Snapshots of Museum Experience

Understanding Child Visitors Through Photography

Elee Kirk, Will Buckingham

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351214049
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Kunst
• Thema: Museumswissenschaft

Children are one of the major audiences for museums, but their visits are often seen solely from the point of view of museum learning. In Snapshots of Museum Experience, Will Buckingham draws upon Elee Kirk's research amongst child visitors to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, to take a different approach. Using a method of photo-elicitation with four-and five-year-old child visitors to the museum, the book investigates children's experience of the museum, and in the process undermines many of our assumptions about the interests, needs and demands of child museum visitors.

Drawing together the fields of museum studies and childhood studies, the book considers children as active creators of the museum visit. It investigates the way that children navigate and take control of the physical and social spaces of the museum, finding their own idiosyncratic pathways through these spaces. It also explores how elements of the museum 'light up', becoming salient to the child visitor. Finally, it investigates how children make sense through intellectually and imaginatively engaging with these elements of the museum visit.

Snapshots of Museum Experience gives a unique insight into the sheer diversity of children's museum experiences and discusses how museums might cater more successfully to the needs of their child visitors. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers and students in the fields of museum studies, visitor studies and childhood studies. It should also be essential reading for museum educators and exhibition designers.

1 Introduction

It is the school holidays, and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History is filled with adults and children of all ages. A family with three young children, two girls of around seven and two years, and a boy of around four, are in the central court, overshadowed by two large dinosaur skeletons: an iguanodon, and a tyrannosaurus (within this book, the names of all animals will be treated as common names, even those derived directly from taxonomic names, and as such will not be capitalised or italicised). The older girl and boy are running excitedly from case to case, while the youngest girl’s hand is gripped by her father, to stop her from disappearing into the crowd. The boy runs to his father, saying, ‘Show you, show you.’ He takes up his father’s free hand, and pulls him through the museum. The man first thinks that he is being shown the three elephant skeletons, and pauses by them, saying, ‘Oh wow.’ But the boy keeps dragging him onwards, into an aisle of reptiles, amphibians and fish, past a huge spider crab and giant tortoise, to the very last exhibit. It is a long, low glass case, sitting on the floor in the middle of the aisle, and it contains a large, taxidermy crocodile. The older girl joins them, and all three children lean on the glass case and stare together at the huge reptile. Having paused here for a while, they together move on a short distance to a small taxidermy Shetland pony, which stands on a table with a sign next to it saying ‘Please Touch’. The children stand together for a while, stroking the pony. Then the boy breaks away from the group again, and stops in front of a taxidermy golden eagle. The others follow him, and the man reads the label out loud. They carry on through the museum, the boy running ahead and excitedly shouting for them to see what he has found, the two girls and their father following behind.

*

Nearby, another father and his four-year-old son are also walking hand in hand. The father is pointing to various exhibits, and telling the boy facts about them. He points to the elephant skeletons, and says, ‘That’s the biggest land animal,’ then points to the giraffe skeleton, and says, ‘Do you know what that is?’ But the boy is looking the other way, peering at the smaller specimens in the table-top glass cases. He sees a bat skeleton, gives a playful scream and grabs his father. Then he notices the giraffe skeleton that his father was trying to draw his attention to, and screams again. His father says, ‘It’s a giraffe.’ Still holding hands, they walk alongside the parade of large skeleton mammals. The man continues to name each animal as they walk past; camel, deer, bison, pig … but the boy is looking in the other direction, still peering into the table-top glass cases that are on his side of the aisle. At the end of this row is a low case containing a beachball-sized brain coral. The boy shouts ‘Brain!’ His father pauses briefly, but then continues walking.

*

Upstairs on the balcony gallery is a group of six: two women, three boys aged around six to eight years, and a girl of around four years. One of the women is looking into the geology cases on her own. The other is talking boisterously and making scatological jokes with the boys. The young girl is trailing slowly, several steps behind them all. At regular points along the corridor, positioned between the glass cases, are large, low, free-standing geological specimens that visitors can touch. Every time the girl comes to one of these rocks or fossils she pauses and briefly lies her head and hands on the cool rock. If the specimen is smooth, she strokes it. The last specimen in the row is a large, polished ammonite. She rests her head on it, holds onto the edges of it with both hands, and then strokes its glassy surface. She stays like this for a while, as the rest of the group chatter nearby. The woman with the group of boys carry on around the corner, but the other woman stops and waits, then picks up the girl, who cuddles into the woman’s shoulder. They talk quietly for a while about a display of precious stones, and then I watch them as they disappear along the corridor and down the stairs.

The child in the museum

Scenes such as these – observed during my research in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History – will be familiar to anybody who has ever worked in a museum, or to anybody who has taken children on a museum visit. Children are engaged, fascinated and often quirkily idiosyncratic explorers of the space of the museum.

In the first of these snapshots, the child acts as a guide to his adult companions. In the second of these snapshots, the boy’s interest in the museum seems to take place almost independently of that of his father: he is far more fascinated by the brain-like coral than by his father’s attempts at imparting knowledge. And in the third snapshot, the girl’s interest in the geological specimens seems almost meditative, separate from the rest of her group both in intensity and mood.

This book is about how young children experience the spaces of the museum. More specifically, it is about how young children experienced the space of this one particular museum. It is based upon my doctoral research in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History where I worked with informal child visitors to the museum, all of them part of family groups, using the medium of photography to explore the question of what it was like for these children to explore and engage with the museum and the exhibits it contained.

My method was, in principle, relatively simple. I would identify four- and five-year-old children who were visiting the museum as a part of family groups. I would approach these groups and ask the children if they were willing to take photographs of their visit and then discuss the photographs they had taken before they left. If they agreed, I gave them a digital camera and let them head off to explore. Some time later, they would return, we would plug the camera into my laptop, and they would navigate through the photographs they chose, talking about what interested them.

Thinking about museum experience

This method provided rich data on the children’s own concerns, on the question of what it was like for them to explore the museum. It was this question of children’s experience, the ‘what is it like?’ question, that lay at the very heart of my research and at the heart of my method. As a museum educator-turned-researcher, I have always been fascinated by the question of how young children experience museums, and in doing so how they make the museum space their own. Whatever the agendas of teachers, family members, adult chaperones, educators, or museum staff, child visitors interact with museums in ways that are surprising, unexpected and revealing. This book is an attempt to shift from an adult’s-eye-view of children’s museum visits – with all of the concerns and preoccupations that this implies – to a child’s-eye-view. Throughout this research, it was my intention to take children’s views and perspectives seriously in their own right, to see these views and perspectives as expressions of a rich, fully-formed world.

The reason this seems important to me is that if – blinded by our own adult preoccupations – we fail to understand the rich and complex experiential textures of children’s museum visits, then not only do we risk seriously failing to take into account the children who visit our museums, but we fail to understand why museums might matter to them, and lose out on opportunities for making museums better for them.

Young children – which I am defining for the purposes of this book as children aged five years and under – are considered as an increasingly important museum audience (Graham 2011, p. 54); and natural history museums in particular are disproportionately popular with young families (Strager and Astrup 2014). In the world of visitor studies, to which this book is a contribution, there has recently been an increase in museum research focusing on this age group. However, this research with young children tends to focus particularly on what the children are (or could be) learning in museums. Yet, as Johanson and Glow (2012, p. 29) write, ‘little research has been conducted on what children seek or value from their experience of museums’ (see also Dunn 2012). This distinction between learning and experience is not, of course, absolute. All experience, as I will go on to argue, is intimately involved with learning, whether we are children or adults. And it is not my aim here to dismiss the value of museums as educational spaces, or to underestimate the importance of museum learning. But learning is just part of a broader set of questions about what it is like for a young child to visit a museum. Seeing young child visitors only through the lens of learning (and the pedagogical agendas that go along with this) can mean that we too readily collapse the rich, multi-textured complexity of children’s museum visits – what museums are like, what they are, and what they mean to young visitors – into a set of instrumental agendas. Ultimately this serves nobody well, because it is only on the basis of taking experience seriously – in its full breadth, depth and complexity – that we can understand how children may best learn.

So this book aims to add to this small but growing field of literature about children’s museum experiences by answering two questions. This first is this: what are the experiences of young children on everyday visits to a natural history museum? These experiences, although they may involve learning in all kinds of ways, are not reducible to ‘museum learning’. The second question this book aims to answer is this: what research methods can we use to access these experiences of young child visitors to the museum?

Experience, of course, has a temporal dimension. A museum can be experienced in anticipation (‘I am looking forward to visiting the natural history museum!’), during the visit (‘Look! An elephant skeleton!’), and in recollection (‘Do you remember the dinosaur’s big, scary teeth?’). For the sake of this research, what I was particularly interested in was children’s experiences during the time of their visit. It would no doubt be possible to do other studies, taking longitudinal perspectives, but my focus in this book is on the texture of the museum experience during the visit itself, and the range of ways in which children responded to the huge diversity of objects they encountered in the museum. Questions of long-term impact, whilst important, are somewhat outside of the scope of this book.

In addition, as should already be clear, I am interested in the experience of museum visiting from the perspectives of the children involved. Such an approach can richly and deeply reveal the significance of the visit for the children themselves, rather than searching for evidence of the particular types of learning or meaning-making museum professionals and researchers judge to be important. The agendas set by educators, museum professionals, researchers or even family members may be radically different from the children’s own agendas in their exploration of the museum. Here we might recall the disparity between the father’s concern with naming animals, and his son’s fascination with the ‘brain-like’ coral.

In the field of childhood studies, Qvortrup writes about the need to see children as human beings rather than human becomings (Qvortrup 1987, p. 5). In other words, the purpose of children’s lives is not simply to become successful adults, but it is also to fully experience life as human beings in their own right. Whilst not negating the value of learning, this does involve a shift of perspective away from external agendas, towards a closer attentiveness – a deeper listening – to what children say about the texture of their experience. The distinction between ‘beings’ and ‘becomings’ is perhaps a little too starkly drawn: in the perspective that I will be taking in this book, rooted in the work of John Dewey, all of us are becomings insofar as we are creatures in flux, trying to make sense of a changeable and changing world. And children, of course, are no different from this. But what is of primary importance for the approach I am taking is that children should not be seen as being on the way to being adults if this is at the expense of the richness and depth of their present experience of and engagement with the world.

The method that I used to explore this question of children’s experience – one for which I am using the somewhat awkward term ‘photo-elicitation’ – turned out to offer extremely valuable insights into the texture of children’s museum experiences. At the outset, I had imagined that the photographs taken by children would be chiefly useful in providing aides-memoire and prompts for the interviews I conducted at the end of their visits. What I hadn’t expected was that the photographs would end up becoming such a rich source of data in their own right, serving as a non-verbal form of expression for the children, and thus responding to the call from Piscitelli and Anderson to include the ‘voices and visions’ of young children (2001, p. 271) in museum research. The use of photography as a research tool in museum contexts is not wholly novel, of course. But what did make the approach used in this project particularly powerful was way in which photography was used in a fashion that was both extremely light-touch and also very undisruptive of the children’s visits. As photography is already a part of the experience of museum visiting (at least, in those museums where photography is permitted!), this was a method that was only minimally disruptive of the texture of the visit, and that therefore fitted with my concern to explore the everydayness of museum visits.

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History

I carried out the bulk of my research at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH), one of the four museums associated with the University of Oxford (Figure 1.1). The OUMNH is housed in a magnificent Victorian neo-Gothic structure on Parks Road, close to the city centre. The collection covers just over 2,000 square metres, and the museum houses tens of thousands of objects. Exhibits include those relating to geology, prehistoric life, and modern animals and plants. The collection is free to enter, and annual visitor numbers are over 600,000, with up to 35,000 school children a year coming to the museum on organised visits.

Figure 1.1 The Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Source: Image © Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

The museum was founded in 1860 to gather together in one place the university’s scientific and natural history collections. Amongst the most striking exhibits are the Oxford Dodo, the world’s most complete remains of a dodo; a parade of skeletons in the main court demonstrating comparative anatomy amongst large mammals; and a nine-metre long megalosaurus, named in 1824 and considered the world’s first scientifically-described dinosaur.

Inside the museum, underneath a glass and iron roof (renovated and restored since the time of my research) that floods the museum with natural light, there are glass cases arranged into aisles on the ground floor. On the first floor is a balcony that runs around all four sides of the building, lined on three sides with glass cases, whilst on the fourth there is a new café (again, installed since my research was completed). The approach to displaying objects in the museum is relatively traditional, consisting mainly of specimens (taxidermy, skeletons, models, fossils and minerals) taxonomically displayed in the glass cases or, for some larger objects, free-standing on plinths. Despite this, the museum has what Gurian calls a ‘lively’ object-centred style (2006, p. 49), in which many of the cases are humorous, curious, or aesthetic, such as displays based on Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll was a regular visitor to the museum), and cabinets of brightly coloured crystals and animals (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Prehistoric reptile gallery, Oxford University Museum of Natural History

The bulk of my research was undertaken in the OUMNH, but I also carried out pilot studies in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, and the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester. After m...