How many times have you seen slogans along the lines of:
We make [insert ostensibly worthy-but-dull topic here] FUN!!!
Science centres and museums are repeat offenders in this regard. And I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with this habit, although I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why. Is it just because it sounds so trite, or is there something deeper at play here?
What is ‘fun’ anyway? Some people think that throwing themselves off a bridge, tethered only by a flexible piece of rope, is the pinnacle of fun and excitement. They part with hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Personally I couldn’t think of anything worse!
When it comes to museum visiting, ‘fun’ is a particularly problematic word. And again, it’s because fun means different things to different people – for some it implies mindless entertainment (and possibly things going ‘bang’); for others it has a more nuanced meaning. To some extent, what people mean by the word ‘fun’ means seems to depend on their age and cultural background.
The lesson here for me is that we have to be careful of the terminology we use (and hear) when speaking to visitors – just because we’re using common language, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all talking about the same thing. It makes it even more important that we let visitors describe and elaborate upon things in their own words as much as possible in our research, and avoid too many pre-defined (and maybe inadvertantly loaded) categories.
Having said that, for some visitors at least, museum visiting is something they definitely would describe as ‘fun’ (as this paper by one of my supervisors, Jan Packer, demonstrates). Drawing from visitors’ descriptions and reflections on their experiences in museums and other free choice learning settings, the paper describes five key aspects of learning for ‘fun’ in museums:
- Learning for fun encompasses a mixture of discovery, exploration, mental stimulation and excitement.
- The majority of visitors to educational leisure settings consider learning to be, more than anything else, enjoyable.
- Although most visitors don’t come with a deliberate intention to learn, they do seek or are unconsciously drawn into an experience that incorporates learning.
- Visitors identify four conditions (a sense of discovery or fascination; appeal to multiple senses; a sense that the learning happens ‘effortlessly’; availability of choice in the experience) that together are conducive to the learning for fun experience.
- Visitors value learning for fun because it is a potentially transformative experience (i.e. it helps people see the world in new ways and appreciate things differently).
Looking at this paper, I think it starts to nail what my problem with the “making xxx FUN!” schtick is. It betrays a lack of confidence in our material, as well as an underestimation of our audiences. It assumes people will only want to engage with the watered-down and sugared-up version of what we have to offer. Yes we need to find ‘hooks’ with which to engage our audience, but this doesn’t necessarily require ‘dumbing down’ (another horrible term!) or sensationalism.
Which brings me to another rather nasty neologism from the museums and science centres world: ‘edutainment’. Several years ago, it was not uncommon to go to a conference presentation where the words ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’ were put at opposite ends of a spectrum. ‘Education’ was serious, worthy-but-dull stuff; the ‘bitter pill’ which needed sugarcoating by mixing in some whizz-bang, nonchallenging ‘entertainment’. But, as the research shows, Education and Entertainment are not polar opposites!
Entertainment is another word that we need to be careful of, however: it’s not a word that visitors often spontaneously offer up to describe their experience. I’ve read other research (not all of it published) which shows that ‘enjoyment’ is a word that comes up more often.
Either way, when you look at visitor learning in the museum as a function of their stated motivation for visiting, both ‘entertainment’ and ‘education’ motivations are good indicators of learning. That is, those that say they come for enjoyment are just as likely to learn something as those that say they’ve specifically come to learn (e.g.Falk et al, 1998).
So people might come to the museum as some gentle exercise for the mind, considering it an enjoyable way of spending their leisure time, in a similar way that a walk along the waterfront is an enjoyable way to get some exercise for the body. They may not even consider it learning, especially if they define ‘learning’ in terms of being drilled and tested as in formal education. But from a museum’s point of view, learning is exactly what it is.
Yet another reason we need to mind our language.
References:
Falk, J., Moussouri, T. and Coulson, D. (1998) The Effect of Visitors’ Agendas on Museum Learning. Curator, vol 41, no 2, 106-120.
Packer, J (2006). Learning for Fun: The Unique Contribution of Educational Leisure Experiences. Curator vol 49 Issue 3, 329-344