Making Sense – Two Ways

When you start planning a museum experience for children—an exhibit, environment, event, program or even a museum for children—how do you go about understanding the children you intend to serve?

While professionals and researchers across the museum field have various methods for learning about museum visitors, they are generally not used widely with children. Even when they are, they often have a narrow focus. This is somewhat understandable. Gathering input is time consuming and requires expertise to be helpful. Familiar methods are generally less suited to engaging children. Outside of behavioral observations, methods like focus groups, surveys, and interviews rely on skills children may not have developed fully. When we do consult children, the focus is often limited. We assess their understanding of a concept or a preference for one activity over another.

Wonder of Learning Exhibit: Reggio Children

And yet, we are undergoing a change in our conceptualization of children. Advances in
neuroscience and brain development and educational projects like the Reggio Emilia schools have expanded our view of children as capable social actors, thinkers, and doers, active agents in their play, learning, and development. This provides ample reason to go beyond occasional questions about a specific activity or a focus on a skill rather than on the child to more fully understand and engage them in museums. 

To be more than a good intention, however, we must create meaningful opportunities to actively involve children and learn with and from them. There is no lack of interesting and important questions to explore. In fact, the questions we might ask for planning museum experiences can also tell us something we didn't know about children's thinking, learning, and understanding which is critical to creating experiences with greater impact. These are questions as much about children as about museums; as much about what delights them as what they are learning; and as much about our broader understanding of children as testing a prototype.

Familiar Steps in an Open-ended, Iterative Process. We can explore these questions using familiar steps and methods in evaluation and research and draw on approaches like the pedagogical documentation used in the Reggio schools. This blend creates an open-ended, qualitative, descriptive, emergent, and exploratory approach which offers a broader, richer, more comprehensive view of children's engagement with their world while helping us glimpse what we couldn't otherwise see.

Reggio Children

Like a series of small studies unfolding over time, one study builds on another, fueled by new questions. We don't know just where such studies will lead. We do, however, know that this iterative process of framing questions and thinking and discovering together, will build our understanding of children and contribute to authentic experiences that engage their potential. 

Framing Questions, like developing research questions, brings focus to our interest in better understanding how children make sense of themselves and their world. Questions about children's interests and understanding need to be generous, not reduced to one activity or behavior while ignoring the richness of the context. A question about how children explore a natural setting, for example, can look at how they navigate undefined spaces, are curious about mud, and develop a connection to the natural world. We might even notice something germane to siting the museum building itself or an outdoor nature play area.

Designing for Engagement, like designing a study, considers a promising focus and how to investigate it: the children, their ages and groupings; the setting, the nature of the engagement, and appropriate methods. Here, engagement is understood as children's activity—behavior, movement, conversation—as well as their attention, interest, and its intensity. The study itself is an opportunity for children to interact with materials, the setting, other children, an artist, animals, and ideas in ways that maintain the complexity of the real world. This approach is necessarily open to the unexpected happening.

Watching and Listening, may appear to be less orderly than data collection typically does, but it is no less intentional. An approach that centers on children, their capabilities, agency, and potential follows their interest, attention, actions, questions, hunches, and conversations. Methods like video, photos, recording, drones, drawings, and mapping capture dialogue, movement, play, and transformations of space. Data collection literally follows them, bringing in multiple points of view and ways of capturing their encounters. A debrief immediately following gathers what has escaped the eye and ear to produce multiple snapshots and sequences of the children's explorations.

Reviewing and Reflection, much like analysis, is concerned with thinking about what we are

Photo credit: Vergeront

seeing in the information and impressions we have gathered. Multiple passes of videos, photos, recordings, or drawings by different people capture what we think might be happening. With careful consideration, we arrive at possible interpretations. We work to locate the meaning making in the child and then in ourselves. And we do it again. Why? Because in suspending our certainty about what we are noticing, what the child might be feeling, paying attention to, or doing, we are also learning about how we see. We are making sense in a way that is provisional both for the child and for us in understanding the child.

Relaunching, much like results, considers where exploration might lead. While a study might be a starting point for understanding a child's interests, questions, and ideas on a potential exhibit topic or activity, it should also help us make sense of how children work with others, set their own goals in play, or view their capabilities and accomplishments. The genesis of an exhibit can come from observing and listening to children rather than from exhibit planners, marketing, school curriculum, or funder interest. A Relaunch invites exploring alternative meanings, pursuing another line of inquiry, and shaping questions around a museum's long-term interest in children. 

Making Sense of Children Making Sense. The involved and evolving nature of a process concerned with making sense of children making sense of the world is challenging both in practice and in making the benefits concrete and concise. Brief descriptions and photos from 3 museum projects follow, each highlighting various aspects of this approach.

•    Planning for the recently opened Louisiana Children's Museum (LCM) in New Orleans involved groups of children and parents in a set of activities and conversations that informed the design direction, exhibit development, architectural design, and graphics. Development of LCM's 2011 museum strategic master plan began with a visitor panel of a dozen children, 5 - 10 years, their parents and caregivers that met 3 times. Sessions focused on what was fascinating to children in LCM's Julia Street exhibits, how parents and caregivers saw their child's thinking and learning, and what was important and interesting to the children about water in their everyday lives. Children's drawings, discussions, photographs, and words not only expressed their ideas and interests, but also inspired planning. 

Photo credit: © Gyroscope Inc.

One boy's drawing of his ideal exhibit showed a giant chessboard overlaid with a map of New
Orleans and sounds collected from across the city. Moving a chess piece would activate a city sound on that square. His drawing inspired the Jackson Square entry experience in the Make Your Mark gallery.

Recognizing how this first round of conversations and drawings brimmed with children's ideas and parent observations, dialogue sessions were held throughout the 8 years of planning. They were incorporated into camps, one-time sessions, and school projects. Sessions focused on topics about growing food, where ideas come from, water, animals and their habitats. Some focused on the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren. The insights and interests that emerged from children and families inspired experiences (a crawfish boil), became gallery graphics, were incorporated into way-finding, and even appear in LCM's logo. Highlighting the role of children's contributions, use of a child's art work includes the child's name and age.

Photo Credit: Louisiana Children's
Museum

Through the team's observations and listening, members learned that these children have a sense of place, understand something about local food culture, and how water plays a role in moving food from New Orleans to the world. Relationships are important to them; they take care of things, help each other, and are careful observers. These observations and new questions are being folded into LCM's ongoing work.

•    Interest in exploring children's ideas about communities and the places that make up communities prompted a 2014 collaboration between Minnesota Children's Museum and the Reggio-inspired Network of Minnesota. As part of MCM's 2014-2017 expansion and renovation, Seeing Everyday Places was a project within a project within a project. MCM shared with educators and families in local early years programs the community settings the Our World gallery would include: a fire station, park, farmers' market, hardware store, post office, and food truck. 

Over several months, children visited one of the settings with their class, in small groups, or with their families. They met and talked with people at the hardware store; went behind the scenes at the bank; and visited the fire station. New lines of inquiry emerged: curiosity about types of mailboxes and each child's family mailbox, and how more money is made. 

Fire Station Kitchen
Courtesy Minnesota Children's Museum

Documentation panels from each of the groups highlighted connections children found between everyday places in their neighborhoods and communities. "A Story of Materials and Money" captured a family's trips to the hardware store. That parent noted that, over the course of the family's exploring hardware stores, her 4-year old's building constructions changed from spaceships and fantasy vehicles to gas stations and neighborhood scenes. Children who explored parks created Nature Park Blue Prints for the Our World park. Four-year old Oliver's blue print specified the number (6), size (s, m, l), and type (deciduous and evergreen) or trees; a button for making rain sounds; a fountain and a bench; and magnifying glasses. Responding to children's curiosity about firefighters living at the 

Fire station living
Photo credit: Vergeront

station when they work, MCM devoted more space and activities to a fire station kitchen where children could explore firefighters' daily routines through dramatic play.

 •    Planning currently underway for Region 5 Children's  Museum (R5CM) in north central Minnesota is conducting a set of small studies and community engagement based in the Museum's strategic master plan. Referred to as encounters, they are intended to engage children, families, and communities around understanding more about how children find their place in the world. They are also part of early exhibit development. The first of several encounters for small groups of children 2 - 10 years is underway in a park that is likely to be the home of the Museum.

Photo credit: R5CM

With an interest in understanding more about how children engage in open-ended exploration and child-directed play in an outdoor setting, the Museum's team set up 2 conditions, a park playground area and a natural area, both with loose parts the children could carry, build with, pretend with, and investigate. In one session, an extended play experience laster nearly 25 minutes. Captured on video, a group of children ages 5 - 9 from a summer day camp program worked collaboratively at the climb-on play equipment. Using 50-feet of rope and moving back-and-forth between two structures tying the rope between them, from 3 - 6 children worked to make a zip line. 

They tied knots and tested their strength. When knots loosened and the rope—and the child—dropped, they tied new knots. They lowered the height of the rope at one end and raised the other end by shimmying up poles and boosting each other up to reach higher bars. Working with an apparent hunch about reducing friction on the zip line, they found a length of PVC pipe and slid it over the rope. Like good problem solvers, they tested, revised, rethought aspects of the problem, and improved their design.

From review and discussion of this and other videos, photos, and notes, the team has been thinking about what the children are doing and what their engagement might mean to them. The team noticed the children's extensive and innovative investigation of materials; how they were collaborative and managed their interactions; had hunches and persisted in exploring them; and that they socialized easily. The child-directed curriculum of everyday STEM the children developed was rich.

The first set of encounters has laid a groundwork for the next which will focus on the natural phenomena at the park the children notice and how they use their senses and imaginations to explore and represent them. The team has yet to see where that will lead.

More Like a Milkweed Pod Than a Pocketful of Rye. Where we place our attention is where we begin to see what is happening. When we follow compelling questions and when we wonder, think, and discover together, we deepen our understanding of the thinkers, doers, and learners in our museums including ourselves. We push on safe ideas, shift perspectives, fold new insights into everyday choices, and create new touchstones within a group working together. Each person takes something of that shared understanding into a new setting, fresh possibilities, and a new set of questions.

My thanks to Lani Shapiro, Tom Bedard, Cheryl Kessler, Mary Weiland, Jim Roe, Peter Olson, Maeryta Medrano, and Julia Bland

Related Museum Notes

• Observation: Seeing, Un-seeing, Re-seeing:

• Listening to Children's Thinking:

 

   

Serving the Museum's Full Age Range

Originally posted December 2012. Magical thinking is not a successful strategy for serving the upper (or lower) end of a museum's age range. Learning from and about those age groups and what engages them can be.

When one museum tackles a big question about serving their audience, I am likely to hear audience in many other questions museums are considering. In multiple master planning sessions, on conference calls, and pouring over marketing studies, the focus on serving the upper end of a museum’s age range comes through again and again. 

Like all museums, children’s museums struggle with how to serve the full range of their intended audience. Their more specific challenge is how to serve the upper end of their target age range and whether to serve children 7 or 8 years to 10 years, tweens, and youth at all. This dance, shared by many museums, has a long history with many variations.

At one time children’s museums opened their doors to welcome children 3 - 12 years old, their parents and caregivers. Children 3 - 6 years arrived, returned, and began owning the museum. With time, many children’s museums rethought their audience and offerings and often landed on serving newborns - 8 year olds, occasionally targeting children up to 10 years. This change, it seems, brought younger children to the museums. More 2 year olds showed up as well as loyal 3 - 6 year olds. Wanting to expand their audience, accommodate families with children of several ages, serve the community well, and sometimes responding to internal pressure to “own” a wider niche, some children’s museums pushed on serving 7-10  and even 12 year olds.

Evidence supports decisions to serve a younger audience and topping out, for instance, at about 6 years. Concern about the skills gap has meant more communities now offer universal pre-K. More 4 year olds are spending more of their day in school with less time for weekday visits to the children’s museum. Elementary schools are cutting budgets and classroom time for anything but teaching to standards and tests. School group attendance that draws children 5-6 years and older is dropping. Out-of-school hours are filled with after-school out-of-home care , with sports, scouts. and music lessons. Growing competition among science, history, and art museums for 6-12 year olds in family and school groups is also impacting attendance. Finally, some children’s museums seem to feel resigned to losing the upper end of their target age, citing KAGOY–kids are getting older younger–and the “boo” factor–bigger children don’t want to be around younger children.  

On the other hand, the lower end of the age range, newborn to 2 years, is fairly secure for children’s museums. Parents with infants and toddlers have fewer options of places where their very young children are truly planned for and welcome. These parents are also strong, sometimes very strong, advocates for their needs and those of their babies: nursing spaces, clean and safe places, less busy times, times with fewer or no big kids. And while art, science, and history museums may be interested in serving 6-12 year olds, serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers is a significantly greater stretch to serve well. Many children’s museums are telling me that they track the average age of their audience and it is dropping. Last week I heard one museum say its average age is 4.5 years. A reasonable decision is to concentrate resources on serving a narrower age group well.

Not So Fast…

Physical challenge in play, part of a healthy childhood

That certainly isn’t the only choice. Before abandoning the upper end of the age range, I would encourage a children’s museum to look hard at the convergence of its strategic interests, the developmental interests of its young audience, and the needs of its families. Children are an audience for many museums. For children’s museums, however, children are more than an audience. They are at the heart of the mission and central to the museum’s reason for being. Children’s museums have become places where children can be children and where they can grow up. They are full of experiences and encounters that enrich millions of childhoods annually. As advocates for healthy and full childhoods, children’s museums have an opportunity, and perhaps a responsibility, to play a major role in stemming the erosion of childhood. The compression of childhood means children suited for play with toys want cell phones. Compression wears away a sense of freedom, safety, and promise that children need for their well-being.

Many parents and grandparents don’t want their children aging up so fast. They want to enjoy their child at each age and stage rather than find themselves saying, “When the children were young,” regretting that time passed unnecessarily quickly. Even children remain attached to their childhoods, at least occasionally. Regrettably lacking a study to back this up, I do have examples from experience: focus group summaries of tweens who are nostalgic about their childhoods and marketing studies citing 11 year olds wanting “lap time” with their parents. In children’s museums I see and listen to 10 and 11 year olds and remember overhearing an 11 year old announce, “I want to do this for a living when I grow-up,” as he pressed his 10^th paper pulp medallion. Museums can make experiences better, much, much better for 7+ year olds by recognizing and responding to parents’ and children’s attachment to childhood.

Holding onto childhood favorites

Any of the 7 year olds we know hover at several points on the developmental spectrum at one time. This is typical. A child may be more like a 5 year old in social development and more like an 8 year old in language development. The broad developmental ranges typical of all children’s development are characteristically greater for children with special needs. A children's museum is a place where an 8 year old  with special needs fits in. These variations expand the picture of the 3, 5, or 7 year old that a museum serves. Differences in children’s background and family experiences also account for variations. What is engaging and challenging to a 6 year old with varied and wide-ranging experiences may be more similar to an 8 year old with limited life experiences. Clear-cut developmental breaks simply do not occur. Even the designations of early childhood (birth-8 years) and middle childhood (6-12 years) overlap. That tells us something. If a museum is planning for 6 year olds, how can it not plan for 10 year olds–who may also enjoy aspects of being 6?

A developmental perspective across the full range of early and middle childhood is invaluable. It shifts the primary focus from chronological ages and grades in school to what is happening for the child. Understanding the full developmental range also means recognizing that it is not prescriptive or predictive. Children's capabilities vary with context, are constantly emerging, and vary across domains. In short we can't follow developmental stages too literally. At the conclusion of a half-day discussion I facilitated with a leadership team to affirm their target age range–newborns through 15 year olds–and how to serve them, one participant noted that serving the age range well means knowing not only where children are developmentally, but also where children are headed developmentally.

Families with children across the age range

Not only are children wonderfully varied, but their families are as well. Many families have children ranging in age from newborn to 10 or 11 years. They want to do things together as a family–in one place. With experiences that engage a 2, 5, and 8 year old and amenities that make it easy for families to explore together, a children’s museum can be family, child, and mission centered.

What other considerations do you find at the convergence of a museum’s strategic interests, the developmental interests of its young audience, and the needs of its families?

Focusing on the Audience

What is interesting to 7 year olds?

By engaging the marketing, developmental and design expertise that has been a hallmark of children’s museums’ growing audience (if perhaps younger audience), a museum could have success serving 7-8 year olds in ways that resemble their success serving 4.5 year olds. This is not the realm of magical thinking and crossing fingers, closing eyes and muttering, “I hope, I hope, I hope they come.” It is the realm of focusing and deepening a museum’s understanding of children 7-10 (or 11 to 12) years; of experimenting, stretching, and revising assumptions about how to serve them. This exploration requires plain thinking and a few guidelines about audience.

• Trying to serve a museum’s full age range is not the same as “aging up” or changing the target audience to  older children. When a museum works to better serve its full age range, it builds on a foundation of serving that audience: attendance data with school group numbers; member and visitor surveys often with age group information; and relationships with members and teachers. An approach to better serving the upper end of the current age range may also be helpful to a museum expanding its age range from, say, 6 years to 8 years or 8 to 10 years–but the starting points differ.

• All parts of a museum’s audience are valued. All must be served well. Here’s the catch: all parts of the audience will not (and can not) have a high presence. An equally high level of services, offerings, programs, and exhibit real estate is not needed for all groups. Groups with a lower presence at the museum, typically the youngest and oldest, should have comparably fewer but still high quality experiences. The 7-10 year old set is in this “older shoulder” group.

• Serving any and all age groups well relies on understanding them well. Get to know 7-10 year olds. Bring varied perspectives and sources of information to this exploration. What do these children say is fascinating to them?  What’s happening for them developmentally? What do their parents say interests them? What do their parents think is wonderful about them? What does the museum do consistently well that other venues do not? Check assumptions about who they are and their interests. Ask them and observe them. Don't guess.

What other considerations of the audience prepare a museum for serving the upper end of its age range?

Getting Started

If serving the upper end of the museum’s targeted age range better is central to mission, attendance, and visitor experience, a deliberate and thoughtful approach is necessary.  By no means comprehensive, the steps below can get a museum started. Lessons from these steps should point to new ones.

Clarify the starting and end points. Decide on the age group to focus on and be specific. Gather information on the number of children in this age range currently served and how: in exhibits? in programs? as members? If no information is available; start counting. A survey may be in order. Also, be clear about what you hope to accomplish with this effort. Is it an increase in the number of children in the age group? If so, what’s a realistic stretch? Is it satisfaction among families with children across the age range? Keeping families as members for longer? Keep in mind that 7-10 year olds flooding exhibits and programs and pushing their share of attendance from 5% to 25% is unlikely. An increased presence could occur gradually as 5 and 6 year olds grow up and stay hooked on museum offerings; as word gets out to more families; and as the museum improves its pitch for older children. 

Get to know the age group. Visit places where children 7-12 years spend time and are engaged in ways the museum hopes to engage them. It may be in your museum, another museum, at the library, park and rec, or Boys and Girls Club. Observe them, listen to what they talk about, notice how they relate to one another. Take notes and photos. Refer to books like Yardsticks by Chip Wood which has a good feel for children 4-14 years and to the Search Institute’s Developmental Assets.

Know your own museum. Take a very good look at where children in the upper end of the age range currently have the highest presence in your museum's exhibits and document it. Observe them; talk to them. Ask what attracts them to the area, what they like about the activity, why, and what else they'd like to do there. Photograph them and what they are doing; make notes. Record numbers of children, ages, and times on a floor plan in the area. Then, build on their interests, responses, and insights. Modify or develop activities and incorporate them into exhibits. Be sure to revisit these areas, observe, and compare before-and-after data. Has the presence, activity, or dwell time of this age group changed? Repeat this process; it may take several rounds to get a good feel for a good match. Apply the approach to programs as well.

Open-ended materials: water, mud and gravel

Rethink spaces with older children in mind. Many museums have spaces designated for infants and toddlers up to 3 or 4 years, both as specific galleries and as “tod pods” in other galleries and exhibits. Seldom used for older children, a designated gallery has both possibilities and challenges. Allocating significant square footage often isn’t justified for a small age cohort. Even when it is justified, identifying experiences that appeal to older children without being a magnet for much younger ones can be a challenge; something that can defeat the purpose. Material intense maker spaces, multi-step processes like stop-action animation, physical challenges requiring coordination, cultural explorations, engineering feats, and creative applications of technology and media are possibilities. These engage the increasing capacity in middle childhood to think abstractly, apply complex problem solving strategies, persist, and use fine motor coordination. 

Tweens area (right) set lower 
than children's area (left)

Targeted age strategies are one approach. Strategies that transcend age are another. Open-ended experiences and materials engage children across the age and developmental spectrum differently. A child’s expanding repertoire of experiences that come with age and development play out differently with build platforms, material explorations, and sensory phenomena such as light and shadow. Design choices can also reinforce these strategies. Adjacencies might locate early child spaces out of first sight at the entry. Changing levels and sight lines can visually separate areas and age groups. Selecting a look-and-feel of spaces to appeal to a broader age range can expand rather than shrink age appeal. 

Taking a cue from children's thinking

Build on strengths. Children across the age range are delightfully curious. Even as babies, children express preferences. As soon as they can talk they share wonderful ideas and make observations. Learning from children and how they think can (and should) happen at any age. With development, however, children enjoy additional capacities to think, imagine, explain, solve problems, and express ideas. In serving the full age range of the museum, take full advantage of these exciting age-related developmental capacities of children 6 and 7 years old and up. These children can draw. They have a wider range of experiences to draw from. They can explain their ideas and use increasingly complex and creative thinking and communication strategies to do so. They can tell you a lot. Perhaps the answer to how to serve children 7 years and up is to ask them.

What strategies have you found that are effective in serving children 6 and 7 years old and older?  

An Invitation to Think Together

If you read Curator, and I hope you do, I encourage you to read Play and Children’s Museums: A Path Forward or a Point of Tension? in the January 2017 issue.

The article reviews findings from research on play that is underway by members of the Children’s Museum Research Network, a project of the Association of Children’s Museum  funded by IMLS.  The Network which includes 10 children’s museums is in the process of conducting 3-5 research studies over 2-years to explore and articulate the learning value of children’s museums. Using a case study approach with 5 of the Network museums, the study has focused on learning frameworks, the major vocabularies they share, the constructs they use, and the learning theories that are implicitly or explicitly supported. Play, a defining concept for many children’s museums, emerged as a problematic element for children’s museums articulating their learning value. Three observations have emerged from the study.

• Each of the 5 museums positioned play differently.

• The museums often did not define play in their learning frameworks.

• The museums viewed the connection between play and learning differently.

Recognizing that the study is small, the authors nevertheless suggest that even children’s museums that have articulated their most important ideas about learning and learning value lack a shared understanding and conceptualization of play, internally and with other children’s museums. The authors suggest that individual children’s museums and the children’s museum field as a whole would benefit from developing a common understanding of play and its relation to learning.

The authors readily acknowledge that several aspects of play make it challenging. First, long approached from multiple theoretical perspectives, play is difficult to define and to operationalize. This is abundantly clear from any issue of The American Journal of Play. Play is variously viewed as the release of tension, mastery over anxieties and conflicts, preparation for life, and consolidating learning already acquired. There is no agreed upon definition for play. Compounding its elusiveness, play is also undervalued. In contrast to the accepted value of learning, play is not highly valued by educators and parents. Even in children’s museums there is ambivalence about play. I was once asked how to advocate for play without using the word play.

Conceptually Messy, Joyous, and Imprecise

The authors are right to look critically at the extent to which children’s museums have defined what is central to their distinct value. They have raised important issues while providing glimpses into the evolving thinking of these museums. It’s not enough to be passionate about play or to have a cherished slogan like play is learning. Diligently articulating what play is, its benefits, and how it is a productive strategy for learning is critical. 

I agree, there is a problem with play. In fact there are, undoubtedly, several problems with play. On the one hand, play is a highly relevant focus for museums that are for and about children, interested in their well-being and potential, and focused on what matters to children. Essentially, play is worthy of attention because of its role in children’s well-being, their social-emotional development, and their entitlement to childhood. 

On the other hand, play is a challenging starting point for rapidly advancing the research interests of a relatively young wing of the museum field. It is conceptually messy, joyous, and imprecise. For centuries it has eluded definition and it is rife with paradoxes inhabiting its very core.

  

In effect the study exposes what has always been challenging for children’s museums. They are about someone–children–not about something like art, science, history, or natural history. They have lacked the subject matter definition and body of knowledge that art, science, natural history and history museums have claimed, enjoyed, and used to good advantage. Moreover, until about 20 years ago, play wasn’t explored in museums. Play was understood primarily in the context of playgrounds, preschools, day care settings, and the backyard.

Problem or Invitation?

Will the children’s museum field be strengthened by lively discussions about play and its role in children’s museum settings? Absolutely. Yet, rather than viewing the lack of definition of play–internally and across the field–as a problem, I would frame this as an invitation to think together. This represents important, urgent, field-wide work. For children’s museums as a field to inhabit this conceptual territory and increase their value for children, parents, caregivers, and communities, they must address this together, developing shared understandings and language around play.

From my perch working with children’s museums, I see growing capacity. Work is proceeding, somewhat slowly, but at an increasing pace. With perhaps one exception, The Strong, National Museum of Play, this work doesn’t obviously resemble similar work in other museums. Children’s museums are as yet unlikely to hire play scholars, designate a vice president for play studies, or have play fellowships in ways similar to how art museums hire art historians and artists, history museums hire historians, and science museums hire scientists.  

Finding a way to think together is not easy, nor is it linear. Like play, it is messy and joyous with invitations everywhere. Starting points are, in fact, at the very heart of each children’s museum, in situating play in the vision, mission, and values–literally or figuratively, directly or indirectly. Every mission statement need not include the word, play. Play, however, like children, families, childhood, learning, creativity, thinking, well-being, and community are relevant to articulating what a museum aspires to create for its community and why it exists. Many and lively discussions help surface areas of tension and ambiguity among ideas, beliefs, and concepts and generate new insights. Crossing boundaries, leaping over walls, and connecting theory, practice, and research are necessary as is engaging with other children's museums. A shared language around play will emerge from articulating the relationship between play and learning or play and creativity. In sharing insights museums will inevitably rework familiar ideas, uncover new ones, and construct new frameworks.

In this endeavor, it is helpful to view children’s museums as an on-going experiment. Relatively new and focusing on children rather than a subject, children’s museums have been experimenting for decades. In effect, they have been playing with the museum model in response to changing social and cultural contexts related to children. Views of children change; family structures shift. The cities and towns in which children grow up and in which children’s museums live evolve and change. They are taking on new roles in their communities and in the lives of children and families.

In her recent presentation, The Importance of And at MuseumNext in Melbourne (AU) Elaine Gurian explored how museums need to appreciate nuance, navigate uncertainty, and manage complexity in being relevant. Among strategies she proposes is engaging in experimentation in exhibitions. As children’s museums push into new territory around play, an experimental mindset is a great asset to be used deliberately.

Considering the nature of play and its elusiveness, it would be unfortunate to force a definition of play too soon or be too certain about any single theory or definition of play. Much work has yet to be done in exploring different possibilities about the relationship between play and learning, considering age groups or the role of adults in the particular context of children’s museums. Articulating beliefs about play, considering alternative constellations of ideas, formalizing conceptualizations, forging a shared view of play requires time and disciplined thinking. An example of this long-term contextualized work comes from the municipal infant toddler centers and preschools in Reggio Emilia (IT).   

After 40 years of studying various pedagogical thinkers, like Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky, the Reggio educators arrived at what they call, “Our Piaget” and “Our Vygotsky.” Emerging from a practice of questioning, these educators identified ways in which these thinkers both narrowed thinking about children in some areas and yet opened other, productive paths for developing a pedagogy for the Reggio schools. Committing to similar diligence, shared thinking, and taking advantage of each others’ work, children’s museums can author a comparable pedagogy, “our play,” that reflects insights into children, play, and museum environments.

An invitation to think together offers the possibility of bringing a children’s museum perspective to play that will benefit children, parents and caregivers, communities, museums, and the study of play. Opening this effort to engage more committed, thoughtful people in working creatively and collaboratively across more children’s museums will help grow a shared language around play. Like play itself, this language and its related vocabulary, ideas, and constructs will express the variety, vitality, and value of children’s museums.