Designing for Youth, Designing for Empathy in the AAA's World on the Move

Abstract

For the past 15 years, the AAA has undertaken Public Education Initiatives, tackling timely topics through the lens of science, history, and lived experience. Our new initiative, World on the Move: 250, 000 Years of Human Migration, seeks to expand and enrich the conversation about migration by engaging the public in their own communities, libraries. Libraries provide access to a different and more diverse audience than museums, it also offers the opportunity for us to connect with middle and high school-aged youth, who are after-school fixtures in many public libraries. Creating pedagogical objectives for youth library patrons, we cannot expect the type of engagement that happens in the classroom. As one of our content reviewers, a museum educator turned middle school teacher, reminded us: “Unless they are led by the teacher with a specific learning objective … they are not ‘students.’ They’re just teens in the museum, and we should respect them as such.” Instead, we are “designing for empathy” (Gokcigdem 2016), creating materials and facilitating conversations that nudge visitors toward a more compassionate worldview. This presentation will outline specific plans, from exhibit content modules that tell migration stories to interactive features that elicit visitors’ stories, community conversation guidelines that encourage deeper thinking, and web-based materials that reach beyond the physical exhibit. We invite attendees to our talkback session to learn about bringing World on the Move to their communities. This Virtual Poster will be hosting a talk back event on November 9th from 1:30 - 2:00 PM, Eastern Time. Please browse the Talk Back section in the left side navigation to find this podcast's title and then follow the link to the live event at the indicated time.