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ABSTRACT
Museum educators and exhibition planners commonly anticipate and leverage visitors’ background, beliefs and goals to promote meaningful experience and learning. In this article, we propose that such visitor characteristics are themselves worthy targets of design with potentially desirable effects on visitors’ experience and identity change. We describe a conceptual continuum that extends the goals of visitors’ learning to transformative experiences and identity exploration. From the continuum we derive three exhibit design principles: re-framing informational content as powerful, self-relevant ideas; as a visitor, re-seeing the environment and one’s role and action choices within it; and, as a visitor, re-enacting new ways of conceiving of one’s role and capabilities. We present strategies that map onto each principle and brief examples to illustrate the approach.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
About the authors
Joanna K. Garner is a Research Associate Professor and Associate Director for Program Development at The Center for Educational Partnerships, Old Dominion University. Joanna’s professional interests emphasize the integration of theory, research and practice in regard to teaching and learning, science education and lifespan development in traditional and non-traditional educational contexts.
Avi Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at Temple University. His research interests focus on student and teacher motivation, self-regulation and identity development. Avi’s recent research involves collaborative design-based studies that focus on promoting educators’ and students’ motivation and identity exploration around the curriculum.
Kevin Pugh is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Northern Colorado. His research concerns the development of a theory of transformative experience focused on understanding how science education can enrich everyday experience (and why it often fails to do so). Kevin investigates why some students undergo transformative experiences and others do not, the effects of transformative experiences on learning, and how transformative experiences may be supported through instruction. Recent work involves development and evaluation of the Teaching for Transformative Experiences in Science model.
Notes
1 National Research Council, Learning Science in Informal Environments.
2 Schreiber et al., “Understanding Visitor Engagement and Behaviors” and Yoon et al., “Scaffolding Informal Learning in Science Museums.”
3 Falk and Dierking, The Museum Experience; Dawson, “Not Designed for Us”; Falk, “Contextualizing Falk’s Identity-related Visitor Motivation Model” and Vitalaki, “Museum Education as a Tool for Promoting School-wide Community and Family Cooperation in Elementary.”
4 Banks et al., Learning in and out of School in Diverse Environments.
5 Singer, “Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan.”
6 Falk, “Contextualizing Falk’s Identity-related Visitor Motivation Model.”
7 Falk and Storksdieck, “Using the Contextual Model of Learning to Understand Visitor Learning from a Science Center Exhibition” and Rounds, “Doing Identity Work in Museums.”
8 Grotevant, “Towards a Process Model of Identity Formation.”
9 Paris and Mercer, “Finding Self in Objects.”
10 Singer, “Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan”; Rounds, “Doing Identity Work in Museums” and Rennie and Johnston, “The Nature of Learning and its Implications for Research on Learning in Museums.”
11 Schreiber et al., “Understanding Visitor Engagement and Behaviors.”
12 Feinberg and Crowley, Museum Learning Collaborative Revised Phase 2 Proposal and Feinberg and Leinhardt, “Looking Through the Glass.”
13 Paris and Mercer, “Finding Self in Objects.”
14 Pugh, “Newton’s Laws Beyond the Classroom Walls.”
15 Feinberg and Crowley, Museum Learning Collaborative Revised Phase 2 Proposal.
16 Pugh, “Teaching for Transformative Experiences in Science” and Pugh, “Transformative Experience.” This is not to be confused with Mezirow’s and Associates’ concept of transformative learning in adult education as described in Mezirow and Associates, Learning as Transformation.
17 Girod et al., “Appreciating the Beauty of Science Ideas.”
18 Pugh et al., “Motivation, Learning and Transformative Experience,” See page 4.
19 Girod et al., “Appreciating the Beauty of Science Ideas.”
20 Pugh and Bergin, “Motivational Influences on Transfer” and Pugh and Girod, “Science, Art and Experience.”
21 Dewey, How We Think.
22 Pugh and Girod, “Science, Art and Experience.”
23 “The Participatory Museum”, Simon, accessed December 15th 2015, http://www.participatorymuseum.org/read/.
24 Dewey, How We Think.
25 Erikson, Identity.
26 Grotevant, “Towards a Process Model of Identity Formation”; Dewey, How We Think; Flum and Kaplan, “Exploratory Orientation as an Educational Goal”; Kaplan et al., “Design-Based Interventions for Promoting Students’ Identity Exploration Within the School Curriculum” and Marcia, “The Ego Identity Status Approach to Ego Identity.”
27 Meeus et al., “Patterns of Adolescent Identity Development” and Kaplan et al., “Teacher Role Identity and Motivation as a Dynamic System.”
28 Vitalaki, “Museum Education as a Tool for Promoting School-wide Community and Family Cooperation in Elementary”; Falk and Storksdieck, “Using the Contextual Model of Learning to Understand Visitor Learning from a Science Center Exhibition” and Paris and Mercer, “Finding Self in Objects.”
29 Vitalaki, “Museum Education as a Tool for Promoting School-wide Community and Family Cooperation in Elementary” and Oyserman, “Identity-based Motivation.”
30 Flum and Kaplan, “Exploratory Orientation as an Educational Goal” and Kaplan et al., “Design-Based Interventions for Promoting Students’ Identity Exploration Within the School Curriculum.”
31 Kaplan et al., “Design-Based Interventions for Promoting Students’ Identity Exploration Within the School Curriculum.”
32 Leinhardt et al., “Talking to Oneself.”
33 Carliner, “How Designers Make Decisions.”
34 Falk et al., “Using Identity-related Visit Motivations as a Tool for Understanding Adult Zoo and Aquarium Visitors’ Meaning Making.”
35 Paris and Mercer, “Finding Self in Objects” and Leinhardt et al., “Talking to Oneself: Diaries of Museum Visits.”