Encountering the ‘Other': Interpreting Student Experiences of a Multi-Sensory Museum Exhibition

The Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia launched the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours (IYMO) exhibition in 2011. Aimed primarily at young adults and secondary school students, this major long-term installation seeks to foster reflection on identity and belonging as well as dialogue about racism through a reflexive, empathetic and interactive museum experience. Drawing on findings from three secondary schools, this paper reflects on a multi-method approach that included narrative interviews, video diaries and focus groups with Year 11-12 students as well as key informant interviews with principals and teachers.

While focus groups were a catalyst for dialogue about everyday experiences with cultural diversity and racism, the ‘identity’ lens privileged in these groups could not account for the complexity of embodied experiences of belonging that were, to at least some extent, captured in narrative interviews and video diaries. For example, the narrative interviews allowed students to talk about themselves in relation to aspects of the exhibition rather than directing and framing their experience a priori, thus capturing a complex understanding of the students’ IYMO experience through an entanglement of their life worlds, at home and school.

Overall, the combination of qualitative methods revealed the ways in which an interactive and immersive museum space can support students to encounter and engage with individual stories and faces, move beyond an abstract tolerance of cultural diversity, unsettle the Self and destabilise stereotyped and prejudiced interpretations of ‘the Other’. We conclude by discussing the potential of multi-method qualitative approaches to draw upon students’ meaning-making, including the narrative barriers experienced in multilingual contexts, in order to provide a rich emic perspective on multi-sensory exhibitions.