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Digital Creativity
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Towards children's creative museum
engagement and collaborative sense-making
Kristiina Kumpulainena, Marianna Karttunenb, Leenu Juurolab & Anna
Mikkolaa
a Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki
b Museum of Technology, Helsinki
Published online: 14 Jul 2014.
To cite this article: Kristiina Kumpulainen, Marianna Karttunen, Leenu Juurola & Anna Mikkola (2014):
Towards children's creative museum engagement and collaborative sense-making, Digital Creativity, DOI:
10.1080/14626268.2014.904370
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2014.904370
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Towards children’s
creative museum
engagement and
collaborative
sense-making
Kristiina Kumpulainen
a
,
Marianna Karttunen
b
, Leenu Juurola
b
and
Anna Mikkola
a
a
Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki;
b
Museum of Technology, Helsinki
kristiina.kumpulainen@helsinki.fi;marianna.karttunen@tekniikanmuseo.fi;
leenu.juurola@tekniikanmuseo.fi;anna.mikkola@helsinki.fi
Abstract
In this article, we elucidate a socio-culturally framed
approach to supporting children’s creative museum
engagement. Specifically, we focus on social activities
and socio-cultural resources that can act as boundary-per-
meating objects in mediating children’s creative engage-
ment and collaborative sense-making regarding cultural
content within, across and beyond the spatio-material
context of the museum. We contend that designing and
organising children’s creative engagement and collabora-
tive sense-making in ways that cultivate boundary-cross-
ing broadens opportunities for engagement and leverages
children’s creative potential and expansive learning. We
build our argument by starting with a theoretical introduc-
tion to the design principles that constitute the Kids,
Museums, and Technology Programme. We will illumi-
nate the design principles of the programme with empirical
examples and consider how the design principles and their
situated construction can help us re-imagine museum exhi-
bitions as hybrid, boundary-permeating spaces that afford
novel transformative interactions, as well as new roles and
identities for both children and museums.
Keywords: creative museum engagement, children,
collaborative sense-making, boundary-crossing,
sociocultural resources
1 Introduction
Today, an increasing number of museums are evi-
dencing a shift from being places of cultural trans-
mission and reproduction to being spaces for
participatory engagement and collaborative crea-
tivity in which new meanings and identities are
constructed for both cultural institutions and
their visitors. Traditional, pre-defined, narrow
forms of museum engagement are seen as
inadequate to serve the needs and requirements
of twenty-first-century society and its citizens.
As a consequence, there is a growing interest in
the development of social practices such as tinker-
ing and making that can broaden visitors’ access to
creative pursuits, multimodal interaction and
expansive learning (e.g. Catterall 2009; Ingold
2013). Simultaneous efforts to foster creative and
experimental engagement are also evidenced in
other fields, including school-based education
(e.g. Kumpulainen et al. 2011), after-school edu-
cation programmes (e.g. Kafai, Peppler, and
Chapman 2009; Honey and Kanter 2013), and
other educational programmes that focus on sup-
porting children’s and young people’s productive
Digital Creativity, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2014.904370
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media engagements and interactions within and
across formal, non-formal and informal contexts
as a means of promoting wider educational, voca-
tional and civic opportunities (Ito et al. 2013).
While we should welcome these relevant and
timely advances, it is evident that they also call
for thoughtful development and the critical exam-
ination of their activity structures and design prin-
ciples, which are based on ensuring inclusive
opportunities for participatory engagement and
collaborative creativity among diverse individuals
and communities.
In this article, we address ‘making pro-
grammes’ as emerging forms of participatory
engagement and collaborative creativity in
museum settings. Specifically, we concentrate on
young museum visitors and consider how to
promote every child’s creative engagement and
collaborative sense-making regarding cultural
content for expansive and personally meaningful
learning within the context of museum exhibitions
that involve creative making. Our work is motiv-
ated by a concern that without adequate focus on
the design of museum spaces, there is a danger
that good intentions and efforts aimed at
promoting inclusive participatory engagement
and collaborative creativity will become counter-
productive and end in serving only privileged
populations and individuals.
Our socioculturally framed approach to foster-
ing children’s creative museum engagement con-
tends that the prerequisites for creative
engagement lie in the design of ‘making’ environ-
ments in museum spaces and the pedagogical
know-how this entails. In our approach, the
designs assumes boundary-crossing as a core
value in supporting children’s creative engage-
ment and collaborative sense-making within
museum spaces. By this, we refer to the ways in
which children are provided with opportunities
to draw upon tools and practices from their
social ecologies within the making settings of
museum spaces. We are interested in developing
social activities, as well as material and conceptual
resources, which can act as boundary-permeating
objects (Star and Griesemer 1989; Akkerman
and Bakker 2011a), thus mediating children’s
creative engagement and collaborative sense-
making regarding cultural content within, across
and beyond the spatio-material context of the
museum. We contend that designing and organis-
ing learning in ways that cultivate boundary-cross-
ing broadens opportunities for engagement and
leverages children’s creative potential and
expansive learning (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti
2005; Ito et al. 2013; Kumpulainen and Mikkola
2014).
We construct our article by starting with a
theoretical introduction to the design principles
that constitute the Kids, Museums and Technology
Programme—a partnership between the Helsinki
Museum of Technology, the Learning Futures
research group of the Department of Teacher Edu-
cation at the University of Helsinki, and local pre-
schools and elementary schools. The design
principles and underlying pedagogy of the Kids,
Museums, and Technology Programme aim to
meet children on their own terms in creative
museum engagements, emphasising the socio-
materiality of creative engagement and the bound-
ary-crossing this entails. The design principles of
our approach are comprised of six prerequisites:
(1) building on interdisciplinarity; (2) encouraging
multimodality; (3) appreciating children’s mul-
tiple sources of knowledge; (4) promoting per-
sonal and collective engagement; (5) facilitating
the interplay of everyday and scientific thinking;
and (6) celebrating imagination and play.
We shall illuminate the design principles of the
programme with empirical examples drawn from a
project of the Kids, Museums and Technology
Programme and demonstrate how these situated
examples and the design principles on which
they are based can help us re-imagine museum
exhibitions as hybrid, boundary-permeating
spaces that support children’s participatory
engagement, collaborative creativity and expan-
sive learning. We will conclude our article by
focusing on our experiences with how the design
principles worked in the project and pointing to
the future analysis of the empirical data in an
effort to understand children’s perspectives on
their creative museum engagement and sense-
making.
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2 A sociocultural approach to
children’s creative engagement
and sense-making
Our development and research work that is geared
toward promoting children’s creative museum
engagement is embedded in the socio-cultural fra-
mework (Cole 1996; Rogoff 2003; Vygotsky
1962,1978). The socio-cultural framework
defines creative engagement as an everyday
social phenomenon resulting in continual pro-
cesses of ‘making the world’ (Tanggaard 2012,
21). It holds that there is a close relationship
between human beings and the material tools
used in the creative sense-making process, and
that there is a close relationship between continu-
ity and renewal, meaning that materials, tools,
institutions and their social practices are starting
points for creative engagement, sense-making
and learning. Within this framework, we under-
stand creative engagement, sense-making and
learning as social constructs that emerge interac-
tively when children engage in object-oriented
activities mediated by various communities, par-
ticipants, rules, instruments and artefacts. Here,
materiality and artefacts are seen as substantial
components of creative processes and creativity
itself (Tanggaard 2012). Moreover, instead of con-
ceptualising creative engagement, sense-making
and learning as purely epistemic processes, we
consider them as inseparably linked with ontologi-
cal processes which involve transforming identi-
ties and developing agency (Packer and
Goicoechea 2000).
The socio-cultural approach contends that in
any context, creative engagement, sense-making
and learning involve and demand identity shifts.
The socio-cultural conception of identity high-
lights how it is locally and interactionally con-
structed and shifts in relation to its social setting
and the actors involved (Hand 2006; Holland
et al. 1998; Nasir and Saxe 2003; Wenger 1998).
The identity one negotiates in relation to a practice
is shaped by the nature of engagement, which is
afforded and constrained by features of the prac-
tice, including its material and ideational tools,
organisation, norms, conventions and structures
(Nasir and Hand 2008). Our intertwining approach
to engagement, learning and identity holds that
when an individual feels that his or her identity
is linked to certain settings, he or she will be
more engaged in learning (Wortham 2006).
The socio-cultural perspective contends that
creative engagement, sense-making and learning
are complex, reciprocal processes that depend on
constructive, culturally relevant interactions
between individuals and their social ecologies,
which vary across temporal, contextual and cul-
tural spaces (Barron 2006). Learning and develop-
ment are understood as holistic experiences of
participation that are situated within a matrix of
multiple socio-cultural contexts (Akkerman and
van Eijck 2013; Daniels et al. 2010; Hughes,
Jewson, and Unwin 2007).
Paying attention to learning and development
as distributed processes that exist across settings
and over time has implications for how we study
creativity and learning, as well as how we design
inclusive and expansive learning spaces (Jurow
2005; Kumpulainen and Sefton-Green 2014).
Thus, the challenge for museum education is to
create authentic spaces for creative engagement
in which participants can engage in collective
social activities embedded within and across
their social ecologies (Star and Griesemer 1989;
Nespor 1994; Leander, Phillips, and Taylor
2010; Ludvigsen et al. 2010; McLeod and Yates
2006; Zittoun 2006).
2.1 Boundary-crossing in creative
engagement and collaborative
sense-making
Recently, researchers in education and related
fields have drawn attention to the ways in which
the intersection of social practices and their
material and conceptual resources creates the
potential for new forms of creative engagement
and the co-creation of meaning (Akkerman and
Bakker 2011b). There is a growing interest in
understanding the conditions that make such
boundary-crossing possible (see, e.g. Akkerman
and Bakker 2011a; Grossen, Zittoun, and Ros
2012; Kumpulanen and Mikkola 2014). In particu-
lar, more attention is being paid to the mediating
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role of material, socio-cultural, linguistic and cog-
nitive resources in boundary-crossing and how
these promote the construction of hybrid spaces;
that is, spaces in which various socio-cultural
resources and practices intersect (see also
Phelan, Davidson, and Cao 1991). Hybrid spaces
are important because they are the result of
various forms of engagement and potentiate colla-
borative creativity and the co-creation of meaning
(Gutie
´rrez, Baquedano-Lo
´pez, and Tejeda 1999;
Jornet and Jahreie 2013; Konkola et al. 2007).
In our work, we define boundary-crossing as a
process that entails managing and integrating mul-
tiple divergent socio-cultural resources in colla-
borative creative engagement and sense-making
(Walker and Nocon 2007). We view boundaries
an essential part of the circulation and co-creation
of knowledge and meaning across the social world
(Bowker and Star 1999; Wenger 2000). We are
specifically interested in boundary-crossing that
creates hybrid spaces in which various social prac-
tices intersect and merge (Bakhtin 1981; Bhabha
1994; Gutie
´rrez, Baquedano-Lo
´pez, and Tejeda
1999). In this subsequent in-between space, oppo-
sitional categories can work together to open up
both possibilities and tensions within collaborative
creative activity and sense-making (Bhabha 1994;
Kumpulainen and Mikkola 2014).
3 Empirical context: the Kids,
Museums and Technology
Programme
Next, we introduce the design principles of our
approach to promoting children’s creative
museum engagement within the context of ‘The
Magic Carpet of the Technology Tales’ project,
which is part of the Kids, Museums and Technol-
ogy Programme. In this project, children and
adults meet in a making (workshop) setting to
examine, design and co-create exhibitions
around technology. We see the empirical contex-
tualisation of our approach as necessary because
our socio-culturally framed understanding holds
that design principles are achieved in the course
of situated activity and interactions and thus
cannot be pre-structured solely via theoretical
knowledge (Jornet and Jahreie 2013).
The Kids, Museums and Technology Pro-
gramme is designed to develop technology edu-
cation for young children aged between six and
eight years old as part of their creative museum
engagement. The main educational goal is to fam-
iliarise children with technology through creative
making activities and also to evoke children’s curi-
osity towards museums. The entire programme
and its projects aim at creating a new model for
the co-design and making of child-centred exhibi-
tions, workshops and activities in museum settings
and beyond. The Kids, Museums and Technology
Programme is funded by the Finnish Ministry of
Education and Culture.
The methodological foundations of the Kids,
Museums and Technology Programme and its pro-
jects draw on collaborative action research (e.g.
Erickson 2006) and social design experiments
(Gutie
´rrez and Vossoughi 2010). Here, research-
ers, designers and educators collaboratively
design museum spaces and practices to promote
children’s inclusive creative museum engagement,
try them out in practice and then reflect on and
evaluate the kinds of social practices and shifts
that emerge in the interactions between partici-
pants and the socio-material context(s) of their
activities. In practice, the process of iterative co-
design involves educators serving as contributing
members of the research team and researchers par-
ticipating as co-designers of the environments and
pedagogy. In addition, our research, development
and evaluation work actively integrates children’s
voices and perspectives into the design of museum
spaces and activities.
The Magic Carpet of Technology Tales project
of the Kids, Museums and Technology Programme
is grounded in three major activity phases: (1) chil-
dren’s exploration, visual documentation and
sense-making regarding technology in their life
worlds and within the socio-material context of
the Magic Carpet of Technology Tales; (2) children
co-creating an exhibition space for their artefacts
with the support of museum curators and educators
within the context of the Magic Carpet of Technol-
ogy Tales; and (3) children’s sense-making regard-
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ing technology within the socio-cultural spaces of
their co-created exhibition.
As a pre-task, the children explore and initiate
questions like “What is a museum? What is technol-
ogy? How has it been changed?” at the preschool.
They are also encouraged to consider which techno-
logical object(s) from their life worlds they would
like to bring with them to the Magic Carpet in
order to examine it in collaboration with others
and consider it as a potential object for their own
museum exhibition around technology.
3.1 Empirical research: piloting the Magic
Carpet of Technology Tales project
In 2013, the Magic Carpet of Technology Tales
project was piloted with six local preschool
groups with about ten children aged between
five and seven years old in each group. Three of
the groups participated in the project at the
museum, and three times the museum-education
team went to preschools with the carpet and its
material artefacts. In addition to children, each
pilot involved several adults, a multi-professional
team who can facilitate, document, research and
evaluate the ongoing work.
The empirical data collected from the pilots are
comprised of participatory observations, video
recordings of the children’s and adults’ social activi-
ties and interactions, the children’s photo documen-
tation of their technology artefacts and co-designed
museum exhibitions, and video-recorded inter-
views illuminating the children’s perspectives to
the project. The research work around the project,
including the closer examination of the empirical
data, is presently underway. In this article, we use
the data as a means of illuminating the design prin-
ciples of our approach to supporting children’s crea-
tive museum engagement.
4 Design principles for supporting
children’s creative museum
engagement
Next, we will describe the design principles that
we have developed as the result of our research
and development work within the context of the
Kids, Museums and Technology Programme. We
will exemplify our design principles by drawing
on the empirical data from the Magic Carpet of
Technology Tales project.
4.1 Building on interdisciplinarity
One of our grounding design principles for support-
ing children’s creative museum engagement stres-
ses the importance of interdisciplinarity in
authentic collaborative problem-solving and iter-
ation. Interdisciplinarity is regarded as a form of
boundary-crossing that supports children’s engage-
ment in the authentic work of professionals, includ-
ing museum curators, designers, scientists, artists
and engineers. Here, creative engagement in scien-
tific inquiry is embedded in a hybrid context of
invention that integrates several disciplines, such
as art, play, literacy, science and technology.
The interdisciplinarity of the Magic Carpet of
the Technology Tales project is also evidenced in
its versatile activities and sociocultural resources.
These include the use of various artefacts and dem-
onstrations, media and communication technol-
ogies, pictures, drawings, storytelling, play and
drama. The actual physical materialisation of the
Magic Carpet of the Technology Tales is a circular,
colourful rug that is split into different spaces, each
representing a different technology-related theme.
The artefacts of the carpet and social activities
around it encourage children to engage in collabora-
tive exploration of museum objects including their
own artefacts representing technological inno-
vations, as well as in the co-design of their own
exhibitions.
The materialisation of the magic carpet has five
spaces with different points of view on museums
and museum objects. Four spaces are marked as
follows:
(1) evolution and change;
(2) different values;
(3) stimulus items and creativity; and
(4) failed inventions and the recycling of ideas.
The fifth space of the carpet is unique: there,
children create their own ‘Future Museum of
Technology’ from the technological objects on
the carpet.
At the Magic Carpet of Technology Tales
project, the children explore and discuss their
Towards children’s creative museum engagement and collaborative sense-making
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own technology objects and those embedded in
the carpet with museum educators; they discover
hidden items, identify unidentified objects and
place them in chronological order. As part of
these activities the children also co-create ideas
for building their own museum exhibitions. The
museum artefacts at the carpet can be examined
from different points of view. They can be con-
sidered as technological innovations, commercial
products or parts of an innovation chain. The arte-
facts can also be approached as sources of creativ-
ity and imagination. Here, the children create their
own uses, meanings and values for the artefacts by
playing, exploring and communicating with one
another.
The Magic Carpet and its social activities can
be used both at the museum exhibition and as an
outreach programme at a preschool.
4.2 Encouraging multimodality
Another grounding design principle of our
approach stresses the importance of making room
for various modalities of children’s creative engage-
ment. Thus, we encourage multiple forms of
engagement in children’s creative pursuits and
interactions – with materials, tools, ideas, others
and the self. While recognising creative engage-
ment and collaborative sense-making as fundamen-
tally human, historical and cross-cultural, we
appreciate the multiplicity of forms they can take
and the potential the boundary-crossing of these
diverse modalities can entail for supporting inclus-
ive engagement and collaborative creativity. Mul-
tiple modalities and pathways to engagement can
account for oral, textual, audial and visual modes,
which in combination with media and materiality
create meaning. These modalities can take various
forms in tool-mediated interaction and in embodied
engagements with material objects.
In the Magic Carpet of Technology Tales
project, the children were afforded multiple and
diverse opportunities for museum engagement.
In addition to their oral participation, they were
able to express and communicate their meanings,
such as accounts of technology, via photographs
and drawings. Figure 1 shows some of the chil-
dren’s drawings that were motivated by the follow- Figures 1a–1c. Children’s drawings about technology.
Kumpulainen et al.
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ing questions: What kinds of technology do I use?
What kinds of technology has grandma and/or
granddad used?
4.3 Appreciating children’s multiple
sources of knowledge
The pedagogical grounding of our design prin-
ciples stresses the appreciation and leveraging of
children’s multiple sources of knowledge, which
embedded in their social ecologies, during creative
museum engagement and sense-making. We
regard children’s multiple sources of knowledge
as significant cultural resources of participatory
engagement and collaborative creativity. Here,
children’s multiple sources of knowledge join
with the museum content, and this interaction
can potentially create hybrid boundary-permeat-
ing spaces for children’s engagement, creativity
and meaning-making (Vygotsky 1978; Daniels
et al. 2010). In such hybrid spaces, educators can
support children in engaging with new roles,
ideas and practices while recognising and lever-
aging the cultural, linguistic and intellectual
resources children bring to the setting (Gutie
´rrez
and Rogoff 2003; Moll et al. 2005).
Below are some examples from children’s oral
accounts during the interviews explaining their
understandings of the technology discussed in the
museum. We can see from these examples how
the children draw on multiple sources of knowl-
edge embedded in their life worlds as they con-
structed explanations in defining what technology
and the museum, as an institution, mean to them.
My granny used to have a bed, a traditional
bed. Now, her bed has technology, and it lifts
Granny up. I am afraid that if my granny
pushes a wrong button, she will get stuck (Kati).
Mobile phones are technology. In the past, we
had regular line phones. You could not go out
and talk, because the phone was attached to
the wall (Pekka).
My treasure is my book. Making books requires
technology. I would like to make a book. I
tinker with my own notebooks by stamping
pages into one another, but it is not as grand
as a book would be (Olli).
A museum can be like ... an art museum ...
somebody’s home ... a fun place ...there are
exciting things, and it is fun if I can touch them
... there can be some old-fashioned things that
you cannot not find in other places (Laura).
In their explanations, the children draw on their
lives, sharing meanings and experiences
embedded in their social ecologies and
relationships. They also communicated their
socio-emotional engagements with technology
and the museum, which indicate the children’s
practice-linked identities, as well as the various
social activities and material resources within
them. These examples give evidence of the chil-
dren’s multiple forms of engagement and
meaning-making that are brought together for
joint examination and development of new mean-
ings and understandings. They account for our
design approach based on the promotion of bound-
ary-crossing in children’s creative museum
engagement.
4.4 Promoting personal and collective
engagement
The design principles of our approach value chil-
dren’s diversity and collective engagement. Chil-
dren are given opportunities for both personal
and collective engagement, creativity and sense-
making, all of which can reciprocally transform
one another. While emphasising both personal
and collective engagement, we want to view
creativity as a collective phenomenon, without
losing sight of the individual’s phenomenal
experience, agency and subjectivity. In our
approach, this leads to understanding the collec-
tive and subjective aspects of culture and creativ-
ity are conceptualised as dialectical opposites in
tension (Jornet and Jahreie 2013). In our
approach, we emphasise meaningful opportu-
nities for children to share their individual and
collective questions, objectives, ideas and
works, both in the process of making and as a
culminating social activity.
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Encouraging the cross-pollination of ideas and
meanings among participants is characteristic of
our making activities (Petrich, Wilkinson, and
Bevan 2013). We see this form of boundary-
crossing as an important means of deepening chil-
dren’s engagement, which encourages making
connections across artefacts, their makers and
cultural content and creating hybrid spaces in
which children can stretch into new roles and
practices.
Figure 2 shows an old telephone one of the
children had brought with her from home to the
Magic Carpet for joint exploration.
Figure 3 illuminates children’s collective
engagement in exploring how museum exhibitions
are built.
In addition to peer interaction, our approach
regards collaboration and interaction between
experts and novices as an important design prin-
ciple for creating a developmentally fruitful distri-
bution of valued practices and skills. Engaging
with new tools and materials alongside experi-
enced others who have the pedagogical expertise
to support children’s inclusive engagement, colla-
borative creativity and meaning-making and have
a historically grounded understanding of cultural
content creates a particular context for the kinds
of hybrid shifts we are interested in cultivating
and documenting.
Figure 4 shows an exhibition space that the
children investigated with the educator on the
magic carpet.
While appreciating hybrid collaborative inter-
actions between children and adults in creative
museum engagements, we also stress that these
design activities should be used for a wider
social purpose. By this, we refer to extending the
process and outcomes of children’s creative pur-
suits to the wider public, thus increasing the audi-
ences with whom children and their works can
interact. This includes that the products of chil-
dren’s creative activities can therefore escape the
boundaries of the local circumstances in which
they were created, and potentially acquire histori-
cal and societal relevance outside the museum
event.
In the Magic Carpet of Technology Tales
project, it was also possible for the children to con-
tinue their work at the preschool by archiving and
processing the photos, drawings and recorded
ideas. The archives of the children’s documen-
taries and designed exhibitions could be commu-
nicated to wider audiences locally and virtually.
These activities are part of our design thinking
in giving children mediating tools to reflect upon
Figure 3. Building a museum exhibition in collaboration.
Figure 2. An old phone.
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their design process and share their designs with
different audiences.
Figure 5 illustrates the children’s photo docu-
mentation of their exhibition.
Figure 6 illuminates the children’s photos from
their exhibition on the carpet.
4.5 Facilitating the interplay between
everyday and scientific thinking
Our approach emphasises the process of creating
and sense-making, entailing efforts to bring skills
and concepts alive in the context of children’s
creative pursuits. These include design as inter-
weaving the scientific and the everyday ways of
thinking and acting with regard to cultural
phenomena and content. The pedagogical lever-
aging of everyday experience is all the more press-
ing for children whose home and community lives
are traditionally treated as deficits to be overcome
rather than rich resources upon which to draw
(Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2005). Likewise,
Nasir et al. (2006) suggest that the recognition of
the overlap between everyday activities and the
disciplinary activities of science can highlight
valuable access points to science for children
who might not otherwise engage in scientific
activities.
In addition to a vertical approach to engage-
ment that illuminates the deepening of the concep-
tual knowledge base on phenomena, our approach
extends its focus to the social practices and mean-
ings that emerge horizontally as we make meaning
within and across settings (Gutie
´rrez, Baquedano-
Lo
´pez, and Tejeda 1999; Barron 2006). These
different contexts and cultures are embedded in
various forms of knowing and thinking, including
everyday and scientific thinking. The notion of
hybridity provides us a valuable construct in
explaining the importance of integrating different
and sometimes competing knowledges and
discourses (e.g. Bhabha 1994). In such bound-
ary-crossing interactions, various meanings are
brought to bear on the same experiences on cul-
tural content. Here, oppositional categories can
potentially work together to generate new mean-
ings and knowledge.
4.6 Celebrating imagination and play
Our guiding design principles emphasise the itera-
tive process of imagination, play, creation and
learning and regard the materialisation of what
has been imagined as necessary for any creative
effort to have a concrete influence. Moreover,
while understanding making as a disposition
characterised by iteration, imagination and
playful experimentation (Ingold 2000,2013;
Resnick and Rosenbaum 2013), we aim at
cultivating children’s imagination, improvisation
and playful experimentation with a range of
possibilities and ideas. We also value play as a
rich developmental space – one that allows us to
treat boundaries as malleable, imagine and experi-
ence alternate realities, experiment with new roles
and act in developmental zones beyond an individ-
Figure 4. What counts as an exhibition space? Figure 5. This is our museum.
Towards children’s creative museum engagement and collaborative sense-making
9
Digital Creativity
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ual level of functioning (Vygotsky 1978). To
ground children’s creative engagement and
meaning-making in play is to draw on children’s
strengths and to create a sense of challenge,
purpose and possibility.
In the Magic Carpet of Technology Tales
project, the children co-designed their own
museum exhibition out of their technological
objects. In the process of co-designing that was
very much based on play and imagination, they
also explored museum objects, the relationships
between various items and the themes of their
exhibitions. The children documented their exhi-
bitions with pocketcams for later dissemination
and reflection. Ultimately, the children also acted
as guides for their exhibitions.
5 Discussion and conclusions
In this article, we have discussed our ongoing
efforts to create opportunities for children’s crea-
tive museum engagement and collaborative
sense-making regarding cultural content in socio-
materially rich exhibition spaces. In our approach,
we see children as important stakeholders in
museums, whose epistemological authority and
active agency must be recognised. We see this as
a necessary condition for cultivating inclusive
creative engagement and lifelong learning, as
well as ensuring the future of museums as impor-
tant hubs of knowledge co-creation.
Our goal is the design of museum spaces that
encourage children’s creative engagement and
sense-making and that transform the traditional
interactions and identities of children and
museums. This calls for socio-cultural transform-
ation that cuts across the boundaries traditionally
separating cultural and educational institutions,
children’s culture, homes and communities (Ito
et al. 2013). The challenge in terms of design is
to enhance boundary permeability by creating pos-
sibilities for participation, interaction and collab-
oration across diverse socio-cultural resources
and contexts (Kumpulainen and Mikkola 2014).
It is clear that these efforts are not simple and,
thus, further research and development work is
necessary. Specifically, we need to better under-
stand the children’s perspective on creative
museum engagement as part of our design work.
In our article, we have focused on elaborating
on the design principles of our approach and
reflected on its socio-culturally framework,
emphasising the importance of boundary-crossing
and the social construction of hybrid spaces in
which children are afforded with diverse opportu-
nities to elaborate on and incorporate their formal
and informal forms of knowing into the ‘making’
activities of museum spaces (Gutie
´rrez, Larson,
and Kreuter 1995; Star and Griesemer 1989;
Vygotsky 1962,1978). Our approach holds that
Figure 6. The children’s museum exhibition.
Figure 7. Children co-designing their own museum exhibitions.
Kumpulainen et al.
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the design of museum spaces based on the notion
of boundary-crossing can potentially transform
social activities and interactions, thus allowing
children to co-create hybrid contexts for their col-
laborative creative activities at the intersections of
social systems (Kumpulainen and Mikkola 2014).
The conception of the museum exhibition as a
hybrid space includes its potential as a site at
which no socio-cultural practices are secondary.
Our learnings from the pilot experiments
suggest that the design principles of (1) building
on interdisciplinarity, (2) encouraging multimod-
ality, (3) appreciating children’s multiple sources
of knowledge, (4) promoting personal and collec-
tive engagement, (5) facilitating the interplay of
everyday and scientific thinking, and (6) celebrat-
ing imagination and play have the potential to
afford various pathways to children’s creative
engagement and collaborative sense-making
regarding technology and museums in general.
These findings are evidenced in the nature of the
children’s creative engagement and sense-
making around the social context of the Magic
Carpet. The children’s interactions were found to
be framed by multiple perspectives as the children
positioned themselves as accountable authors of
their knowledges and artefacts embedded in their
life worlds. Our observations also demonstrate
multiple instances in which the children’s ideas
and practices travelled across contexts, such as
from children’s homes to museums and from
museums to school. This created opportunities
for boundary-crossing and the construction of
hybrid spaces for creative engagement and colla-
borative sense-making in our design work.
According to our observations, the Magic
Carpet of Technology Tales, as a concrete physical
object, played an important mediating role in the
social activities and interactions of the children
and adults while they engaged in exploring and
co-creating cultural content related to technology.
The magic carpet and its material and conceptual
resources communicated past knowledge about
technology and innovation, as well as pre-existing
ways of creating museum exhibitions. These
socio-cultural resources of the past became part
of the children’s creative engagement while they
were engaged in creating the future. Here, past
experience and knowledge acted as the raw
material for producing the new (Tanggaard 2012).
We were also able to identify challenges in our
design efforts that became visible in the emerging
social interactions between the children and adults
around the Magic Carpet. Here, the pedagogical
know-how in scaffolding children’s rich and
multi-sided interactions towards inclusive and
productive meaning-making was identified to be
pivotal. Scaffolding interactions in ways that
support children’s inclusive engagement in cogni-
tive and socio-emotional respects and that leads to
expansive learning clearly require advanced peda-
gogical expertise from adults. Otherwise, there is a
danger that openness to diverse forms of engage-
ment leads to unproductive tensions and disconti-
nuities rather than to fertile boundary-crossing
(Kumpulainen and Mikkola 2014).
In sum, our emerging findings and subsequent
understandings contribute to our ongoing design
work, providing insights into the possibilities
and challenges in promoting children’s creative
engagement with and sense-making of technology
beyond traditional museum interactions. These
understandings posit an alternative landscape for
conceptualising exhibitions as co-creative and
socio-materially extended spaces for children’s
creative engagement and sense-making.
The research questions that we believe would
be worthwhile to explore in more depth in the
future include: (a) identifying boundary-crossing
interactions in situated, tool-mediated social prac-
tices and the possibilities and tensions these
create for children’s creative engagement and
sense-making; (b) specifying organic opportu-
nities to connect children’s ideas with the ‘big’
ideas of disciplinary forms of knowing in creative
museum engagements; (c) investigating how chil-
dren’s creative engagement reflects and constitutes
deep forms of learning – that is, what it signifies in
terms of children’s shifting participation in and
relationship with ‘making’ practices; (d) exploring
how creative engagement in socio-materially
extended museum spaces creates possibilities for
children’s identity and agency development; (e)
following children across time and space in order
Towards children’s creative museum engagement and collaborative sense-making
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to gain a deeper understanding how children learn
to translate their practice-linked identities and
knowledge(s) across contexts; and finally (fe)
investigating what kind of tools and forms of
engagement increase children’s sense of personal
and collective creativity.
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Kristiina Kumpulainen, PhD, is a professor of
education at the Department of Teacher Education,
University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on
participatory and inclusive pedagogies, children,
media and creativity, learner agency and identity,
sociocultural processes of learning and wellbeing
across contexts as well as visual methodologies.
Marianna Karttunen, Master of Arts in Ethnol-
ogy, is a project manager in the Kids, Museums
and Technology Programme at the Museum of
Technology, Helsinki, Finland. She works with
developing technological education for preschoo-
lers and invoking their curiosity towards
museums.
Leenu Juurola, Master of Arts in Education,
works as head of development at the Museum of
Technology. Her responsibilities include develop-
ment and network projects and financing.
Anna Mikkola is a PhD student at the Department
of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki. Her
research interests include issues of resilience,
identity, social exclusion and co-participatory,
visual methodologies.
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