Essential Experiences: Where Museums Can Matter

Museums want to matter. They want to matter to their communities and to their visitors in large and small ways. Those hopes are expressed in their missions; they guide museums in framing the future and in making major decisions. Museums work to build connections with their communities, place visitors at the center of their thinking, and find meaningful ways to engage children and adults in exhibits and programs in order to matter.

Yet, a vast expanse of territory exists between intending to provide meaningful experiences and actually doing so. Missions are typically lofty and aspirational; they don’t readily translate into experiences for learners or something a family can do on a visit. Conducting audience research about whether a museum’s experiences are meaningful is ambitious, if not out-of-reach of most museums. Exhibit goals can miss the mark as well by being narrow and primarily focusing on cognitive areas such as thinking skills and knowledge.

Museums can, however, be deliberate in delivering a set of essential experiences that make a difference in people’s lives and, eventually, in the collective life of their community. Essential experiences are valuable opportunities that build on and contribute to the potential of the visitors in areas that move a museum towards its mission and achieving its impact. While museums alone cannot change life outcomes, they can focus their expertise, efforts, and resources on creating and delivering root experiences in areas that matter. 

At the Convergence

Most museums have a handful of opportunities that would be a starting place for a set of essential experiences. Perhaps a favorite phrase or powerful image surfaces and is repeated. “Frequent and positive experiences with nature,” “a time and a place to be children”, or “coming together as a family” might galvanize teams and resonate strongly as experiences your museum values.

A museum’s essential experiences emerge from its mission; on behalf of its audience; and from opportunities afforded by its strengths and distinct features.

Essential experiences are where a museum needs to deliver over time in order to act on its mission and reach its stated outcomes. A mission gives direction about what experiences matter: people discovering and valuing nature; the role of science in everyday life; children’s well-being; understanding works of art; or sustaining our community. These are clues about how children might succeed in life, how a community might be healthier, or what a brighter future might look like. Essential experiences build on these hopes and beliefs. 

Essential experiences are for the audience, building on their potential, and considered from their vantage point. They can be developed for priority audience groups such as children, youth, or families and might be tailored to an age cohort or interest group. Essential experiences focus on and are inspired by potential, by an image of vibrant, competent, curious children, connected youth, motivated educators, engaged citizens, or involved parents. For Louisiana Children’s Museum’s Early Learning Village, positive outcomes for children, families and the community inform the essential experiences. Robust, healthy children become responsible, caring adults who, in turn, contribute their strengths to their children and to their communities in the future.

A museum’s advantage in contributing significant experiences and influencing outcomes is where its strengths complement what other organizations and agencies offer–and don’t offer. As informal learning environments, museums are social settings, where participation is self-motivated, guided by learner interests, voluntary and personal, contextually relevant, collaborative, and non-linear. In these attributes are opportunities during out of school time, for families, bringing people together, and using rich objects and environments. A museum’s particular valued contribution is in its partnerships, its collection, its site, and its story.

Framing Experiences

Similar to building blocks, essential experiences support internal resources, positive developmental processes, and protective factors. While they emerge from the mission and connect with strongly held organizational values, they are also grounded in research, supported by theory, and reinforced by community wisdom. Enjoying many of these experiences is associated with a firmer toe-hold in life, with flourishing, and helps advance well-being, strong families, engaged citizens, or increased social cohesion.

A set of experiences will not, and need not, be exhaustive. They should, however, be rich and varied. Building block experiences span domains, tapping into the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional dimensions. They are holistic and inclusive, accommodating children and adults from a wide variety of backgrounds. For some parts of the museum audience, essential experiences reinforce a good start or provide an extra boost; for others these experiences serve as protective factors against challenge and risk. Delivering these experiences alone will not change life outcomes. Doing so, however, represents a well-informed step towards building on capabilities and intentionally adding positive factors to members of the community.

Children and adults should enjoy essential experiences regularly with their family, friends, peers, and new members of a group at the museum, as well as in other settings. More than an activity like problem solving or reading, essential experiences are opportunities with long tails. Close observation of the world; experiencing wonder, beauty, and awe; and following interests and motivations to explore personal questions are experiences that contribute to a long-term experiential bank, enhancing internal assets.

Essential experiences may be framed by a museum team or with community members as part of many museum-planning processes. They can be identified in planning a new museum as the emerging Children’s Museum of Sonoma County did or as Louisiana Children’s Museum has in planning its early childhood campus, the Early Learning Village. Tamarack Nature Center designated essential experiences when it reinvented itself through its master planning process. These platform experiences can be identified during exhibit master planning as The Family Museum has. Providence Children’s Museum has developed Avenues of Play Experiences for its Play Power initiative. In every case, essential experiences need to emerge from a museum’s core interests and be easy to communicate to staff, board members, and partners.

Naming Experiences

Essential experiences are an invitation to capture, name, and cultivate assets that we hope children, youth, adults, and members of our community enjoy. Rather than focusing on skills, communicating exhibit content, or interpreting principles, these experiences emphasize what happens for the person. Solving a problem for someone else, being at the spot where a view is revealed, or transforming materials for new uses draws on internal resources and contributes to a solid foundation for life.

Describing an experience in a way that is more poetic than clinical makes room for interpretation and insight. While clear and backed up by evidence, these experiences are not narrow, nor are they necessarily tangible. Finding respite in nature, being touched by art, connecting with place, or making the most of everyday moments fuses thinking, feeling, and doing with a generative quality.

The Early Learning Village focuses on offering essential experiences that cultivate: a robust sense of self; supportive relationships; a sense of well-being; making sense of the world; and a child’s expanding sense of the world. These five areas reflect what matters to the ELV’s target age range in the Greater New Orleans area and highlight adults’ critical roles. They work as a set, strong in all domains. Each is a platform supported by more specific experiences. For instance, a robust sense of self is supported by Pursuing appropriate risk and experiencing disappointment and failure in a safe environment and four other related experiences which are all supported by many and specific activities and moments. The ELV’s essential experiences have guided facility and exhibit design and are the areas in which it is building capacity.

Each and every encounter with exhibits, programs, events, take-homes, on-line activities, or walking through the museum door, offers children and adults an opportunity to engage in a rich, experience that matters and contributes to their individual resources. Museums support building block experiences when they are intentional in many and everyday ways.

A museum’s commitment to its experiences guides planning, revisiting and recalibrating an outdoor site, exhibit component, family night, badge project, or professional development workshop. In which part of the site do visitors connect with nature through all the senses? How does this particular component help a learner reduce uncertainty by seeking and gathering information? In what ways does someone enjoy a sense of well-being here? How is our staff prepared to provide attention, guidance, and support to parents? to children? to seniors? Considering questions like these and finding ways to intentionally support and strengthen experiences that matter for visitors is foundational work for museums that matter.

Remembering Peter Benson

As I have been thinking about essential experiences, I have been remembering Dr. Peter Benson, a great champion of youth and what it takes for them to thrive. Until he passed away October 2, Dr. Benson led the Search Institute (www.search-institute.org) in its remarkable work on positive youth development work that has made a difference to children, families, and communities across the country.

Museums have used assets for healthy development for understanding what children and youth need, as tools for planning exhibits and programs, in interacting with visitors, and as inspiration for essential experiences. In 2010, Dr Benson accepted the Association of Children’s Museums’ Great Friend to Kids Award on behalf of the Search Institute.

A Convivial Conference

An invitation to the dance

The recent ASTC Conference in Baltimore was a convivial gathering. It held together with a quality highlighted in Wendy Pollock’s and Kathleen McLean’s session about their book The Convivial Museum.

I hesitate to use the term convivial. The rush to use a fresh and evocative phrase or image soon flattens and dulls it. I so like their idea of being alive together. A range of offerings, an invitation to be open to new ideas, and a spirit of collegiality came together at the conference.

We come to professional conferences to step back and recharge our batteries; to have our sense of the possible expanded; to connect with friends and colleagues; and to mark changes in our profession’s growth. We find that some ideas have blossomed over the year and others have faded. We discover useful connections between our work and that of our colleagues. We expand our understanding of how to be helpful and valued in our communities. We take away more than we realize in ideas, thoughts, connections, inspirations, and probably business cards. If we are fortunate, this harvest will perplex and nourish us in interesting ways over the next many months.

Thumbing through my conference notebook, I catch phrases, fragments, quotes, and ah-ha’s that are underlined, *asterisked*, and bolded. I like rereading them again now, recalling what was said before and after, thinking about why they struck me at the time, and focusing on ways they sharpen and consolidate my thinking. They are all over the place: macro and micro with both bottom up push and top-down energy. Many have an elegance and a brevity in spite of their yoking together seemingly mismatched elements. Thoughts I’ve carried away and will noodle on follow in no deliberate order.

•         A playful mindset. Karen Wilkinson, Tinkering Studio Director, used this wonderfully evocative phrase to describe the Exploratorium’s approach to encouraging interdisciplinary inquiry and materials exploration in its Learning Studio

Working with a playful mindset in the exhibit hall

•         Art is essential; people are primary. Betsy Adamson, from Explora gracefully negotiated the seemingly competing priorities of a museum’s works of art and its audience by valuing both in different ways in her presentation in The Convivial Museum.

•         Logical necessity is an experience we are not told, but that we know. Ricardo Nemirovsky engaged participants in experiencing his meaning in physical demonstrations and movement exercises in Learning Math With Your Body. I liked the primacy of direct, first-hand experience in knowing.

•         Planning for imagined audiences. In one of the early sessions, Reinvention Redux, a young woman who expressed a strong interest in cultural theory made this astute observation. I take as a caution that we often assume we know more than we do about our audience, the people we should know the most about and be learning from.

•         If you don’t give parents something to do, they might not do anything. Lorrie Beaumont, Evergreene Research, made this simple, straightforward connection in Assessing Caregiver-Child Interactions in Museum Exhibits. We know how critical parents are to children coming to science centers and museums, to scaffolding and extending their learning, and to taking experiences home. And yet, we fall short in finding ways to fully engage parents in exhibits and programs. 

•         You can’t judge what happened in the past by what we’re capable of today. Michael Specter, keynote speaker and author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives farmed this basic and critical idea: managing multiple, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives at the same time.

•         The only visions that take hold are shared visions—and you will create them only when you listen very, very closely to others, appreciate their hopes, and attend to their needs. Ace Everette from Randi Korn & Associates shared this from, “To Lead, Create A Shared Vision” by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner (Harvard Business Review). Developing and acting on a shared vision–a vision of a museum’s future, a shared understanding of learning, or a shared commitment to the audience–is an everyday best practice at all levels of an organization.

•         The maker movement feels like a transition point from being a consuming culture to a producing culture. This seemingly targeted observation made by Eric Siegel from NySci is, in fact, a very big idea with enormous opportunity for museums.

•         Conversing with phenomena. Karen Wilkinson quoted Hubert Dyasi Professor of Science Education and Director of the Workshop Center at CUNY. This rich image captures the poetry in play and science expressed in the 100Languages of Children and explored in Playing With… Paper.

•        We know it. Why don’t we do it? KathyMcLean posed this question in talking about creating convivial museums. It insists on the obvious and we could–and should–do in evaluating alternatives, making choices, allocating resources.

Viewing, wondering, and laughing high atop the Maryland Science Center

The thinking and sharing, conversations and questions at a conference are revisited and drawn on throughout the year and over the years. This engagement serves as a strong point for our work. It moves us forward in many ways including towards creating museums as places for being alive together. What words, images, and questions engage you and will push your thinking and practice forward?  

Playing with ….. Paper

Tower cut from one sheet of paper: Peter Callesen Papercut

Paper is so everyday, ordinary, and ubiquitous. Its basic properties are so familiar they seem unimpressive, but somehow, that just seems to increase paper’s possibilities. Even when paper is used, it can be re-used and sometimes it's up-use is even more astounding.

Something remarkable about paper and, for that matter, other familiar materials such as water, clay, wire, fabric, sand, paint, wood, light is:

Paper has two lives. First, getting to know paper. Later doing something with it.

At virtually any age–baby, toddler, preschooler, children, tween, teen, and adult, and including, artists, designers, engineers, scientists, cooks and bakers, sewers, fix-it guys, plumbers, fabricators, sculptors (I’ll stop here)–first explore a material to find out how it behaves, responds, and changes. Information from messing about sparks connections and ideas and shapes a goal to reach for.

Learning About Paper

Exploring paper may begin with any of these actions:

Bend, braid, burn; coil, color, crimp, crumple, curl, cut; dissolve; fold, flip; glue, grease; mold; layer; paint, pleat, pierce, press, print, pulp; recycle, rip, ruffle; scratch, shred; soak, stack, stitch, stuff; tear, turn, twist; weave, or wrap.

Paper loves verbs and in many combinations. What happens when I crumple this big green sheet of tissue paper? It makes a quiet, rustling sound; it feels soft, dry, crinkly. How small does it get if I crush it tighter? It’s small, round like a ball and hidden in my hand. Open my up and smooth out the sheet. It’s big and flat again, but now with criss-crossing wrinkle lines. Like roads. There’s a tiny tear on one of the roads. How does the paper tear? It tears every-which-way in one direction. It tears in long straight lines in the other, tearing fast or slow. One big sheet of tissue paper is now 8 long strips. Folding a strip in the middle; twisting and twisting. Folding it in the middle again and twisting more. Let go of the ends and it doesn’t untwist. Tie the crumpled, smoothed, torn, twisted tissue paper in a knot. Spread the ends flat between the thumb and forefinger. One end is much longer; tear that off. 

Crumpled, wrinkled, flattened, torn, twisted and tied

One green sheet of tissue paper carries all this information; and it’s not even written on the paper itself. It is released through the research of a child or adult wondering, touching, testing, noticing, questioning what will happen if and what happened when. Introducing paint, glue, tape, water, or using a scissors or a hair dryer extends the investigation into paper’s properties. 

Then there are the explorations of many other types of paper: cardboard, acetate, Letter or A4 paper, butcher paper, cellophane, magazines, newspaper. What might sound like a preschool activity easily moves into classrooms, workshops, studios, exhibits, and maker faires.

Playing with Paper, Exploring Ideas

Paper’s second life relies on knowing how paper behaves, responds, and changes. Children and adults enjoy greater control with this knowledge in work on projects or activities: making shapes, constructing 3-d forms, investigating structures, or exploring motion.

Adding a twist and a touch to the paper helicopter

Familiarity with paper shifts the emphasis to doing and thinking about what’s going on with paper flying machines. Flat, lightweight, easily foldable, crisp creases, paper’s attributes suit it for paper airplane design and construction. Trim the paper plane to get it to float gently down; toss at different speeds and angles. Vary the design to test flight times and distances. Other paper flyers like helicopters also draw on paper’s properties. Dropping them from over head (or from a chair) suggests questions about why they spin as they fall, how air pushes up against the blades, bending them up a little and pushing sideways on the two blades. Paper and many paper products are familiar and inexpensive materials, like small paper cups. They work for quick, iterative experiments with moving air: snip the edges, toss above a blowing fan. Observe the falling, floating cup; now think about new ways to snip and bend the strips. Follow with a succession of quick redesigns. 

 Visiting Cardburg

Children and adults work with cardboard's properties–stiff, sturdy, springy, strong in one direction, and weak in another–to build at a large scale, create BIG constructions, and change the environment; these are experiences with merit but not often provided in museums. Crawling into and through boxes; opening them up and flattening them; stacking boxes, building walls and bridges... these activities and others support explorations with spatial reasoning, gravity, balance, and strength. Add tape to the project or Makedo connectors to join units and construct cardboard cityscapes. Few, if any, structures become as elaborate as Cardburg. But there’s always hope.

Everyday familiarity with paper, cardstock, or cardboard applies as well to creating automata, those quirky, appealing mechanical toys. Stories, nature, or imaginations inspire these crank-driven moving sculptures powered by combinations of simple machines. Cams, cranks, gears, ratchets, levers, and pulleys produce a range of movements–up, down, around– that bring blooming flowers, celestial events, and flying fish to life.

Learning New Lessons

Familiar, friendly, and unpretentious, paper is an entry point for a wide, wide range of skill levels, thought processes, and interests. For toddlers and young children, the hand and finger action involved in reaching, gripping, tearing or twisting paper or rolling a cardboard tube reflects brainwork. 

Moving up the age range, explorations of paper are a bridge to complex thought processes: ordering, sequencing, and patterning; exploring cause-and-effect, sparking connections; asking questions; naming and describing materials, ideas, and processes; relating 2 and 3 dimensions; and taking different perspectives. Exploring paper is actually part of a larger dialogue, sometimes with others and always with past experiences. The possibilities of abundant quantities of paper, varied and novel types of paper, or paper in unusual forms, like pulp, support and extend these and other investigations.

In the Paper Factory at Minnesota Children’s Museum, a giant pulper continuously produces paper pulp for making paper by hand or pressing paper medallions. To make medallions, children scoop pulp onto a drawer of a small press, place a carved mold on top, and push in the drawer. Turning a wheel applies pressure that squeezes water from the pulp. Reversing the wheel releases the pressure; the drawer can be opened and the medallion removed. A gentle nudge dislodges a 2" diameter (genuine) pressed medallion. On one of my visits, I overheard 11-year old Joe say, “I could do this for a living when I grow up.” Indeed, he did make medallion production his afternoon’s work: scoop, press, release; dry the medallion; choose a mold with another design; repeat; add glitter or a sprinkle of confetti. Line up the medallions and carefully package each one.  Joe’s concentration was impressive as was his evident pride in medallion production.

Following in Joe's footsteps: an avid medallion maker

Perpetual paper pulper at Minnesota Children's Museum

Paper’s Third Life

If exploring a material can delight toddlers as it does in the You-tube video of a laughing baby tearing paper as well as inspire Peter Callesen to create Papercuts and Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave to make 18^th century fashions out of paper,  well, it is not too much to concede that playing with paper has enormous possibilities

So, maybe paper actually has three lives. First, getting to know it and how it behaves. Then doing something with it. Finally, fully exploiting paper with inspiration and imagination. How does paper inspire you?

Paper Info, Museums, and Exhibits

• Paper Airplane Museum: www.hawaiiweb.com/maui/html/sites/paper_airplane_museum.html

• Robert C. Williams Paper Museum: www.ipst.gatech.edu/amp/index.html

• Cardboard Institute of Technology at the Exploratorium: http://blogs.exploratorium.edu/tinkering/

• Smithsonian Institution’s Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop, Turn: oecexhibits.si.edu/blog/2010/06/paper-engineering-fold-pull-pop-and-turn.html

• Information about paper: www.scribd.com/doc/25089272/Material-Exploration-With-Paper-1

The Dance: Informal & Formal Learning

Just one example of informal learning in its many dimensions

For years, I viewed the relationship between formal education and informal learning as a kind of dance. Two partners move in relation with one another inspired by a shared goal of educating students and serving the public. This image fit when I worked in public education in professional development and when I moved to museums. At Minnesota Children’s Museum, school visits and field trip programs were a high priority. Our long-term school partnerships reflected local school priorities and they grew. Curricula and kits that we developed, whether on geometry or water, were hands-on, for small group or family learning, and place-based. Yet they always reflected topics, skills, or resources where teachers expressed a need for support. Along with others, I described museums and informal learning as enhancing, complementing, or supplementing formal education.

Finding Our Stride

Verbs matter. Enhancing, complementing, or supplementing are following verbs. For years, informal learning in museums was following formal education.

Learning, or at least our understanding of it, has been undergoing a transformation. Virtually all people of all ages and backgrounds are, at some time, engaged in informal learning, characterized as self-motivated, guided by learner interests, voluntary and personal, contextually relevant, collaborative, and non-linear. Opportunities for out-of-classroom learning through media, museums, zoos, libraries, nature areas, recreational activities, hobby clubs, community programs, on-line courses and resources (+ big etc.) are abundant and increasing. An estimated 80% of a child’s learning between the time she enters kindergarten and graduates from high school happens outside the classroom. 

Currents of change have placed informal learning in a pivotal role in life-long learning, classroom learning, and the broader educational infrastructure.

Given a persistent achievement gap, an inadequate supply of scientists and engineers, and the US slipping internationally in education, the promise of informal learning environments grows. That potential has also been at the heart of thinking, research, discussions, studies, and reports including the National Research Council’s Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits (LSIE). In many ways the 2009 IMLS project Museums, Libraries, and 21stCentury Skills also lays the foundation for museums and libraries to assume a larger and pro-active role in bringing informal learning environments to the forefront of a dynamic 21st century learning society. More recently, a posting on the Center for the Future of Museums raised the question of museums as major players on a completely new educational landscape that is on the horizon.

 

Not Entirely There

Returning to the dance metaphor and working it a bit harder: Museums need to pay closer attention to the music and how good at dancing they really are. At least weekly I encounter cases where, unwittingly, museums follow, and sometimes mimic, formal education ignoring the tremendous assets available in their own informal learning environments.

Several years ago I started noticing museum annual reports with color photos of children eagerly raising their hands; photo captions mention how the museum serves schools. Perhaps these photos had long been there and I finally woke up to the disconnect: representing children’s enthusiasm and learning capabilities in a dynamic, object rich and free-choice museum environment using a trite symbol for traditional and teacher-directed learning.

Just this past week I came across two examples of how formal ed frames perspectives in museums. A statement on a museum resource website said, “Museums enable us to supplement the formal, structured, curriculum-driven model encountered in classrooms.” In a recent and otherwise excellent article in a professional journal, science centers and museums were referred to as 3-dimensional textbooks of science. Do we ever refer to textbooks as 2-dimensional museums?

More classroom, less museum

A formal ed mindset is strong as well in designing and outfitting non-exhibit museums spaces. With few exceptions, classroom spaces in museums are replicas of school classrooms, with tables and chairs replacing desks. In fact, these spaces are generally called classrooms on the building directory. The creative thinking and fresh design that shape multi-sensory, flexible, contextual, and sometimes immersive exhibit environments manage to  leave workshop, studio, and lab environments completely untouched.

More museum, less classroom

While I feel impatient, there are understandable reasons for not yet having full traction. In a session at the Visitor Studies Association conference Joe Heimlich highlighted one reason. Most educational theory and frameworks have been developed using formal education with captured audiences and time frames and treatments useful to schools. Without fully registering this difference, we generalize from formal ed with captive audiences, individual cognition, and text-based approaches to settings where learning is voluntary, sparked by personal interest, contextual, social, and object based.

Learning New Steps

Transitions take time, especially transitions from a following role to stepping out and leading. Evidence of the shift that is occurring is gratifying and insightful. For instance, the 2006 Tamarack Nature Center (MN) master plan noted how environmental education professionals had allowed formal educational policy and standardized tests to determine the focus of programs, teaching methods, and the commitment to informal learning experiences–at the expense of a lasting connection to nature. In a recent Museum Commons blog, Gretchen Jennings reflected on how she had brought her public school perspective to museums, over time arriving at new ways of thinking about museum learning independent of formal ed.

Museums need to actively own and advance their learning territory and do so with a sense of urgency. Changes in the world of learning are unfolding right now; and they are changing in the direction that resonates with the very attributes that distinguish informal learning environments from formal education. They are self-directed, personal and social, evidence rich, with engaging physical contexts. Museums can amplify their contributions to a more robust and extensive learning landscape across communities and the lifespan. 

A common framework for informal learning independent of formal ed is needed. And while multiple theoretical frameworks exist, they have yet to be integrated, a task made more challenging by the need to recognize perspectives of different fields and a wide range of settings. Initiatives like Falk and Dierking’s 2007 In Principle, In Practice explore and make explicit connections among research, evaluation, and practice in museum learning. Frameworks such as the proposed Ecological Framework Across Places and Pursuits from LSIE pick up the challenge as well.

Advancing the potential of informal learning happens as well in the everyday work of creating learning experiences and environments. Museums serve learners across a wide age range, across generations, and across the community. Their array of interactive learning and experience strategies and methods is rich, varied, and enviable. They enjoy significant potential for engaging learners in meeting personal goals, museum learning interests, and community priorities. As they explore, articulate, and study these strategies, methods, practices, and impacts, program developers, educators, prototypers, designers, and evaluators can build a shared vocabulary, test new approaches, learn informally themselves, and inform the larger discussion.

Let the dance continue. Informal learning environments can be both partners with formal education and, it appears, lead the next dance.

Some Related Resources

•            In Principle, In Practice: Museums as Learning Institutions. (2007). John H. Falk, Lynn D. Dierking       and Susan Foutz (Eds.).

•            Lessons Without Limits. (2002). John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking.

•            Perspectives on Object-centered Learning in Museums. (2002). Scott G. Paris (Ed.); Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.

•            Learning in School and Out. (1987). Lauren Resnick. Educational Researcher; 16-30.

Strengthening Parent Engagement

 

Over the summer I’ve been working on several museum projects that are framed around reaching and engaging parents. By parents, I mean not only mothers and fathers, but also other significant adults in children’s lives­: step-parents, foster parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. For simplicity, though, I’ll refer to this large, loving, and important group as parents.

These projects and their museum’s interests emerge from what research and experience show about the critical role of parents in children’s lives including, pre-natally and right on through, well maybe,  forever.

•            Strong attachment between a child and parent, or caregiver, nourishes a child’s emotional development, fostering development of a healthy sense of belonging, self-esteem, and well-being.

•             Parents are children’s first teachers, supporting early language and literacy development, problem solving, and dispositions to learn, for starters.

•            Parent participation in their child’s play and learning extends to the prosocial and independent behaviors in the classroom. 

•             Increased parent involvement in children’s education is associated with a child’s improved achievement in school. 

Children and museums need parents in order accomplish their goals for richer engagement

Museums, like schools, libraries, early childhood programs, health and social service agencies, businesses, colleges, and universities need parents in order to reach their goals for children and for the community. Every one of these groups needs to reach parents, engage them, and communicate with them, share or reinforce messages about their critical role in children’s growth and development. While this may be especially true for children facing multiple challenges, all children need the solid foundation for a good start in life that parents offer. In museums, we also know that children engage more and in more complex ways in exhibits with parent involvement.

The Parent Imperative

The imperative for effective parent involvement in museums is clear. The strategies for doing so are less clear. After recently immersing myself in reading research, writing and mostly re-writing, thinking, and talking with colleagues about how to reach and engage parents, I am struck by how museum efforts are not stronger and more comprehensive than they seem to be. New efforts at engaging parents are hopefully percolating through museums right now. With few exceptions, however, we seem to be using limited strategies for accomplishing a challenging, complex, and sensitive goal.

From my scan, approaches seem to rely on text panels with parent tips though I am aware of several promising exceptions.

•            One is the exhibit Wonder Years: The Story of Early Childhood Development at the ScienceMuseum of Minnesota and reviewed on Museum Notes in July. It covers lots of information well.

•            The Adult Child Interaction Inventory is an assessment tool that can be used for evaluation or development of exhibits where the role of the adult in the child’s experience is significant to the exhibit project. Developed by Boston Children’s Museum with researcher Lorrie Beaumont, the tool assists in identifying what key design elements of the exhibit support adult-child interactions. The ACII is also useful as a training tool for museum staff.

•             Along with Lorrie Beaumont, other researchers have been looking at parent-child engagement as a part of their studies on children’s learning, literacy development, and family learning. A good, but by no means exhaustive, list includes: Maureen Callanan; Kevin Crowley; Jessica Luke; Suzanne Gaskins, Doris Ash, Steven Guberman, Kirsten Ellenbogen, Lynn Dierking, and Cheryl Kessler.

•            I have also been involved with projects and hear of more that are using visitor panels and focus groups to explore parent interests and questions about their children and using this information to inform exhibit design, develop parent information strategies, and plan programs.

Listening to parents and children at Louisiana Children's Museum

Text Traps

Relying on text to communicate important and sometimes subtle messages to parents in a setting planned to engage their young and active children is problematic. I struggle with the following challenges and find it hard to sidestep them. I encounter these traps labels I write and those currently in exhibits.

•            Getting a parent’s attention when she is attending to her children, with whom we want her to interact.

•            Coming across as telling a parent she should be doing more.

•            Being congratulatory about parental efforts, but not too much.

•            Seeming to suggest that the information is intended for another parent and his child.

•            Over-simplifying information about brain-development, play, talking to your child, etc.

•            Sounding too bossy, jargony, breezy, or clever; being too wordy or too elegant.

I recently wrote, “Play is joyful exploration. Add a spirit of inquiry and building play becomes science play.” A colleague noted that this elegant turn of phrase was not what parents are interested in while they watch their child hustle to the top of the climber. His comment woke me up and I hit the delete button. But knowing what to write instead was the next challenge.

Be Positive, Think Strategically, Act Collaboratively

Museums may not have the same kind of opportunities that schools and childcare centers have to connect with parents on a daily basis, at-pick-up-and-drop-off times, and at conferences. They do, however, have distinct opportunities they can exercise more fully and effectively than they currently do. Parents visit museums with their children rather than sending them off to school by themselves. The relationships museums want to focus on walk in the door everyday. With objects, interaction, a lively social context, and active exploration, museum settings accommodate a wide range of exploratory approaches. And because they are not grading children’s performance–or the parents–parents can relax in museums.

After 10 days of mucking about in search of parent engagement strategies and thinking about our ambitions for reaching and involving parents, I have a beginning list of promising strategies to assist museums in supporting and strengthening the connection between parents and their children.

•            Be positive and assume the best. Parents want to do their best on behalf of their children. Many factors overwhelm parents’ intentions to be actively and intentionally engaged with their child during a museum visit and in the everyday moments of their lives. Parent involvement strategies should build on good intentions, strengthen parents’ positions, and support their relationships with their children.

•            Frame a clear set of goals. Be clear about what you are trying to accomplish through parent engagement and why it’s important: does it relate to local issues? has it been identified as a priority for the audience? is there a gap in local resources in this area?

•            Focus on strategies and actions that evidence suggest makes a difference for a child. I have realized I need to follow the research more closely. In combing research, a useful focus might be on behaviors and situations that are relevant in an informal learning environment around asking questions, participating in play, everyday moments– rather than about homework, for instance.     

•            Get to know parents. Parents are a diverse group even when “parents” is not a placeholder for a much larger group of step-parents, foster parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Within any group are smaller, but distinct groups, who might benefit from being engaged in particular ways or who have preferences for how to be approached. There are members and first-time visitors; mommy bloggers and weekend dads; new parents and parents who are uncertain about their role in museums; out-of-town grandparents and custodial grandparents. A parent segmentation scheme might be in order.

•            Identify and employ multiple engagement strategies. By its nature, facilitating parent involvement with their children is a complex negotiation. Adding a museum's agenda to the mix means 3 agendas are at play: the parent's, the child’s, and the museum’s. Navigating this means considering all approaches–text panels, facilitation, parent programs, film and video, hand-held media; it also means borrow and invent more. 

•            Engage more often, more directly, and in more varied ways with parents. This calls for some imagination and research. For instance, is there a voice parents are more likely to want to hear in text and even from facilitators? I wonder if there’s an “Aunt Judy” voice? A trusted, helpful, warm, yet firm voice. Could a museum recruit a cadre of trained volunteers to serve as Aunt Judys and Uncle Peters who engage parents in conversation, focus observations, share insights, ask questions? What about parent play sessions with staff who scaffold with and for parents?

•             Build museum capacity around parent engagement. Increasing capacity comes in all forms at every organizational level. It could be a staff person who serves as a parent advocate. A team gathers input from parents, summarizes and introduces parent perspectives into exhibit planning and program development. Someone coordinates staff training like Wakanheza that enhances parent involvement at the museum.  Partner organizations also have expertise to leverage and build capacity.

What might an Aunt Judy or Uncle Peter do to encourage engagement?

•            Expand on research and tools with practical applications like the Adult Child Interaction Inventory. Projects like Making Playful Learning Visible (2006 by Thomas Siobhan and James Bradburne) is an example of a project that accomplishes many of the above ideas. (Unfortunately, the report used to be available at www.ngf.org.uk/mplv/index.htm; it is now referenced but not available at: www.londonmobilelearning.net/aigaion2/publications/show/566.) Museums will hopefully also consider collaborative research projects to explore their questions about parent engagement with other museums and among cross-setting partnerships with libraries, schools, early childhood programs, etc. 

Getting Better Together

I hope this list is only a start. There's lots to be done and undoubtedly more than I know of is happening.  

• How is your museum engaging parents?                

• What strategies are working well?                 

• In what are areas are you most interested in making changes? Why?                  

• What have you learned that might be helpful to other museums?               

• Are there other researchers and projects in this area to share with others? 

Listening to Children’s Thinking

A few months ago I was shopping in Target. In the next aisle, I heard a child say, “I want to look in that mirror to see if my face is in that mirror too.” Looking around the aisle cap, I saw a girl about 3 years old leaning out of the seat in a shopping cart while her mother pushed the cart. I pulled out a scrap of paper, scribbled down what she’d said, and waited to hear more. The mother pushed on. I relished this privileged glimpse into the amazing everyday thinking of a young child: if my face is in the mirror at home, is it also in this mirror? In other mirrors? In all mirrors? What does that face in the mirror mean?

I love to listen in on children’s conversations at airports, playgrounds, restaurants, stores, and hotels, as well as in museums, nature centers, and zoos. I often overhear remarkable comments that I record and share. Others enjoy these quotes, laugh, and sometimes share something they have overheard a child say.

To call these anecdotes cute or funny does not take them or the children who have said them seriously. Yes, they are delightful and they do have a charm and freshness. Yet, the more I listen to children, the more I find examples of remarkable thinking as they make sense of their world. These quotes become anecdotal evidence of children as thinkers and learners. They provide insights into how children construct their understanding of the world in the ordinary, everyday moments of their lives.

These and other anecdotes reveal children more as they are and very likely as more competent and resourceful than we usually view them. Both are relevant in planning for children in museums, zoos, nature centers–and schools. First-hand information about children deepens an understanding of this part of a museum’s audience. An appreciation of young children as competent thinkers and active learners is invaluable in exhibit development and design, writing parent labels, planning programs, and training staff to engage and interact with children. Anecdotes like these go well beyond generic developmental profiles. They bring reality, fullness, and visibility to what a child formulating questions, testing a hunch, or discovering a new meaning might actually look like.

In My Dreamscometrue

We expect that children will become readers. But questions like the following put a spotlight on moments in that process when a child is constructing an understanding of how sounds, letters, and words work together.

“Mom, how do you spell ‘W’?”

Children’s growing awareness of letters and words comes through in this question asked, not surprisingly, by 4 year old. A question like this reflects a growing awareness that letters are associated with sounds and that letters and sounds make up words. The distinction between a letter, a sound, and a word, however, may not yet be clear or stay fixed. Eager, fueled by curiosity, and cued to questions about what letter a word starts with, children look for and link clues about words and sounds asking, as a 5 year old boy did, “What does “B” start with?” 

Babies, it seems hear spoken words as a continuous flow of sounds. Gradually, a child recognizes familiar sounds within the stream; these become words a child knows and uses.  But young children also continue to use several words as if they were a single word. Three words continue to be one word for a 6-year old girl who promises her sister, “And I’ll keep you in my dreamscometrue.”

These questions and words are reminders of how very complex learning sounds, letters, words, and phrases is. Adults could treat them as mistakes and correct them. On the other hand, these questions and children’s speech are evidence of how they construct an understanding of language, how they listen carefully, notice patterns, and apply rules to become competent speakers, readers, and writers.

Thinking About Objects

Ordinary moments fill a child’s day, holding countless opportunities to notice, wonder about, and explore basic relationships that operate in their world. We may think little of it when a baby repeatedly drops a spoon from the highchair; a toddler pushes a car up a track; or a group of children shape dinosaur worlds in the sand. Yet, from the falling spoon, spinning wheels, and miniature worlds in shifting sand, children develop hunches and explanations about materials and their properties and how different conditions affect them. They make observations, link them together, test and retest assumptions. With experience, they develop, revise, and organize ideas about movement, causality, perspective, and changing conditions. 

In a motel lobby, a 5-year old girl pointed to a red line on a highway map. She turned to her younger brother and said, “That’s a road. Roads make cars park.” This explanation draws on an observation the girl and many others make: cars park on streets. The unusually ascribed causality that streets make cars park might come from evidence that cars park virtually exclusively on streets; or perhaps painted parking lines seem powerful; or perhaps the agency of drivers parking cars is less apparent.

We know four-and-five year olds have a strong interest and great delight in categorizing and organizing objects and events; but what does it look like? Five-year old Jake laid out a kind of timeline of world history to his mother when he announced, “Dinosaurs. Baby Jesus. The Knights. Me.” In his short history of time, Jake has correctly sequenced some major figures in his world. He has noted the dinosaurs and knights that fascinate him, Baby Jesus who is culturally significant for him, and, of course, himself.

Even at a young age, children are revisiting observations about their earlier experiences and activities. Seven-year old Andy’s changed perspective on his 5-year old world came through when he said to his playmate, “Barry, do you remember when we thought our block was the whole world?” The difference between how big the block seemed then and really was (at least in this 7-year old’s view) suggests how actively children revisit, revise, and, in fact, notice changes in their thinking.

Building theories about when the fan will blow off the hat

Children are constantly and intently paying attention as they learn language, navigate how to relate to others, and make meaning of their everyday experiences. We might also listen as intently to them. 

Music Hat or Dancing Hat?

Interpreting what a child might be thinking is, admittedly, speculative. We don’t know for sure whether Jake’s timeline of world history is just that. But a record of what he or another child said, the context in which he said it, and his approximate age, invite conjecture and a healthy regard for alternative interpretations about what he was thinking or his meaning at that moment. These anecdotes also support respect for children’s competence.

Glimpses into children’s thinking fascinate me, but I’m also interested in listening for insights into how, for instance, they see themselves, the competencies they are proud of, what interests them, and the possibilities they see in materials and objects.

“Why do you have a dancing hat on?” " It’s a music hat.”

I was in the Providence airport this summer when many families were coming home from beach vacations. Several parents compared vacation notes while their four-year-old daughters gradually struck up a conversation. One girl was wearing a derby-style hat decorated with animated musical notes. The other girl asked, “Why do you have a dancing hat on?” Her new friend answered, “It’s not a dancing hat. It’s a music hat.”

That apparently important distinction intrigued me. I wanted to hear more and couldn’t help but wonder, what are they thinking?