ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters in this book. The book talks about how young children experience the spaces of the museum. More specifically, it is about how young children experienced the space of this one particular museum. The book discusses an attempt to shift from an adult's-eye-view of children's museum visits – with all of the concerns and preoccupations that this implies – to a child's-eye-view. Scenes such as these – observed during the research in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History – will be familiar to anybody who has ever worked in a museum, or to anybody who has taken children on a museum visit. The approach to displaying objects in the museum is relatively traditional, consisting mainly of specimens taxonomically displayed in the glass cases or, for some larger objects, free-standing on plinths.
