‘Contemplative wonder’: the potential for learning in museum open storage

Yiu, Yuen Ting

‘Contemplative wonder’: the potential for learning in museum open storage

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Journal article

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Yiu, Yuen Ting

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Date published

December 16, 2025

Abstract

Developing from the principle of democratising collections, there is an increasing call to turn museum open storage into places for visitors’ learning. Much of the existing literature has suggested that encountering huge collections without interpretation or guidance can be overwhelming for visitors (Dawes, 2016; Slater, 1995). However, an emerging counterargument suggests that open storage without curation empowers visitors to explore the area freely and enjoy unexpected encounters with objects within vast collections (Bond, 2018; Keene, 2005, Thiemeyer, 2017). Using a case study of the Open Store in the National Railway Museum (NRM), York, this paper examines the potential for embodied learning in open storage seen through the lens of contemplative wonder (Schinkel, 2017, 2020). It argues that contemplative wonder is an important learning tool with strong affective power and the ability to stimulate imagination. Using qualitative data gained from adult visitors through accompanied visits, personal mind maps and interviews, this article demonstrates that the distinctive characteristics of museum open storage can indeed evoke visitors’ contemplative wonder. The visit experience had strong affective power and stimulated visitors’ imaginations. The potential of contemplative wonder for learning is evident since it encouraged visitors to connect to their personal experiences, generate questions, and exhibit reasoning and expressing a view on world development. Interestingly, this study also found that in the setting of museum open storage, feelings of confusion and being overwhelmed were always found when visitors experienced contemplative wonder, leading to the conclusion that these two feelings are not necessarily hindrances to visitors’ learning as existing literature suggests.