Curating the Story Museum: A Resource for Educators

Project Description


Children's story or book museums are distinctive venues for critical engagement with representations of childhood and childhood texts. Our research examines the children's story museum as a dynamic transmedia platform participatory exhibits and critical dialogue. Story museums are new additions to the children's museum field and as such relatively little research has engaged with these sites.


While many museum exhibits idealize childhoods, transmedia engagements have significant potential for critical and subversive dialogue with these constructions. Framed by participatory and activist museum movements, towards 'queering the museum' and 'decolonizing the museum', our project focused on the negotiation of youth citizenship through emerging technologies in museums.


We query how current children's museum exhibits focused on childhood texts and cultures present opportunities to negotiate, subvert, and/or reaffirm cultural discourses of childhood, nationalism, gender, race, sexuality, and ability. The research aims to harness the potential of transmedia storytelling with the invitation for critical dialogue with childhood discourses across media. While museum education has employed interactive media for visitor engagement, the inclusion of digital storytelling and transmedia practices for critical dialogue and intervention is relatively new.

Drawing upon theoretical and methodological frames from museum studies and the field of children's media cultures, our project was designed to invite children to engage as collaborative curators in the transmedia design of a story museum exhibit using local archival collections including those from the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, and Toronto Metropolitan University's Children's Literature Archive, alongside the children's own stories and imagined narratives.

Our research pivoted with COVID-19, and this e-book highlights our engagement activities with young curators, work from our research assistants, and our publications. We gratefully acknowledge all our collaborators, and hope you will enjoy this e-book.

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