The Transformational Power of Children's Museums: True or False

FAIN: GA-255823-17

Association of Children's Museums (Arlington, VA 22202-4015)
Laura Huerta Migus (Project Director: December 2016 to November 2017)

The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) is pleased to submit a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities requesting a Chairman’s Grant of $30,000 to support the Transformational Power of Children' Museums: True or False project. This project will enable ACM to work with scholars to gather and analyze data on the development of the children's museum field during the last 25 years. This period was a time of great change in the children’s museum field, encompassing the “museum boom” that saw more than 140 children’s museums founded (with the majority of those in the 1990s) as well as increasing organizational maturity of those organizations. At the same time, there were significant changes in the understanding of children's development, changes to the larger cultural landscape, as well as changes in the understanding of childhood.
Through this effort, ACM will gather data from a select group of senior knowledge-holders in our community to better understand the intersections of large scale social change and the growth of the children's museum field. The project will culminate in a Children’s Museum History & Culture Summit in May 2017 in Pasadena, CA, in conjunction with the Association’s annual InterActivity meeting. The goal of this meeting is to bring knowledge groups from the scholarly and children’s museum fields together so that they can begin to learn from one another. The Association will invite thirty people to attend the Summit, including five academics, twenty children’s museum staff, and five staff and stakeholders from the Association. Following the summit, ACM will document and maintain the data collected prior to and during the data and make it available to both current children’s museum staff and academics.