Welcoming Young Children into the Museum

A Practical Guide

Sarah Erdman, Nhi Nguyen, Margaret Middleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000482393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Études des musées

Welcoming Young Children into the Museum provides all of the information practitioners need to consider when making the decision to engage with this audience and their carers. Meeting the reader where they are, this guide enables professionals to work toward outcomes that fit with their needs.

Working methodically from the initial stages of bringing staff on board, through to implementation and evaluation, readers are carefully steered through each phase. "Big-picture" needs, like adherence to mission, are considered alongside logistical components, like cleaning schedules, to ensure that museums cater to young children in a way that is beneficial to both the visitors and the institution. Drawing on current neurological research and best practices in early childhood education and development, this guide presents case studies from a variety of different institutions around the world that demonstrate that creating interesting, developmentally appropriate opportunities for young children is about much more than just simplifying what is already on offer. Erdman, Nguyen and Middleton demonstrate that the age and needs of the visitors must be taken into careful consideration, as well as the assets and potential obstacles of the institution.

Welcoming Young Children into the Museum will be essential reading for professionals working in museums large and small, regardless of type. It will be useful to those who are considering setting up new programmes for early years audiences and those with existing programmes, who would like to improve their offering.

1 Reflection and research

DOI: 10.4324/9781003055198-2

Preparing the ground

Sarah Erdman, Nhi Nguyen with Margaret Middleton

When families have enjoyable experiences in museums with their young children and babies, this can set the tone for long-lasting and trusting relationships between institutions and families: they can grow together. A grandmother attended preschool workshops at the museum for over ten years as part of her regular routine of providing childcare for her granddaughters and described it as “an end of an era” when the youngest started school. We were delighted to welcome her back to the museum at one of our lunchtime talks for adults a few weeks later.

—Nicola

It’s been a joy to see how our youngest visitors grow into appreciating museums. At the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, our toddler program is called “Tad’s Tots,” so named after Lincoln’s youngest son. To practice keeping our hands to ourselves in the galleries, we make “duck tales” for some of our gallery adventures. When I first began the tours, I cannot think of anyone within the museum other than me who wasn’t a little wary of how the toddlers would be with the artifacts. After a couple of monthly visits, though, they witnessed one little boy who had brought another small friend on a play date. As the née friend reached out to touch a cannon, the other enthusiastically stopped him and said, “No, no, we are at the museum and we keep our hands to us unless Ms. Natalie says we can touch.” It was the moment that everyone realized the toddler program worked and that we were training future museum lovers.

—Natalie

This chapter is about “preparing the ground” through research and reflection. ing time to do this now means there will be less wasted effort propping up shaky products. So, this chapter is more reflection than action. Throughout you will asking yourself WHY are we doing this and HOW will it work for us. Keep those questions in the forefront of your mind as you read on.

Motivation

Before you begin to plan programming, or think about outreach or decide how to allocate staff time, you need to examine your motivations. Why do you want to deliberately reach out to families with young children?

1. Whose idea was it to start including families and young children more deliberately in your museum? Was the goal for more visitors, specific programs or something else?4
2. What was the “push” for getting this started now? Was it in response to something specific, like a particular event or a Board Member or community request? Is it something that has been planned for a while but is just now getting off the ground?
3. What is your “end goal?” Why do you want families to come?

Circle “yes” or “no” for each of these statements.

• Y / N I think that including families is the right thing to do/I think our museum has a lot to offer families.
• Y/N We have lots of families visiting and I want to have more things avail-able for them.
• Y/N I think families are an untapped revenue stream for our museum.
• Y/N My supervisor/director/Board is pressuring me to bring more families into the exhibits and/or programs.

Make a few notes about what you think the “yes” and “no” answers are telling you. This will help you when you are either figuring out how this fits into your physical and mental workload or drawing up your talking points for bringing others on board.

Team effort

The premise of this guide is that you want to bring in sustainable, effective programming for families with young children. To do that, you need to have every level of your museum on board. Ideally, you need 100% of your administration to back the effort. Most museums are structured in a top-down manner and if there is conflict at the administrative level, it will filter down (Sporleder and Forbes 2016, 52). If your Director/Board or other upper administration skeptical, then you won’t have the institutional support that you need. When it comes to staff, ideally you would have 100% participation, but that may not be possible. For large-scale initiatives in schools, which share a similar structure to museums, research points to needing at least 75–80% of staff willing to embrace the idea to keep momentum going (Sporleder and Forbes 2016, 56). If your staff, both front and back of house, don’t see it as a worthwhile effort, then the quality that will keep families coming back won’t be there or your staff will feel overly burdened by the responsibility.

The numbers mentioned earlier, of percentage of staff needed to be on board, aren’t there to make or break whether you carry on with the project. Although, in some cases, you may find that right now isn’t the time for the initiative, think of them instead as an opportunity to see your idea from all angles.

Although it isn’t strictly necessary to have buy-in from your visitors and community, it certainly doesn’t hurt. At the very least, having a sense of what your current visitors, community and other stakeholders think about the idea can help you to plan for getting them involved. But you can’t just guess where people are at. You need to talk to them and get a true sense of how they perceive the museum, what resources, programs or exhibits would be of interest to them and whether it is something that would be used if it was created.

Quick Tip: Use your existing avenues to get input. You can talk to existing advisory groups or community partners, have conversations with visitors or set up a simple white board or post it note station inviting visitor feedback. If you have an active social media presence, you can solicit comments through that as well. You staff is also a valuable asset and will have input or connections in the area they can share.

Maybe right away you’ll have 100% on board. But, if not, you’ll have a valuable opportunity to ask: “why not?” They may highlight concerns you hadn’t thought of and as you address these, your plan will get stronger and your buy-in will improve.

If you don’t have well established access, or if you feel like the responses are too niche or not inclusive enough, then you can look at other options based on your museum and resources. These may include reaching out to local community and family-oriented groups (in person or online) and talking with the local school district and early childhood education centers in your area about sending information home to families.

So, what do you know about where everyone else stands? It may help to use a scale to rate where the different groups fall. Allowing for more detail and easier comparison than simply 1–10, this scale, adapted from the Fuel Smart Goal Work sheet, will let you give insight into each group’s opinion.

SMART Goal Scale Sheet. Adapted from Fuel Smart Goal Worksheet

1. No way we can do that.
2. I am confident we won’t be able to do that.
3. I am pretty sure we won’t be able to do that.
4. I really want us to do that, but I don’t think that it is likely we can do it to the extent we want to.
5. I’m not sure if we can do that.
6. If we try really really hard, I think we can do that.
7. I think we can do that.
8. I am pretty sure we can do that.
9. I am very confident we can do that.
10. We can do that no problem!

Using the scale, note what you think best meshes with each group’s opinion. Jot down why you think that. Did you have a conversation about it with them? Have you seen a pattern in similar situations in the past? Make notes on how much is a guess and what is solid information.

Also jot down how and when you can have conversations to fill in those gaps and make specific plans to schedule these conversations. You will know best how to approach these conversations within your organization. Should you go straight to the top and talk to the upper administration first? Is it better to get a general sense from colleagues? Bring up the idea at an all-staff meeting? Let what you know about the culture of your institution, your own preferences and the relationships you have with colleagues guide you. Use the following space to write out your notes.

Board

Administration

Staff

Visitors

Community

Other_________

Elevator pitch

Once you have your notes, you need to craft your “why.” You will use this you talk to people and bring them on board, in funding requests and marketing, basically any time someone asks what you are doing. An elevator pitch, where you imagine having only a brief elevator ride to “sell” your idea will keep your thoughts focused. Imagine a series of elevator rides where you end up with someone from each of the groups mentioned earlier. What would you say to them?

Jennifer Oleniczak Brown, author of “Thinking On Your Feet” (2019, 83–87), says that a good elevator pitch needs to be:

• Short—It is a conversation starter, not the entire project from start to finish.
• Specific—Keep it tailored to the audience that you are speaking to and have one specific goal that you are highlighting.
• Interesting—Leave the listener wanting to learn more about the project.
• Authentic—Focus on the essential parts that make this idea special.

In order to accomplish this, you need to be able to confidently explain:

• Who you are?
• What you are doing?
• Why the person you are talking to should care?

Take a few minutes and jot your thoughts down. What is your role? What are you planning on doing? Make notes about why different people you will be talking to should care about this project. If it helps to organize your thinking, you can use these prompts.

• What is your goal?
• Why is this mission related or otherwise fits into what you already do?
• What is the unique position or asset that you think your institution can bring to this audience?
• What specific question would you have or what type of feedback would you need from them?

Once you have a sense of where the different stakeholders for your institution lie, you can start looking at what resources you have available to put toward this project.

Resource analysis

There are very few museums that have unlimited resources to put toward new projects. More often, you are looking for things that can be retrofitted and resources that can be split or reallocated to make the vision come to life. Taking time now to think about what resources you have will help in your personal planning and also as you work to get the rest of the staff onboard. Resources come many forms and each is important to think through.

Although you don’t need to tie yourself down to a strict and specific budget at this stage, it is important to think through the costs for what you are trying to accomplish: the supplies needed, staff costs, any additional purchases, etc. You may be able to offset some of those as you continue through your resource analy sis, but you need to track what you need as well as what you have.

At my first museum job it wasn’t clear how much money was going to be allocated to education. I sketched out multiple budgets, my “dream” budget as if no expenses were spared, a “realistic” budget and then a “bare bones” budget. It let me mix and match and see what I could create with what I had.—Sarah

If you have done any budgeting before, or if there are budgets from past projects that you can access, you should be able to create a reasonable estimate based on past experience for exhibits and events/programs and supply catalogs for materials that will need to be purchased. If budgeting is not something that you have done before then try to connect with a colleague or mentor who can walk you through the process at your museum, it will be a valuable skill that you use throughout your work.

If you really aren’t sure about costs for these specific types of projects, or want more detail, then you can reach out to other museums that are doing work si...