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.

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.

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to provide a description and theoretical rationale for a methodological innovation used to explore relationships visitors form with a single museum over time; and second, to examine and critique the research outcomes in light of this approach. Design/methodology/approach -To probe individual relationships with a museum, in this narrative inquiry, a unique method of data generation was developed -a "guided tour" of the museum. The guided tour, led by participants, provided a context and purpose for rich conversations between researcher and participant and deepened the relational quality of the research. Findings -The quality of the researcher-participant relationship played a critical role in shaping understandings, gained through the research process, about the phenomenon under investigation and self. Research limitations/implications -Findings from the study document that novel insights emerge when opportunities to strengthen the researcher-participant relationship are built into the research design. Originality/value -This paper illustrates the value of employing strategies that deepen the relational quality in narrative research.

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