TITLE:
Curating Knowledge and Curating Fun: An Analysis of the Expanding Roles of Children’s Museums
AUTHORS:
Sarah C. Harris, Flávio S. Azevedo, Anthony J. Petrosino
KEYWORDS:
Children’s Museum, Adult-Only Events, Social Roles of Museums, Mixed Methods
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.9 No.12,
September
30,
2018
ABSTRACT: Museums constantly undergo shifts and changes in the roles and functions they serve in society. We report on the expanding roles of a children’s STEAM museum through a case study of two adult-only, fundraising events that the museum implemented. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative measures, our analysis pursues two complementary threads. First, we seek to characterize those events in detail so that we might understand the events’ culture and functioning. Second, we look into the population who frequents the events, focusing specifically on various indicators of socio-economic status. By bringing these analytical threads together, we corroborate the finding that museums are expanding intocurating funexperiences that are highly tailored to certain segments of the adult public. Importantly, attending to the empirical details of such processes, we further find that the observed changes1) directly impact the job demands and requireskills of children’s museum staff, 2) reifythe museum as an important economic agent in the community, and 3) potentially reproduce patterns of inequitable access to STEAM cultural capital, among others.