Working at Play: Informal Science Education on Museum Playgrounds

Abstract This article discusses the importance of play in informal science education and the growth of science playgrounds as an international trend among museums to create safe, challenging outdoor environments that use play to explore the foundations of science. Play is characterized by intrinsic motivation, active engagement, attention to means rather than ends, non‐literal behavior, and freedom from external rules, a means for acquiring information about and experiencing the environment. Successful exhibitions for children and families share these qualities and outdoor exhibitions encourage a degree of exploration and full‐body experience often not possible nor appropriate inside a museum. Two case studies are provided as evidence of the importance of play in the interpretation and design of science playgrounds. The first, Science Playground at the New York Hall of Science (opened 1997), uses an interpretive strategy in which evaluation and remediation are continually incorporated into the educational process. Experimental workshops were conducted to observe children's intuitive uses of the physics‐based exhibits, uninhibited by any authoritative explanations. From this evaluation, the institution elected not to produce interpretive signage at each unit, but rather to develop a guide for visitors and one for educators that outline the exhibition's basic physics principles and encourage visitors to experiment and make connection to their own experiences. The second case study, Exploration Park at Prisma, Zona Exploratoria de Puerto Rico in San Juan (opening 2002), outlines ten design criteria used to develop the playground. These include bringing together a diverse team to respond to institutional and audience needs, ages, interests, and cultural backgrounds; creating a specific sense of place, making use of the local environment and taking advantage of natural elements including water, soil, wind, and sun. Practical considerations of safety, materials, and prototyping are also addressed. The article concludes with the idea of play as essential not only in child development, but also in development of successful outdoor science exhibitions.     

A Narrative History Museum

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) opened in April 1993 in Washington, DC, to wide critical and popular acclaim. It is a narrative rather than a collection-based museum in that its displays are based on facts rather than things. The facts of the Holocaust are presented objectively. At the same time, the museum employs design elements that involve visitors in the narrative and enable them to understand it and the events' universal implications.     

A History of Ways of Seeing the Land: Environmental History at the National Museum of Australia

One of the distinctive features of the National Museum of Australia is the prominent role of environmental history in the Museum's programs and in its organizational structure. Environmental history is a field that operates best at the boundaries of science and the humanities, where the natural sciences and social history meet. The National Museum is one of few museums that facilitate this, drawing historians, geographers, archaeologists, earth scientists, and biologists into program development as members of the one curatorial and design team. This article discusses the advantages of environmental history as a strategic focus for the Museum, and looks at one of its major exhibitions.     

Media in the Museum: A Personal History

Abstract In the past 50 years, museums have adapted various media for use in museum exhibitions. In the past 15 years, both the formats and the applications have changed dramatically, altering the relationships between museums and visitors, and between visitors and collections. Taking on the challenge of the newest media allows museums to experiment and to reinvigorate their interpretive programs.     

Professional minutia and their consequences: provenance, context, original identification, and anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois

Historical settings structure how archivists and museum staff understand their work and how they apply relevant professional principles including the three core principles of provenance, context, and original identification. Their professional practices shape how the public understands or reads “original” artifacts and records. In helping to define what originals (artifacts and documents) are at a particular point in time, archivists and museum staff reinforce, support, or contradict theoretical paradigms, discourses, and social narratives on ethnicity, empire/internal colonialism, class, and gender among others. The article discusses two exemplary cases from the museum world that illustrate how the application of the three core principles is influenced by historical conditions and theoretical concepts and how these contingent applications influence what originals come to signify. In the first example, the theoretical concept of social evolution and the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago informed the founding, collecting, describing, and displaying of American Indian objects at the Field Museum of Natural History in 1894. Reflecting this, provenance, context, and original identifications were defined to mean different things for Euro-American versus American Indian objects and records, and Native Americans and others challenged these definitions and practices at the time. In the second example, the 1929–1933 making and displaying of the Hall of Races, a specific race anthropological understanding of race created unambiguous race anthropological provenance, context and original titles (identifications) for both the exhibit and individual race sculptures. By altering information concerning the three principles over the next 60 years, the Field Museum consciously destroyed the integrity of the originals and their meanings. The exhibit had become a political liability and the museum wanted to erase any trace of the race anthropological roots of the project and its sculptures. The article ends by asserting the contingency and importance of the three core principles for archivists and museum staff regardless of the format of the material involved and adds a few related observations for our contemporary hybrid, that means physical and digital, work world.     

Displaying Dinosaurs at The Natural History Museum,London

Dinosaur reconstructions have been exhibited in public for over a hundred years. During that time, scientific and public understanding of these extinct animals has changed considerably. Changes in perception have influenced and been influenced by the three-dimensional reconstructions mounted in museums and galleries, and these in turn have been influenced by the availability and use of mounting materials and techniques. The dinosaur exhibition in The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London contains examples of original, altered, and new dinosaur reconstructions that are described here—two, Gallimimus and Massospondylus, in detail. The final form of any reconstructed dinosaur is often influenced by factors beyond the control of the conservation, preparation, and mounting workers involved.     

Competing Agendas: Young Children's Museum Field Trips

Abstract Visitors to museum settings have agendas that encompass a wide variety of missions. Agendas are known to directly influence visitor behavior and learning. Numerous agendas are at play during a visit to a museum. We suggest that in a museum‐based learning experience, children's agendas are often overlooked, and are at times in competition with the accompanying adult's agendas. This paper describes and qualitatively analyzes three episodes of competing agendas that occurred on young children's field trips to museums in Brisbane, Australia. The aim is to elucidate the kinds of tensions over agendas that can arise in the experience of young museum‐goers. Additionally, we hope to alert museum practitioners to the importance of considering children's agendas, with the aim of improving their museum experience. Suggestions are also made for ways in which educators can address children's agendas during museum visits in order to maximize learning outcomes.     

The Topical Museum of Natural History: A Walking Paper

Abstract As museums enter a new century, they are challenged to demonstrate their relevance to society. Increasingly, institutions have recognized that in order to thrive, they must ensure that mission‐related activities—exhibits and programs, collections and research—are meaningful to the public they rely on for support. Numerous deeply‐ingrained habits of practice and of thought have prevented object‐based exhibits from responding effectively to visitor interests. For museums to be truly relevant to their audiences, this paper argues for a fundamental shift in how they think about and organize exhibits. Exhibits need to become more topical and issue‐oriented, rather than generalized and systematic. Furthermore, a successful topical exhibit program needs to operate on two separate, yet integrated, levels: long‐term exhibits providing context on broadly relevant, interdisciplinary themes shorter‐term exhibits on specific, current issues embedded within the longterm exhibits, linking that broad content to visitors' lives Beyond the crucial role of increasing the museum's relevance to its audience, such an exhibits program would have numerous ancillary benefits, including more evenly distributed costs, greater creativity, lessened job burnout, and new funding opportunities. Though specifically addressing natural history museums, aspects of this paper should be relevant to museums of all kinds.     

博物馆儿童研究中“道”与“器”的思考——来自《儿童博物馆建设运营之道》一书中的启示

美国儿童博物馆协会编著的论文集《儿童博物馆建设运营之道》,既是一部启发思路的成果汇编,又堪称是一本指导实践的实用手册。该书不仅专注于显性意义上形而下的器,还重视隐性意义上形而上的道。本文对该论文集中各位学者的真知灼见和核心观点进行归纳和述评,并在此基础上反思该书在当代博物馆儿童研究中的地位和价值。同时主张在面对与日俱增的儿童现象及材料时,不应仅止步于追求“求实”“致用”的经验,还要探寻隐匿于经验之中的本质及其关联,以“求真”实现“道器并重”。     

论博物馆展览各级传播目的的设定及执行

本文针对我国各类博物馆展览普遍存在的传播目的不明确、不按传播目的进行策划设计的问题,从理论与实践两个方面就如何准确设定和忠实执行展览传播目的进行了论述,提出:要准确设定展览的总传播目的及认知目标、情感目标和体验目标,要以传播目的为导向规划组织展示内容,要科学地处理好展览各级传播目的的逻辑关系,要严格按照传播目的设计展品展项。     

Children's Museum Experiences: Identifying Powerful Mediators of Learning

This article reports on a study of young children and the nature of their learning through museum experiences. Environments such as museums are physical and social spaces where visitors encounter objects and ideas which they interpret through their own experiences, customs, beliefs, and values. The study was conducted in four different museum environments: a natural and social history museum, an art gallery, a science center, and a hybrid art/social history museum. The subjects were four‐ to seven‐year old children. At the conclusion of a ten‐week, multi‐visit museum program, interviews were conducted with children to probe the saliency of their experiences and the ways in which they came to understand the museums they visited. Emergent from this study, we address several findings that indicate that museum‐based exhibits and programmatic experiences embedded in the common and familiar socio‐cultural context of the child's world, such as play and story, provide greater impact and meaning than do museum exhibits and experiences that are decontexualized in nature.