Marianna Adams’s research while affiliated with Earth Innovation Institute and other places

This chapter, Chapter 19, is the first in Section IV, Visitors, Learning, Interacting, of the book, A Companion to Museum Studies. Chapters in this section discuss questions about the visitor experience, models of education and learning, visitor studies and museological approach. This specific chapter contextualises visitors' use of museums within the framework of changes in society, notably that people are now living in a Learning Society, with a consequent focus on free-choice learning, that is, bottom-up learning based on a person's curiosities and needs, rather than top-down, compulsory learning. Authors argue that these societal changes in perceptions of and approaches to learning require new models for understanding why people visit museums, what they do while they are there and what sense they make of the experience, as well as changes in museum learning research and methodology.

This chapter will address how changes in our perception of museums and learning are resulting in a paradigm shift in how we approach research of learning in and from museums. Traditional notions of the museum as ultimate authority and arbiter of taste are being challenged as we recognise that visitors make their own meaning in museums. An evolved understanding of the nature of learning suggests thatlearning is a relative and constructive process that is dependent on personal, socio-cultural, and physical contextual factors. To be meaningful, research on learning in and from museums, therefore, must be designed to be responsive to these realities. Personal Meaning Mapping, one such approach that was specifically developed with these criteria in mind, is explained and illustrated through three case studies.