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The Sound Travels research team will share a recording that exemplifies affective associations made with specific sounds by visitors to free-choice learning environments (a science museum, a park, a zoo, and a botanical garden). This recording reflects direct collaboration with visitors and demonstrates the variation in how people make sense of sound, both in identifying its sources and in describing its effects on their emotional and cognitive states. Our US-based, federally funded project explores the impacts of ambient and designed sound on STEM learning and leisure experiences. Beyond addressing our research questions, we embrace the larger goals of seeking meaningful input from professionals in and visitors to these spaces and directly informing educational design practice. Our methods include multiple stationary ambient recordings within spaces of interest, a post-experience visitor questionnaire, and a “sound search” instrument in which visitors record video clips during their experience to represent sounds that make them feel curious, energized, uneasy, and peaceful. Together, the resulting data reveal not only how visitors are affected by sound but also how visitors experience and notice sound in context, and in what ways a person’s embodied and culturally informed associations with sound relate to their experiences of learning and leisure.
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Outside Museum Walls: The Impact of Community Facilitators in an Outdoor Social Science Exhibition
The museum field has begun exploring the effects of facilitation on visitors’ learning, focusing on facilitation by museum staff inside museum buildings. However, some museum professionals contend that museums have a responsibility to serve their communities in the spaces where community members spend time, rather than expecting the public to come to them. Less is known about the effects of facilitation on visitors in urban outdoor spaces where interactions with facilitators are unexpected. The present study contributes to this line of literature by describing a quasi-experimental study that assessed the effects of exhibition facilitation led by community stewards using a trauma-informed approach in an outdoor, freely accessible civic plaza. Video observation and visitor interview data were collected. The present study found that facilitation increased visitors’ exhibit usage, overall satisfaction, and some but not all assessed areas of affective and metacognitive learning. The study highlights the value of research conducted in partnership and the power of content-humanizing facilitation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2116110
- PAR ID:
- 10515282
- Publisher / Repository:
- Visitor Studies
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Visitor Studies
- ISSN:
- 1064-5578
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 35
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/10645578.2024.2310464
