Applying intertextual method in museum pedagogy: studying portraits as cultural texts at Sinebrychoff Art Museum

The power of images today lies in their relations with other texts. I have designed an intertextual method for use in art education research that enables texts, understood as denoting both visual and verbal signs, to be studied in relation to each other (Paatela-Nieminen 1996, 2000). The aim of the experiment described in this article was to determine whether this method could be applied to art education with young children at a museum. An educational curator at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki tried out the method and primaryschool children studied portraits subjectively in relation to other kinds of cultural texts. The findings suggest that a simplified form of intertextual method can be applied with young children.