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Thomas Kador, "Object-Based Learning: Exploring Museums and Collections in Education" (UCL Press, 2025)
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A
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B
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with Thomas Cator, author of Object Based Learning Exploring Museums and Collections in Education. This book was published in September 2025 by UCL Press, and I want to highlight that it's available open access, which I love, and I'm going to try to add a link to that in the episode's description. Object Based Learning provides a concise overview of some of the most important approaches to material culture and object analysis. And I'm really delighted today to be joined by the author Thomas Cator to speak more about the book. Thomas, welcome to New Books Network.
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C
Hi, Chen. Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to having this conversation. Thank you.
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B
And before we dive into talking about your book, I would love if you could introduce yourself to listeners. It would be really great if you could share a little bit about your background and the path your education has taken and then the work that you're doing now.
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C
Gladly, yes, and I'll try and I could go quite broad, so I try and keep it focused a little bit on my object based work and where that came from. But working in an interdisciplinary department and I come back to that in a second kind of is high, you know, my fit to that department is highlighted by my trajectory, I think, and because I started out in chemical engineering in the, a while ago in the, in the sort of the mid-90s or something and decided lab work wasn't quite for me, but it still gave me a lot of insight into different ways of working and working with materials in completely different ways from what most people, unless they're conservators in the kind of the museum field, for example, would experience on the curatorial side. So did five years of chemical engineering and then parked that and then went into a combination of archaeology and Celtic studies. So worked with early text manuscripts, but also in the field as an archaeologist. And that's where I spent sort of close on two decades of my life, I guess, and more and more into the mainstream archaeology of that. But it swung back then to archaeological science a little bit. So I've kept the lab work going to some degree. But my proper, explicit, at least entry then in the world of objects was when I started teaching in archaeology as a PhD student and I was so frustrated with the theoretical nature of so much of the education and by accident I discovered that our department, which is a quite small archaeological department in Dublin, actually had a teaching collection that had nobody had used for years. So I dusted down some boxes of stone axes and metal objects and so on and brought them into my tutorial groups. And from that moment, and actually was the moment when I saw how the students responded to that, that I was completely hooked on that way of teaching because there was that response to objects which was completely different, a completely different level of engagement that I saw just that, immediately saw that potential and that then stayed with me. And then as I said, I worked in archaeology in a number of different places before. Ten years ago, some colleagues at UCL took a leap and offered me a job initially actually to focus explicitly on object based learning, on the connection between the museums that we have at ucl, which is great as a university to have some museums and collections, and the academic side. And since then I've moved into a slightly different field on the Arts and Sciences department, very interdisciplinary department where I still continue my object based work. But I also work on a new field now called Creative Health, but maybe more of that later or maybe another conversation. But this is sort of my journey with objects. But as I say, it's from that point where I was sort of a second year PhD student onwards. I've never not worked with objects and especially I've never not worked with objects when it comes to an educational learning setting. I've always tried to find ways of bringing objects into the education work that I do.
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B
Thank you so much for sharing all that. And I am always so fascinated. I can never predict the paths that people take to writing the books that I've read. And coming from chemistry, it makes so much sense, but I never would have guessed. So thank you for sharing that. And so then turning to your new book, for listeners who aren't familiar with object based learning, can you explain what that is and what some of your goals were in writing a book about it?
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C
Yeah, no problem. And in very simple terms, I guess in object based learning, the very basic definition is something like working with material culture in a facilitated way to enhance learning and student engagement is the broadest sense, if you want. So it's anything where you work with something tangible, something that's material. And I don't think we'll have time to go into what material culture is and isn't, but it can be documents, photographs, artworks, obviously archaeological, ethnographic, historical artifacts, library items, archival material, any of those things really, or even mass produced everyday contemporary items and integrating those things into a learning setting where learners actively engage with the physical properties of that material or if it talking about the online, potentially all of the digital properties of that material, but traditionally engaging with physical stuff in order to change or develop our understanding of the human world. Because I guess as humans we are quite unique animals, right? That we have this intimate connection with material culture and that goes back through evolution, right since the emergence of modern humans and before for several millennia as hominins there has been that that connection has built up. So we've sort of co evolved with material culture. And lots of animals use objects in different ways and some even make objects. But I don't think any other animal is out there that actually can't do anything, literally anything, without objects. And that's us, right? As humans. So objects kind of define us. And that's why I think object based learning is so powerful. And I guess that's one of the motivations for writing a book is just the fact that there is that huge potential there. And also the little anecdote that I started with these undergrad students in archaeology and the transformative potential I saw when they looked up from the slides or the PowerPoints or their textbooks and realized the world of objects and what that can bring to their learning and understanding. And I've been teaching an undergraduate module for 10 years, essentially since I started at UCL, called object lessons. And it all involves students working very closely with objects and specimens and artworks from the UCL collections. And every year I've been writing in our handbook. There is not one core text for this module and I advise you to read this, this and advise you to read broadly and so on. But every year when I've been writing that line, I've been thinking, wouldn't it be great if there was a starting point for students to get a sense of what it's all about? And also my conversations I've had with colleague over those years, lots of people reflected that to me. Right. And that there is maybe some colleagues, especially if they haven't come through a material culture training in their prior education. There could be can be a lack of confidence of bringing stuff into a classroom for lots of different reasons. And for those two kind of. So these are my two core audiences in mind. Was my students who I've been teaching for over a decade and having a first kind of port of call for them to get started with object based learning. And then all those many colleagues that are out there that have been asking me questions about okay, how can I do this? How can I introduce this in a safe way, in an organized way? So it's that really what really drove me then in the end to write the book. And it's been a labor of love. It's taken quite a few years and a few iterations of testing it with my students, with colleagues to hopefully get it as right as it can. But now it's out there so people can let me know what they think of it.
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B
Yeah, I mean the opportunity also to test it with students before publishing it. That's fantastic. And I think it produced a really useful book. So the book itself is divided into three parts and in part one, you take a look at the theoretical foundations of object based learning. I really appreciated how you introduced some of the learning theories that object based learning engages with. And so I would love if you could reflect on some of the strengths of object based learning and what kinds of learning this approach really augments.
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C
There are a number of strengths in a number of different opportunities with object based learning in a number of different ways. And I think that's why it's quite broadly applicable to lots of different things. So you can of course approach objects or at least start there in a very traditional, almost discipline focused way. Art historians need to look at artworks, archaeologists need to work with artifacts, material culture in some way, anthropologists. So there's these very traditional ways, but that's usually quite a subset of disciplines. And even within those, what we have seen, especially since the middle of the 20th century is that education has become more and more theoretical, or rather than theoretical, actually separated from the physical materials, in particular in fields like biology and physics, even more so, archaeologists will always have to some degree engage with the material culture and art historians with the artworks. But in fields like biology, geography, physics, we see a lot of the work has become much more theoretical. And forgetting that in the past, so much of that teaching happened with physical specimens. So one of the simple benefits is understanding then traditional disciplinary concepts and the foundations of those in a better way. But once we start working with objects, it's very difficult to keep them contained within a singular disciplinary setting. So immediately, I think, as soon as you introduce objects, learners will ask questions that break us ahead of that silo and make bigger connections with the wider world. Where things come from, how they are made, what people might have done with them, how they might have used them, all of that. So instantly, I think objects and invite learners to ask these broader interdisciplinary questions, which is I think, one of the core benefits apart. So you can learn some key concepts in chemistry or biology or physics with the objects, of course, but it's then these broader questions, these questions about values and ethics and broader social histories, and all of that can come so nicely together with objects. So I think that's, that's a great, maybe my favorite of the benefits, but another one is the social element to that as well, that if you bring a number of people together and they look at the same thing, they will probably all see slightly different things. And if there's an opportunity to share this kind of knowledge, then that can enhance everybody's perspectives, that everybody can gain from what other people see. And that goes back to school educational theory from the 1920s from Levi gov Vygotsky. Socially distributed learning, where you bring learners together and they don't just learn from the activity, whatever that is, but also from each other and from each other's perspectives. So I think that's another wonderful opportunity. And then finally add one more, and that is broader kind of transferable skills in the broader sense. Basic things like just taking time for observing and analyzing. But also you can introduce very easily then drawing, for example, annotating things, taking notes in an effective way, and outward facing communication. So having conversations about objects in lots of different ways and finding the right words that we all share. So there are lots of opportunities there for this kind of transferable skills development and sharing. So these are sort of my. Is that four, I'm guessing disciplinary focused, interdisciplinary, broad, conceptual, socially distributed opportunities. And then finally, the kind of the transferable skills development.
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B
Fantastic. And I mean, your book gets into a lot more that. I know, I know we can't talk about everything here, but I do again want to remind folks that it's an open access book and so they can go and check this out. So moving along to part two of the book, there's four chapters in this section that explore the materiality of objects and. And more specifically, how we can talk about and learn from the materiality of objects. What are some of the conversations and ideas that we can engage with when educators and students interrogate the properties, production and use of objects?
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C
I think this is a really important element and I was looking forward to that part of the conversation. And War of the Mist, and it's sort of in the book, is also thinking about how we approach objects and materials and problematizing some of the concepts. And materiality is one of those wonderful concepts that I think we need to look at very critically and carefully in some ways because many people, I guess, don't use it very critically when they're employed. And you see so many publications, and I'm not just talking in conversation where it's completely fine, but if it's people who are publishing things and you see materiality creeping in in so many ways, and I'm always questioning what does it mean when we say, you know, what is the stoniness of stone, the materiality of stone? If you compare different types of stone, and there's some very soft stones and brittle stones and very hard stones, and therefore there isn't one materiality of most things. So what I like about them playing with this idea of materiality is then trying to bring things back to materials and their properties and getting learners to really engage with what is stuff made of and why is that important and what does it tell us? That can be broadly scientific approach, if you want, about properties of things and how they came about, but it can also be a very social approach in terms of using different materials for different functions and the different ways and the histories associated with that. When it comes to that section in particular, I was very much influenced. I mean, a lot of my work has been influenced. But that section, the central part where I talk about the materials of objects and the making and use of objects and their social lives, have been very much influenced by the work of Tim Ingold, anthropologist Tim Ingold, who has been thinking about this for many decades before me, and talking about the fact that essentially the properties of materials are the histories, right? That they are a microcosm of stories of where a thing has come from, how it has come about. And if you just look carefully enough and we know how to look at them, we can sort of unpick not all of those, but some of those histories, some of those stories. And that goes for natural objects in similar ways to artifacts that were made by people. So I think that is really exciting and really interesting. So in a way then the most important aspect about this is I think really looking, really taking the time and focusing on materials and their properties and what are objects made of and why is that important? And I really love introducing weird and wonderful and strange objects in science. There's something called mystery specimens to learners. I really like starting with those where there is where learners won't have an immediate answer to what is in front of them. They will have very few reference points on the face of it, which is really useful then to start thinking about what do we do in that case? How do we approach objects if we don't know what something is? So introducing mystery specimens to learners and then thinking about how do they approach them. What can I say about something that I've never seen before? And that really makes them then look at what are the materials? What is it made of? What can that tell me about it? What are the signs of its use, of its function, of its aging, those kind of long term processes? And I think that that's really the most important thing from that section is look as much as you can and as carefully as you can at the things you're working with.
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A
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B
Experian this holiday discover meaningful gifts for everyone on your list at K. Not sure where to start. Our jewelry experts are here to help you find or create the perfect gift in store or online. Book your appointment today and unwrap love this season only at K. Yeah. So then speeding along to part three of the book, you focus in this section on how objects are used for communication and specifically on using objects within exhibitions. What are some of the pedagogical considerations that should be taken when Designing exhibitions in order to create the best conditions for object based learning in these spaces.
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C
I think exhibitions can be quite tricky. They can be quite difficult in an educational setting because the practicalities of exhibition making tend to take over. There's so much you have to think about when you want to exhibit objects. And it can sometimes take away from the core decisions about the conceptual decisions about why you exhibit something and how you exhibit it, rather than the practicalities of, especially if it's physical exhibitions of kneading mounts and lighting and how it's displayed and designed. Questions that can take over. And I've seen this with students who have, you know, and colleagues actually working on exhibitions together. Most of the debates are about those aspects, those very practical aspects of physically displaying things, as opposed to about the conceptual elements and motivations behind the exhibition. What are we trying to say with them? So my focus or my advice then, I guess in an educational setting is to try and give as much space as possible to the conceptual part of that, to the elements involving thinking about what an exhibition should be about and what is it trying to say, rather than the practical aspects of design and lighting and where things are positioned and those kind of elements. I think that's really the most important aspect. That's why, for example, my module, I don't tend to have a physical exhibition, we have a virtual exhibition. It's essentially a website, but that takes away a lot of, not all of them, but a lot of the design considerations and focuses much more on the stories and what stories are you trying to tell with these objects and how are you telling them, and the different layers of information you can provide by the physical objects themselves, but also the elements of text that we will inevitably want to use and that are different aspects, different ways of conveying information when you exhibit. And I think that's so much more important in a way than being able to physically put objects into a glass case, as it were, and make it look well, obviously that has a place. But what I'm most interested in is actually the. The thought processes and the concepts and the thinking behind coming up with interesting stories told through objects. And I think that's what I like to focus on. I think for learners that are especially early on in the journey, if they are in a postgraduate program on curatorship, fine, they need to know how to make exhibitions. But other than that, I think it's much more important to focus on the stories and how you tell them the best with help of objects as well as other media.
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B
Definitely. And speaking of, I guess, web Based exhibitions. You deal really in a focused way with digital objects in chapter nine. And I would love to hear your thoughts on how digital environments impact objects based learning. I guess what are some of the opportunities that digitized or born digital objects offer for teaching and learning? And also what suggestions do you have, especially for folks who may have less access to physical collections and will thus rely more on digital objects for teaching?
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C
I think there are lots of opportunities and there's obviously huge amount of interest in working in a digital space. And one of the key challenges in writing about this has been the fact that I realized that anything I write will look dated by the time it appears, right? Because things are changing so quickly, that technology is moving on so fast, and anything I can Write about in 2024, 25 will be outdated very, very, very quickly. And also I wouldn't claim any level of technological specialism expertise. So this is not my main field. But I think it's a really important element and that's why I thought it's really important to have a chapter on this in there. Because so much that happens now in object based learning, as in virtually any other walk of life, has a digital element to it, has a digital side to it. And there are lots of opportunities in terms of accessing materials collections that would be inaccessible to people for one reason, because they may be on the other side of the world, they might be very far away, or they might be inaccessible for other reasons. So therefore accessibility can clearly be enhanced through digitization. And I think that that's really interesting to think about this. And there is obviously, I guess there is a perception that a digital surrogate, if you want to call them that, of an object, is sort of a lesser thing. Similarly, I guess, to the way we look at traditional copies of objects as well, whether they are plaster casts or 3D prints or something else, replicas, as they are sometimes called as well. And I was really interested, actually listening to your conversation with Bridget Wirty, I think, on digital codicology and her take on manuscripts and the importance of, of the digital and how it's not necessarily a lesser thing. So I think that that's an important element, that they are new kinds of objects that we need to think about carefully and we need to find ways of working with them in interesting ways. I mean, my first love has always been getting stuck in and working physically with objects that we can touch with tangible objects. And I think that's still really important. And in a way, I think one of the great aspects of object based learning is that it allows people to focus on physical objects and maybe turn away a little bit from digital tools. But on the other hand, there's lots we can do with digital tools that enhance our experience of working with objects. I've already mentioned accessibility, but also objects that we can, in theory encounter. And medieval manuscript is a really great example. While we can potentially, if we're lucky, get to touch a medieval manuscript and even change over the pages. And that's very few people in the world who will ever have the chance to do that looking at them so closely that you see all the fine. Maybe there's annotations, maybe there's markings, there are impurities in the vellum. And there's lots of great work being done with digitizing these manuscripts and making them available in really high resolution. And therefore what you can do with them is completely transformed compared to maybe physically accessing a copy and very carefully leafing through it at the experience. The smell of the parchment of vellum, it's unique. You can't replace it, but you can do something very different. Similarly with art, there's some wonderful websites, like Closer to Van Eyck on the Ghent Altarpiece in Belgium, for example, where they show the artworks in really high resolution before, during and after the restoration process, as well as X ray scans of each of the works, for example. So you can look at them in lots of different levels and layers. And if you're standing in front of the piece behind glass about a meter and a half away, there's no chance you can have that detailed engagement. So I think there's lots there with digital tools I could go on. So I think it's about finding the right tool for the purpose of what we're trying to do, but also knowing. And that's the tricky part, when we don't need to go digital, right? When we can work with the physical objects and we don't necessarily need to have a digital approach to it. And it's knowing the difference, I think, is really the most important thing because I get students from both perspectives and colleagues to some degree who, some of them who really find almost a form of sanctuary in the fact that they can work with objects in an almost digital free environment, with physical objects, museum objects in particular. And on the flip side, I have lots of students who are interested in working on that space of the interface between objects in collections and the digital world, digitization, the possibilities of artificial intelligence for searching and finding new connections between objects. And there's lots of wonderful research happening. So it's knowing when to Use which approach?
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B
Definitely.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And neither is better. They're both great in different ways.
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C
Yeah. And they are complementary in lots of ways, as long as you know when and where to draw the lines. And that's not always very clear cut, but I think that's exciting as well.
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B
Definitely. And then another theme that comes up throughout your book is the ethical issues surrounding the collection of objects, the power dynamics of the institutions that usually have these collections, and also the ethics of exhibition curation. What are some of the questions that educators should ask and should guide their students in asking in order to engage with all these ethical considerations when teaching and learning with objects?
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C
I think the focus on ethics, which is so essential, is sort of a phenomenon that's been driven in inverted commas from below that for the past two or so decades, there's been a demand from communities and people who have formally been largely excluded from the processes of working with objects and collections, like communities and citizens of formerly colonized countries, members of racialized or minoritized communities, and therefore. And there are different sections within our societies that have been gaining a little bit more of a voice in the space and that has allowed a focus on different perspectives and I think is leading to a readiness to acknowledge some of the challenges and problems with a lot of historical collections in particular. And I think acknowledging those or even just recognizing those is really important. And if you go to virtually any European, and I'm pretty sure North American or Australian collection, you don't have to look very hard before you find some ethical problems with almost any of the items there. It's very difficult to find many items. There's no challenges around it. And it's interesting that I have colleagues within the university museum sector who are actively working and experimenting with this. Can you source a completely ethically sound taxidermy specimen, for example, of a particular animal, because it likes to include it in an exhibition, but you want to make sure you have all the documentation and you know, this animal wasn't killed to be stuffed for a museum exhibition to become a museum exhibit. It died of natural causes, ideally died in a happy circumstance. Right. And then was treated appropriately. And so it gets really difficult. And obviously when you're talking about cultural artifacts that were made by people, it's even more complex and complicated. And especially then when questions of colonization and colonialism or other forms of serious power dynamics come into the scene. So I think the question of ethics then is really important to introduce from the get go and highlight some of the challenges and problems, but also try from the start to think about solutions and the potential of objects to help us with that. Because I do hold the view that even though the majority of materials we might work with, especially if they come from historical collections that we might work with in an object based learning setting, are problematic from an ethical perspective, doesn't mean we shouldn't work with them, I think. On the flip side, I think they can allow lots of interesting perspectives. And what I've been feeling for a long time is that in fact, working with material culture, working with objects allows, if you do it carefully and sensitively, allows us to create a relatively safe space, a safe environment where people can actively work through some of those challenges and difficulties and ethical problems. And I think that's where I'd like to work. So there's quite a lot of work happening in these spaces thinking about, and there's interesting discussions even about the right terminology for this, talking about tricky heritage or difficult heritage or dark heritage or awkward heritage, there are lots of different phrases used for essentially the challenges of working in a messy world with huge challenging power dynamics in the past and the present and how we engage with that. So that's definitely one of the key aspects, and I hope I've highlighted that well in the book, that every collection within my university, for example, has its problems and its ethical challenges. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't work with it. It just means we should think about how we work with it and who we actively encourage to partake in that conversation. And then the other thing is, I wanted to give quite a lot of space to the question of ethics involving human remains, because that's for in the past has been taken for granted. And even if you have 30 visitors who go to an archaeology museum, for example, they expect to see some human remains on display. It's sort of almost taken for granted, but for many, many people, that is completely unthinkable to look at dead bodies like that in a glass case, for example. So I think that's also really contentious but important topic for us, which is related but slightly separate from the other ethical concerns around these difficult histories. But both of those, I think, are really important to challenge and to think about how best to work through them.
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B
Cooper, thank you so much. Well, before we wrap up, I also want to give you an opportunity to chat about whatever else you're working on. I don't know if there are more directions that you're taking, your research and writing on object based learning or other totally new and different projects you're working on now that this book is out.
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C
So yeah, one of the projects I'm working on is a follow up to my colleague Helen Chatterjee's 2021 book on object based learning and well being. And what we are working on now is thinking about working with objects beyond curated collections. So working with material culture in lots of different settings, not excluding collections, but thinking broader and thinking about all the things that are not curated and what we can do with them. Lots of quite ephemeral material that still has really interesting things to teach us. And material culture is obviously so much broader and at the start dimensioned, working with mass produced everyday items. And it's not just mass produced items, but things like analog film, celluloid essentially, which is now becoming redundant or has become redundant that everything is digitized, everything is on digital formats. So that is a really interesting medium to get learners to think about the history of moving image, but also broader histories of the world. And I've been working for a few years also with a few colleague from Milan who is a food scientist and some other colleagues, a food philosopher as well on object based approaches to food and how bringing to the fore the material culture properties of food can highlight lots of interesting elements of food that people usually don't really engage with. So that's what we are trying to do is bring a broad perspective to objects and material culture that usually don't get a lot of outing because they are sort of falling between stools. They're not necessarily mass produced consumer items that get some interest from that literature that focuses on anthropology of consumerism or sociology. And they are not from historical curated collections. So they fall between these tools. And that's what we are focusing on. And then there's an ongoing research focus on the health and well being aspect of working with objects and collections that will keep going for a while. But I'm really interested in essentially what we spoke about when we talked about ethics in the potential of objects in material culture in lots of ways to allow tackling challenging histories in a safe environment. So that's what I'm working on quite a lot at the moment. And yeah, so watch this space.
- [39:38]
B
Yeah, amazing. A lot of really, really great projects to look forward to. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this and thank you for taking time for this conversation once again. Today I've been speaking with Thomas Cador, author of learning exploring VMs and collections in Education. My name is Jen Hoyer and you're listening to New Books Network.