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

Abstract

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.

Integrating socio‐cultural contexts and location‐based systems for ubiquitous language learning in museums: A state of the art review of 2009–2014

“…To be specific, in the years 2009-2011, students tended to rely heavily on system guidance, the related activities focused on individual learning, and there was less social interaction in real-life and a reduced level of playfulness. More recently, the use of ubiquitous systems combining museums and language learning have resulted in better social closeness and group work when users use mobile apps in socio-cultural contexts (Burston et al, 2014;Charitonos et al, 2012;Chiou et al, 2010;Kumpulainen et al, 2014;Shang et al, 2011;Smørdal et al, 2014;Turan & Keser, 2014;Zurita et al, 2014). In other words, students have changed from being passive receivers to active learners.…”

“…Definition of key terms related to the present issue Museums : places that provide interactive and audience‐oriented learning contexts, with the focal materials ranging from art, language, science, history to cross‐cultural settings (Kumpulainen et al , ; Smørdal et al , ). A socio‐cultural context : Liu et al () explained a “context” as the learning environment existing between a mobile‐learning application and learners. In addition to a ubiquitous environment, a “socializing context” (p. 8) is often emphasized in language learning museums.…”

“…Conversely, scholars have indicated that knowledge will become more actively constructed and exchanged through socio-cultural interactions related to specific social settings and to the learners involved (Kumpulainen, Karttunen, Juurola & Mikola, 2014, citing Vygotsky, 1978. Among various learning environments, museums are a particular environment in which experiments can be done with social interaction systems to guide mobile users and advance their learning (Shang, Yu, Gu, Xu & Zhu, 2011).…”

“…For example, Kumpulainen et al (2014) reported that museums are a suitable context to positively influence students' socio-cultural knowledge. Smørdal, Stuedahl and Sem (2014) also indicated that social awareness between learners and cultural exhibits can be enhanced when they highly engage in interactive systems in museums.…”

Researching young children’s engagement and learning in makerspaces

“…The makerspace context of Niklas's activity also implies a space for creative and playful activity in which something new and personally meaningful can be created by the participants with the help of available artefacts and tools (Honey and Kanter, 2013;Kumpulainen, Karttunen, Juurola and Mikkola, 2014). Ideally, makerspaces prescribe a model of learningby-doing in which children and older people too can work on creative design projects that are personally and/or collectively meaningful.…”