Practitioner-Driven Synthesis of Museum Family Learning Conversations Research

The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), in partnership with the University of Minnesota (UMN) and Bakken Museum, is conducting a Practitioner-Driven Synthesis of Museum Family Learning Conversations (FLC) Research. The project team, which includes researchers, librarians, museum educators, and experience designers, aims to bridge research and practitioner knowledges to produce bidirectional insights for the future of museum design and museum-based learning research. The research involves gathering, scoping, and synthesizing 25 years of research and evaluation on Family Learning Conversations conducted in museum settings, and formally incorporating practitioner-generated knowledge to spark the next generation of design and research on family learning in museums. This project is structured differently than a traditional synthesis in order to achieve the broadest impacts. Museum practitioners drive the synthesis, contributing their own practice-based knowledge, questions, and critical commentary to each part of the synthesis work. For practitioners, literature syntheses that identify how their existing ideas relate to research findings provide ecologically grounded and accessible insights for design. For researchers, understanding how practitioners identify learning or valuable interactions distinct from what has been valued in FLC research historically provides fertile ground for innovation in research methods and research questions. By bringing researchers with expertise in informal learning, video-based discourse analysis, and evidence synthesis into collaboration with museum educators, designers, and evaluators from institutions of varying size and emphases, the project is synthesizing research knowledge and practice knowledge that is fundamentally practitioner-driven, making knowledge in informal learning research more accessible to practitioners, and generating new questions and insights for further practical and research development.

This work contributes directly to advancing knowledge through synthesis of 25 years of museum Family Learning Conversations research in direct response to museum practitioners, while attending to how shifting values in museum education have shaped prior research and require new directions for future work. Using both rigorous literature synthesis processes and ongoing collaborative partnership with a cohort of museum educators, designers, and evaluators, the project is reactivating this literature and research approach, providing practical guidance for research design based in intertwined research and practitioner knowledges and charting a new vision forward for museum family learning research. The work involves first describing the existing knowledge of research and practitioners regarding design for FLC and then generating a focused mixed methods meta-synthesis on a practitioner-prioritized line-of-research. The project team is also engaging in a critical reflection on research methods used in FLC research and identifying underlying values shaping current knowledge and new avenues of investigation to further knowledge generation. Through targeted dissemination to museum practitioner and museum family learning researchers, the project aims to create bi-directional learning and to make the wealth of FLC research more accessible and interpretable through a rigorous synthesis that centers the values and priorities of museum practitioners at every stage of the work.