Kunstiga kiusamise vastu. Kiusuennetustunni eesmärk ja ülesehitus Kadrioru kunstimuuseumi ja Tartu Kunstimuuseumi näitel
Authors: Kont Hanna-Liis 
Published: December 2021

With the shift of focus on the part of museums towards a fuller consideration of the audience’s needs, a number of museums around the world have begun to contribute more actively and consciously to people’s welfare, including their physical and mental health and the inclusion of more vulnerable and marginalised social groups. Several museums in Estonia have joined in these efforts over the past few years. A specific example of such a museum innovation is the work that has been done with bullying prevention. To date, studies have shown that one in five children attending a school in Estonia is a victim of bullying and that bullying can cause anxiety and depression, or in other words, it can significantly affect one’s mental health. Although there are several organisations in Estonia dealing with this problem, more active co-operation with museums started only in 2018 when Kadriorg Art Museum and Tartu Art Museum, independently of one another, contacted the Foundation for the Bullying-Free School with the request to develop anti-bullying educational programmes for schools of general education. As a result of the co-operation, two versions of the museum lesson, ’Using art to combat bullying’, were prepared for both museums.
The article addresses the questions of why the above art museums decided to undertake their bullying prevention initiative and how this concern and art mediation are combined in the structure of educational programmes and to some extent, in that of the exhibitions. There are several reasons for undertaking anti-bullying initiatives in art museums from the perspective of both schools and museums as well as the Foundation for the Bullying-Free School. As school children have become an important target group, museums have sought to adapt their programmes, as effectively as possible, to the needs of schools. Considering that schools likewise have become more proactive and systematic in their approach to bullying, museums have seen this as an opportunity to offer alternative anti-bullying lessons outside the classroom routine. The development of such a lesson has provided an opportunity to simultaneously offer schools a museum lesson which would combine two critical themes—bullying prevention and art mediation—as well as train instructors in how to intervene expertly in bullying situations and apply current theoretical approaches. An added bonus for the foundation is that the museum lesson enables them to introduce the Bullying-free School programme to the schools that have not yet joined it and offer further knowledge consolidation activities to the schools that have already enrolled in the programme. However, it is still a young initiative that needs further development in order to find more sustainable collaboration formats which would have a more long-term influence on school children than a single museum visit. It is likewise important that the museums should seek to tie bullying prevention more strongly to their broader strategic orientations, or otherwise they run the risk of it remaining an ephemeral experiment that is not grounded by continuous development or follow-up activities.
Through discussions, cooperative role plays and a craft activity, the museum lesson, ’Using art to combat bullying’, combines mediation of art works and introduction to anti-bullying principles. Discussion of topics related to bullying through works of art enables children to analyse art works in the light of their own experience and to approach familiar situations from a novel angle provided by the artist’s perspective. The co-operative role plays help to test out in practice the conclusions of the discussions. To consolidate the recently gained knowledge children are tasked with drawing pictures and compiling a contract based on the pictures. Although it has not yet been possible to study in detail the impact of the lesson on the participants, an analysis of the existing data suggests that it is possible to impart simultaneously knowledge regarding the essence of art as well as social skills and attitudes. Art and bullying prevention act in partnership, so to speak, where they support each other without either of them becoming marginalised. One possible way of making the lesson more effective, however, would be the tightening of the interaction between the museum staff and teachers outside the lesson time so as to negotiate mutual expectations and exchange information regarding both the needs of a particular class and the specific adjustment of the lesson as well as follow-up activities. When examining the way in which the lesson was anchored to different exhibition environments, it became clear that the lesson could be combined with a variety of art expositions, including permanent displays and temporary exhibitions as well as displays of both historical and contemporary art. Regardless of the exhibition context, however, interaction between the curators and museum educators in the planning of spatial solutions and sound design could be further strengthened in order to deliver a more effective lesson.
For curators and museum educators, the ongoing museum innovation holds the potential for initiating co-operation with many other target groups. However, given the limited resources, it is increasingly more important to choose priorities very carefully in order to align, as effectively as possible, the developments in the field with the local needs.