Meet me at the museum: creative methodologies for understanding young children’s museum experiences

Young children are not just service-users or pupils, they are citizens with an active role in cultural life. The study discussed here used accompanied visits to explore how two- to four-year-old children engaged with a university art museum with the aims of demonstrating children’s capacity for cultural participation and enabling adults to notice and support this. The qualitative exploratory case study used innovative approaches to generate data collaboratively. Participating families and a practitioner researcher visited the Museum together, creating fieldnotes, reflective observations, photographs, a project scrapbook and artwork. Visual and written data were subjected to systematic reflexive thematic analysis. Findings demonstrate that children’s engagement with museums is complex and sophisticated, and takes places across personal, material, and social arenas. Attention to creative forms of expression including movement, sound, play, and artmaking enabled adults to notice and respond sensitively. The study demonstrated that creative research approaches are invaluable for documenting this engagement, particularly in non-formal learning environments.