Something Different: A pilot study evaluating family outreach ...

The Case
Something Different - Page 6 of 47
This pilot evaluation research study was designed 1 to assess the impact of a recurring
outreach activity that brings young and disadvantaged mothers into the Fitzwilliam Museum
with their children. The aim of these family outreach visits is to introduce the mothers to the
museum, enhance their engagement with the arts and give them experience gaining
confidence in an otherwise unfamiliar setting. The approach taken by the education officer
leading this outreach activity was to invite attendance from a group of young mothers who
attend short child play sessions at a local community centre located in the south of
Cambridge. Specifically, a gatekeeper at the community centre invited mothers attending the
play session in the week before the scheduled Fitzwilliam family outreach visit; the mothers
generally had to find their own mode of transportation to get to the Fitzwilliam Museum on
the day of the visit.
The outreach visit was comprised of the following three elements (lasting a total of
about two hours).
1. Arrival and greeting (approx. 15 minutes). The mothers did not arrive all at once, but
rather came in ones and twos with their children. They were ushered through the
reception area and into the studio / workshop room downstairs, where they were
offered tea and biscuits.
Figure 1: Mothers offered tea on arrival and begin completing questionnaires (9.2.10)
1 The author gratefully acknowledges the integral role of Dr Kate Noble at the Fitzwilliam Museum in
supporting the design and implementation of this study and Emily Barton at Romsey Mill for assisting in the
data collection process, as well as Education Assistants Rob Law and Alison Ayres for their support during the
data collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Finally, Dr Brady Wagoner, Associate Professor of Psychology at
Aalborg University, helped conduct the data collection (ethnographic and interviews) on the days of the visits to
the Fitzwilliam Museum. He would also like to thank Gill Hart and others at the Fitzwilliam Museum for their
helpful comments on an earlier draft of this report.