Understanding Your Family Audience
In order to plan activities that facilitate family learning, one must first understand more about family audience dynamics. The articles below give insight into the makeup and characteristics of family audiences as well as provide examples and case studies.
“Designing Exhibitions to Support Families’ Cultural Understandings”
Suzanne Gaskins, 2008 - PDF 2mb
Family learning theory assumes that learning occurs during people’s interactions, particularly in their conversations. This assumption has guided the design of museum exhibitions intended to engage families. Suzanne Gaskins complicates this picture by illuminating how families from various cultural backgrounds bring to the museum different assumptions about the educational potential of play and of adults’ role in it and outlines ways that museums can respond to these diverse expectations.
