Museums and Health: A Case Study of Research and Practice at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article will discuss how museums may serve as community anchors by catalyzing and helping to sustain significant behavioral and attitudinal changes among the public. When museums integrate research, deep community roots and trust, and a museum and arts-based pedagogy, they are uniquely positioned to effect change. The article will review a long-term project of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (CMOM), the statistical evidence of behavior change and documentation of why the change took place. The author will review the process by which CMOM’s collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created, tested and published the nation’s first early childhood obesity prevention curriculum, a new exhibition, training model and website. For the NIH (and, subsequently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Department of Agriculture), the museum’s pedagogical approach and extended personal interactions with low-income families in New York City and New Orleans revealed the importance of informal feedback loops to complement formal research.