Education and learning

Our teaching is dia­logue-based, and we aim at creating a constructive encounter between the student’s own expe­riences of art and the museum’s specialist experience and interpretation.

The educational options of the Schools Service cover many different topics and disci­plines, and we offer teaching at all levels, from day-care centres to primary and secondary schools as well as youth education and adult language programmes.

Dialogue-based teaching

The moment you walk in the door of Thorvaldsens Museum, you also enter a quite unique uni­verse centring on Thorvaldsen’s life, art and art collections. The museum not only offers out­stan­ding art and architecture; it is also an authentic ‘period piece’ from 1848, which is interesting today from both an aesthetic and historical perspective. The teaching of the Schools Service is dia­logue-based, and we aim at creating a constructive encounter between the student’s own expe­riences of art and the museum’s specialist experience and interpretation – an encounter in which we all learn and gain a subtler understanding of art, of how it is perceived and used, giving the student the experience of being an important, valued co-creator of new perspectives on and mea­n­ings for the art and the classical material in our collections.

Classical content – modern focus

The educational activities characteristically have a classical content but a present-day focus. The students are encouraged to relate creatively and reflectively to the classical art and to its topicality and meaning in a modern context. This is done by incorporating digital media as well as current con­temporary parallels in the teaching. In this field of interactions between the classical and the contemporary new and relevant interpretations are broached with the students as co-creators.

The students’ interpretations of art – take a look!

We believe that the interpretations of art that arise in the encounter between student and museum can be of importance not only to the student, but also to others, inasmuch as communication about art becomes more interesting when more voices can be heard. This is why the students’ digital creations are displayed in our digital Project Space at www.tilbygningen.dk.

Educational options

Besides our paid courses we also have free educational options for all grades of the public educa­tional system. We regularly hold artist workshops, and enter into extended development projects with schools and other educational institutions.