenary celebrations of Surf Lifesaving Australia. Pedagogy, and more specifically the concept of pedagogical work, is utilized to understand representations of the past in museums and to compare and contrast with written history. Pedagogy and pedagogical work reveal that the Between the Flags exhibition, like many other museum displays, was purposely and explicitly linked to educational curricula, unlike the written history of Surf Lifesaving Australia which was not aligned to formal education. Equally importantly, museum exhibitions primarily provide tacit knowledge through objects and artifacts while, in contrast, written history mostly relies on verbal knowledge through the written word. In the Between the Flags exhibition, tactic experiences were amplified by specific displays which engaged the senses—visual, tactile, auditory and kinesthetic—to create a sensory and bodily experience far removed from reading words on a page. Understanding these differences challenges historians to consider exhibitions through the complex systems of representations that define museums rather than those which characterize written history.

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