Introduction to the study

Transcription

1 1 How the museum became a children s place: a consideration of space, movement and agency in ethnographic research Abigail Hackett, University of Sheffield This paper is based on ethnographic research with two and three year old children, and their parents in museums. My research question was How do families with young children make meaning in a museum? I was interested in the ways in which young children and their parents have a social and a learning experience in the museum, and the ways in which they appropriated the museum space for their own purposes. Following the aims of this conference, I will focus my discussion on the role of space as a political and socially dynamic component of the children s experience in the museum. In addition, I argue for the significance of a long term, ethnographic methodology to my growing understandings about the meaning the children attached to and produced for the museum space during a series of visits. Throughout my research, my aim was for the children s perspectives of the museum place, and the meaning they attached to it, to take primacy over the abstract concept of the museum space, and adult led conceptions of the meaning of the museum. I argue for the need to acknowledge the social competence and agency of young children to create their own emplaced cultural ways of being, and their own socially situated versions of place. In this paper, I will present an analytic model along with examples from my dataset which show how micro incidents of children s walking, running, dancing and bouncing in the museum took on significance over time, as they were repeated and adapted over a number of visits. In this way, the children were able to construct their own version of the museum place, a social product. Three themes run through the analytic model I will present, and are key to the meaning the young children made in the museum; firstly their experience of the museum was a sensory and emplaced one, which created embodied ways of knowing and understanding the space. Secondly, the research reveals the social competence of the children, even as young as two years old, to develop their own methods for appropriating the museum for their own purposes, the examples of the action in the museum I will present are very much child led responses to the place. Thirdly, I draw on Soja s (2004) argument that space, time and sociality act as a triad, each playing an equal role in the construction of experience. I apply this thinking to my data and demonstrate the inseparability of these time, space and social context to the children s production of museum place.

2 2 Introduction to the study The focus of the ethnographic study was a series of monthly visits to two local museums, over the course of 9 months. Eight families were involved in the research. I took part in all the visits as a participant observer, usually with my own two year old daughter with me. The data collected included fieldnotes, video footage, audio interviews with parents and video interviews with the children. I will give more detail about my data collection methods below, when I discuss the methodological implications of placing children s perspectives and embodied, emplaced experience as central to my research question. The children in the study were all two and three year olds, and made visits one of two local museums, nearest to where they lived. All mothers participated in the museum visits, and half the fathers were also involved in the museum visits. Some of the fathers who did not participate in the museum visits took part in the parental interviews. I recruited families through personal contacts and friendships, and more by accident than design, the families spanned a very broad socio economic range. During the study period, from April 2011 until December 2011, I made roughly monthly visits with the families to the museums. In total, I visited Park Museum 12 times, with a total of 5 families. I visited House Museum 8 times, with a total of 3 families. The visits usually included as many of the families as could make the visit on that day, and the local families all knew each other prior to the research. Space as socially constructed In this section I will give an overview of three key areas of literature which have influenced my thinking; founding theories of space as political and socially dynamic, research that has specifically focussed on children s experiences of place, and thinking that centres of walking and movement. The work of Lefebvre (1991) laid foundations for a generation of research which places space as equal to time and sociality in a triadic relationship through which human experience is generated. Scholarly focus on space has been termed by Soja as the spatial turn (2004: ref). Key aspects of the spatial turn are acknowledgment that space is socially produced and constructed, it is related to politics and power, and is therefore an event or a process rather than a fixed entity, open to change and flux and constantly remade (Massey, 2005, Fog Olwin and Gullov, 2003, Leander and Sheehy,

3 3 2004, Lefebvre, 1991, Soja, 2004). Lefebvre argued that (social) space is a (social) product (1991: 26), therefore it is subjective and takes on a reality of its own. In other words, sociality and spaciality are mutually constitutive and this socio-spatial dialetic, as I have called it, develops in space and time as intertwined histories and geographies, as geohistory. Putting space first is thus not a rejection of historical or social analysis but incorporation of them in a balanced three-sided relation of the social, the historical and the spatial. Soja, 2004: xiv Following Lefebvre (1991) and Soja (2004), Leander and Sheehy (2004) apply this thinking directly to the study of literacy, by arguing that when we use words, we are always situating ourselves (ibid: 3). Leander and Sheehy s arguments that place is constructed through literacy practices is of relevance to my study, because of my focus on the voice and the communicative practices of the young children, which I see as an extension to concepts of literacies. While the spatial turn in general argues for a link between social action and space, the work of Leander and Sheehy (2004) traces the specifics of the relationship between communicative practices and space / place. Lefebvre s (1991) work also emphasises the sensory and the experiential, and he sets space up in opposition to texts and writing systems, which he argues should not dominate our thinking about the nature of knowing about the world. Sarah Pink s (2009) work on sensory ethnography can also be seen to follow this line of thinking, as she emphasises the sensory and embodied nature of human experience, which she argues has deep implications for the methodologies researchers use to understand the lived experiences of others. Through her concept of emplaced experience, Pink stresses the role of the whole body in perceiving the environment, and the inseparability of the body from its environment; the act of the body being in a place. An embodied and multisensorial way of knowing that is inextricable from our sensorial and material engagement with the environment and is, as such, an emplaced knowing Pink, 2009: 35

4 4 This emphasis on sensory knowing has been embraced by researchers who are concerned with the experiences of children, and with how they perceive and make meaning in their world (Christensen and O'Brien, 2003, Fog Olwin and Gullov, 2003). Just as Soja (2004) emphasises the potential for a focus on spatiality to challenge accepted understandings of society, Fog Olwin and Gullov (2003) argue for an emphasis on places constructed by children, rather than those assigned to them by adults, as a way of challenging the social marginalization of children. This can be achieved by an emphasis on the embodied, lived experience of place for children and the meaning which children attribute to the places they use and spend time in (Christenson, 2003, Hallden, 2003). Christenson (2003) argues for the importance of paying attention to children s concrete experience of place and the understanding that emerges from embodied movement through place (Christenson, 2003: 16). She emphasises the concept of emplaced knowledge (the way in which children attribute meanings and memories to their familiar places) and argues that it should not be considered secondary to spatial knowledge (abstract, formal). Rasmussen and Smidt (2003) examine children s phemenological experience of being in a place, leading to an understanding of place which goes beyond words. The creation of meaning is basically a physical manifestation. Knowledge about the neighborhood is therefore not always expressed in verbal language, but is rather expressed through a physical 'know-how', for instance about how to scale a tall fence or specific manner a climbing a certain tree. Rasmussen and Smidt, 2003: 88 Through this concept, the emphasis is firmly on the close inter relation between familiar place and the child, and two way relationship in which children are in the neighbourhood, but also the neighbourhood in children; the neighbourhood is perceived through all the children's senses and becomes part of the child's being and knowing. Within anthropology, Ingold (2007, 2008) also emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between the body and the environment that body is situated in. He refers to entanglement, the act of the body moving through a place, where there are no clear boundaries between the body and the environment, with each impacting on and changing the other. Ingold places emphasis on movement in particular, stressing the importance of moving or way faring through a place in order to

5 5 experience it. For Ingold, place is conceptualized not as dots or boundaries on a map, but as locations were many lives come together and are concentrated in a mesh. Thus the knowledge we have of our surroundings is forged in the very course of our moving through them, in the passage from place to place and the changing horizons along the way Ingold, 2007: 88 Writers from diverse disciplines have explored the role of space and place in human experience, and some common threads can be identified from their thinking. Firstly there is an emphasis on the body, sensory perception, embodied action and non verbal forms of communicating and knowing, and this is sometimes set up in opposition to spoken communication and written language. The suggestion is that the way people experience space is beyond cognition and language (Leander and Sheehy, 2004, Lefebvre, 1991). In addition, the connection between the body and the environment is so close that it at times becomes blurred (Ingold, 2007, Rasmussen and Smidt, 2003). Secondly, the close relationship between space and sociality is stressed, building on Lefebvre s description of space as a social product (1991: 26), space can be produced by the actions of individuals, constructed by literary practices (Leaner and Sheehy, 2004), and therefore is multiple, with different versions of space created and understood by different groups and individuals. Lastly, it is proposed that spatial perspectives of lived experience has potential to offer new forms of understanding, to disrupt accepted truths (Soja, 2004), and give voice to the marginalised (Christenson, 2003, Fog Olwin and Gullov, 2003). Children as social actors in their own right: methodological implications By focussing on children s cultural worlds as valid and worthy of study in their own right, I draw on the perspectives of the new sociology of childhood (Christenson and James, 2008, James and Prout, 1997). Christenson and James conceive of children as central informants in their own lifeworlds and social actors in their own right (Christenson and James, 2008: 1), whose actions play a role in shaping the structures around them. This theoretical perspective also has methodological implications, in that in order to enable two and three year old children to be the central research informants, I needed to think through carefully methods which would enable their (in many cases, non verbal) voices to be heard. I needed to find research methods which resonated with my young participants. In addition, the focus on embodied, emplaced experience arose largely from my focus

6 6 on the perspectives and experiences of the children. Their experience of the museum seemed to be largely embodied, and their communicative practices mainly non vocalised. The overriding activity for the children in the museum was moving through the space, walking and running to see what they could find, to make loops around the galleries, and to engage their friends. This focus on walking and running in itself presented a methodological challenge, as I strove to record fast moving action, complex multimodal communication, and ephemeral meaning making. An ethnographic approach enabled me to place an emphasis on what the children did, rather than what they said. This approach worked well because the children did much more than they said, fitting with my aim of recognising young children s voice, and participant observation did indeed seem to be a method which resonated with my participants. In addition, perspectives of multimodality (Kress, 1997, Flewitt, 2008) were useful in recognising the communication of young children through gesture, gaze and other bodily movements. I captured much of the action in the museum on video camera, which enabled me to carry out fine grained analysis and multimodal transcription after the visits (Flewitt et al, 2009). The biggest challenge of making the video recordings was the fast speed at which the children moved, and the unpredictability of what they did. I have many video recordings of children running off shot! I came to view the children s running and walking around very much as a communicative practice, worthy of study in its own right. I developed an approach to multimodal transcription to record how the children moved around the galleries and through the space, and in addition, I created line drawing walking maps, in which I transcribed the paths the children created with their feet around the museum from video recordings into the mode of drawing. I provide examples of both my multimodal transcription and walking maps in the examples I will present below. Introducing my analytic frame: children s communicative practices and cultural worlds In the analysis of my data, I wanted to think about the intricate details of movement and other communicative practices of the children in the museum, and pay attention to their nuances. I also felt that over a number of visits to the same museum, the children had developed specific places they liked to go, sometimes in a specific order, and specific things they like to do when they got there. This repetition over time was important, and gave many of the practices of the children their power and significance. The model below presents a frame for thinking about the situated meaning making of children in the museum. The diagram shows how my analysis moves from the micro

7 7 analysis of multimodal communicative practices to an understanding of the development of the children s cultural worlds, a process which took place over time, and was situated in the museum space. I argue that key defining features of this were the children s sensory embodied perception of the museum place, and their moving through that place, which Ingold (2007) describes as way faring. Being in and perceiving a place, and making one s way through it, as an act of place making (ibid); the multimodal communicative practices which the children developed over time evolved into cultural practices through which the children made a version of place, with a distinct set of meanings and associations. In this way, we begin to gain an insight into these children s own version of museum place. placemaking, wayfaring, perceiving children's cultural worlds multimodal communicative practices "Perception is fundamentally about movement" (Ingold) Wayfaring, in short, is neither placeless nor place-bound but place making. Ingold) ritual and meaning time, memory and imagination seperate from the adult's cultural world situated sensory embodied experimental Multimodal communicative practices A focus on the multimodal communicative practices of the children is a key way in which I gain an insight into their perspectives in the museum. However, focussing on multimodality from a sensory ethnographic perspective has given me insight into the way in which the multimodal communicative practices of the children are primarily sensory, embodied and a situated response to the environment the children encounter. The children move their bodies in order to experience different sensory sensations in a specific place (i.e. situated). This is a way of experimenting with the

8 8 potentials for meaning making in the museum. In addition, it means that the creative experimentation with potential often becomes a collaborative act the children work together, through their bodies not words, to develop new forms of multimodal communicative practice that make sense in that place. Therefore, I am drawing on Finnegan s (2002) understanding of communication, and also Pink s (2009) emphasis on sensory experience, and applying these to my thinking about multimodal communication. Finnegan (2002) presents a broad view of communication as being about people interconnecting, through resources of the body, artefacts and the environment. Emphasising the creative and experimental nature of communication, she argues for A view of communication that that is not confined to linguistic or cognitive messages but also includes experience, emotion and the unspoken. Finnegan, 2002: 5 Example from the dataset: dancing in the art gallery In the following example, from the first visit I made with the families to Park Museum, I illustrate the way in which movement is central to the children s communicative practices. In addition, I argue that this communication forms the development of an emplaced knowledge (Pink, 2009), directly referencing and relying on the immediate environment of the gallery, and in addition, is a creative experimentation concerned with embodied sensations and emotional connections with others (Finnegan, 2002). The action takes place in the art gallery at Park Museum, a large bright airy space, with walls lined with various painting of different topics and styles. Comfortable padded benches run down the middle of the room. Beneath the paintings, on a fairly high desk, are a range of interactive activities which explore colour, texture and shape, such a coloured wheels to spin and textured shapes to rub with crayons. There are also some flaps which can be lifted to read information about some of the art works. There are two buttons on opposite walls which play music when pressed. The music they play is inspired by the painting they are positioned under, and fills the gallery for several minutes. At one end of the gallery, curved padded benches are arranged in a circle around a table filled with jigsaws, paper and pencils.

9 9 The art gallery at Park Museum Millie and Bryan, both aged two years, discovered the button in the art gallery during the first research visit to the museum, in June During this first incident, Millie s mum pressed the button to start the music, and Mille and Bryan danced to the music. When the music stopped, Millie pressed the button to start the music again, and the children danced. After observing Millie, Bryan also pressed the button to start the music, so that the two children could dance. The following extract from my fieldnotes gives my description of this episode. Fieldnotes 16 th June Music starts Tina (Millie s mum) has pressed the button under the picture of The Butler, which starts French restaurant music which is supposedly inspired by the picture. Millie immediately runs into the middle of the room and begins to dance, spinning around, waving her arms in the air, big smile, running in circles. Bryan returns from the natural history gallery with his mum, and joins in the dancing jumping up and down and doing moves that look like break dancing on the floor. When the music stops, Millie runs and presses the button so the music starts again. They both dance. As the music comes to an end for the second time, Millie stands near the button, waiting for it to stop so she can press it and start the music. In addition, some of the action of this episode was captured on video camera by Clare, Bryan s mum. The fieldnotes and video are interesting in themselves because they show how the two mediums of fieldnotes and video captured different understandings of what happened. Although my fieldnotes gives an overview, whereas Clare and Bryan only arrived with their video camera half way through, I

10 10 did not notice Bryan learning to press the button from Millie in the fieldnotes, this was captured on video. INSERT VIDEO While both the fieldnotes and the video capture only partial perspectives on the episode, they together reveal that a great deal of observation, imitation and communication took place between Millie and Bryan during the episode, both in passing on factual knowledge about the button that started the music, and embodied, emplaced ideas about how to dance to it. 1) Creative, collaborative experimentation Both Millie and Bryan had their own embodied response to the music which they heard filling the gallery space, which presumably referenced other things from their life experiences. For example, Millie s dancing with floaty arms is quite balletic, whereas Bryan s postures on the floor with legs up in the air is evocative of breakdancing. The table below summarises the range of different types of embodied movement Bryan and Millie used when they danced. Bryan Running in a circle Jumping and spinning Bending over with hands on the floor, legs in the air Jumping up and down Swinging arms Running with arms outstretched Millie Walking a wavy line across the floor Waving arms up into the air Moving both hands in a circular motion in front of her body Walking in a circle Holding hands up in front of her Spinning on the spot The music that Bryan and Millie heard when they pressed the button was French accordion music, which has its roots in classical dance music. Therefore, although the intention of the museum was for people to listen to the music and look at the painting, Bryan and Millie bypassed this intention; they instead identified the original purpose of the music; to dance. Millie in particular, fits her style of dancing to the music she can hear; the music is elegant, repetitive, and therefore has a circular quality, which I think is reflected in the style of dancing Millie chooses to enact.

11 11 2) Showing, swapping and the mutual gaze Despite the differences in the style of dancing the two children chose, the dancing was intensely communicative act between Millie and Bryan; each child reflected the other s use of space and choice of movements, and encouraging the other to continue dancing. Fine grained multimodal transcription was the key for me to identify the nuances of the communication and collaboration which took place between Millie and Bryan during this episode. I transcribed the whole video on a second by second basis, using the following categories for multimodal communication; vocalisation, expression and gaze, gesture and body movement, moving through space. The below image shows a sample from this transcription. When Bryan enters the art gallery, his gaze is immediately to Millie, and he begins to dance because he perceives her already dancing, and the music playing. The children do not dance with each other, or right next to each other, but they make contact with each other at key moments; at 10.17, Bryan runs past Millie, arms held high in front like superman, while keeping eye contact with Millie as he passes. Although each child has their own range of dance movements, there is a point at when the two children swap dance moves; Bryan floats his arms into the air and Millie spins and jumps.

12 12 Bryan learns about how the press the button to start the music from Millie. There are specific points in the multimodal transcription when we can see the process of this learning taking place. At 10.27, Bryan runs after Millie and stands nearby her in order to observe her pressing the button. He stands still after this, looking at the button which starts the music. It is quite a bit later, at that Bryan returns to look at the button. There seems to be a nervousness or unsureness at this point, as he drags his mum by the arm to come with him to the button, a behaviour Bryan often exhibits when something is unfamiliar or new in the museum. It is only at 12.48, when the music has stopped and his mum has encouraged him that Bryan finally runs over to press the button. The act of creating the multimodal transcription enabled me to trace the nuances of the communication and experimentation which took place between Bryan and Millie. Although they say nothing to each other, adopt generally different dance moves, and do not necessarily dance near to each other, the dancing is still very much a social act. In addition, however, the social work of Millie and Bryan experiments with, and is inspired by, the sensory qualities of the place they are in. Therefore, I argue, the embodied response of Bryan and Millie is emplaced and situated. 3) An emplaced response: filling the space Bryan and Millie s use of space also seems important to the communicative act they are performing in this example. The focus is not on dancing close to each other, on dancing with each other as a pair, or on strictly copying each other. Instead the intention seems to be on collaborating to fill the space of the art gallery as fully as possible with both the music of their choice and their embodied response to the music. For example, the walking map below shows the way in which Millie fills the space during just 30 seconds of dancing half way through the video recording. The walking map does not capture many things, such as the way in which she moved both slowly and quickly at times, and moved her arms intricately during the dance, but it does show the way in which she worked to fill the space available quite completely.

13 13 In this example, I have illustrated the sensory and embodied nature of the situated multimodal communicative practices of Millie and Bryan during a short period of time at one location in Park Museum. However, an important dimension to how the children used and attributed meaning to the art gallery place is the way in which their communicative practices were repeated and adapted over a number of subsequent visits, and taken up by all six children involved in the research visits, which I would now like to focus on. Children s cultural worlds I argued earlier that my research illustrates the social competence of two year old children to develop their own meaning within a location (the museum), and therefore produce their own version of place. Although we see this happening to a certain extent in the example above, where the two children work together to develop a child led response to the space and its sensory characteristics, it is over time that the sophistication and power of the children s place making is truly clear. These practices, which take on meaning and become almost ritualistic in the way in which the children intentionally repeat them every time they visit the museum, I call the development of children s cultural worlds. These cultural worlds are situated and ephemeral, the practices carry symbolic meaning mainly in the museum space, and often for relatively short periods of time. I argue that children s cultural worlds, ritualistic practices and ways of knowing about place are worthy of our attention in their own right. My analytic model presented above proposes a process whereby spontaneous moment by moment multimodal communicative practices of the children produce a children s cultural world. Symbolic

14 14 meaning develops from multimodal communicative practices which are powerfully experienced in a shared, sensory and embodied way by the children in the museum. These certain practices are then repeated over time, attached to a specific location, communicated with the other children or taught to each other. They are adapted, experimented with, evolved or rejected. These cultural practices carry their own cultural references, in that they do not necessarily need to follow adult logic or value systems, they may be influenced by adult actions or practices, but exist in their own right as a separate cultural tradition. Returning to the example I outlined above of Millie and Bryan dancing in the art gallery of Park Museum, it is important to note that this incident was not a one off occurrence. In a series of future visits, the six children involved in the research at Park Museum all returned to the art gallery at Park Museum and repeated actions similar to the ones I outlined earlier. They took it in turn to press the button, they danced together in response to the music. Knowledge about how to start the music playing by pressing the button was passed on between the children during the course of the visits, until they all knew about it and all chose to do this particular communicative, situated and cultural practice. In total, the children danced to the music in the art gallery on four visits, over a four month period, as the table below summarises.

15 15 June Millie and Bryan dance to the music, Mille and Bryan both press the button to start the music July Izzy, Millie and Millie s little sister Sienna dance to the music, Both Millie and Izzy press the button to start the music August Four children, Millie, Izzy, Bryan and Liam all dance together to the music, Izzy and Liam start the music Sept Izzy, Emily and James dance to the music, All three children press the button to start the music

16 16 The table below summaries when the children chose to go to the art gallery during the museum visits, and on which visits they played the music and danced. Date of visit Went to art gallery Played music Performed dancing June July August Sept 1 Sept 2 Oct 1 Oct 2 Nov 1 Nov 2 As this table shows, the cultural practice of pressing the button and dancing to the music was significant during the summer visits. By September, the children stopped pressing the button or dancing to the music, and around the same time, their interest in going to the art gallery at all waned. Dancing in the art gallery seems significant to my research because of the extent to which it was repeated and shared. It became normalised the thing we do when we go to the art gallery as one of the mums put it. This example I have presented is one of many I recorded during my research. The children established many child-led responses to the things they encountered in the museum, and many rituals or customary actions which they repeated every time they visited the museum. In this way, the museum ceased to be an abstract concept, an official ground plan, or a typical adult s concept of what a museum might be or be for. Instead, for the families involved in my research, the meaning of the museum place became a series of situated cultural practices; we move the sausages around in the butchers, we wear the headphones, we run under the tree, we bang the Inuit drum, we dance to the music in the art gallery. To an outside audience, these practices sound strange and obscure, but for a certain group of families who were involved in these visits, in a certain museum, during a certain summer last year, they carry great symbolic meaning, memories, and embodied sensations.

17 17 Place making and way faring in the museum My research sought to find out more about how families with young children make meaning in a museum. My findings show that the meaning created by the children in the museum was one of sensory, embodied knowing. Rather than learning facts or using spoken language to articulate learning in the museum, the most significant episodes during the museum visits were beyond words (Rasmussen and Smidt, 2003). They involved embodied practices, particularly running and dancing, and creative, spontaneous responses to the sounds, sights, spaces and sensations of the museum. Just as Rasmussen and Smidt described a physical 'know-how', for instance about how to scale a tall fence (2003: 88), the meaning the children made in the museum was embodied, such as the knowledge of the sorts of dance moves this piece of music makes you feel like doing, and the way in which you can fill the big wide space of the art gallery with music and movement. The way in which the children worked together to establish these activities as ritualistic, cultural practices which could be repeated over time and referenced on future visits, illustrates a social competence and cultural sophistication which I argue is rarely acknowledged in two year old children. While my original research question was about how families make meaning in a museum, the examples I have presented today show how the children led the experience, their ideas and their powerful cultural practices made the greatest impression on the meaning the families attached to the museum place. In terms of the meaning making of the two year old children in my study in the museum, concepts of space, time and social context have proved inseparable. Putting space first is thus not a rejection of historical or social analysis but incorporation of them in a balanced three-sided relation of the social, the historical and the spatial. Soja, 2004: xiv In the example I presented above, the communicative dancing practices initially developed by Millie and Bryan were a direct response to their emplaced experience of being in the art gallery, and the sensory characteristics of that location. In addition, for Millie and Bryan, each others presence in the art gallery was important to the meaning of the action; dancing was as much a social practice, about strengthening a friendship and having an experience of dancing together, as it was a response to the

18 18 museum place. As the dancing in the art gallery developed into a cultural tradition, it was a way for the children to confirm their friendships and their membership of the group; this is the thing we do in this place. Finally, time passing greatly increased the symbolic meaning of the dancing in the art gallery. On subsequent visits, the dancing in the art gallery referenced what had happened before; it was meaningful because the children had done it on previous visits, as much as it was meaningful because of it was an embodied response to the place. In this way, actions such as dancing in the art gallery take on a ritualistic aspect, the meaning and power comes from the way in which they refer to the previous time the children have spent in this place, and their growing familiarity with the museum. Lefebvre stated that (social) space is a (social) product (1991: 26), and in my research I have been interested in exploring this process of production, and in particular understanding the extent to which two year old children could themselves be the producers of social space. I argue that the children in the research employed concepts of space, time and sociality in order to construct their own version of the museum place. This was achieved largely through embodied action; movements such as walking, running, dancing and bouncing were key to their agency in this process. Ingold emphasized the power of moving through a place when he wrote Wayfaring, in short, is neither placeless nor place-bound but place making. (2007: 101). By way faring through the museum, the children made a version of the museum place. In my research, the social competence of the two year old children was accessed through walking, running and dancing as a communicative practice. This social competence was identified and highlighted by taking a research perspective which focused on production of space as a dynamic social entity. I considered embodied ways of knowing about place as being of value and worthy of attention. An ethnographic approach which adopted the perspectives of the children as primary, and allowed time for the children s meaning making to develop and be understood by the researcher, allowed the voices of the children to be heard. In this way, the research relates to social justice, as it seeks to address the marginalization of children s perspectives in society (Fog Olwin and Gullov, 2003), and also to value non verbal, non language based ways of knowing and communicating about place (Finnegan, 2002).

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