Hint about Fireflies
If you loved seeing them as a child, you can encourage them now by growing fields rather than lawns and by turning off the bright lights at night that disturb their natural urge to reproduce. Here's to dark skies and fireflies!
The Magic of 7-Year-Olds
By Susie Wilkening and James Chung of Reach AdvisorsMuseum Advocates are those curious individuals who love going to museums in their leisure time - but where do Museum Advocates come from? And do they have childhood experiences that are similar?
To find out, last summer we asked 110 Museum Advocates in their 20s and 30s to tell us about their earliest childhood museum memories, and then coded those memories to look for patterns. Additionally, this spring we gathered 501 early museum memories of museum professionals (one from a study of science museum employees, the other from a survey of New England Museum Association members). While museum professionals are different than the general public, what we found generally reinforced the findings from our 110 Museum Advocates....
Common Themes
For all 611 respondents, the mean, median, and mode of earliest museum memories is age seven. Seven (give or take a year) appears to be a particularly "sticky" time when memories are being made and retained, and museums have the power to create those memories.
For about 2/3 of respondents, memories include one or both parents.
Although some individuals specifically mentioned their mom or dad, generally respondents referred to parents or family, implying both parents. Given that our research indicates about a third of moms visit museums with their spouses, this also implies that dad may be rather important to raising new generations of Museum Advocates....
For about _ of respondents, however, earliest memories were of school field trips, with no mention of any parent. We were heartened to see this as we were initially afraid we would see a pattern that Museum Advocacy was almost exclusively handed down from parent to child. Instead, there is a clear path for youngsters to become engaged with museums regardless of the engagement of their parent...through school field trips. School field trips appear to be incredibly important not only to learning and visitation in the short-term, but also for the long-term sustainability of museums and to create a strong pipeline of museum professionals. So we are increasingly troubled not only by the cuts in field trips by school districts, but also in the number of museums that are discontinuing field trip programming.
What They See Is Important
And when it comes to those early memories, what they see may actually be more important than what they do. About a third of early memories came from natural history museums alone, a disproportionate number, indicating that natural history museums may have a disproportionate impact on the creation of young Museum Advocates. Additionally, art museums and history-based showed up at high rates. Why these types of museums? Memories tended to be of large-scale, static exhibits that promote internal activity and imagination. Dioramas, dollhouses, suits of armor, dinosaurs, period rooms. Objects and exhibits that tend to be highly narrative appeared time and time again. One of our favorite memories clearly illustrates how a static object can spark internal cognitive activity: "[I was] maybe 4 years old and running around under the huge whale....I pretended I was swimming with him - and we were friends."
Other museum types do not appear in as many memories. At first we thought age might be the issue, in that older Museum Advocates were young children before large numbers of children's museums and science centers, in particular, were around. But when we control for age and only look at respondents in their 20s and 30s, still these types of museums do not show up at nearly the rate of other types. The only exception? Overall, current employees (of all ages) of science centers were more likely to remember visits to science centers.
The low incidence of children's museums is relatively easy to explain.
Many families stop going to children's museums when they feel their oldest child has started to grow out of it, typically around age five or six...and before that magic age of seven. So a smaller incidence makes sense. The low incidence of science centers is a puzzle, however, though a few more details may shed some light on this, and give us paths of inquiry for future research.
First, the memories from these types of museums are less detailed from natural history, history, and art museums. Memories tend to be less vivid, more concise. A typical one might be "went to the science center with my class." Quite a difference. At this time, we are postulating that the different narrative quality of the exhibits may be key to this difference.
The second thing we noticed is that, overall, hands-on experiences were in very short supply in the collected memories, even, again, when we controlled for age and only looked at younger adults. Overall, fewer than five percent of memories included a hands-on activity. And, of course, children's museums and science centers are highly hands-on.
Does this mean hands-on activities are not as important as traditional, static, artifact-based exhibits? Not at all. Hands-on activities have been shown to be a tremendously valuable learning format. Just, for whatever reason, they are not as memorable. We would suggest that museums continue to offer both types of experiences as they provide different, but equally important, learning opportunities. Besides, parents of young children view hands-on activities as absolutely essential for a visit. No question. They expect them.
These results are, as mentioned earlier, only preliminary, and just scratch the surface of what we think is a very rich vein of future research.
Summarized from an August 2009 article in Museum Audience Insight E-News with permission from authors Susie Wilkening and James Chung, who have just published a new book entitled Life Stages of the Museum Visitor: Building Engagement Over a Lifetime. If you would like to share your early museum memories and help the authors with their research, email Susie Wilkening at Susie@reachadvisors.com.
