Opening Up With Questions

I facilitate a lot of workshops and planning sessions both on my own and with other planners. Sometimes I work with museum teams I know fairly well and sometimes I work with new groups. No matter what the agenda or how short or long the process, starting off on a good footing is critical to inviting lively discussion, strengthening the group, and developing comfort with and confidence in the process.

I know, because sometimes a workshop starts off just plain wobbly and requires a whole lot of energy to get it back on kilter. Preparation and lots of pre-workshop communication is critical as is a well-developed, timed agenda with outcomes. More and more, however, I find that opening questions have an unaccountably large and favorable impact on how the 4 hours or 3 months can go. They can accomplish what a timed agenda, perfect slides, and good treats cannot.

Opening questions have a lot in common with good questions and with hard-working questions. But positioned early in a workshop and cast as they are, opening questions act as a catalyst moving the group and the work forward in relatively brief time.

For Openers

While questions are commonly used throughout many types of workshops to invite people to think and dig into the work at hand, they can serve other purposes when they launch a session. They help create a sense of community among people who need to work well together as a group on projects that require open back-and-forth, sharing perspectives, and collaboration. Opening questions can also become an informal way of gathering data in areas relevant to the work at hand.

Opening questions are folded in with introductions at the start of a workshop. Invited to respond to a question crafted for the topic, each person around the table offers something from his own experience that brings him into the group and into a frame of mind for the workshop. Sharing at the very beginning builds relationships and begins to weave a group culture. An opening question is an invitation to participate and one that everyone can accept and respond to in a personal and meaningful way.

Offerings contribute to a shared experience for the group and sometimes have a strong presence throughout the process. Often, during the course of the session, someone will illustrate a point or propose an idea and link it explicitly to a feature in one of the opening stories. In a workshop of several hours or a strategic planning process of 6 months, a sense of connection strengthens the group, encourages lively exchange, and helps in navigating the inevitable rough spots along the way. Even with a tight agenda, this is time well spent.

There’s no formula for selecting opening questions. A few considerations, though, have been helpful to me in developing and using them.

Cue questions to the work at hand. Doing so brings participants into the area or topic the workshop is exploring and in ways they might not have considered. For strategic planning, orient questions to the museum’s track record or its position in the community. For learning frameworks, tap into memories around childhood or life experiences that made a difference. For exhibit planning, draw on vivid experiences from play, nature, messing around. For a session on creating outdoor play spaces for a museum or nature center, an opening question might be, What do you remember about your favorite outdoor play place as a child and how it felt and smelled?

Questions come from everywhere. Memories and related stories, mine and others’, inspire many opening questions. Comments overheard from visitors at a museum or a child at the store suggest lines of inquiry. I also pick up pieces of questions that I overhear that hold promise. This morning I heard a snatch of a question on the radio, “Which part would you optimize?” I don’t know what it referred to, but I plan to hook it up to another question for a strategic planning retreat.

Capture, record, and post. Sharing the stories verbally is essential but doesn’t go far enough. Write them down for all to see. Post the sheets of paper around the room and keep to post at future sessions. Responses to questions can be long, expressive, and full of striking images. In a recent exhibit charrette, one line was referred to several times over 2 days: “I can remember now what it felt like when my father lifted me up above the breaking waves.” Written on big paper, stories become part of the group, its culture, and its work.

Questions beget questions. An opening question can have follow up questions that prompt or invite elaboration. A piece of a question that worked for one group might be a promising kernel for another group or may suggest a new direction for future questions. And so a set of opening questions grows and evolves. 

Questions in Play

Without quite realizing it, I have been collecting questions and thinking about what they have brought to projects and participants. Here are some examples that I return to for the next round of questions. You are free to use–combine, recycle, or vary.

• The opening question for a science center team planning a large gallery for young children was: What vivid memory do you have from when you were 3, 4 or 5 years old? Where were you? What were you doing and Who was there? In going around the table there were memories and stories of building forts, playing with cats, getting together with family. The last memory had barely been recorded when one member of the group eagerly identified four qualities present across these memories: being outdoors, messing around with loose parts, being active and on-the-move, and relationships. These qualities, which came from the team itself, shaped the planning criteria for the gallery.

• The invitation to a children’s museum core planning group that was updating its learning framework was: What memory of yourself as a child do you have that gave you an insight into yourself as a learner? Memories flowed of someone realizing that she could direct her own learning, of interests discovered that endure today, persistence that resulted in success, and memories of making a paper maché otter. As the group shaped its image of the learner, identified focus areas, and listed engagement strategies, it had varied examples of learning to draw on as well as vivid, personal memories of what it felt like to be a learner.

• In launching a strategic planning process, the opening question for the science center’s planning team asked, What was a moment for you as a child that was illuminated by science – when you were intrigued, dazzled, delighted or helped by some aspect of science? A board member shared his experience. Chuck talked about spending time as a child with his grandfather in his garage, puttering, fixing things and learning about how things work. Science learning encouraged by his grandfather’s knowledge and example made Chuck want to become an engineer. And he did, becoming the head of the top ranked automobile plant in the country.  This became “the power of science” story that shaped the strategic vision

• For a children’s museum exhibit master planning process, I wanted museum staff and board to keep what is fascinating to children top of mind as they considered and shaped exhibit experiences. We started the 2-day workshop with this question: If you could recreate something from your childhood in an exhibit for children at CDM, what would it be? Why? The experiences remembered were everyday moments steeped in the senses and intensely recalled. They had nothing in common with a list of exhibit topics or activities typically suggested in exhibit planning. Instead, someone shared the excitement of taking a risk, another relived the feeling of an authentic moment, still another remembered the strength of parental connection, and several recalled sensing the power of place. No one, however, felt the need to answer why they would recreate the moment.

A Life of Their Own

Really good opening questions are what I think of as questions people didn’t know they were dying to answer. They tap into something significant a person is eager to revisit and share. Somewhat oblique, these questions sidestep expected, prepared, rehearsed responses. Something flows. A really great question can take on a life of its own. In these cases, I have been very tempted to toss out the rest of a workshop agenda and follow the threads and interests of what people have shared. After the set of stories about a vivid memory from childhood, for instance, I wanted to ask, “Tell us more about when you chased after your sister with a stick…”

Not Just About Play

At the recent Math Core advisors’ meeting I attended, several exhibit developers, advisors, and designers mentioned how they had observed children building with blocks, constructing towers and houses, before and sometimes instead of focusing on the math. I noticed the same thing.

One particularly long building sequence started when two girls, 4 years and 8 years, walked up to Scaling Shapes, an exhibit about doubling the size of the object in three dimensions, height, length, width. The exhibit has a large work surface with a one-inch grid, loose one-inch cubes, and several block structures of assembled cubes. A monitor shows a structure being enlarged by doubling all three dimensions.

Standing at the exhibit, one girl said to the other, “Do you want to build a house?” They swept all the cubes to one side and started building a house for their three stuffed animals, a giraffe, a puppy, and a bear. As they built, they talked about what they were building, and who their animals were: “They’re all triplets.” “They’re watching TV.” “Where should we put him?” the older girl asked holding up the giraffe. “Let me deal with that!” the younger one replied, grabbing the animal. The activity continued, sometimes with more building and problem solving (“How do we make a window for the giraffe?”) and some times with more conversation.

This kind of activity sequence occurs frequently in children’s museums, science centers and museums and probably in every type of museum. While content specialists, advisors, exhibit developers and designers who create exhibits all want to see our exhibits used as we intend them to be, more than likely, it’s just not going to happen or not going to happen right away.

Exploration and Play

Planned for or not, play and exploration are an active, present, and inevitable part of the museum experience. The problem solving, critical thinking, and the planned discovery we intend for children and adults in exhibits require time and the opportunity to explore, to develop a familiarity with and knowledge of the materials, objects and even the context.

We can look to play for some insights into what happens at exhibits and, for that matter, in many contexts. What we think of broadly as children’s play with objects has two distinct aspects proposed by Corinne Hutt in 1970. In her play taxonomy, also referred to by Rennie and McClafferty (2002), she identifies epistemic behavior, or exploration, and ludic behavior, or self-amusement, along with games with rules.   

What can this do?

In exploration, a child picks up a ball, block, stick, piece of string, sock, stone, (etc.) and begins to investigate it. In eying, touching, lifting, squeezing, shaking, pounding, throwing, dropping, rolling, stepping on, and for the very youngest, mouthing and gumming, the child gathers information about the object’s basic properties. Implicit in the child’s mind during this investigation appears to be: "What can this object do?" Hutt also suggests that investigative, epistemic, behavior may be divided into three kinds of activities. In exploration a child uses her senses to gather information. In problem solving she focuses on doing a puzzle. In productive activity she is intent on making changes to the material and/or acquiring skills.  

What can I do with this object?

Play, or ludic behavior, relies on the child having sufficient information about the object to make it familiar and to be comfortable in shifting to ludic behavior, or amusement. Here the implicit question is, “What can I do with this object?” In this realm, Hutt says, children draw on the knowledge gathered about the object and skills in using it to play symbolically with the object. A block becomes a phone; the stick is light sword; a stone is a magic egg; a sock fits over the hand and is a cat puppet; and a pile of blocks are stacked to be a house with a window for a giraffe. Often pretense is involved.

A new combination, a new round of exploration

 Through play–informed by the initial investigation–a child gathers and consolidates additional information to develop further knowledge and understanding about the object and greater skill in using it. Children often move between exploratory behavior and play. Occasionally, the accidental discovery of a novel feature or introduction of an unfamiliar object prompts a new round of exploration, but this is incidental rather than the goal of the activity.


The need to explore and become familiar with something does not disappear with childhood and is not limited to toys or play. Adults certainly bring more information to each encounter, but the material (and even social) world is not static enough to remain familiar. When a new gadget or piece of equipment enters our life, when we try to open a particularly pernicious type of packaging, or we walk up to the rocket launcher at a science center, we take time to inspect, investigate, and explore before wholeheartedly committing to its use or to making something with it. In fact, Rennie and McClafferty suggest a paraphrase of Hutt’s two questions: “What can this exhibit do?” and “What can I do with this exhibit?”

Museum and Exhibit Context

In developing and designing museum experiences, most of us, most of the time do so as if investigation, play, and planned discovery to accomplish objectives were one and the same. They are not. In fact, the distinctions among them are often material to the goals museums have for learners in exhibits and programs. This disconnect seems to influence not only how learners engage in those activities, but also how long they are likely to remain with an activity and even the messages and understandings they take away.

When a learner encounters objects, tools, or materials at a maker table, a math exhibit, a harmonograph, or a building platform, investigation begins. It is likely to be relatively brief if there is some previous experience and familiarity with what is being explored. With new objects or novel combinations of materials, however, inspection and investigation are both longer and necessary for gathering information.

Museums, however, are not the highly familiar, everyday environments of the kitchen or car. They are, in fact, an intentionally prepared mix of familiar, unfamiliar, and often, rare objects, materials, and mechanicals, presented in engaging and intriguing ways. Since variety, novelty, and something out of the ordinary does characterize museums, it is reasonable to expect that many visitors will require time to explore, become oriented, and take in a museum and its exhibits. Similarly, a certain level of investigation, or epistemic behavior, is likely for children and adults to become familiar or reacquainted with an exhibit since most visitors do not attend museums frequently.

At many exhibits, investigation is likely to focus on what Hutt calls productive behavior that is concerned with changing the material or the user’s skill in using it. Changing the material may involve altering it by tearing, folding, cutting, applying pressure, or dissolving; changing another material by cutting, pounding, piercing, or illuminating it; or making something with it by attaching, assembling, connecting, or sewing it. Combinations of these processes are likely and expand the investigation. Another concern of productive behavior is developing skills in using or working with a material, object, or tool. Through familiarity and extended use, and through multiple tries at one’s own pace, the investigator acquires skills, develops competence, and derives a sense of confidence.

Lessons and Starting Points

Investigation, play, and productive behavior offer useful insights and lessons for planning exhibits. While related to one another, they serve distinct purposes. While similar to many exhibit engagement behaviors, their focus is less on the exhibit's objectives and more on what its elements can do.

Through exploration that often informs–and is informed by–play, children and adults engage with an exhibit. They develop a familiarity with the materials, objects, tools, and the context. These are the very same elements an exhibit intentionally brings together in order to meet its specific objectives. Equally as important, exploration and play provide the learner with skill in using the materials and a degree of preparation that is valuable in pursuing and accomplishing the exhibit’s objectives.

The learner’s tendency to investigate, play, and explore his own objectives offers insights and opportunities into additional ways exhibits might accomplish their objectives:  

• Recognize the learner as someone inclined to investigate, play, and pursue objectives
• Channel these activities towards the exhibit's objectives
• Provide for these activities in exhibit design 

Museum Notes From the Road

Recently, I have been traveling a lot, even more than usual. In just under two weeks, I visited museums in 4 states from coast to coast. Along the way, I spent time in 7 museums in different roles, attended a national project advisors' meeting, and walked New York City's High Line, something I have long wanted to do. I was headed for three more museums and a planning meeting before deciding to make a quick exit ahead of last week’s East coast storm. I sure am glad I did.

Observing the vitality and listening to what’s happening in so many museums–large and small, in towns and cities, across the country–and in quick succession is quite amazing. The variety and intensity alone require many deep breaths, time to thumb through notes and photos, and moments to recall, reflect, and share. Before too much fades away and with a reminder or two about where to explore more, here are some notes from the road.

Partners in Play

Three Seattle area children’s museums have been conducting exploratory research to look at how parents and caregivers see their children’s activities as play and their own role in extending and supporting it. Last fall, Lorrie Beaumont of Evergreene Research and Evaluation, and I interviewed caregivers and trained interviewers at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma, Imagine Children’s Museum, and KidsQuest Children’s Museum to conduct interviews. I wrote about some of my early impressions on an earlier post, Parent Voices, New Insights. Now, using the results of nearly 100 interviews, the three museums are beginning a new round of research. Three action research projects are ramping up and exploring questions that emerged from the exploratory study. Action research is an iterative, reflective process looking for improvements, or action, around everyday, real situations. More often used in school settings, it is well suited for museums and other informal learning environments. It's a great approach for exploring questions related to practice or emerging from research and is an excellent professional development tool. Look for a future post on action research as well as for dissemination of this work by the museums at conferences and on-line.

Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), Seattle

When I hear someone propose developing a scavenger hunt for a museum, I am drawn to the idea. I like to imagine pairs of children or family groups combing through a gallery, alert for possible clues, furrowing brows about another way to read this clue, and exchanging ideas. I also tuck it away, wondering how well it will actually work in the bustling museum setting and for whom. I was pleasantly surprised on my visit to MOHAI to be paralleling the trail of two 8-ish year old boys enthusiastically scavengering their way through the museum with a set of cards. I noticed their intensity, listened to their conversation, and rejoiced in their sense of accomplishment when they yipped, “Yay! We built a railroad” after pounding in spikes. A few exhibits later, I heard one say to the other, “We have to ask questions.” The other replied, “Yeah! Gotta have questions.” The imperative captured my attention and that of others around us. This is precisely the enthusiasm and immersion we hope for and, in this case, in somewhat older children. While only a sample of 1 (or maybe 2), their enthusiasm reassures me of the potential for children to be actively engaged and excited in searching and discovering.   

Children’s Museum of Boston

It’s been more than 30 years since my fist visit to Boston Children’s Museum and I have been many times since. On this visit, I was impressed by how much the Museum has stayed the same even as it has changed. Approaching on foot from the T’s South Station, I navigated the streets by feel and was delighted to see the big white “Hood” Milk Bottle from across the channel, welcoming and guiding me. Changes in the neighborhood and on the Museum’s plaza made the milk bottle seem different and the same, a dynamic that persisted throughout my visit. A new entry experience flows into a familiar hive of activity around the four-story climber. Legacy exhibits including Construction Zone, Japanese House, PlaySpace connected by a wide corridor of activities for Chinese New Year. Bubbles and Raceways enjoy a new context in Science Playground. One thing that had not changed was the number of highly engaged parents in PlaySpace, including dads, many comfortably occupying the resource room; I noticed they do seem younger than 30 years ago. This mix of enduring and new BCM experiences is fitting for a museum celebrating its 100 birthday.

Math Core

As an advisor for Math Core for Museums, an NSF-funded project of the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), I participated in the project meeting at the Museum of Science (Boston). This project has an interesting focus and structure. Its four museums (SMM, Museum of Science, North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, Durham, and Explora, Albuquerque) have been developing a set of interactive exhibits that engage learners, especially middle school students, in experiencing and understanding ratio and proportion physically as well as cognitively. The project has an interest in long-term math environments and repeat visits. Selinda Research Associates is conducting a longitudinal evaluation of the project and at the meeting, Deborah Perry provided an overview of the evaluation that is underway.

Like past advisors’ meetings, this gathering of evaluators, exhibit developers, researchers, and advisors generated  lively discussion, valuable observations, and questions about the project and about museum practice and learning experiences more generally. Why, for instance, has repeat visitation been studied so little? Children’s tendency to build towers and houses with blocks before and often instead of focusing on the intended math activity was noted several times. The thoughtful, succinct, and quotable Paul Tatter observed that, “Learning is not an event,” yet we plan and evaluate learning as if it were. The idea of designing for persistence was thrown out inviting thoughts about what that might look like. Conversations from the advisors’ meeting are continuing.

Children’s Museum of the Arts

This New York children’s museum is not as well known as its New York peers, but deserves to be. It’s a fresh iteration of the Children’s Museum of the Arts I last visited about 20 years ago. Reopening in October 2012 after a relocation and expansion in a new SoHo location, it’s a smart hybrid of a children’s museum and art museum with a thoughtfully playful and seriously arty style infused into both its experiences and design. I am impressed. Still compact at 10,000 square feet, CMA uses its children’s art collection, artist-in-residence programs, artist-led programs, hands-on explorations of art materials and exhibits, and extensive outreach programs to children from a wide range of backgrounds. It’s committed to highly facilitated experiences by artists in its art labs, media lab, clay bar, and video-making and animation station. I especially loved the giant, highly utilitarian, octopus-like sink-and-water station in the center of the art lab that is inviting and visible from the street.

  

New York Historical Society/Jon Wallen

New York Historical Society

This was my first visit to the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library (NYHS) across the street from the American Museum of Natural History and Central Park. The set of interactive touchscreens in the newly designed Robert H. and Clarice Smith New York Gallery of American History were fascinating and as elegant as the gallery itself. Fortunately I had been alerted to the new DiMenna Children’s History Museum in the Jan-Feb 2013 issue of Museum. History exhibits for children are challenging and, until recently, there have been few, if any child-centered, interactive exhibits. As this recent NYHS exhibit, Chicago History Museum’s Sensing Chicago, and Minnesota Historical Society’s Then, Now, Wow! seem to indicate, the moment for children’s history exhibits has arrived. Since I plan to write soon on history exhibits for children that I have seen, I’ll leave that until later.

Loving the High Line

A public park built on an historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side, the High Line might be prettier and softer when green and warmed by sunshine than in the bleak mid-winter. It could not, however, be any less amazing as a brilliant found opportunity to open up the city and rediscover public space. Meandering through the 1-1/2 mile park high above the street, following old tracks, moving between plantings, and walking along paths punctuated by art is a novel, joyful feeling. Openings between buildings afford amazing views to the Hudson River. On the High Line, the city does not just close in up above and over head. It also spreads out down below and far into the distance.

A Disposition to…

In the world of learning, whether in museums or schools, we often hear about skills, knowledge, and proficiencies. We seldom, however, hear much about dispositions. Disposition might be a bit of an old-fashioned word and doesn’t enjoy great use. Perhaps that is because disposition lacks the crisp currency of skill with its sharp edges that lend it to being tested and measured.

Disposition, however, is a useful and underutilized concept, especially in museums with an interest in inviting thinking, engaging learners, and supporting life-long learning.

A disposition is a habit, an inclination, or a tendency to act in particular way.  With a focus on frequent and voluntary patterns of a behavior or activity, dispositions differ significantly from skills and knowledge. Acquiring a specific skill or knowledge on a particular subject does not guarantee it will be used or applied. A disposition makes use of that skill or knowledge more likely. We might say someone has a disposition to be curious if she typically and frequently responds to the setting by exploring, investigating, and asking questions about it. Simply having the skills to ask questions, however, does not assure that she will do so.

Lillian Katz who has been writing and talking about the role of dispositions in children’s learning for 30 years defines disposition as a “pattern of behavior exhibited frequently . . . in the absence of coercion . . . constituting a habit of mind under some conscious and voluntary control . . . intentional and oriented to broad goals.” In Cultivating a Culture of Thinking in Museums, Ron Ritchhart of Harvard University’s Project Zero refers to a dispositional perspective on thinking as not only the ability to think but also the disposition to think. Patterns of thinking not only can be used, but also are used.

Dispositions can be social. Someone may have a disposition to be friendly, helpful, or cooperative. Other dispositions are intellectual such as a disposition to ask questions, to read, to gather information, to observe, to weigh evidence. Not all dispositions are positive. Consider a disposition to be bossy or complain.

Dispositions can be developed and are more likely to be developed when other people, such as parents, grandparents, teachers, siblings, peers, model them. Even so, developing a disposition requires time, time for it to be enculcated, practiced and strengthened. Environmentally sensitive, dispositions are acquired, supported, or weakened by the conditions of the environment, the interactive experiences in settings with significant adults and peers.

Unpacking Dispositions

The qualities characterizing dispositions set them up as a good fit for museums in creating experiences for children and adults. Dispositions can be modeled. Museum educators, floor staff, facilitators can be (and often are) trained to model certain behaviors: asking questions, noticing patterns, or checking assumptions. As museums prepare environments and exhibits with particular objects and activities to invite and encourage learners to use skills and draw on understandings, they can also encourage certain dispositions. Many dispositions relate precisely to the kind of behaviors and actions we want learners to engage in: to notice, to try, to ask questions, to gather information, to be creative. Some dispositions relate strongly to certain areas, like science.

Three related aspects of dispositions make them even more useful in museum settings. First, focusing on dispositions reinforces a learner-centered focus. The learner is the subject, the agent, the person likely to try, to read, or to ask a question. Second, planning that encourages certain positive dispositions builds on strengths and puts abilities into play. Someone is likely to do this; a parent wants to answer a child’s question. Finally, dispositions are associated with action and doing. They lend themselves to active engagement; and this aligns with museum interests. Considering what people are likely to do in an exhibit or at a component based on the conditions created (or that can be created) becomes a worthwhile exercise, reinforcing museums as places to exercise choice and preference. Discussion shifts from learner outcomes and what a child or adult will do or will learn, to what a child or adult can do or is encouraged to do.





Dispositions in Museums

The experiences and environments museums create are powerful mediators of thinking, doing, and learning. Bringing a dispositional perspective to planning these experiences alters the focus from skills and content to learners, and to framing experiences that encourage dispositions relevant to broad project goals. I have been reading, searching the Internet, checking old files, and talking with colleagues to find out how a dispositional approach to providing experiences is being used in museums. I found several references to and examples of dispositions being used in museums.

Dispositions are sometimes mentioned along with skills, knowledge, and attitudes as foundations for science learning in museums as they are In Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits. Ron Ritchhart, mentioned above has been exploring and writing about a dispositional approach to thinking in schools and bringing that approach to museums as places for nurturing students’ awareness of and inclination for thinking. Boston Children’s Museum has brought a dispositional approach to interpretation in Science Playground. Graphic panels invite children to "Notice, wonder, question, play” throughout the exhibit’s three areas. Habits of Mind call out basic dispositions and their relevance to learning about the world.

The Exploratorium deliberately uses and supports the concept on disposition in the Tinkering Studio. Cultivating a “tinkering disposition” is the Tinkering Studio’s approach to engaging visitors in using their hands to investigate phenomena, materials, and tools. In this case, a tinkering disposition is “a proclivity for seeing the word as something that can be acted upon and building confidence in one’s ability to do so”. The Tinkering Studio focuses on space, activity, and facilitation as the conditions that encourage tinkering. A welcoming studio space anticipates and provides for interactions, access to materials and tools, and for tinkerers’ comfort and concentration. Activities are thoughtfully designed to support tinkerability, emphasizing, for instance, hand-made materials, making processes visible, and revealing easy entry points. Facilitators are prepared to be alert, helpful, and unobtrusive in encouraging tinkering.

These examples are varied and interesting but are too few. The people I have talked to about dispositions, while unfamiliar with them, recognized the promise this approach has in museums. If you know of work being done in this area, please share it. If using a dispositional approach to creating museum experiences inspires or interests you, I hope you will get going and get in touch. In any case, please spread the word. 

When Zero is Not Nothing

 

How does your museum, preschool, library, or childcare refer to the very youngest children you serve? To those less than 12 months?

Do you say, or hear others say, “Our target audience is zero to 10 year olds.” “What kind of activities should we offer for zero-to-threes? What’s our attendance of zero to one’s?”

To many, referring to this very young age group as zero seems like simply reading the numeral 0 on a scale for temperatures, distances, or weights. To me and to others, zero is a harsh-sounding dismissal of very young children as nothings.

There are no zeroes born to parents crazy with love for the tiniest beings; parents willing to get up in the middle of the night multiple times, who get down on the floor and make silly faces, and who talk nonsense in high pitched voices to engage the attention and delight their very dear and tiny babies. A baby is not a tabula rasa or an empty bucket to fill. From the very start, a newly arrived infant is active in taking in and making sense of surrounding stimuli and building social relationships.

Words matter. Disability awareness is one area in which thinking about words and meaning recognizes assets and capabilities and removes barriers to convey respect and change lives.

An infant carried in a Snugli, a newborn perched in a parent’s arms, a baby reclining in a stroller, or peepers and creepers crossing the squishy pad in the tot spot are welcomed visitors. Museums plan for them thoughtfully, calibrate experiences to support their growth and development, and provide comforts and amenities for them and for their parents and caregivers.  

If a museum, preschool, library, childcare program, or advocacy organization is investing time, energy, affection, and resources to enrich and improve the lives of very young children, perhaps it should refer to them as newborns, infants, babies, peepers and creepers and skip the zeroes.

 

Children at the Center

Children at the center has a ring to it and, at least in my networks, is referenced often enough to be familiar to many. But, is it a powerful tool or an empty buzzword? Yes–and both. With some teams I work with, children at the center sparks an interested, highly engaged response. From other teams the phrase produces a polite blank or bored look, signaling a readiness to move on.

A suspiciously attractive phrase, I nevertheless think placing children at the center extends well beyond a professional belief invoked with passion. What is at the center is what is important. Occupying a central position serves as a reference point towards which other considerations and actions are oriented. Children at the center asserts that children, their healthy growth and development; their resilience in the face of adversity, small or large; what is in their long term interest; and their joy are all important.

At its fullest, this idea offers an asset-based approach to building social capital in communities–better day-to-day experiences for children now as well as brighter futures. Children at the center has the capacity to align interests among multiple organizational partners to work towards long-term change for a community, its families and children. Finally, it is a compelling idea with enough gravitational pull to consolidate and focus a shared set of understandings and practices to better serve children in a museum, school, childcare, or community program.

While placing children at the center can advance these significant strategic, organizational, and learning interests, it does so only with deliberate and steady work among a group, or even an active network, of people. The work starts with developing a deep, clear, shared understanding of what placing children at the center means. 

Seeing Strengths

Seeing children as strong, capable, competent, and full of potential is at the core of placing children at the center. The strengths and possibilities of even the very youngest child refute the easy assumption that children are simple and in need of correction, direction, and filling up with facts. Through movement, thought, reason, and language, infants and toddlers notice, follow sensations, organize information, seek out others to engage with, and make and change meaning. We might even view children as the original hackers, with their innovative customization of their world.

Children’s amazing potential is captured in an experiment of delivering a box of tablet computers in sealed boxes to two remote Ethiopian villages. The purpose was to see if illiterate children with no previous exposure to written words could learn how to read by themselves by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded programs. Within 5 days, children had opened the boxes, figured out how to operate the tablets and were using an average of 47 apps each. 

It is not just children in remote villages with comparatively limited opportunities to spark an eagerness to explore that illustrates their strengths and capabilities. Evidence from everyday moments abounds. Children use others, often adults, as tools to accomplish their goals: to access something on a high shelf, roll the ball back to them and play, decode text, lift them up for a better view. Children observe others doing something they can’t do and then imitate them. Now they do it by themselves.

Our perspective influences what we see in children’s curiosity, expressions, persistence, and successes. When we see a strong, capable child, we see an active agent in exploring and learning. We view a child’s marks, questions, and choices as intention to make meaning–something we value greatly. We notice an extended focus on a purpose a child has invented herself rather than presuming a short attention span. We believe each child has something to say; each brings a narrative to the moment. It might be an observation about time, such as one 5-year old’s chronology of  world events, “Dinosaurs, Baby Jesus, the Knights, and me.” These are some of the magnificent offerings of children.

New Starting Points

Museums that internalize a view of children as strong and competent are in a position to activate the potential each child has. This sounds ambitious, and it is. The careful work of placing children at the center requires a deliberate shift from creating exhibits and programs that fill heads with facts or impress museum peers to centering the museum’s language, thinking, planning, and actions around children.

Learning from, with, and about children offers significant new starting points for a museum’s work. Who are these children? What do we know about them? What fascinates them? How do they explore, think, and make meaning? If children are the focus and source of what is important, then everyone across the museum becomes interested, patient observers. This is precisely the same as everyone being alert to safety everywhere and all the time.

Focusing on children’s strengths and capabilities reveals their competence as authors of their own experiences. They follow interests, investigate materials, make choices, modify approaches, and express possibilities. Children’s use of their many languages or ways of representing and expressing their ideas and emotions comes through in their spoken and written words, visual arts, drama, movement, and more. This focus opens new understandings about children and allows a museum to imagine ways the child’s agenda can be the starting point for explorations that will generate new thinking. Approaches shift to make room for children’s competence in building knowledge and seeking meaning in the environments the museum creates, the interactions it facilitates, and the relationships it nurtures. Rethinking environments, experiences, exhibits, and programs that invite children to wonder and extend their investigations is inevitable.

The sustained work of placing children at the center relies on listening to, being responsive to, and sharing in a child’s world attentively and respectfully. While evidence of children’s thinking and connections and their own words about what they are doing and understanding is rich, varied, and plentiful, it is all but overlooked in most settings. Documentation, an approach that gives visibility to children’s processes and accomplishments, brings together listening, recording, photographing, and reflecting on children’s actions, work, images, and words.

In making children’s thinking visible, documentation gathers evidence of an individual child’s or a group of children’s thinking from their words, drawings, questions, actions, and exchanges. In a program, at an exhibit, during a drop-in activity, and while prototyping, staff may listen to a child’s questions about what keeps a ball aloft; observe a child's repeated adjustments of objects around a light source to change shadows; notice a child’s persistence blowing bubbles; or reflect on a child’s varying the base of block structures. Notes, transcripts, photos, and children’s drawings that staff collect fuel discussion and interpretation about how children approach and think about the experiences the museum has created for them, or that they have created or discovered. Documentation is an iterative process of reflection, distillation, and sharing. It yields insights into how to support and extend children’s explorations, and modify environments where children will choose to invest their curiosity, imagination, and creativity.

At its best, documentation is a teaching, learning, and research tool. It illuminates children’s thinking and learning to them, to parents, and to staff. It frames new questions, and informs future planning.

Centering the Museum Around Children

There is no straight, short, or simple path to placing children at the center of a museum in a meaningful way. However, when educators, developers, designers, and visitor service staff from across a museum wholeheartedly and collectively engage in placing children at the center, momentum builds and change occurs along many dimensions.

Seeing children as strong, capable thinkers, planners, and doers readily translates into seeing colleagues across the organization as capable and competent. Colleagues are recognized for bringing valued perspectives and complementary expertise needed to advance a shared vision. Staff working in different departments become collaborators in explorations and documentation that informs and deepens their work. A larger community of learners and partners with and around children takes shape.

Centering the museum’s language, thinking, planning, and practice around children takes hold gradually. New and more ways of placing children at the center begin to appear earlier in planning an exhibition, developing programs, framing the budget, hiring and training staff, forming partnerships. Through each project insights into children’s strengths and capabilities deepen, revealing new insights. A shared vocabulary develops. New ways to support more elaborate explorations unfold. Cycles of documentation are tried, shared, and modified. Existing practices evolve and new ones emerge, clustering into an increasingly supportive set of everyday practices with children at the center. Museum-wide practice aligns thinking and links qualities of environments, experiences, exhibits, programs with children’s thinking and knowing.

All museums have aspirations. Yet few actually translate these aspirations into change at a meaningful scale for a community, its citizens, or even itself. A shared vision and a sustained commitment are required. Placing children at the center of a museum’s long-term interests can be a way a museum matters in the life of its community. This commitment may be adopted as a value, a foundational principle, or a vision statement such as, “We envision a child-centered community that makes decisions based on what is in the long-term interest of the child's well-being.” 

Stated clearly and at the highest strategic level, placing children at the center can inspire, guide, and unify a museum’s varied and complex work across multiple formats and over time.