Using Affordances of Science Museums to Support Youth Trajectories

• In Event: Equity and Access in Science: Understanding Pathways Frameworks for Youth Learning and Development

Abstract

Science museums are unique, vital places contributing to the ecology of learning spaces for all people, especially youth. The visible and invisible structures that exist in such places are critical in defining them as particular places and how these spaces contribute to the trajectories of young people who enact culture through active participation within them. As such, we describe findings from a study that focuses on youth participation in out-of-school time programming in a large urban natural history museum with the following question, “In what ways does long-term participation in out-of-school museum-based science programs mediate the trajectories of youth as related to interest, motivation, and ability to pursue and persist in STEM majors?”

We define place as the physical context for our lived experiences. There are structures that define places, resources that shape our activities within places and the identities that are produced, reproduced and transformed as we access and appropriate available resources in these places. Museums have been described as a “complex, layered atmospheres made up of physical and virtual places” (Leach 2007, p. 207), and to this we could add ephemeral as the context changes, along with changing people and activities. Recognizing the dialectical relationship between place and identity, where one mediates the other and cannot exist without the other, we document how the affordances of a museum program shape the beliefs, actions and social networks for young people and how these same youth shape and transform the museum.

Using one-on-one interviews, focus groups and survey data, we document the activities and perceptions of youth in several museum-based programs. Recognizing our own subjectivity in the research process as people professionally connected to museums, we used a constructivist approach to the data analysis (Charmaz, 2014). We first used open-coding where we looked for keywords and phrases within and across data sources that pointed towards affordances in the museum as connected with youth identity and agency in pursuing and persisting in STEM (Saldana, 2013). We then grouped the keywords and phrases to describe several salient themes and subthemes.

The key claims from this research are that youth develop strong and positive science identities in programs that are situated in a physical place with particular affordances in science. The structures (schema and practices) of that place mediate the ways that youth engage with science and see themselves as people who can do science. Youth who sustain their participation within these environments transform and begin to embody the essence of such places carrying the schema and practices into spheres of their life outside of that place such as school, community and higher education. This study advances our understanding of the role of museums in supporting youth in science and the specific ways that youth positioning and agency within these contexts contributes to science trajectories beyond the museum.

Authors

• Preeti Gupta, American Museum of Natural History

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, Brooklyn College - CUNY

• Robert Habig, American Museum of Natural History