How do young children experience museums?

How can museums identify their strengths and make decisions about what sorts of programming, spaces and opportunities to offer to families with young children?

This website collates some of the research and thinking from researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University. We are working in collaboration with a number of museums in England, who are interested in what museums are like for young children, and in rethinking the role of museums in children’s lives and learning.

We are particularly interested in accounts of children’s presence in museums that foreground the importance of bodies, touch, place, movement and objects in children’s experience, and their unconventional, but often creative ways of engaging with the world and making meaning. You can read more about the kinds of frameworks and theories we think are needed in order to better account for young children’s experiences in museums here.