ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about culture, context and creativity when teachers and young children visit treasured objects in museums. Shawn Rowe, James Wertsch and Tatyana Kosyaeva emphasise one feature of a creative response: “Linking Little Narratives to Big Ones” in history museums, and, in a very different context, indigenous Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand-Mason Durie describes a cultural ecosystem in which very small become “part of a wider context that gives them shape and meaning”. The chapter explores a few questions about the building of creative capacities, choosing museum visits as a rich context to explore how these educational encounters can, might and/or do become creative capacity-building sites; and explains how the combination of children, teachers and taonga/things in the museum worked together. It describes the notion that the children and the teachers were regarding the taonga/things “not as objects of regard but as animate things in their own right”.
