Abstract
Children are a key demographic for museums to consider in their practices. Yet their experiences of visiting museums is under-researched in a context outside of learning. Whilst participatory research with younger visitors continues to develop as an area of research, there continues to be an emphasis on children as learning bodies, who are in the museum for educational purposes above everything else. Birch (2018) notes that to re-conceptualize how children are perceived and engaged within museums, it would be helpful to have more participatory research findings, which can reveal a broader picture of children’s embodied perspectives that are untethered to a learning trope. How might we detach the perception of being a child and being a learner?? What would such a detachment look like considering the museum’s consolidating role as an educational facility? Taking on these difficult questions, this paper reflects on the challenging nature of producing collaborative museum exhibitions with younger visitors. Framed around the research question ‘What kinds of tensions emerge in museum collaborations with children when the frame for the collaboration is challenged?’ the paper offers a reflective discussion around the authors’ experiences with broader collaborative museum research and exhibition development projects ranging from co-design to citizen science. Conceptually the paper turns to Freire’s (1993) pedagogy of the oppressed, to question whether museum professionals and scholars are genuinely able to consider children as “valued social actors and knowledge-bearer” if we only do collaborative work as a means to educate them.
Presenters
Stefanie SteinbeckPhD Fellow, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Museum Transformations: Pathways to Community Engagement
KEYWORDS
Children, Collaboration, Experience, Learning, Critical Theory
