Evaluating Early Learning in Museums

Planning for our Youngest Visitors

Nicole Cromartie, Kyong-Ah Kwon, Meghan Welch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000376715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Evaluating Early Learning in Museums presents developmentally appropriate and culturally relevant practices for engaging early learners and their families in informal arts settings.

Written by early childhood education researchers and a museum practitioner, the book showcases what high-quality educational programs can offer young children and their families through the case study of a program at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Providing strategies for building strong community partnerships and audience relationships, the authors also survey evaluation tools for early learning programs and offer strategies to help museums around the world to engage young children. At the center of this narrative is the seminal partnership that developed between researchers and museum educators during the evaluation of a program for toddlers. Illuminating key components of the partnership and the resulting evolution of family offerings at the museum, the book also draws parallels to current work being done at other museums in international contexts.

Evaluating Early Learning in Museums illustrates how an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers and practitioners can improve museum practices. As such, the book will be of interest to researchers and students engaged in the study of museums and early childhood, as well as to practitioners working in museums around the world.

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Young children in museums today

Recent program models for the High Museum of Art

A growing audience

A wealth of research and a growing understanding of the development of young minds has fed a burgeoning interest in programming for this increasingly important audience. By following the recent journey undertaken by staff at the High Museum in establishing new programs and initiatives for early learners, this chapter will detail some established and emerging trends that served as models, including:

• programming for infants
• gallery tours for early learners
• early learning programs in modern and contemporary art museums
• how museums are thinking more holistically about young children in offering amenities and other resources

The infancy of a thoughtful plan at the High Museum

Since its founding, the High Museum of Art has positioned education at the core of its mission. Teaching art and creating a dedicated space for children have always been priorities of the Museum. The High received its first home in 1926, and by 1928 the new High Museum had welcomed 16,000 visitors, formalized art classes, and had opened a special children’s section (Atlanta Historical Society, 1994, p. 31). In 1968, the Museum was joined by the Alliance Theatre (then the Alliance Resident Theatre Company) and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to form the Woodruff Arts Center in Mid-town Atlanta, Georgia.

In 2015, the Museum established the goal to transform Atlanta into a city where exposure to fine arts at an early age is a hallmark of growing up in the Capital of the South. This goal translated into several new family initiatives, a deeper focus on accessibility and inclusion, and several community-based partnerships. These initiatives provided an opportunity to rethink existing methods when designing for family visitors alongside experts in the field. All programs were developed with the aim of creating educational experiences that bring families together, are developmentally appropriate, and incorporate strategies for both looking at and making open-ended, creative, and playful art. Additionally, the goal of inclusion centered the necessity of having program participation that reflected the diverse population of the city of Atlanta. In particular, as a majority African American and linguistically diverse city in the American South, the focus on inclusivity in program design and communications became one of major importance. High Museum staff knew that families with young children made up a large proportion of family audiences at the Museum, and it was decided early on that the Museum’s youngest visitors (from birth – 8 years old) would be a major focus of planning.

With the launch of a new family initiative, the education team kicked off this new chapter for the Museum with a reflection on the history and theory of early learning in museums and the state of the field at the time. Sharon Shaffer’s Engaging Young Children in Museums, originally published in 2014, was the perfect primer. In it, Shaffer expertly outlines the history of children in American museums from the founding of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in 1899, through the development of special children’s exhibitions at The Toledo Museum of Art in 1914, to children’s story times at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1918 (Shaffer, 2015). Engaging Young Children in Museums is an essential text for museum professionals working with family audiences to understand how we arrived where we are today with programming for young children in museums. Thanks to the efforts of trailblazers like Sharon Shaffer and many other museum educators, museums of all types have recognized that young children are a critical audience and there are many model programs and initiatives for museum professionals to learn from.

When one works in museum education, it can be relatively straightforward to survey what colleagues in the field are up to. If your museum is contemplating a new initiative, a quick internet search will reveal similar programs in other museums that might be used as models for development within your institution. High Museum education staff continuously research best practices for perennial activities in museum education (art making and story time being common examples) but were also interested in more novel ways in which early learners were being considered in museum spaces. The following program examples represent a variety of approaches to early childhood education utilized by museums worldwide at the time of writing this book. This multitude of perspectives underscores Sharon Shaffer’s assertion in International Thinking on Children in Museums: A Sociocultural View of Practice, that it is “not possible to identify a singular approach to education” (Shaffer, 2020).

Infant programs

High Museum educators observed the growth of early learning programs in museums, over the past decade in particular, expanding from preschool visits to include infant programming for families. Since the 1990s, the High Museum has presented programs designed for families with toddlers (approximately 12–36 months old). With the new family initiative, High Museum staff started to think more deeply about the many younger siblings (infants from birth up to 12 months old) who participate in Toddler Thursdays and in other family programming at the Museum. On Toddler Thursdays and on family days, there were a significant number of infants present.

Many museums are creating programs for families with infants, with contrasting approaches. For example, The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, offers a close looking program for infants and their adults called Cultural Cuddles. Activities for babies change each month and include discovery-based themes, including “faces,” “my senses,” and “color” (National Museum of African American History and Culture). In contrast, “Baby Mindful” at Orleans House Gallery in London is designed to support the adult mental health of caregivers of pre-crawling babies (Orleans House Gallery, 2018). Seeing divergent program models like these, High Museum staff began to wonder what approach to take to best serve this audience at our institution.

While at a local conference on early learning and literacy, High staff were introduced to the concept of joint attention and the work of Michael Tomasello (who had once served as a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia). Joint attention, a child-directed shared looking experience with an adult that benefits early language acquisition, seemed to High Museum education staff to be ideally suited for the museum context (Tomasello, 1986). Museum experiences are centered around looking at art together and sharing perspectives with our companions. This concept also resonated on a personal level with several education staff members who had experienced transformative moments with babies in museums. The powerful connection between language development and shared experience of the visual world led High Museum education staff to Talk With Me Baby.

Talk With Me Baby is an Atlanta-based cross-organizational initiative, designed to support quality conversations between children and their care-givers during the first three years of life. This initiative is led by the Georgia Department of Public Health and Department of Education, Emory University’s School of Nursing and Department of Pediatrics, the Marcus Autism Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Atlanta Speech School’s Rollins Center for Language and Literacy, and Get Georgia Reading – Georgia’s Campaign for Grade Level Reading. The premise of Talk With Me Baby is to educate the public about the critical importance of language nutrition – the quantity and quality of nourishing language – in children’s most dramatic time of development: before 3 years of age (www.talkwithmebaby.org). The mission and theory underpinning Talk With Me Baby seemed to be in alignment with the concept of joint attention, and immediately identified the initiative as an intriguing potential partner for the High Museum.

High education staff began conversations with Kimberly Ross, Senior Manager, Early Brain Development and Language Acquisition at the Georgia Department of Public Health regarding the potential development of a new infant program following the principles of the Talk With Me Baby program. Ross confirmed High Museum staff’s intimations that art museums might be the perfect place to start conversations with babies, and to introduce new words that families wouldn’t typically use in the home. These conversations evolved into a partnership between Talk With Me Baby and the High Museum of Art, and the co-development of a High Museum program designed for caregivers with infants from birth through 14 months of age. Ross consulted with the Museum, providing both classroom and in-gallery trainings for staff as well as guiding program design and scripting. During the first conversation between High Museum education staff and Talk With Me Baby, Kimberly Ross immediately saw the opportunity of an infant program inside a museum. “One of the best things that families and educators can do to support healthy brain growth,” she explained over a phone call, “is to introduce lots of words.” The Talk With Me Baby web-site features a section dedicated to “conversation starters”: a list of phrases that caregivers might use in different locations like the beach, shopping, or at bedtime, many of which are easily adapted for a museum visit (Start a Conversation). Museums represent a location and source of activities where new vocabulary that babies wouldn’t necessarily hear around the home can be introduced.

What resulted from this collaboration was Baby Book Club, a monthly 20-minute session, where a High Museum teaching artist pairs an infant book with a work of art in the galleries, to get adults and their babies talking. For the pilot program on Saturday, January 5, 2019 at 11:15 a.m., teaching artist Nicole Livieratos led 18 participants in activities related to Winter Landscape painting by Alex Katz and A Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. Nicole greeted families, introduced the Talk With Me Baby initiative, and outlined the experience participants would share in the gallery together. She read A Snowy Day in front of Alex Katz’s Winter Landscape and encouraged close looking and conversation about the artworks in the gallery. Several families had their babies make snow angels on the rug. At the end of the program, she distributed Talk With Me Baby books (offered in both English and Spanish), which were received with appreciation by families. Participants lingered long after the program, socializing with other families and providing feedback about the program. When asked how they heard about Baby Book Club, the first family who arrived responded that they had found the program listed in an internet search for things to do with babies in Atlanta. They detailed their frustration surrounding the lack of things to do with this age group in the city, and expressed appreciation for the High’s new program meeting their needs. Given this response, it is perhaps unsurprising that Baby Book Club remains an ongoing and popular program among the High’s offerings, and continues to evolve to meet the needs of caregivers and their babies.

Tours for early learners

Museum tours are typically led by museum staff or volunteer docents and consist of guided visits to a handful of artworks on display to share information and spark discussion among participants. Tours are a well-established means for museums to connect audiences with what is currently on view. Like so many other museums worldwide, the High Museum has long offered gallery tours designed for adults and for families with children ages 5 and up, leading curious education staff to speculate as to what a tour for visitors younger than the age of 5 might look like. This interest launched early experiments in tours for early learners in 2014, in preparation for an exhibition entitled, Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections (on view October 2015 – January 2016). High Museum Interpretation staff were inspired by the Gala Carriage of the Vienna Court – The “Princes’ Carriage” ca. 1750–1755 from the collection of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, which would be on display for the exhibition. This opulent carriage made of wood panels, bronze, glass, iron, velvet, silk, and gold embroidery was designed to carry the imperial family’s children: a striking example of an 18th-century stroller. Noticing an increase of families with children in 21st-century strollers in High Museum galleries, the interpretation team took a stab at designing a stroller tour specifically for the Habsburg Splendor exhibition. For this project, educators conducted research, looking at examples set by other institutions. Through this process of research, staff quickly learned that there were many different models for stroller tours being offered in museums at the time and that they would need to decide which best aligned with High Museum educational philosophy, and the identified goals for their tour.

Each tour differed from institution to institution in terms of duration, frequency of the offering, and content, but the major distinction between all of the tour models researched was whether they were designed specifically for the adult caregiver, or for the entire family, with the infant and developmental appropriateness in mind. Museum website program descriptions often explicitly state who the tour is designed for. Stroller Tours at the Whitney Museum of American Art were clearly focused on the adult experience; “Whitney Teaching Fellows – PhD candidates in art history – lead engaging tours of current exhibitions before the Museum opens to the public, for adults with babies who are 0–18 months old” (Whitney Museum website, Stroller Tours). In contrast, other early learning tour descriptions would detail a tour clearly designed for the little one in the party. For example, the Brooklyn Museum’s Stroller Tours description is all about the baby: “We welcome our youngest museumgoers and their caregivers to experience the Museum through an interactive tour. This baby-friendly program features touchable objects, songs, exploration of the art in our galleries, and an opportunity to connect with other adults” (Brooklyn Museum website, Stroller Tours). High education staff came to understand they would have to make a decision to one side of this defining line.

Being in conversation with museum educators who were responsible for designing their museum’s early learner tours reveals the thinking behind the developm...