Leisure
- Leisure becoming more central in last 10-30 years
- Leisure is connected to identity: pursue leisure to construct, situate, realize identity
- Satisfaction with leisure depends on the activity meeting expectations/motivations: not about "what" people do but "why" they do it. The success of the leisure activity depends on fulfilling the "why". This was defined as the "experiential approach" by Driver and Tocher. Driver defined 15 major motivational categories to describe why people engage in recreational activities
Research on Museum Motivations
- Describes several different studies
- Different motivations correspond to different learning outcomes
Learning in Museums
- For visitors museums are, at their core, places of leisure learning
- Learning in museums is about intrinsic identity building, not extrinsic performance goals
- We don't have good tools for measuring learning when learning is about identity rather than performance.
Identity-related visit motivations
1. Explorer
2. Facilitator
3. Experience seeker
4. Professional/Hobbyist
5. Recharger
- Visit motivations probably include a mix of these (not strictly pure)
- Education/learning is implicit in all 5 categories
My thoughts
- I like the 5 categories of identity-related visit motivations. I'm not sure I understand why this categorization is superior to other categorizations.
- I find 2 ideas in this chapter very compelling:
- 1. Learning is an inherent part of the museum experience. People go to museums expecting to learn something. Like people go to a restaurant expected to get full. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to make "Education" or "Learning" a motivation in and of itself.
- Lack of good tools for measuring learning when learning is about identity rather than performance.
- How do you measure the identity-learning that occurs when someone already knows something, but the museum learning experience validates what they learned?
- Or, how do you measure identity-learning when someone comes out of a museum feeling like they are more of a curious person (identify) but don't perform better on a pre- post- set of factual questions?