Leave only footprints: how children communicate a sense of ownership and belonging in an art gallery

ABSTRACT

Despite rapid growth in young children visiting museums, and an increasing acknowledgement that these visits are important to children’s development as cultural citizens [Mudiappa and Kluczniok 2015. “Visits to Cultural Learning Places in the Early Childhood.” European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 23 (2): 200–212] there is still relatively little published research on children’s encounters with them [Hackett, Holmes, and Macrae 2020. Working with Young Children in Museums: Weaving Theory and Practice. London: Routledge]. Our practitioner-led ‘playgroup-in-residence’ explored how young children made sense of the museum in dialogue with the objects, spaces, and people within it. Working within an interpretivist framework, we collectedrich multimodal data and used grounded theory to identify significant patterns in children’s responses. One important theme was the way in which children made marks and left traces to both explore and communicate their emerging sense of belonging within the museum. Our findings have implications for understanding how young children enter into dialogue with environments outside the home. This work is important as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, during which children have spent long periods at home. It is vital that we support them to forge relationships with places and spaces within the wider community.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum learning
• belonging
• mark making
• multimodal communication
• cultural citizenship
• art education

Acknowledgements

The researchers would like to thank Dr David Whitebread, Dr Ros McLellan, Dr Jo Vine, Gemma Spence, Susan Lister & Margaret Winchcomb for their expertise and guidance as part of our Project Advisory Group. We also thank the Fitzwilliam Museum, especially Education Assistants Alison Ayres and Nathan Huxtable and Head of Learning Miranda Stearn, and the staff, children and families of Playlanders playgroup for their support and participation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research project was funded by the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant Scheme (2019–2020).