Museum as an Educational Resource

— The article assesses the role of museums in the process of forming professional competencies of would-be teachers studying at the History Department. The museum space for future history teachers is an area where the students not only have museum practice. They come to the museum to work with documents while writing their course papers and theses and also bring schoolchildren there during their teaching practice. There are also classes in a variety of subjects given to the students themselves during the educational process. The effectiveness of museum pedagogy is recognized all over the world, as evidenced by the wide geography of research on this issue: Greece, Spain, Canada, Russia, the United States, Taiwan, Turkey, Croatia, etc. The information about the effectiveness of using the potential of museums within higher education was collected through various procedures: the study of reports and diaries of teaching practice based on the museums in the region, reviews of the museum staff about the work of the trainees, analysis of the essays written by the students on the topic “Museum as a pedagogical phenomenon” and evaluation sheets of the viewed expositions. The made conclusions are based on descriptive analysis, a statistical method, and a questionnaire. Being immersed in the life of the museums during the training practice, as well as in the capacity of visitors, the students themselves appreciated the quality of the exhibitions and interactive classes. This work allows us to confidently state that cooperation between universities and museums should grow stronger and expand.