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Purpose
This co-design project investigates how museums can support belongingness for neurodiverse audiences. Three museums are collaborating with autistic co-designers to develop, test, and iterate engineering activities grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. The findings will inform a set of guidelines for creating neurodiversity-affirming engineering design programs.
Theoretical Framework
The neurodiversity movement describes neurological differences as integral to people’s identities, and diverse ways of thinking as beneficial to creative problem-solving in many STEM fields (Asbell-Clarke 2024, Botha & Gillespie-Lynch, 2022). This movement advocates for dismantling structural barriers to allow neurodivergent and neurotypical people to learn from and with each other, rather than offering ad-hoc accommodations that can isolate or marginalize neurodivergent learners. The emphasis on changing the environment to explicitly value diverse ways of learning aligns closely with the principles of UDL, which focuses on providing all learners with multiple means of engaging with, representing, and expressing ideas (CAST, 2018). The current project is exploring the impact of UDL-based approaches on neurodivergent learners’ sense of belongingness and engagement in engineering design activities in museums.
Methods and Data Sources
We recruited 24 autistic co-designers across three museums (between 4-14 per site). Co-design sessions focused on generating strategies to support belongingness for all learners, especially neurodivergent learners. Co-design groups met between January –July of 2024 to discuss their past experiences in museums, critique existing engineering activities and suggest revisions, generate ideas for new activities or supports, create prototypes, and test their designs with museum visitors. Data included pre/post interviews with co-designers, artifacts from co-design sessions (including collaboratively generated notes, drawings, photos), and reflections from museum staff facilitating co-design sessions.
Results
Co-designers focused on multiple facets of belongingness in their projects, including:
fostering greater comfort within museums’ physical environments (signage to help visitors navigate unfamiliar spaces, visual or auditory descriptions of activities, and information about sensory qualities of activities);
providing options and guidance for social interactions (e.g., signage demarcating a “social zone” vs “solo zone”, or explaining how to approach facilitators for help);
helping visitors pursue their interests (via activity overviews and clearer activity goals, adding narrative elements to frame engineering problems);
minimizing feelings of frustration or alienation (via detailed instructions for how to use materials, examples of what to build).
At some museum sites, co-designers incorporated tools and technologies (e.g., soldering, Makey Makey controllers) into the activities they designed. At other sites, co-designers used technology to support the design process itself (using Illustrator, Canva, ChatGPT, and other digital tools to express their ideas).
Significance
This work highlights the promise of using UDL to support belongingness in museums. Autistic co-designers added information and options to help all visitors tailor museum experiences to their interests and needs. In the next stages of this work, museum staff will work with youth to iteratively test and revise the co-designed activities to generate evidence-based guidelines for the museum field. By the date of the conference, we will have completed multiple cycles of testing to extend findings reported in this proposal.