Abstract
Museum exhibitions are literacy rich environments. Visitors may engage with a range of texts including texts that constitute the exhibition objects themselves, those that convey information about the objects and those that instruct visitors about how the visitors are expected by the museum to navigate through the exhibition. The ways in which visitors engage with these diverse texts are important defining factors of the visitors’ museum experience.For museums, understanding how texts in their exhibitions are influencing the museum experience, and the possibility of a museum experience for the broad public community is important in the fulfilment of their public mission as cultural and education institutions. In this paper, we adopt a view of literacy as a social practice, the perspective of New Literacy Studies (NLS), that offers a fruitful way for museums to consider the interactions between exhibition texts and their audiences. Such considerations, we argue, can inform museums’ approaches to broadening their visitor demographics to more strongly fulfill their public mission. We show that the goals of NLS resonate with some of the goals of the New Museology movement in museum studies, a movement that aims to democratize what museums represent and how. From NLS, we employ the concept of a literacy event to describe an exhibition visit through a literacy lens, and the concept of a literacy mediator to examine the literacy event not exclusively as an individual event, but a collectively produced event. The paper draws on data on how the literacy events of two groups of ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups were mediated in an exhibition, and show how they reveal the range of different literacies that visitors need to negotiate in a museum exhibition.
Highlights
We will – Be an 'open' Museum – open to rich engagement, to new conversations about the collection and transparent in how we work and make decisions Offer visitors diverse ways to interact with the museum Present programs and exhibitions that reflect the spirit of the times and explore new ways to engage with audiences that may challenge, involve experimentation or generate controversy Support new kinds of learning and knowledge creation inside and outside the Museum Develop a comprehensive customer service ethos throughout the Museum Promote an internal culture of dialogue, experimentation, transparency and individual accountabilityThe above ‘values’ statement from a public museum in Sydney, Australia is not atypical of that which can be found on websites of other public museums
For the purposes of this paper, we use the term ‘traditional’ visitor groups to refer to those groups of visitors who are strongly represented in the visitor demographics, and ‘nontraditional’ visitor groups to refer to those groups who are underrepresented, recognising that such characterisations are not unproblematic
We show how the democratic goals of New Museology resonate with similar goals of the perspective on literacy that we take in this paper, namely New Literacy Studies (NLS)
Summary
Be an 'open' Museum – open to rich engagement, to new conversations about the collection and transparent in how we work and make decisions. The adult literacy and numeracy practitioners attending her session asked what type of learning resources the museum provided for adult numeracy and literacy learners – a question that triggered our thinking and led to the current study to explore how museums as cultural institutions understand how (or if) museums consider literacy as a factor in exhibition design for engaging visitors, ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups. The museum had recently opened an exhibition targeting families with young children (aged two to five years) which presented the story of a popular internationally known children’s entertainment group, the Whirly Gigs (pseudonym) This exhibition was chosen as the site for this study because of the long exhibition duration and the museum’s interest in expanding their family audience and fulfilling their values statement, in relation to expanding the diversity of their audience base. There were six sets of data, collected using different methods
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