The paper focuses on curriculum development at the Reinwardt Academie (Amsterdam) and the role of (theoretical) museology in it. The Academie, founded in 1976, developed its curriculum from a new understanding of professionalism, referred to as the emancipation of museography, with Museology as the binding rationale behind the curriculum instead of a collection related subject-matter discipline. Museology was seen as a genuine discipline, with its own lecturers, not as an applied science. The present author developed a different approach to museology, very much influenced by Zbynĕk Stránský, Ivo Maroević and other Central European museologists, in which a structured approach towards the object as data carrier was key. Throughout the 1990s, new ideas on value assessment, social inclusion, participation, and learning were introduced in the curriculum, being a mixture of British New Museology and Portuguese/Brazilian Sociomuseology. In 2001 the existence of the Academie was threatened which made to re-define the study programme as Heritage Studies. In line with this integrative thinking, a spatial turn became visible in the curriculum focusing on the concepts of lieu de mémoire, cultural biography, and heritage community.
Zou et al. (2025) studied this question.