Working with Young Children in Museums

Hackett, Abigail; Holmes, Rachel; MacRae, Christina

doi:10.4324/9780429434457

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…Influenced by the work of Vygotsky and others, we recognise the function of external semiotic activity such as talk, drawing and gesture as powerful “tools of thought” (Arnheim, 1969; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985; Bruner, 1986; Kress, 1997; Matthews, 2003; Anning and Ring, 2004). We are also mindful of the work of Hackett et al . (2020) exploring children's physical and material encounters with museum objects and spaces.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Embodied and sensory responses to space, time and materials allow for endless (re-)generative possibilities, transformations and “ways of being” (Barad, 2015). Previous research with young children in museums can be critiqued as being overly reliant on socio-constructivist perspectives of meaning making by placing undue emphasis on verbal language and narrative which can reinforce socio-cultural inequalities (MacRae et al , 2018; Hackett et al ., 2020). Birch (2018) proposes that we pay attention to, “sensory and bodily encounters with space and matter for these are valid ways of knowing and instruments of comprehension for both adult and young children” (p. 252).…”

Section: Enacting Change Through New Ways Of “Seeing” and “Being” In The Art Museummentioning

confidence: 99%

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It's our museum too: co-producing research in a university museum through a nursery residency programme

Noble

Wallis

2021

QRJ

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PurposeThe authors draw on Howard and Thomas-Hughes' (2020) framework for quality assessment of co-produced research, to interrogate our assumptions and processes and to reflect on our project. They consider if they achieved our planned outcomes around developing practice, enabling a range of voices and perspectives within their research, and enacting change within the university museum.Design/methodology/approachThe authors’ early years residency programme explores the potential of collaborations with community groups to transform knowledge and practice through action research. As museum educators, the authors find synergy between the participatory pedagogies underpinning their practice and the co-construction of knowledge within action research. Both are committed to enabling diverse interpretations within a collective and supportive framework. Within their project, practitioners from the museum and playgroup worked collaboratively to collect video footage, photos, children's artwork and reflective journals and memos.FindingsThe process of action, observation and reflection revealed much about the authors’ different perspectives and they found variations in both pedagogy and practice. Although the authors had a shared commitment to providing high quality, memorable, exciting opportunities for the children, the exploratory nature of the project meant that they did not agree what these experiences might look like in advance, and so they had different understandings of what they saw.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the authors’ methodological framework was designed to make their research collaborative, structural challenges and the contexts of the art museum and university reinforced long established hierarchies. While some felt supported by the research process and the prestige of working with a university museum to gain legitimacy for their practice, others were disempowered by these same structures. The authors consider their obligations as practitioner-researchers to become aware of the role they play in maintaining, as well as challenging, hierarchies and assumptions.Originality/valueYoung children in museums is a growing area of study and this practitioner-led action research project develop a new strand of enquiry within this field. Through this research the authors can collaborate with community partners to record, analyse and make visible the many different ways in which young children experience the museum. As research led institutions, university museums are ideally placed to develop research in partnership with local public bodies and community groups. However, future work in this area would benefit from a more explicit consideration of the constraints implicit within the institutions within which they all operate.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Enacting Change Through New Ways Of “Seeing” and “Being” In The Art Museummentioning

confidence: 99%

It's our museum too: co-producing research in a university museum through a nursery residency programme

Noble

Wallis

2021

QRJ

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“…By drawing attention to the happening of noncompliant learning in these intra-actions, we show the noncompliant ways in which the museum intra-acts with and thus comes to matter in the city (of Bergen). The intra-action, therefore, enables multiple diffractions of the morethan-human entanglements as inseparable co-dependencies (Ellsworth 2005;Hackett et al, 2020;Murris 2016;Massumi 2002;MacRae et al, 2018) with/in/ through the city.…”

Section: Constitutive Intra-actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Noncompliant Learning: Diffracting SpaceTimes, Intra-active Ropes, and a Museum’s Roping into the City through a Curious Child

Sadownik

Bastiansen

Gabi

2022

Video J. Educ. Pedagog.

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In this article, the authors intra-act with Barad’s (2007) conceptual toolkit to examine noncomplaint learning of a ropemaking activity at The Norwegian Fisheries Museum in Bergen. Barad’s concepts of intra-action and diffraction allow us to perceive the rope as noncompliantly diffracting into the two different SpaceTimes of the 19th and 21st centuries. The former SpaceTime is intra-actively constituted by historical ropemaking craftship and the museum staff, and the latter by the children’s approaching the ropemaking through toys and play. In the overlap of the entanglements of the two SpaceTimes, noncompliant and ‘new areas of curiosity’ (Wertsch 2002, p. 123) unfold and continue the rope’s diffraction into the city. By following the intra-active community of Ida and the rope, the authors map entanglements of more-than-human worldings and conclude with a call for more museal diffractions that can (intra-)activate the museum’s relational capacities in the ecology of the city.

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“…Here we recall Arendt and Benjamin’s interest in surfacing “pearls” (Korsgaard, 2018), as objects that contain fragmented pasts; rather than exemplifying history, they offer us “a stubborn subversive protest against the typical, the classifiable” (Burman, 2008, 72). We think of the hard and resistant material qualities of the bonbonnieres as also contributing to the notion of “the museum as meshwork of multiple past‐present‐future entanglements and encounters” (Hackett et al, 2020, 16). Through these multiple encounters the bonbonnieres have the capacity to “animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.” (Bennett, 2010, 6).…”

Section: Hard Peas and Slippery Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The new family learning space, on the ground floor and near the front of the gallery, was planned to open in May 2020 (delayed due to Covid19 pandemic), and aspires to provide a range of services beyond the frequent conflation of childhood and learning in museum and gallery provision (e.g. Hackett et al, 2020; Kirk, 2016). The gallery is interested in inter‐sectoral collaboration, and co‐production within service development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bonbonnieres in the gallery: (re)presenting sugar in a family gallery space

Boycott‐Garnett¹,

MacRae²,

Hackett³

et al. 2020

Int J Art Design Ed

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This paper charts an on‐going process emerging from a collaborative project between Manchester Art Gallery, and early childhood researchers and practitioners, who are currently working together to develop a new learning space for families. It revolves around the potential of exhibiting a collection of bonbonnieres in this space. These little 18th Century pots, originally filled with sweets or breath mints, are colourful and depict fanciful animals that have an almost cartoon like quality that may resonate with younger children. Yet the contents that once lay inside would have been cut from plantations by the hands of enslaved people. Sugar, in all its sweetness, is intrinsically linked to Britain’s colonial history. Sections of a poem by Tina Otito Tamsho‐Thomas (http://revealinghistories.org.uk/smoking-drinking-and-the-british-sweet-tooth/objects/bonbonniere.html) are emplaced throughout to unambiguously contextualise the bonbonniere as a symbol of enslavement legacy, sugar trade history and British colonialism. Today, excess sugar consumption sits at the heart of the healthy eating agenda, a key priority area for local early years providers. In this paper, textual ‘fragments’ act as provocations in a series of interdisciplinary conversations that were initiated as a strategy to unsettle the positions of the institution and its curators, educators and practitioners, opening up discursive thinking about the potential of this particular object‐space ensemble. By considering these bonbonnieres as ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010) that can affect and be affected within the gallery space (Tolia‐Kelly, 2016) we ask questions about how these objects might sit alongside the daily interactions that occur in the space in a way that opens up ‘discomfort zones’.

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Working with Young Children in Museums

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

It's our museum too: co-producing research in a university museum through a nursery residency programme

It's our museum too: co-producing research in a university museum through a nursery residency programme

Noncompliant Learning: Diffracting SpaceTimes, Intra-active Ropes, and a Museum’s Roping into the City through a Curious Child

Bonbonnieres in the gallery: (re)presenting sugar in a family gallery space

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