Early years, art learning, and museums: principles and practices

The 2019 Art in Early Childhood Education Conference at Victoria University was rich in presentations in the field of early years learning in cultural institutions. These all confirmed the ways in which learning visits to cultural institutions can offer enriching experiences for young learners. They celebrated the diversity of museum arts experiences, including engagements in learning and talking about art, learning between cultures, or sensory engagement and embodied aesthetic experience. The threads of these themes were drawn together in a conference panel discussion hosted by the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa). Panel members included Clare Britt, Martin Langdon, Amanda Palmer, Sarah Rusholme, and David Bell, authors of this article. Their discussions embraced institutional and community perspectives on areas of engagement and response, valuing, contributing, and understanding, funding, access and safety, inclusion and exclusion, communication and collaboration, and agency, empowerment and active participation. Their dialogues about arts learning in museums embraced both New Zealand and Australian perspectives, addressing a central question – of how best to cultivate museum and art experiences for early learners.