Hi Natalie

It’s great to hear that you are applying this kind of learning within your museum. There is so much value in mindfully designing open-ended, play based environments for children and their adults, where they the ones shaping the learning experience through their play. The closest pedagogy to this that I have come across is Reggio Emilia, and it can be easily applied within a hands-on gallery space. I also recommend this paper by David Whitebread as a starting point for thinking meaningfully about play and understanding its benefits. 

I was lucky enough to lead the organisation Playeum in Singapore from 2015-2017, which specialises in this kind of learning environment. We opened Asia’s first centre for creative, focussing particularly on open-ended, creative activities, interactive environments and artworks for children and their adults. Playeum has some useful information about its pedagogical approach on their website here

Keep the good work up! 

Best wishes

Anna

Anna Salaman
Cultural Heritage Learning Consultant

M: 07848 878424
W: https://annasalaman.com/ 


On Friday, 27 April 2018, 10:55, Natalie Wallace <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


Happy Friday, Gemmers!

Earlier this year, we ran an activity called Monsters' Cave here at the Roald Dahl Museum.  This was an open-ended, drop-in, collaborative family activity which was entirely self-led and unsupervised.  We provided some starting points, materials and atmospheric sounds and then invited participants to build and role play in our monsters' cave.

We learnt a lot from this activity - about our visitors, about working with our Visitor Services team, about our own team and even about the nature of learning!  It was very popular (much more than we'd anticipated!) so we do plan to try something similar again in the near future. 

We've never tried something like this before but we'd be really interested to hear from other places that have!  We'd like to share our reflections and observations with you and hear about your experiences.

Please drop me a line if this is of interest. 

Many thanks
Natalie

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