Browsing by Subject "family learning"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Defining the Chaperone’s Role as Escort, Educator or Parent
    (Taylor & Francis, 2010) Wood, Elizabeth; Museum Studies Program, School of Liberal Arts
    The concept of family learning in museums emphasizes the interaction between related adults and children through the process of free-choice learning. The complexity of family learning in the context of school visits presents new questions for museum staff on the role of chaperones and the extent to which chaperone-led groups might function as family units. Do chaperones operate as escorts, educators, or parents on a museum field trip? This article provides a brief overview of existing field trip and chaperone research findings, raises some critical questions on the role of parents as chaperones, and describes the results from a study on chaperone behavior in the museum. Results from observations of 289 chaperones in a children's museum setting suggest that chaperone behavior is not necessarily influenced by exhibition context, but parents and chaperones do differ in preferred family learning interactions with children in museum exhibitions.
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    Integrating Scaffolding Experiences for the Youngest Visitors in Museums
    (Taylor & Francis, 2012) Wolf, Barbara; Wood, Elizabeth; Museum Studies Program, School of Liberal Arts
    Research demonstrates that children have vast potential to expand their knowledge base with simple supports from adults and older children. Children's museums have a heightened awareness of the value in and the need to reach out to support adults accompanying children, thus bringing about an emphasis on family learning. Iterative exhibition studies conducted at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis illustrate the impact of planning for family learning. But for any museum, intentionally applying the strategy of scaffolding by building on simple concepts and working toward mastery of ideas, can inform adults and simultaneously help children stretch to new levels of understanding and achievement. This strategy requires curators, educators and exhibit developers to work collaboratively to determine various levels of accessibility of content and activity moving from entry level ideas through more complex and abstract ones for older children and adults. Children visiting museums of all types is certainly nothing new, but their experience in those spaces has changed over time. From the earliest iterations of children's museums, to contemporary practices in museums of all types, the attention museum professionals place on the needs of this special audience is changing. The idea of hands-on learning, facilitated and mediated learning experiences, and scaled-down environments have become more prominent (and often expected) in museum settings where young children visit with their families. The increased visitation of family groups, especially those with young children, requires greater attention by museum educators, exhibition developers, and designers to support the learning needs of this audience. Most children's museums place special emphasis on designing environments that support learning for very young children. Lessons learned from the work done in children's museums can provide models for those in other museum settings to meet the needs of early learners.
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    Understanding the Practices and the Products of Creativity: Making and Tinkering Family Program at Informal Learning Environments
    (ACM, 2019-06) Kim, Soo Hyeon; Toomey Zimmerman, Heather; Library and Information Science, School of Informatics and Computing
    This study investigates how families' sociomaterial experiences influence the creative practices of novel idea generation and feasible solution generation and the products during family workshops using littleBits as prototyping tools. We conceptualize creativity as a distributed and materially-grounded activity. Methods are interaction analysis on video-based accounts of 31 families' activities and creativity assessment metrics to analyze the novelty scores of families' products. We take an exploratory approach to understand families' sociomaterial interactions in high and low novelty score groups. Findings illustrate that collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering with materials support the emergence of novel ideas and feasible solutions.