Engagement In Museums Research Articles

Understanding the Multilingualism and Communication of Museum Visitors who are d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing

The current conversation of multilingual engagement in museums often focuses on people who use spoken languages. Deafness, and visitors who use signed communication, such as American Sign Language (ASL), is instead placed in the realm of disability engagement. Drawing on relevant literature and contextualized by data gathered through recent visitor research at the Museum of Science, Boston, this article defines how people who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing are a diverse audience with a range of language and communication needs, argues that museums currently support only a subset of this audience, and lays out potential methods for better supporting the needs of all visitors who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing. Three categories of d/Deaf or hard of hearing visitor groups are described, including “Spoken-Focused,” “Simultaneous Language,” and “ASL-Focused.” Whereas written resources support “Spoken-Focused” groups and sign language resources support “ASL-Focused” groups, multilingual groups in which visitors use both ASL and English require further support. In order for museums to better prepare for and engage visitors who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing, museums should not conflate hearing loss with ASL use and understand that there is a wide range of multilingual and communication needs within this diverse audience.

Participatory and Transformative Engagement in Libraries and Museums: Exploring and Expanding the Salzburg Curriculum

Participatory and Transformative Engagement in Libraries and Museums: Exploring and Expanding the Salzburg Curriculum

Maintaining Aboriginal engagement in Australian museums: two models of inclusion

Recent decades have seen efforts by museums to become more inclusive and to open up space for the sharing of different voices and different perspectives. Such efforts have been driven by broader social and political changes in support of these inclusive practices. In Australia, where the political context has shifted away from policies of Aboriginal self-determination, a potential gap has opened between museum and government priorities with regard to Aboriginal engagement, putting efforts toward inclusion at risk. It is therefore vital to consider how museums have enacted practices of inclusion and to consider their vulnerabilities to changing social and political contexts. To illustrate such consequences, this paper considers Aboriginal inclusion within two Australian state museums, the Australian Museum and Museum Victoria, and argues that inclusionary practices need to enter institutional structures in order to have sustained meaning despite broader political change.

Object relations in the museum: a psychosocial perspective

This article theorises museum engagement from a psychosocial perspective. With the aid of selected concepts from object relations theory, it explains how the museum visitor can establish a personal relation to museum objects, making use of them as an ‘aesthetic third’ to symbolise experience. Since such objects are at the same time cultural resources, interacting with them helps the individual to feel part of a shared culture. The article elaborates an example drawn from a research project that aimed to make museum collections available to people with physical and mental health problems. It draws on the work of the British psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to explain the salience of the concepts of object use, potential space, containment and reverie within a museum context. It also refers to the work of the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on how objects can become evocative for individuals both by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and by the way they are used to express personal idiom.

Subjective experiences of an art museum engagement activity for persons with early-stage Alzheimer's disease and their family caregivers.

To describe the subjective experiences of older adults with early-stage Alzheimer's disease or related cognitive disorders (ADRDs) and their family caregivers who participated in an art museum engagement activity. Four focus groups were conducted with 10 persons with ADRD and 10 family caregivers following the completion of a 1-time, 3-hour engagement activity. Participants also completed a brief satisfaction survey, and associations were examined using nonparametric statistics. Three key themes were identified: cognitive stimulation, social connections, and self-esteem. In addition, we identified programmatic issues such as activity-specific concerns and program logistics that could help improve future art program offerings. Past experience with art and perceived social cohesion were correlated with participants' overall satisfaction with the program. Efforts aimed at improving the quality of life of those with Alzheimer's disease and their family caregivers should consider the potential role of art museums.

Participatory heritage innovation: designing dialogic sites of engagement

Innovations in digital cultural communication for museums challenge us to develop appropriate methods for participation in curatorial processes and to rethink the role of audiences inside exhibitions. The article explores the potentials of scaffolding sites of dialogue and creative engagement through the design process and final exhibition. It draws upon experiences from an interactive exhibition project, Digital Natives, in which we combined principles from Participatory Design with issues of contemporary digital culture to explore possibilities for creating heritage innovation. We suggest three critical stages of the dialogic design process in which engagement between stakeholders, researchers, and audiences can be central to shaping and transforming future conceptions of digital cultural heritage, through process and final exhibition. In this way, we argue that a participatory design anthropological approach to digital culture can expand opportunities for heritage innovation through technological means of engagement in museums.

Towards children's creative museum engagement and collaborative sense-making

In this article, we elucidate a socio-culturally framed approach to supporting children's creative museum engagement. Specifically, we focus on social activities and socio-cultural resources that can act as boundary-permeating objects in mediating children's creative engagement and collaborative sense-making regarding cultural content within, across and beyond the spatio-material context of the museum. We contend that designing and organising children's creative engagement and collaborative sense-making in ways that cultivate boundary-crossing broadens opportunities for engagement and leverages children's creative potential and expansive learning. We build our argument by starting with a theoretical introduction to the design principles that constitute the Kids, Museums, and Technology Programme. We will illuminate the design principles of the programme with empirical examples and consider how the design principles and their situated construction can help us re-imagine museum exhibitions as hybrid, boundary-permeating spaces that afford novel transformative interactions, as well as new roles and identities for both children and museums.

The Hands-on Model of the Internet: Engaging Diverse Groups of Visitors

Based on ethnographic field research at the Miraikan National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, this article uses the Hands-on Model of the Internet in the Future, Innovation, and Society section of the museum as a case study in the various issues related to effective public engagement in science museums. Museum exhibit design and implementation is critically assessed in terms of the role of educators and volunteers, the balance of educational and entertainment properties, and how exhibits and their accompanying explanatory material must cater to audiences of mixed age and scientific experience. It will be argued that the hands-on model has endured over the past ten years due to its successful negotiation of these elements.

The Hands-on Model of the Internet: Engaging Diverse Groups of Visitors

Based on ethnographic field research at the Miraikan National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, this article uses the Hands-on Model of the Internet in the Future, Innovation, and Society section of the museum as a case study in the various issues related to effective public engagement in science museums. Museum exhibit design and implementation is critically assessed in terms of the role of educators and volunteers, the balance of educational and entertainment properties, and how exhibits and their accompanying explanatory material must cater to audiences of mixed age and scientific experience. It will be argued that the hands-on model has endured over the past ten years due to its successful negotiation of these elements.

Augmenting the agora: Media and civic engagement in museums

Mirroring digital culture developments in society at large, museums are increasingly incorporating social media platforms and formats into their communication practices. More than merely providing additional channels of communication, this development is invested with an understanding of social media as integral to the ongoing democratisation of the museum. The confluences of new media affordances with New Museology objectives along with the underpinning of the aforementioned understanding is discussed in this article. The article will argue that development in this area is not only driven by solid results and public demand but also by collective assumptions and associations as well as by a political need for institutions to justify their relevance in society. In conclusion, the article suggests that, while the integration of social media communication may serve to market the museum as inclusive, it may also simply pay lip service to genuine civic engagement and democratic exchanges with the public.

Dialogue and carnival: understanding visitors' engagement in design museums

As the role of museums has shifted from collection-driven institutions to experience-centred environments, researchers in museology have felt a growing need to understand how visitors experience and engage in exhibitions. Defining design museums as sites of meaning-making through diverse interactions and co-creative experiences, we examine dialogue as a means of encouraging visitors' active participation and creative engagement in design exhibitions. This article presents a theoretical framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and carnival theory. Four kinds of dialogic engagement are identified to illustrate different ways of engagement and co-creation in design museums through the analysis of example exhibitions.

Teenagers' Multisensory Routes for Learning in the Museum

ABSTRACTIn this article I draw on a study of sensory aspects of teenagers' use of digital media, how these sensory aspects are incorporated in emerging learning strategies, and the implications of this for the same teenagers' engagement in museums. My focus is on how an ethnographic approach that attends to the senses may enable a critical review of prevailing pedagogical ideas in museums. Recent developments in museum education have led to large investments in state-of-the-art technology to produce interactive, multisensory exhibits. However, the question of how teenagers respond to these campaigns remains rather under-researched. This article shows how habitual use of digital media in teenage everyday practice incorporates learning to appropriate other people's experiences and ideas through a configuration of vision, touch, motion, and imagination, thereby enhancing non-representational learning qualities such as affect and sensation. The implications of this sensory approach open up routes to differentiate pedagogical settings in museums that on a superficial level apply the same educational technologies, but since they are based in different sensorial belief systems, different conditions for learning unfold in their use. In developing this analysis I argue that through ethnographic attention to the senses we might advance theories of learning within museum education.

‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums

Public engagement has become a central theme in the mission statements of many cultural institutions, and in scholarly research into museums and heritage. Engagement has emerged as the go-to-it-word for generating, improving or repairing relations between museums and society at large. But engagement is frequently an unexamined term that might embed assumptions and ignore power relationships. This article describes and examines the implications of conflicting and misleading uses of ‘engagement’ in relation to institutional dealings with contested questions about culture and heritage. It considers the development of an exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto in 2009 within the new institutional goal to ‘Engage the World’. The chapter analyses the motivations, processes and decisions deployed by management and staff to ‘Engage the World’, and the degree to which the museum was able to re-think its strategies of public engagement, especially in relation to subjects, issues and publics that were more controversial in nature.

Audience Research for Qatar Museums

Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) is developing a variety of different museums. It is essential that QMA understands the needs and expectations of potential audiences. As part of this process, during 2011, a significant ongoing research project investigating potential family audiences for museums in Qatar was undertaken. The objectives fall into two categories: understanding the demographics of potential family audiences and their perceptions of museums and secondly understanding current family usage of museums in Qatar and neighboring countries. It focused upon developing an understanding of the needs of families during leisure time, and their motivations for family activities. Perceptions of museums as family destinations were sought and actual behavior in museums recorded. The research was conducted over two phases from winter 2010 to summer 2011, and consisted of a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. * Questionnaires were sent to all eligible schools in Qatar and forwarded to every pupil's family. Focus groups explored motivations for and expectations of, family engagement with museums. * Motivations and expectations were further tested through observation of family visits to museums and comparable venues. * In depth discussions with family groups. Results have confirmed a significant interest in museum visitation. Families are motivated by a variety of factors, which can be divided into social, intellectual and emotional categories. The majority (72%) of families are motivated by social factors (e.g. the desire to spend enjoyable time with family). This percentage is significantly higher than is normally exhibited in Europe and America, suggesting a cultural difference. Observations confirmed this social motivation, but highlighted a lack of familiarity with museums as venues for interaction. Challenges faced by family visitors were highlighted, including orientation, exhibit usage and how best to support children's learning. The research indicated a potential family audience for museums in Qatar, and built an understanding of the motivating factors for visits, illustrating a marked difference from other countries. It has also shown several potential barriers to family engagement in museums which must be addressed for museums to successfully appeal to this key audience.

Ignite the Power of Art: Advancing Visitor Engagement in Museums

Ignite the Power of Art: Advancing Visitor Engagement in Museums

Embedding civil engagement in museums

Initiatives over the last decade on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond have sought to re-position museums at the heart of their communities as agents for civil engagement. This paper explores the principles involved in making the role possible, using the example of urban history museums. It argues that this will take time, commitment and careful planning, and will impact on every aspect of the museum's activities. It is an essential task, however, reflecting the direction museums should be taking in society in the twenty-first century, but will only be achieved if there is a change of culture across the profession.

Between the Lines of Engagement in Museums: Indiana University and The Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Abstract The concept of engagement across the Learning Sciences and in museums draws from research on visitor interests, motivations, and behaviors. Such involvement by museum visitors reveals institutional and field expectations about museum efficacy and demonstrated impact. However, engagement is a concept with different uses and interpretations across institutions and fields. If we are going to talk about visitor engagement in museums specifically, it is incumbent on museum educators to understand and address the values that are associated with this idea. What does engagement look like and sound like in a museum's exhibitions, programs, and visitor studies? In this paper we present critical questions to frame a discussion on the assumptions, values and cautions that come with the concept of engagement in a museum setting. We present practical examples from research in a children's museum and discuss the implications of using engagement concepts in museum work. We argue that the ways in which museum sta...

Between the Lines of Engagement in Museums

The concept of engagement across the Learning Sciences and in museums draws from research on visitor interests, motivations, and behaviors. Such involvement by museum visitors reveals institutional and field expectations about museum efficacy and demonstrated impact. However, engagement is a concept with different uses and interpretations across institutions and fields. If we are going to talk about visitor engagement in museums specifically, it is incumbent on museum educators to understand and address the values that are associated with this idea. What does engagement look like and sound like in a museum's exhibitions, programs, and visitor studies? In this paper we present critical questions to frame a discussion on the assumptions, values and cautions that come with the concept of engagement in a museum setting. We present practical examples from research in a children's museum and discuss the implications of using engagement concepts in museum work. We argue that the ways in which museum staff observe and measure visitor behaviors are guided by assumptions and values, institutional goals and values, and the visitor's assumptions and values. Understanding Learning Sciences research can aid in the articulation of what visitor engagement looks like for an institution.

Forureningen på museum. Museernes arbejde med miljøspørgsmål i Danmark og nabolande

Public understanding of environmental issues is critical for the active positions we need to take as individuals and societies for transforming unsustainable to green economic activities. Museums have the potential to contribute significantly to this by communicating scientific knowledge on environmental issues. The study examines the scale and character of environmental exhibitions and collections in Denmark and surrounding countries. The study finds that the scale far from exhausts the potential. Exhibitions predominantly focus on natural science dimensions with limited coverage of the social science aspects of environmental problems and their solutions. Interdisciplinary museum activities including social science aspects on institutions and values are recommended. Moreover, it is argued that the emotions and the scientific and political controversies involved in environmental issues should not be seen as obstacles to museum engagement in the environmental field, but rather as important ingredients in creating valuable museum experiences.