AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Engaging learners around climate change in ways that do not antagonize or dishearten is no simple task—one that museums have just begun to tackle. While many have argued that museums can and should be important sites of climate learning (e.g., Anderson & Williams, 2013; Cameron, 2012; Newell et al., 2016), empirical research is still comparatively nascent. Extant work has tended to focus on museum educators (e.g., Geiger et al., 2017), producing valuable knowledge on how to engage learners in productive conversations. Yet, research on exhibits is still quite emergent, at a time when it is critical to consider what specific exhibit elements lead to desired outcomes and what could inhibit such outcomes.

The Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) aims to advance the field by investigating visitor learning at an innovative climate change exhibit, A Climate of Hope, which opened in November 2023 after an intensive, research-based development process. By studying learning at A Climate of Hope—which offers a counternarrative to educational experiences that scare, polarize, and/or exclude—we work towards dismantling the current “spiral of silence” around climate change. Analyzing learners’ discourse and engagement with the exhibit, we seek to understand how design features, message framing, and interactivity of exhibit elements can shape visitors’ learning.

This session will provide an overview of the frames utilized in A Climate of Hope; how they differ from frames used in past exhibits about climate change; how we communicated the frames through interactives, images, and text; as well as what NHMU’s NSF-funded research is revealing about supporting productive learning about climate change among diverse learners in museum settings.