Grounding Systemic Changes in Museum Visitors’ Identities and Agendas: Lessons Learned from an Engineering Design Exhibition

As museums and science centers work to reach broad and diverse public audiences, staff face challenges in aligning learner-centered educational approaches with the needs and motivations of audiences with varying identities and agendas. This article synthesizes several years of practitioner-driven work, in which science center staff revised an engineering design exhibition in response to visitor feedback and observations in practice. Analyses examine practitioners’ perspectives about the unanticipated challenges within the original design of the exhibition, and the ways in which museum staff updated their expectations and pedagogical strategies. Analyses are grounded in two theoretical models: (1) Falk’s Museum Visitor Experience Model, which describes how people use museum visits to affirm specific aspects of their identities; and (2) Dawson’s Access and Equity Framework, which describes structural forms of inaccessibility and exclusion that become embedded within museum spaces. These frameworks are used to examine the systemic changes that staff made to multiple facets of the visitor experience, including signage, framing and facilitation of activities, curation and preparation of materials, and the design of adjacent exhibits. This ever-expanding process was a necessary investment to realize the exhibition’s original intention of building on visitors’ existing knowledge, identities, and lived experiences.