Inclusive MuseumKathie Carpenter’s Shares
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Finding Place and Feeling Culture in the Universalized Spaces of Children's Museums
Children’s museums are inspired by universalist approaches to child development, learning, and the “ideal” childhood. Assumptions that inform this approach to museum design include, for example, that children learn best through play, that children should be grouped by age because activities should be developmentally appropriate, and that parents or other adult caretakers should be involved in children’s play. In addition, children should have dedicated spaces for learning that are designated by design elements such as vivid colors, cartoonlike characters, and bounded spaces that maintain clear lines of sight so that children are visible at all times. Implementing these assumptions as design features leads to children’s museums that tend to resemble one another regardless of their geographic or cultural location, raising the following questions that guide this research—if children’s museums are designed to reflect universal beliefs about children, how can they also convey a sense of place or cultural connection? How can children’s museums distinguish themselves when they are designed according to universalist ideas of child development? This article argues that incorporating more local content and design features makes the children’s museum more compatible to a broader range of social values and therefore more inclusive of a broader range of visitors. It also enhances the educational goals of the museum. Based on museum observations made in seven different countries, this article will describe several successful examples of ways that children’s museums have introduced cultural and geographic distinctiveness.
Credit: The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 12 (3): 1-14
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The Rules in Children's Museums
This article describes and analyzes signage in children's museums, including how their wording, content, salience, and number are informed by culturally specific assumptions about appropriate ways to communicate with children. The findings show that most museum signage consists of directives that can be split into four categories: rule directives, parenting directives, informational directives, and developmental directives. Because the value that museums place on self-directed exploration makes explicit rules about behavioral expectations seem discordant, rule statements are highly indirect or even absent. The other three types of directives are more direct and explicit because they are more consonant with the assumptions and principles underlying children's museums' designs and programming. I propose that this state of affairs can be a source of confusion and anxiety for parents who want their children to behave well but may not be familiar with what this means in the museum context. I argue that because the assumptions about appropriate ways to communicate with children are culturally specific and because strategies for making directives more polite are language-specific, the indirect wording of rule statements may result in a lack of clarity about appropriate behavior. This could make visiting children's museums uncomfortable for demographic groups who already tend to be underrepresented among visitors, particularly racial and linguistic minorities, single parents, families with several children, and families of lower socioeconomic or educational backgrounds. I suggest ways to improve signage in order to clarify expectations without undermining the principle that museums should be fun and inclusive spaces. This research is based on in-person visits to nine children's museums and the analysis of online materials from five others.
Credit: International Journal of the Inclusive Museum. 2018, Vol. 11 Issue 1, p 13-25.
