Towards children's creative museum engagement and collaborative sense-making

Abstract

In this article, we elucidate a socio-culturally framed approach to supporting children's creative museum engagement. Specifically, we focus on social activities and socio-cultural resources that can act as boundary-permeating objects in mediating children's creative engagement and collaborative sense-making regarding cultural content within, across and beyond the spatio-material context of the museum. We contend that designing and organising children's creative engagement and collaborative sense-making in ways that cultivate boundary-crossing broadens opportunities for engagement and leverages children's creative potential and expansive learning. We build our argument by starting with a theoretical introduction to the design principles that constitute the Kids, Museums, and Technology Programme. We will illuminate the design principles of the programme with empirical examples and consider how the design principles and their situated construction can help us re-imagine museum exhibitions as hybrid, boundary-permeating spaces that afford novel transformative interactions, as well as new roles and identities for both children and museums.