Traces of engagement: narrative-making practices with smartphones on a museum field trip

Abstract

In this paper, we explore museum visitor learning through the examination of the engagement in narrative-making practices of school children while visiting a natural history museum. Two groups of children are given worksheets and encouraged to use their own mobile technologies to document their visits in relation to the subject of evolutionary mechanisms. Their engagement is occasioned through this worksheet and we show how they negotiate the interpretation of the task and then go on to complete it in quite different ways. We examine, in turn, how the students structure their visits with walking paths through the museum exhibitions, and how they structure the narratives they produce to complete the tasks by using the tools at hand and incorporating different parts of the exhibits.

Keywords:

• museum
• mobile
• learning
• narrative
• paths
• engagement

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to especially thank the education staff at the Gothenburg Natural History Museum, and the students and teachers who participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Thomas Hillman is Assistant Professor of Information Technology and Learning at the University of Gothenburg. His research examines the design and use of technology for learning with a focus on the mutually constitutive relationship between the development of technology and educational practices. This work spans a wide variety of contexts from schools to museums and online communities.

Dr. Alexandra Weilenmann is Associate Professor of Applied Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg. She has many years experience of studying mobile IT use where method development has been a central part of her work. She has done ethnographic fieldwork of many different user groups, including museum visitors, teenagers, journalists and hunters, while focusing on the situated accomplishment of mobility practices.

Beata Jungselius is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Applied Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interest is social media use, focusing on interaction rules when communicating online. She has previously studied how people use mobile technologies and social media to document and share their experiences within different institutions and is currently studying the skills people need to develop to become competent members of social media communities.

Tiina Leino Lindell is a Ph.D. student within the Swedish School of Education and Communication in Engineering Science, at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She investigates students' use of mobile communication in school contexts. Her aim is to increase knowledge of how mobile technology supports students' problem solving activities.

ORCID

Thomas Hillman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3325-1204

Alexandra Weilenmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3989-4588

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the University of Gothenburg Learning and Media Technology Studio (LETStudio).