BY KIDS FOR EVERYONE: KIDS TAKEOVER DAY IN MUSEUMS

Program Reviews | Samantha Kilpatrick

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For this last edition of Program Reviews in 2018, I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to review a program I hadn't attended. In fact, I wanted to review a program that a museum didn't design. Who, then, is this interventionist? This invited artist or academic, will they treat these hallowed halls with respect?

The group of children taking over Lincon Castle, home of the Magna Carta for 2018 Kids Take Over day. Source.

How about school kids? Would you invite a team of children into your museum to lead tours, handle artefacts, and sell items in the shop? Would you invite them to design and lead programming of their own?

That's the premise of Takeover Day, an initiative now in its 8th year. Run by Kids In Museums, Takeover Day is a charity based in England which encourages and assists museums in being more family and child-friendly. On its face, the idea combines two of the most basic underlying ideas in museum engagement today:

First, "Nothing About Us Without Us": If your institution is creating an exhibition, programming or event focused on serving the needs of a particular community, you should at least consult with, if not collaborate with that community.

Second, families, school groups, and children are a massively important part of any museum's audience.

The logical conclusion, therefore, is that we should be consulting, collaborating, and generally involving children in our institutions. Not just as guests and visitors, but as designers as well.

Kids In Museums Takeover Day logo. Source. 

If we should be doing this, then what does it look like to have kids running a museum, even if only for a day? Well, you can ask the over 200 institutions who participated in 2017. (The data for 2018 isn't in just yet, given that it happened a scant week and a half ago as of the time this article was written). Kids In Museum's official case-study document even helpfully lists roles that kids in museums can fill, including, but not limited to:

     -Archivist
     -Front of house staff
     -Curator
     -Conservator
     -Cafe
     -Tour Guide
     -Social Media
     -Workshop Leader

Congratulations to pupils from Walthamstow’s Our Lady and St George Primary School, who gave guided tours of the Gallery today as part of #TakeoverDay. Well done all! pic.twitter.com/l5Ls0ilyO2

— WilliamMorrisGallery (@WMGallery) November 29, 2018

Ceding your social media to outside forces is not unknown, (heck, Honda let the Grinch take over their twitter account for a holiday promotion) and it's easy to imagine giving over some gallery space to a local school to display art and have them put on their own show.

But what about having a bunch of middle schoolers answer phone calls and emails on behalf of your institution that day? What about trusting them with the function of making and serving food?

But what about writing labels, or wall text? What about keeping that text up after Kids Takeover day is finished, without a tag that says it was written by kids?

What about putting a kid, or a teenager, on your board of directors, to ensure someone young has a say in where your museum is going for the next five, ten, twenty years?

This is what makes Takeover Day so fascinating to me as an initiative. It strikes right at the terror of museum authority. If we are institutions of the public, for the public, don't we need to involve the public in our decision making? And how, among all the communities we need to satisfy, do we do this with children?

I hope these questions are never fully answered. Our field is more complicated and wonderful for having to struggle to answer them. Kids Take Over is one fascinating, brilliant start to addressing these questions, and I look forward to seeing where it goes in years to come.