Elee Kirk
Through a Low-Down Lens: Young Children’s Perspectives of a Natural History Museum
Filled with dinosaurs and stuffed animals, natural history museums are generally agreed to be ideal places for young children to visit.
As a discipline, Museum Studies carries out research with visitors to understand the relationship between the museum and those who visit them, but research with children under the age of six is challenging.
This study presents a project in which young children’s digital photography was used as a research method for gaining their own views of the museum, laying out some of the reasons for the particular success of this method.
In addition, using some of the delightful photographs taken by the young participants (from terrifying tyrannosaurus teeth to a tiny seed pod) the study illustrates a number of the research findings and suggests how these could be significant to museums and researchers in the future.
Elee will be presenting her work at the Festival of Postgraduate Research 17th May 2012 - view Elee's festival poster.
