Negotiating the Goal of Museum Inquiry: How Families Engineer and Experiment

Abstract

Children have many opportunities to learn about science before they start studying science in school. From an early age, children engage in deep conversation with parents and build their own theories for understanding how the world works (e.g., Callanan & Jipson, 2001, Designing for science: Implications from everyday, classroom, and professional settings. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; Callanan & Oakes, 1992, Cognitive Development, 7, 213-233). As children grow, they frequently have opportunities to visit zoos, botanical gardens, parks, science centers, and museums with their parents. According to Resnick (1987, Educational Researcher, 16, 13-20), learning in these informal settings depends on more than the individual cognition, pure thought, and symbol manipulation. Informal settings highlight more socio-cultural processes such as shared cognition, tool manipulation, contextualized reasoning, and situation-specific competencies (Schauble, Beane, Coates, Martin, & Sterling, 1996, Innovations in learning: New environments for education, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Families in informal settings engage continuously in a negotiation about who is directing the activity, what the activity is about, and what content there is to be learned (Falk & Dierking, 2001, Learning from museums: Visitor experiences and the making of meaning. Lanham, NY: Altamira Press; Swartz & Crowley, 2004, Visitor Studies, 7(2), 1-15). In this chapter we present a study about the impact that different learning goals have upon the ways families interact and what children may learn from an informal learning environment.