Analytic case study of educational purposes of the docent program in the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, R.O.

The purpose of this study was to examine the docent program in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan and to describe and analyze the docents' perceptions of the museum's educational mission and their responsibilities within that mission.;In the first part of the twentieth century museums developed a number of programs to address their educational role. The guided gallery tour conducted by docents emerged as one of the primary methods of introducing the museum's collection to the public. The docent serves as a host who invites visitors to interact with the objects in the collection. Through knowledge of art history, theory and techniques that docent acts as a teacher and catalyst who, by interpreting the works on display, strives to educe creative responses from the visitors.;This study was an inquiry into the educational function of museums and the nature of docent programs. The research design reflected the merger of ethnographic strategies for data collection and qualitative data analysis on a single site research problem. The major phases of the research process were: (a) preparation for the field, (b) fieldwork, and (c) data analysis. The three steps of data analysis provided by Miles and Huberman and the Jones Visually Weighted Free Key Word Indexing System were used to analyze the multiple-methods of data collection and to present the findings.;The results of the study were organized in seven categories which set forth, an analysis of data gleaned from the interviews, participant-observations and documents gathered at the site. The results focused on issues related to the docent program and perceptions of the docents concerning the educational activities in which they participated.