Working with Young Children in Museums

Weaving Theory and Practice

Abigail Hackett, Rachel Holmes, Christina MacRae, Abigail Hackett, Rachel Holmes, Christina MacRae

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429785030
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Arte
• Thema: Museología

Working with Young Children in Museums makes a major contribution to the small body of extant research on young children in museums, galleries and heritage sites.

Bridging theory and practice, the book introduces theoretical concepts in a clear and concise manner, whilst also providing inspirational insights into everyday programming in museums. Structured around three key themes, this volume seeks to diverge from the dominant socio-cultural learning models that are generally employed in the museum learning literature. It introduces a body of theories that have variously been called new materialist, spatial, posthuman and Deleuzian; theories which enable a focus on the body, movement and place and which have not yet been widely shared or developed with the museum sector or explicitly connected to practice. This book outlines these theories in an accessible way, explaining their usefulness for conceptualising young children in museums and connecting them to practical examples of programming in a range of locations via a series of contributed case studies.

Connecting theory to practice for readers in a way that emphasises possibility, Working with Young Children in Museums should be essential reading for museum practitioners working in a range of institutions around the world. It should be of equal interest to researchers and students engaged in the study of museum learning, early childhood education and children's experiences in museums.

1

Introduction

Abigail Hackett,Rachel Holmes and Christina MacRae

Imagine a young child enters a museum. Perhaps they are 2 years old, or five and a half years, or 10 months. Maybe they come with their family, or a group of children from their nursery, or couple of families with kids of a similar age. They run to the museum entrance, or do their new funny walk they invented on the way here, or sit in a pushchair messily eating a biscuit. Perhaps they pause at the threshold, a little uncertain. Or they run inside, and down a corridor before their grown up has had a chance to remove their coat. A young child has entered a museum and something is going to happen.

Increasingly (in the UK and globally), more young children seem to be entering museums than ever before. From the point of view of museum professionals, there is an increasing interest in how to programme exhibitions, events, activities and practical considerations to best serve this audience. Planning spaces, activities, encounters or visiting experiences for any audience begins with imagination and, coupled with this, are particular ideas and assumptions about the child, the museum and who and what else might come into play when young children visit museums. Reflecting on how well a museum or gallery caters for an audience involves processes of observation and reflection. It involves wondering, asking and experimenting. When observing what children do in museums, sometimes predictable, sometimes completely surprising, researchers and museum practitioners find themselves asking different versions of the same question: what does that mean? This question is frequently phrased in other ways; what does this behaviour signify? What are these children learning? How successful is this exhibition for this audience? What is the value of children visiting museums?

This book provides a wide range of practical examples of how others have worked with young children in museums. In developing the title for this book, we thought carefully about the relationship between these two things; theories for thinking about or conceptualising what is happening when young children visit museums and the practices of museum professionals who work with these audiences. Rejecting words such as “bridging” or “integrating,” we settled on “weaving theory and practice,” because, as a metaphor, weaving seems to leave the question of the relationship between theory and practice a little more open, rather than assuming a separate-ness or a binary (theory on the one side, practice on the other). Whilst bridging implies joining together in a straightforward, fixed and rather permanent way, in weaving, threads can have similarities and differences that come in from different directions and starting points. When they are brought together, something new is made.

Good theories should make sense in the everyday. They should become illuminated, transformed and made to shimmer more vibrantly by practice. They should not stand apart from practice, pointing a finger and dictating how things should be organised. When some of the most frequently observed ways in which young children behave in museums are overlooked within dominant models of children’s learning in museums, multiple unresolved questions are left for museum practitioners and the unique role museums play in the experiences of very young children remains vaguely articulated (Macrae et al., 2018). An important impetus for this book was our conviction that in order to consider young children’s museum visiting, we (researchers and museum professionals) need a wider, more generous and more materially focussed framing. Many of the theories we offer in this book are “new” in the sense that the language might be unfamiliar to museum professionals and they are not the dominant “learning theories” currently within the sector. Yet part of their power and usefulness is the way in which they align (we would argue) in very resonant ways with practice, with the way in which things unfold between young children and museum spaces in the everyday.

In this book we will outline, explain and play with some of the key ideas and theories we have found to resonate with our observations of young children in museums. By making the case for the usefulness of these theories for conceptualizing young children in museums, as well as connecting these theories to practical case study examples of programming in a range of museum, gallery and heritage sites, we offer a contextualised way of thinking about these ideas.

Coming of age? Researching young children in museums

As Piscitelli outlines in the forward to this book, the field of research focussed on children in museums is fairly young. Within “the new museology” paradigm (Macdonald, 2007; Vergo, 1997), children visiting museums were understood as learners, constructing personal meanings during the visit and drawing on their own personal schemas. Within this kind of socio-cultural approach, a large body of work emerged looking at family conversations in museums, with an emphasis on construction of meanings between adults and children (Ellenbogen et al., 2004; Leinhardt et al., 2002; Leinhardt and Knutson, 2004). Meaning making was frequently conflated with talk; particularly the kind of talk that involves turn taking, clear engagement with the intended learning themes of the museum exhibition and what Leinhardt and Knutson (2004: 7) describe as “gradual enrichment of talk” (p. 7), that is, a more complicated structure of conversations, such as synthesis and analysis, as evidence of learning.

Whilst this work usefully made the case for the value of children learning in museums, the dominance of this approach within a small body of research also created some unintended consequences. Children seemed to be designated as “little learners” from the start, rather than visitors in their own right (Kirk, 2014), with the words they spoke coded against intended topics and learning outcomes of the exhibition. Even with the increased availability of video and visual data to document museum visits (e.g., Callanan and Braswell, 2006; Crowley et al., 2001), the emphasis remained on the cognitive learning of the visitors as evidenced through their talk or other actions that could be clearly interpreted as intentional communication (e.g., pointing to something of interest). This emphasis on talk-as-learning also spilled into assumptions that children and adults should ideally be deep in dyadic conversation and interaction during visits (e.g., Dooley and Welch, 2014). Overall, the child-as-learner-through-talk-with-adults seemed to be a figure strangely abstracted from the museum building, from sensory engagement with the stuff in the museum and from physical embodiment of the experience of moving through and in a museum space.

As interest grew in young children and their families as museum audiences in their own right (Graham, 2011), interesting approaches to consulting with children and families about provision and exhibition design have been developed (Cape UK, 2011; Kelly et al., 2006), together with evaluation of existing provision (Graham, 2012; Hancock and Cox, 2002). Around the same time, some of the first research projects that attended in particular to younger children in museums began to gesture towards the need for a different kind of conceptual framing. In Australia, the QUT Museums Collaborative Research project (Piscitelli and Anderson, 2001) was amongst the first to focus on younger children (4–6 years), emphasising the importance of full body engagement and “hot and sweaty learning” (Weier and Piscitelli, 2003). In the UK, MacRae (2007) drew on phenomenological perspectives to describe a museum-practitioner-led session for pre-school children in an art gallery, with a focus on the sensory and embodied experience of engaging with objects. More recently, research in New Zealand has examined the experiences of pre-school children (2.5–5 years) visiting a range of museums and galleries (Carr et al., 2012), noting how nursery children noticed and interpreted museum-specific practices, such as standing behind a yellow line to view artwork, and then reincorporated these practices in their own activities in the nursery (Clarkin-Philips et al., 2013).

In the UK, two doctoral studies completed around the same time attended closely to the experiences of young children visiting museums with their families (Kirk, 2014; Hackett, 2014). Both Hackett and Kirk emphasised movement, and the experience of a body moving around a place, as a key characteristic of young children’s museum visiting. Hackett (2016) offered Ingold’s (2007) notion of wayfaring as a way of describing and valuing the way in which young children’s museums experiences unfolded through lines of movement. Over time, thickening lines of wayfaring led to deep embodied knowledge, memories and rituals attached to museum spaces by the children and families. Kirk (2014; Kirk and Buckingham, 2018) mapped the importance of young children navigating and negotiating the museum as an important part of the process whereby they encountered places or exhibits they connected with and from which they could make sense.

From this work so far, the importance of movement as a key way in which the museum is experienced (Hackett, 2016; Kelton et al., 2018) has emerged as a major force shaping thinking about young children in museums. A lens of movement, body and place have encouraged researchers to attend to the sensory nature of museum experience (Dicks, 2013; MacRae, 2007) and the way a museum is experienced through the body (Hackett et al., 2018; Macrae et al., 2018; Yamada-Rice, 2018). The importance of sufficient time for children to become familiar with and develop their own ways of being in and using museum spaces has been increasingly recognised as key (Clayton and Shuttleworth, 2018; DeWitt et al., 2018). In turn, this more expansive way of considering children’s presence in museums has enabled researchers to attend more closely to the diverse and often unexpected way in which things unfold in the moment and in unexpected directions (Birch, 2018; Lester et al., 2014; Piscitelli and Penfold, 2015).

Children in museums as more-than-human

The emphasis on movement (Hackett, 2016; Kirk and Buckingham, 2018), place and sensory experience in the research outlined above all point towards the potential of theories beyond socio-cultural theory to account for young children’s museum experiences in a more expansive way. Tracing the possibilities of understanding a child’s experience in a museum through, alternatively, a cognitive, a socio-cultural and a posthuman lens, Macrae et al. (2018) advocate for posthuman theories (also referred to as more-than-human theories, post-qualitative theories, new materialism, Deleuzian and so on) for two reasons. First, to enable a fuller consideration of place, materials and objects, the things that actually often constitute what is unique and special about being in a museum from the point of view of a child. Second, these theories allow us to escape from the idea of representative meaning; instead of only valuing things we observe and are able to explain (for example, in terms of a child’s learning), these theories allow us to pay attention to things that happen that seem important whilst also seeming to escape or evade easy descriptions or neat explanations.

Research methods and theories centred on talk and learning shaped and framed what researchers and professionals were able to notice, value, interrogate and story with regards to what happens when young children visit museums. While we do not dispute that visitors (young children and the adults they come with) often use prior knowledge and experiences in order to make sense of the museum, and sometimes express this through talk, the experiences of young children in museums extend beyond this in several different directions. Beyond talk and adults, young children in museums are also deeply entangled with and co-exist alongside spaces and things, with the more-than human, so that all these things lose their clear boundaries. The case studies in this book are replete with examples of this, as young children spin around in a revolving door (Chapter 10), place a colander on their head (Chapter 22) or dump a cardboard box on their baby brother (Chapter 22). Crawling or running across surfaces and rolling around on a wooden polished floor (Chapter 12), young children and their ideas seem frequently to be in constant motion, rigorously resisting the fixing down of meanings, yet still with a sense of purpose, of something special unfolding. Whilst we are not suggesting that these kinds of moments are the only thing to value or pay attention to when working with young children in museums, we are arguing that an account of young children in museums that disregards these frequent and common practices is insufficient. Further, we would suggest that the possibilities for becoming entangled with different and unique kinds of objects, spaces, sensations, architectures, is a large part of where we see the value in children visiting museums (Macrae et al., 2018). This entanglement is an important part of the answer to “what does that mean?” when children visit museums.

Theories that we find helpful for attending to the body, movement, experience of spaces in museums can broadly be described as more-than-human theories. By more-than-human we refer to a theoretical lens that does not truncate the child and the adult human accompanying them from the building, objects, smells, movements, atmospheres and sensory experiences which are also bound up in museum visiting. These theories offer more expansive ways to take seriously about the way in which museum visits always extend beyond talk, humans, the notion of children as “learners” and the kinds of behaviour that are easy to explain or rationalise. Although the literature on the more-than-human is extensive, we have focussed in particular on theories that help us to rethink objects, spaces and time during children’s museum visiting. More-than-human theories are useful for helping us to reconceptualise how we understand objects, space and time within our research and practice. At the same time, objects, space and time have become vehicles for us to use when looking at what these different theories might afford our thinking in terms of children in museums.

Across the three Parts of the book, we engage with theories of objects, space and time in the following ways.

1 Thing-ness and the power of objects

This Part will make the case for taking objects themselves seriously when considering children’s experiences in museums. Whilst in the wider museum literature Dudley (2014) has made a case for museum artefacts as “complex material objects” rather than only mediums for generating human learning, the full potential of the materiality of museum obje...