Museum spaces and experiences for children–ambiguity and uncertainty in defining the space, the child and the experience

Abstract

Museum designers, curators and educators have traditionally emphasised children as a group of learners but children are also experiencers and players. Exploring frameworks of understanding, based on packaging and person matter intra-actions of new materialism, leads me to propose the development of an imaginative alternative to the learning rhetoric. An alternative lies in thinking collectively about children’s and adult’s museum experiences, offering: a rarely considered presentation of adults and young children as alike and a much-needed unpackaging of the adult–child binary. In proposing a challenge to the generalisability of children’s museum experience, an emphasis is placed on ambiguity and openness of experience. I suggest that matter is acknowledged as agential for children, as for adults and children may more freely be understood as humans entangled with the nonhuman and with each other.