Capturing Situational Interest in the Past. The Salience of Children's Experiences in Open-Air Museums (original) (raw)
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Thematic Analysis of the Children’s Drawings on Museum Visit: Adaptation of the Kuhn’s Method
World Journal of Education, 2014
Researchers are using techniques that allow children to express their perspectives. In 2003, Kuhn developed the method of data collection and analysis which combined thematic drawing and focused, episodic interview. In this article the Kuhn's method is adjusted using the draw and write technique as a research methodology. Reflections on the technique are drawn from our experience of using it in study with primary school students aged 8 to 10 years. This was part of a larger study undertaken to investigate the relationship between the way younger school-age students perceive the museum and degree of didactic structuring of museum contents. The students are asked to draw a picture showing their museum visit to Museum of Ancient Glass in Zadar and to write a shot text about it. Free written expression of students and their drawings illustrate children's abilities to convey their opinions when there is an enabling climate created. Analysis of children's' drawings has provided insight into the structure of students' perceptions, its orientation and content. At the same time it provided us with the information about the process of perceiving museum exhibits and museum environment by the students who were involved in the pre-visiting curricular activities and those who were not involved in them, as well as the information on students' perception of social interaction and abstract values that can be seen in the drawings.
Aesthetic Attributes of Museum Environmental Experience: A Pilot Study With Children as Visitors
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020
The research project is a small pilot study of the restorative aspects of museum experience on children; these include the sense of fascination during the visit. Museum environmental awareness was a latecomer to Museum and Visitor studies but is now highly valued. No longer just the "objects" contained in the museum fascinate but also the environment itself becomes an object of fascination. Some authors provide a clear categorization of feelings experienced by the visitor during a museum experience and suggest a framework with four categories of satisfying experience: objective, cognitive, introspective, and social. In designing our study, we began with the definition of museum experience and added a fifth category of "environmental experience." With this term, we refer to the extent to which the physical environment in and around a museum affects visitors. Indeed, our aim is to analyze the visitor's stream of feelings and opinions during a museum visit (specifically, the MART-Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto) to find a proper definition of the aesthetic elements characterizing the "environmental preference." To do this, we referenced classical and experimental paradigms of Environmental Psychology applied to a museum context and building aesthetic researches, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. The case study involved 41 children, 20 male and 21 female, from two primary school classes in Rovereto (Italy); the average age was 8.3 years old.
Young children’s museum geographies: spatial, material and bodily ways of knowing
Children's Geographies, 2018
In this guest editorial, we outline a new field of children's museum geographies. We do this by opening up a space for the reader to engage with a collection of papers that trace embodiment, tacit and emplaced knowing, material entanglements and non-representational aspects of experience in accounts of children's presence in museums. We hope that this special issue will act as an impetus for further working, thinking and collaborating, firstly by disrupting the conflation of children in museums with narrowing notions such as learning and talk, and secondly by highlighting the rich potential of museums as a space of interest for the field of children's geographies.
A CHILD IN A MUSEUM: BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE AND EXPERIENCING TRADITION
CHILDHOOD REMIXED AUGUST 2020, 2020
In this article, I would like to focus on the tasks of contemporary museums and centres that address their exhibitions to children aged 3-12. It is interesting that over the last two or three decades many museums have fundamentally changed their strategy for disseminating knowledge about different cultural phenomena and science in order to attract young children. Generally, museum exhibitions use different ways of attracting children's attention, but, most frequently, the museum staff create interactive areas that make it possible to strongly focus the attention of young visitors. This educational strategy is partly a consequence of new findings from research into psychology, and it is partly associated with the Froebel tradition (the idea of education through activities), which was disseminated in European countries at the turn of the twentieth century. Moreover, because of software applications and devices equipped with artificial intelligence, interactive areas in museums have become visually more attractive. We would like to present this process of changing the educational strategy of contemporary museums by providing two interesting examples-the Centre for Modernity-Mill of Knowledge and the Museum of Toruń Gingerbread-which were recently established in Toruń. The former makes it possible for children to better understand than they would in a regular kindergarten or school the crucial phenomena studied by researchers in such fields as anatomy, biology, physics, and geology; while the latter involves young audiences in unravelling the "mysteries" of the process of making gingerbread in the past.
THE CHILD AND THE MUSEUM: A relationship with many dimensions
The paper examines how the child interacts with the museum and how its more active participation can contribute to the better designing of museum services, gradually leading to the shaping of a new identity for the museum to be structured through the concept of the so-called “child-centered museum”.
Journal of Visual Literacy, 2017
Children’s museums and exhibitions designed for children are well-thought adult projects; however, children rarely participate in the design process. Visual research methods can provide a remedy for this scarcity of children’s agency in determining significant exhibition qualities. The paper will discuss a visual research methodology that empowers children, even very young ones, to express their opinion in a palpable and child-friendly way on what is important for them in the exhibition design of child-centred museums, while at the same time sensitizing them to the importance of visual images in conveying messages. Equipped with a digital camera 60 children ranging from the age of 4–12 years old captured the elements that were of special notice to them during their visit; images were later used as a prop in analysing their embodied experience, based on the content, the angle and framing of the photographs, as well as children’s own selection criteria. Apart from presenting the main ...
Journal Of Education in Museums, 1997
"As a result of the influences of the theoretical views of the role of experience and social context on the child's learning, the prevalent approach adopted by child-orientated museum exhibitions is participative and interactive in nature. The main purposes of such exhibitions are, in general, to stimulate curiosity and to encourage exploration and social interactions in an unconstrained environment. But are children's galleries achieving these learning goals? How do children and their families perceive these exhibitions? Do they perceive children's galleries as learning environments or are their perceptions more orientated towards a 'fun' element of the experience? The purpose of this article is to present some findings of a pilot study carried out in a child-orientated museum exhibition aimed at exploring children's and their families' perceptions of it." (STUDART, 1997, p. 28)
2019
This paper describes a collaboration between museum staff and university researchers to develop a framework for analysing museum spaces from the perspective of young children. The resultant APSE (abstract, physical, social and embodied) framework draws on spatial theories from childhood studies and architecture to consider children’s museum visiting from a spatial perspective. Starting with space not only foregrounds the role places, objects and bodies play in how experiences are constituted, but also resists linearity and predictability of mainstream educational policy discourses about young children’s learning. As place, children and objects entangle together, they design and make one another. We draw upon Massey’s description of the “chance of space”, in which people, objects and places become entangled in unpredictable and unknowable ways, to consider the potential of the APSE framework to offer alternative framings of children in museums. Exploring Abstract, Physical, Social an...