Family meshworks: children’s geographies and collective ambulatory sense-making in an immersive mathematics exhibition

Abstract

We present a video-based study of family visits to Taping Shape, an immersive exhibition that allows visitors to explore the inside of geometric objects. The exhibition was designed to support embodied sense-making, intimacy, and material encounter with mathematical objects. This study builds on research on walking and movement as forms of place-and sense-making. We draw on the notion of a meshwork to examine how children and their families co-produce, develop familiarity with, and assemble meanings for the exhibition space. This case study focuses on 4-year-old Easton and his extended family, exploring how Easton's talk and movements are part of an intergenerational meshwork that weaves together an emergent and distributed sense of place within the built geometries of Taping Shape. Our findings further considerations of embodiment and materiality in children's geographies.

Young Children's Engagement with Objects in Science Museums: A Rapid Evidence Assessment of Research

“…Six papers presented participatory research exploring young children's perspectives on museum visits (Dockett et al, 2011;Dunn & Wyver, 2019;Hope, 2018;Kelly et al, 2006;Piscitelli & Anderson, 2001;Wong & Piscitelli, 2019). The findings from many of the studies in this category focussed on talk-as-evidence of child learning, the nature of adult-child interaction, and adults' By contrast, five papers turned to spatial theories and/or post-human ontology to conceptualize children's museum visits as sensory and embodied experiences (Carr et al, 2018;Hackett et al, 2018;Kelton et al, 2018;Larsen & Svabo, 2014;Wöhrer & Harrasser, 2011). Questioning what Latour (2004) refers to as the Great Divides that are assumed in humanist research, such as between humans and artifacts, this literature points to new ways of conceptualizing and designing museum spaces as social, material, embodied and sensory assemblages rather than as places of gazing (Larsen & Svabo, 2014) and to new ways of researching and theorizing children's museum visits, where 'the world is experienced through sensory entanglements, indivisible from the places that bodies inhabit' (Hackett et al, 2018, p. 489).…”

“…If free to roam, children often walk or run in seemingly random ways, but stop to gaze at exhibits before moving on (Watson et al, 2002). They develop walking patterns as they revisit museums, and these pathways become an important product and resource for their learning (Kelton et al, 2018). Over time, thickening lines of wayfaring, whether by children on their own or by families, lead to 'deep embodied knowledge, memories and rituals attached to museum spaces by the children and families' (Hackett et al, 2020: 4).…”

The art of displacement – curating a preschool context in a public transport system

“…Another body of research relevant to this study is in childhood studies on museums (Hackett 2014;Procter and Hackett 2017;Birch 2018;Kelton et al 2018). These studies report on how museums are constructed by the children's interactions and meaning-making within exhibitions (Hackett 2014;Kelton et al 2018).…”

“…Another body of research relevant to this study is in childhood studies on museums (Hackett 2014;Procter and Hackett 2017;Birch 2018;Kelton et al 2018). These studies report on how museums are constructed by the children's interactions and meaning-making within exhibitions (Hackett 2014;Kelton et al 2018). Museums are places with social and cultural significance, and in which children are intended to gain specific knowledge about the things exhibited in the premises.…”

“…Several of the above-mentioned childhood researchers have investigated children's visits to museums, and how children participate in constructing space for learning (e.g. Procter and Hackett 2017;Birch 2018;Hackett, Procter, and Kummerfeld 2018;Kelton et al 2018). One way of displacing the meaning of art is to place it into public contexts other than museums, since this physical move enables relocation of the meaning from within the artwork itself, to the interplay with the context in which it is placed (Kwon 2004).…”