Reflections on “Symposium on Family Learning, Inclusion and the value of play in Museums”
This symposium was held 5–6 Dec 2019 at the Canadian Museum of History/Musée Canadien de L’Histoire (CMH) in Ottawa-Gatineau, Canada. Thanks to Maureen Ward and the Symposium team for inviting me to speak.
A chilly -3 degrees C outside, but snug and acoustically perfect inside the theatre, a few hundred professionals gathered to hear from international experts around themes of relevance to the re-development of the museum’s famous Children’s Museum.
To get my bit out of the way — I spoke about the redevelopment of the Pauline Gandel Children’s Gallery at Melbourne Museum. I talked about how we aligned expertise, communities of interest and talented professionals through a prototype-driven design process to make spaces enabling play for families with children aged 0–5. Here it is: What Makes a Playful Exhibition Experience?
The key themes i took away were:
- the rapid development of our understandings of childhood and play
- international asymmetry in the quality of museology and related practices
- increasing homogeneity of design practice internationally
- the difficulty and value of genuinely centring children in the development of provision
Dr Peter Gray
First keynote was Dr Peter Gray, child psychologist. Here’s his blog. Dr Gray spoke eloquently, passionately and knowledgeably about the centrality of play to the growth of the human, and of his fear in the decline of free play. He said that “Children are more deprived of play now than in any time in human history” and that this was behind (consistently, rigorously measured) rise in anxiety and the decline of creativity. This was the most intriguing to me — evidence of the code-switching children away from complexity when around adults.
This thread has all the quotes I could capture! He spoke about the essential purposelessness of play. It is intrinsic, its value is its triviality. Any whiff of authority directing play will kill it. He spoke of children learning cooperation through play — i must play well, or the other person will simply stop playing and i will be left alone. So i must be careful not to ‘win’; because a loser won’t play. This is why play is not sport, and sport is not play.
He also said that in decades of studying, he has never seen an older child bully a younger child when adults are absent. This is a fear adults have, and it is rooted in a need to control the child — an early foreshadowing of childism, raised by Dr Jason Nolen on day 2.
Patrice Aubertin, National Circus School, Quebec
This is the school created in the early ’80s to teach circus skills, which three years after formation birthed the Cirque de Soleil. Today, there is a rich program of academic research as well. Mr Aubertin brought a rounded outsider perspective to the symposium: it was really useful to have highlighted the importance of physical play, of embodied learning. So often absent from children’s life, Mr Aubertin made a convincing case for the value of circus skills inside curricula and all informal learning spaces.
I was struck by his descriptions of cohort-based activities, in which multiple circus skills are occurring simultaneously, yet the jugglers never hurt the acrobats, nor vice versa. The group develop their sensory and physical awareness by working so close to each other
One slide in particular resonated with me.
He spoke to the ways that girls’ freedom to move is socially constrained and that this persists in traditional physical education (school sports). Their studies show that circus skills (instead of sport) dramatically reduce the gap between boys and girls in early high school.
The first two speakers both critiqued the socially constructed equivalence between ‘sport’ and ‘play’ — something i have noted is even stronger in Australia compared to my native UK.
Is the museum field on the same field?
This slide surprised me, here’s my instant reaction:
I found this a consistent theme throughout the conference. It reminded me that Museum practice is uneven around the world, and that some countries and museums are more advanced than others in an aspect of the field. There are outliers for sure. But it seems to me that North America and continental Europe are far behind Scandinavia, UK and Australia when it comes to human-centred design / audience-centred thinking, whatever phrase you like to use. Now, it doesn’t matter whether people arrive early or late to a party, what’s important is that everyone arrives in the end. I’m not singling out anyone for critique here, the journey towards better is never-ending. But it is strange to me that so much effort across such a long period of time by academics, ICOM and a relatively mobile international workforce has not made ‘good practice’ a little more even across the globe. For what it’s worth, I think North America has Australia beat for narrative storytelling and is neck and neck on visitor research (more on that later).
The Pauline Gandel Children’s Gallery did something radical for Australian Museum practice, in beginning with a conceptual frame that did not include objects or curatorial content. The CMH has decided from the start to include objects. There feels to me a disjunct here between the research on play (centre the child) and the insertion of artefacts (an adult concern). I return again and again to this, but it is a separate line of thinking, for another post.
North America leads: inclusion and applied audience research
Inclusion is really hard to get right, and the Australian museum sector often fails to meet the bare minimum physical requirements encoded in building regulations. It is a constant surprise to me that Australian practice is so far behind even the UK: I was trained in the social model of disability in 2009.
Laurent Carrier of Toboggan neatly illustrated the diversity of needs within a population of visitors by simply referring to heights. Kerry McMaster of the Canadian Museum of History and occupational therapist Kara Lee shared some of their thinking around inclusivity for the renewal of the Children’s Museum.
The image says it all. New parents, particularly mothers, are fatigued, their bodies bear an additional burden of recovery from childbirth. reading this very literally, an adult may be less competent than a child. And their thinking on neurodiversity was very impressive, though i cannot say i developed a sophisticated understanding through my jet-lagged state!
Applying this to gallery redevelopment is the most sophisticated approach to neurodiversity that i have ever seen. It makes me even more excited to see the end result when they open the new Children’s Museum in a few years’ time.
Susan Foutz, Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
This shone out as a gold standard application of audience research to object presentation:
This is an incredible tool. Derived from researching audience responses to objects over many years and many exhibitions, this provides both an evaluative framework and a means to have a conversation in a project team about object inclusion. Ms Foutz cited how they’d used it to adapt interpretation if the object was non-negotiable (such as a touring show), and also as a means to debate which objects precisely should be included or excluded. I can see how it could be applied across narrative development. As with all these models, it matters less to debate its perfection or suitability than it matters to actually use a model rigorously rather than run at object presentation on the basis of what curatorial staff think and feel. Apply this, or Falk and Dierkins’s modalities, whatever. But this is so simple, so elegant… I just love it.
Childism — Dr Jason Nolan
I can’t describe his impact on me. So focused, so clear in his thinking and application of his principles in his lab. He works to centre the disabled child, not in designing something for them, but in enabling them to design and make something that fits their needs. He showed a picture — i’m not sharing it — of a child who made their own chair that worked perfectly for their specific immobility of lower torso and legs.
He was the least paternalistic of anyone i have ever met with respect to moving aside and yielding authority and autonomy to children.
Homogenisation of design
I think this is the rise of insta and pinterest, but i was interested in how similar many of the designs of children’s spaces of the last five years actually looked. For a field working so hard to centre the specific needs of the child, the material, shape and colour palette seems remarkably similar. Perhaps it was always thus — the plastic primary colours of the late 1980s science centres were all cut from identical cloth — but it really stood out. Perhaps it matters less with Children’s spaces; after all, they are not touristic drivers in the same way that permanent exhibitions or ‘blockbuster’ shows are, and so do not need to be distinctively different from anything else. But it surprised me, that’s all.
Conclusion
There’s great work going on around the world, and the symposium gave an excellent snapshot if it. The emergent neuroscience and psychological research, developing social models of practice and the continuation of cross-disciplinary thinking present a bright future for audience-centred museum development!
Thanks again to Maureen Ward and the Canadian Museum of History for inviting me to share Museums Victoria’s work in the Pauline Gandel Children’s Gallery and to learn and reflect with so many great thinkers, designers, researchers, curators and educators.
