What do kids think about museum text? Want to hear directly from them?
On Monday, I spent the day with year six students from MLC and year seven students from Granville Boys’ High. I was part of a team conducting a kids’ college workshop to find out what the kids thought about our upcoming exhibition on Birds of Paradise. I was interested in the kids’ views on exhibition text and other ways to tell a story in an exhibition. What I discovered was very useful indeed! While much of our research already confirms the following outcomes, it was great to hear directly from kids what they thought about sample texts and layouts.
• short, bold text
• overview information rather than detailed labels
• well designed and spaced labels that were placed in close proximity to the object
• simple language that did not exclude young children or those whose first language is not English
• catchy second-person text that engaged them personally to ‘imagine’, ‘consider’ or contemplate a scenario
• clever or interesting topic sentence or heading
• text in an interactive or on a digital screen
• bullet points in labels
• labels that directed you to look at a particular aspect of an object or display that wouldn’t initially be apparent
• a mystery trail throughout the exhibition
• different points of view in text or in interpretive strategy (i.e. POV of an animal or predator)
• exhibition-themed booklets that offered take-home information and activities
• ‘magic paper’ in a sample exhibition booklet shown to them.
• text in general
• too much text
• plain colours
• cluttered design
• descriptive language when it didn’t have obvious information
• excessive use of bolded text that distracted the eye from reading the sentence
• exhibition-themed booklets that required too much immediate attention and distracted them from the displays.
Kids’ College was a great day for staff and students. A big thank you goes out to the MLC girls and the GBH boys!