Working with Young Children in Museums: Weaving Theory and Practice - Paperback

by Abigail Hackett (Editor), Rachel Holmes (Editor), Christina MacRae (Editor)

Working with Young Children in Museums makes a major contribution to the small body of extant research on young children in museums, galleries and heritage sites.

Bridging theory and practice, the book introduces theoretical concepts in a clear and concise manner, whilst also providing inspirational insights into everyday programming in museums. Structured around three key themes, this volume seeks to diverge from the dominant socio-cultural learning models that are generally employed in the museum learning literature. It introduces a body of theories that have variously been called new materialist, spatial, posthuman and Deleuzian; theories which enable a focus on the body, movement and place and which have not yet been widely shared or developed with the museum sector or explicitly connected to practice. This book outlines these theories in an accessible way, explaining their usefulness for conceptualising young children in museums and connecting them to practical examples of programming in a range of locations via a series of contributed case studies.

Connecting theory to practice for readers in a way that emphasises possibility, Working with Young Children in Museums should be essential reading for museum practitioners working in a range of institutions around the world. It should be of equal interest to researchers and students engaged in the study of museum learning, early childhood education and children's experiences in museums.

Author Biography

Abigail Hackett is a Research Fellow at the Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focusses on the role of place, materiality and the body in young children's lives in numerous contexts including museums. Her original doctoral research looked at the meaning making of young children in museums and she currently holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled "The emergence of literacy in very young children: place and materiality in a more-than-human world."

Rachel Holmes leads the Children and Childhood Research Group in the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research activities appreciate the complexity of the contemporary worlds that young children, families and communities occupy. The work she engages with includes the development of theoretically-driven intellectual, as well as diverse empirical, research and evaluation projects.

Christina MacRae is a Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University whose research interests lie in the Early Years, and, in particular, in the way that sense, affect and movement express a bodily relationship with the world. Her research has focussed on young children's learning in classroom contexts as well as in museums and galleries. She has been an Early Years teacher in inner-city nursery schools, most recently in Bradford. Alongside her teaching, she has an interest in art-making and she has also worked as an artist in collaborative projects with young children in schools.