Family touch practices and learning experiences in the museum

Abstract

This paper investigates how family museum visitors crafted learning through interaction with one another and the touch objects of an exhibition. Through a case study of seven families' interaction, we show how families used touch to bring their interests and resources into dialogue with museum expectations and resources. Using a multimodal approach to analyse observational data, we generate a fine-grained account of differently configured family touch practices and ways of experiencing and knowing objects through their material, sensory tactile and affective qualities. We conclude by highlighting how our findings can inform the design of touch exhibits to support family learning, with attention to engagement, narrative creation, and embodied learning, and point to the paper's methodological contribution to the analysis of visitor situated real-time interaction and learning in museums.

Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication

“…Understanding bodily knowing through research on and with the body is a founding feature of the authors' work within multimodality (Jewitt et al 2016;Jewitt 2014;Kress et al 2005Kress et al , 2014 and sensory ethnography (Leder Mackley and Pink 2014) especially as articulated in relation to digital communication and interaction (Jewitt and Price 2019;Price et al 2016). We bring multimodality and sensory methods together to explore touch in response to the methodological challenge of how to understand the changing social landscape of touch, and the need for embodied methods to help gain insight on socially orientated understandings of digital touch.…”

“…We bring prototyping into the frame of social science as a way to engage research participants in exploring touch and digital touch communication. As social researchers exploring the multimodal and multisensorial qualities of touch, the ways prototyping enable the body to play a central role in generating qualitative data are significant (Jewitt et al 2019).…”

Taking an Extended Embodied Perspective of Touch: Connection-Disconnection in iVR

“…This connection made her feel more engaged with the narrative through the 'in the moment connection' , which is different from a more removed stance when reading a label in the museum. Engagement with the materiality of the objects has been linked to establishing social, cognitive connections (Chatterjee and Noble, 2013), and emotionally meaningful experiences with those objects that can provide access to representations of social, cultural and historical meanings (Jewitt and Price, 2019).…”

Supporting Family Scaffolding and Collaboration Through Digital Interactive Tabletop Exhibits

“…image, gaze, touch, gesture, body posture). The modal and semiotic choices that visitors made sought to understand the implications of their choices for meaning and learning (Jewitt et al, 2016;Jewitt & Price, 2019). Specifically, we analyzed the different design features of the digital exhibit environments, their affordances and constraints, in terms of how these shaped body positioning, family grouping, touch practices and experiences, as well as the principles that visitors used to organize their interactions.…”