Chau Chak Wing Museum awarded for its role in student learning

The University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum has won a prestigious international award for its use of its collection for student learning.

The University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum has won an international prize for a program which uses objects in its collection for teaching students across the university.

The University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum has won a prestigious international award for its use of its collection for student learning.

The museum won the 2023 UMAC Award for its object-based learning program, which exposes more than 13,000 students to its collection each semester.

Museum academic engagement curator Eve Guerry said students in every faculty had joined the program, which started in 2021.

Under the learning program, which incorporates objects from the museum’s 500,000-piece collection into the teaching curriculum, students observe, and in many cases handle, items from the collection and discuss them to gain insights into their course.

For example, Dr Guerry said, a large first-year pharmacy class was able to examine scientific instruments, natural history and botanical specimens, ancient medical practices and more modern health communication posters that gave them insights into the history of pharmacy.

The program helped them develop communication and observation skills, she said.

The museum’s puffer fish helmet from Kiribati

In another program, architecture students designed an experience museum for blind and low-vision people and produced touch objects to give them a museum experi­ence.

Dr Guerry said each individual program was bespoke, using objects and concepts relevant to the course the students were doing.

She said medicine and health students had been closely involved and science students had looked at the history and philosophy of science.

Business students had used the museum’s collection to examine leadership issues, and social action in post-crisis situations, Dr Guerry said.

The objects they looked at and discussed included a 19th-century helmet made from a puffer fish on Kiribati, objects from ancient Egypt and a portrait of Queen Victor­ia.

Dr Guerry said there was a focus on group work and developing empathy, communication and critical thinking.

The UMAC Award of Excellence is given annually by the International Committee for University Museums and Collections.

It honours projects that make an impact on the museum’s host university and community and particularly looks for things that are interdisciplinary and can be used by other university museums.