TEHRAN – An academic meeting titled “Narrative in the Museum: From Representation to Education” was held on Saturday at the Faculty of Art and Architecture of Tarbiat Modares University, organizers said.

Attended by academics, researchers, students and individuals interested in museum and art studies, the session featured a lecture by Azam Safipour, a museum studies researcher, who discussed the theoretical and practical foundations of narrative in museums and described it as a link between the representation of objects and educational processes.

She underlined that narrative in museums goes beyond presenting historical information, serving as a means of creating meaning and shared experience between objects and audiences.

Referring to narrative and storytelling theories in cultural and literary studies, Safipour said narrative has become a central communication mechanism in contemporary museums, shifting from simple representation toward the creation of experiential and participatory environments.

She said modern museum practices no longer limit narrative to object arrangement, but include experience design, interaction and sensory and intellectual engagement of visitors.

Safipour cited theorists including Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur and Gerard Genette, linking literary narrative concepts to exhibition and interpretation practices in museums, while he underlined that museums function as multi-layered texts that require structured narratives to convey meaning through spatial design, symbols and object sequencing, adding that narrative is both a method of knowledge transfer and a learning process.

She also referred to educational theorists John Dewey, Jerome S. Bruner and Howard Gardner, saying narrative supports experiential learning, exploratory learning and engagement of diverse audiences through multiple forms, including visual, auditory and tactile approaches, adding that education in contemporary museums would be incomplete without narrative, noting that effective storytelling encourages visitor participation and cultural understanding.

AM