Museum Literacies And Adolescents Using Multiple Forms Of Texts "on Their Own"

By Author: Amandda
Total Articles: 59
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Museums display and represent cultures, and they allow visitors to read objects, such as printed texts, images, and three-dimensional artifacts, and to make meaning about their worlds through language and other communicative forms (c.f. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Giroux, 1992; Hooper-Greenhill, 1999). These diverse practices comprise museum literacies. Museums serve, among others, students on field trips as well as adolescents touring exhibits casually on their own. The purposes of this article are to situate museums in current literacy education practices and Tag Heuer Replica perspectives, to show how the adolescents in this study used and resisted museum literacies, to explore why adolescent museum practices might be important for educators to examine, and to offer teachers instructional possibilities and resources about museum literacies.

1. Literacies of Adolescents on Their Own in a Museum
The data reported in this article were drawn from an eight-month qualitative investigation of how museum texts were designed and constructed and how ...
... participants in school and in out-of-school groups transformed, accommodated, and resisted museum texts, broadly defined to include printed texts, images, other objects, and spaces (Eakle, 2005). Although some data collected during the larger study related to traditional teaching and learning, this article focuses on how adolescents used museum texts for their own purposes, a salient issue in adolescent literacy research (e.g., Alvermann, 2001; Guzzetti & Gamboa, 2004; Lewis & Fabos, 2005), and on their own, that is, with limited adult supervision and direction.

2. Method
The general methods of the larger investigation are briefly described in this section. For further details on method see Eakle (2007).

3. Setting and Participants.
The study took place in Marthasville, an urban center in the southern United States, and involved three museums. The museums were selected based on their diverse collections and common missions of education. The Bedford Museum, which displays archaeological artifacts from the Americas, Greece, and Africa and is part of a large academic institution, is highlighted in this article. Principal participants in the study were adolescents in school groups and adolescents outside of school time. All participant groups toured the Bedford and viewed the same content but at different times during the data collection period. The tour lengths ranged between 90 minutes and 2 hours. This article focuses on six adolescents in three out-of-school groups and two adolescents in a school group who struck out on their own during a museum field trip.

4. Tools and Analyses.
I used ethnographic tools and qualitative methods in collecting data, which involved (a) participant observation recorded in field notes and audiotape, (b) individual interviews, and (c) artifacts. I conducted observations Tag Heuer Replica Watches in museums two to three times per week for between two and six hours per observational session for eight months. For this article, data were chiefly derived from audiotape recordings of adolescents as they toured the Bedford. This article addresses literacy elements typically identified as part of four literacy resources or practices: decoding, understanding, using, and critiquing texts (Luke & Freebody, 1999) and focuses on how participants used various forms of museum texts.