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| Photo: Getty Villa |
Children
are becoming an increasingly important audience for museums. Several changes
and trends have been at play. Children’s museums have rapidly grown in both
number and attendance since the early 90’s. Understanding families as powerful,
flexible, learning groups in museums has also helped open doors for more
museums to serve families with children. Advances in neuroscience continue to
reveal both young children’s significant capabilities as well as the life-long
implications of early experience. For most science centers and museum, children
and families have become a high priority audience. Increasingly, history, art,
and natural history museums are also interested in attracting families with
children to exhibits, programs, and events.
At the
same time that museums work to reach and serve children visiting in school,
childcare, family, and community groups, we often do so without a deep
understanding about who those children are that we want to serve.
It’s true
that the word “children” conjures up a wide range of candidates. “Children”
spans the first decade of life when remarkable changes occur in every domain of
human development that have life-long implications. A colossal developmental
arc embraces the years from birth through 12 years—that’s infants to tweens. “Children”
also encompasses living and growing up in wide ranging conditions and social
and cultural contexts.
Sometimes
to simplify things, we group anyone under 12 as “kids,” maybe “little kids” or
“big kids.” When we do get specific, we refer to them by grades in school, even
though museums are not schools, but informal learning settings. We sometimes
think of children as numbers: 60 children arriving on 2 busses for a 9:30 field
trip. Sometimes we say “children” when we are
actually referring to someone who is a novice with a narrow range of experience
in a relevant area. Yet, we also know many children who are not novices and
have expertise in dinosaurs, heavy machinery, or players on a favorite sports
team.
If
museums intend to welcome and serve children, we need to do so from informed, appreciative,
and varied perspectives just as we would for any valued audience group,
especially non-traditional museum audiences. In conversations with colleagues, reading
articles and blogs I often have the sense that museums view children, what they
are doing, and why in critical ways that reflect a limited understanding of
children. For instance:
Children are egocentric; they
think only of themselves and what they want. This usually means that children are selfish with
a rigid “me first” attitude. There’s a finality to these statements that
ignores the many contrary examples we see of children’s kindness and caring, a
mutuality and reciprocity in their interactions. When paying attention, we see
toddlers’ eagerness to be helpful. Research supports this; it shows toddlers are helpful to others in accomplishing their goals suggesting
they are naturally altruistic.
“Egocentric”
also means understanding the world in terms of oneself. This is something we
all do—everyone of us—regardless of age. Our experience of the world and what
is familiar to us is core to how we understand the world. This is apparent when
4-year old Jake lays out his timeline of world history: “The dinosaurs, Baby
Jesus, the knights, and me.” He’s linking what’s important to him and what he
knows to where he fits into the world.
Children have short attention
spans. It is true
that with development, a child’s attention span develops. Ability to focus and
manage distractions increases with the development of executive function. Yet, even young children, including toddlers, are able to be focused and
persistent. They are often single minded when something is of interest to them.
Who has not marveled at how a very young child intently pores over a book, perseveres
in getting a lid off a container, or plays for hours with a cardboard box?
Unwittingly
we often reinforce children’s short attention spans. We interrupt them while
they are deeply engrossed in play or a project. In museums, at home, at the
library, on the playground, a parent, caregiver, teacher, or museum volunteer
interrupts a child’s focus with, “Let’s go. We’ll do something else.” If, on
the other hand, we were attuned to children’s cues, we would notice their
concentration, help manage distractions of sound or traffic, follow their lead,
and reduce transitions that interrupt their concentration.
Children will make trouble if they
are not closely managed. Children are open to the possibilities of an object or space and they
use them in novel ways. They view objects, space, and the world itself for what
it might do or how it can be used. This often appears to adults as if children
are up to mischief. We have only to think of the times we have seen (and been
rattled by) children filling their mother’s sun hat with sand to be reminded
that children are not limited by an object’s fixed use. Their alertness to the
affordances of an object or space is why a large open area is a command to run
and a narrow ledge is a step for reaching a distant object.
In fact,
children are experts in being open to possibilities. They see opportunities in
upturned chairs as an obstacle course. In tipping chairs upside down, children
are not being destructive and uncooperative. They are using the very skills we hope
they cultivate: creative thinking, problem solving, and following hunches.
Children (and adults) are always finding uses for things for which they were
not intended. This is what creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and
innovation are about.
Interested, But Uncertain
We don’t notice
the multiple ways that children explore, connect, and learn because this
happens in more subtle, variable ways than we expect. For instance, children’s
interest in exploring big ideas is not always obvious. When 5-year old Andy
asks, “Not counting me, how many people would you say there are in the world?”
he is thinking hard about big numbers, his expanding world, and his place in
it.
Children’s
knowledge may not meet adult expectations, agendas, or curricula. What they do know
about how sand spills onto the floor, the best way to spin a helicopter, or
what makes a good story, is, however, constructed, visible knowledge, and a promising
starting point for extensive explorations. Long before they can talk, children have
questions. They know more, much more, than they can express clearly with words.
They can express ideas, follow hunches, and form new questions with their
senses, their bodies, with materials, and with others.
Museums
can, however, develop an image of the child that shines a bright light on their
strengths and capacities and serve them accordingly. We have well-developed
strategies and practices for learning about valued audience groups–observation,
research, staff expertise, evaluation, and prototyping. We can be an ally in
their exploration and learning by being alert to what fascinates them, holds
their attention, and sparks their delight in responding to a material, object,
or setting. When we see them use materials in unusual ways, we can ask
ourselves, “how else can we see and understand this?” We can then imagine fresh
invitations for children to experience a space, objects, an activity, or
materials that engage and support them in building foundations for learning
that inspire them and us.
We owe
this not only to children now, but to our other visitors, to our museums, and
to the life-long museum-goers we hope children will become.
Related Resources
Thank you for this very insightful blog post Jeanne! Sometimes issues/topics that are understood as second-nature to those of us in the children's museum field need articulating for the broader field.
ReplyDelete-Mary Weiland