Kunst kindgerecht erklärt – eine Fallstudie zu museumspädagogischen Erklärvideos

As young visitors represent “the museum audience of the future”, museums should be particularly committed to engaging children in museum experiences pursuing a child-oriented approach to art communication and education. The analysis of museum communication from a linguistic perspective seems thus a promising way of exploring the target-group-specificity of museum educational resources explicitly designed for addressing young audiences. Explanatory videos featured on museum websites which present the museum itself or masterpieces of its collections are examples of digital tools employed by museums to introduce children to art and encouraging them to become devoted visitors. The paper presents the findings of a case study of a sample of German and Italian museum explanatory videos for primary school children, aiming at analyzing the linguistic and multimodal strategies used by museums in order to transfer knowledge about art, artists and exhibitions in a child-centered explanatory style. Of particular interest in this context is the question of whether and to what extent these videos encourage a participatory, play-based access to art or enable an experience-oriented approach to art-related contents, as advocated by current trends in museum communication and education.