Exploring abstract, physical, social and embodied space: developing an approach for analysing museum spaces for young children

ABSTRACT

This paper describes a collaboration between museum staff and university researchers to develop a framework for analysing museum spaces from the perspective of young children. The resultant APSE (abstract, physical, social and embodied) framework draws on spatial theories from childhood studies and architecture to consider children’s museum visiting from a spatial perspective. Starting with space not only foregrounds the role places, objects and bodies play in how experiences are constituted, but also resists linearity and predictability of mainstream educational policy discourses about young children’s learning. As place, children and objects entangle together, they design and make one another. We draw upon Massey’s description of the ‘chance of space’, in which people, objects and places become entangled in unpredictable and unknowable ways, to consider the potential of the APSE framework to offer alternative framings of children in museums.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• early childhood
• architecture
• entanglement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a discussion on the distinction between the terms space and place, see Hackett, Procter, and Seymour (2015, 6–8).

2. We would like to gratefully acknowledge funding from Humber Museums Partnership for this work, as part of the Under Fives in Museums Arts Council Major Museum Partners Award.

3. The APSE framework can be downloaded from https://underfivesinmuseums.com/museum-spaces-and-young-children/

4. The staff involved in the APSE project were Lisa Howarth, Rebecca Kummerfeld, Ros Macaulay, North Lincolnshire Museum Service, Jane Avison and Esther Hallberg, Heritage Learning Hull, Robert Chester, Sarah Hammond, Christine Rostron, East Riding of Yorkshire Museum Service.

5. We introduced a thematic coding exercise despite being aware of the post-structural critique of data coding, in particular its tendency to exclude, fix and introduce hierarchical order too quickly, to subsume difference (MacLure 2013). MacLure (2013) however, points out that there are benefits of coding, namely a slow entanglement with the data, through which ‘things gradually grow, or glow’ (174). In introducing thematic coding we de-mystified ‘data analysis’, thus opening up a space where practitioners and researchers could entangle together with data, where ideas from the entire data set could take flight, and begin to ‘grow, or glow’.

Additional information

Funding

We would like to gratefully acknowledge funding from Humber Museums Partnership for this work, as part of the Under Fives in Museums Arts Council Major Museum Partners Award; Arts Council England.