Personal Meaning Making

Recent research acknowledges that visitors come to museums with their own agendas and construct their own meanings from a museum experience. Even in highly structured tours, regardless of tour goals, visitors' different expectations, previous museum experience and levels of perceptual skills mean that a museum experience is often personal and individual rather than standard and generic. As such, understanding the nature of personal learning and meaning making from a museum experience are important to museum educators because learning in museums is not just about what the museum intends to teach visitors, but also what the visitors choose to experience. Hence, the role of museum educators should be that of providing appropriate learning environments where visitors may explore, increase, and confirm their knowledge, because visitors will continue to create what meanings they can from their own educational encounters. In the future, it is suggested that successful museums must communicate effectively with visitors, and inherent in this communication is the museum staffs ability and willingness to be good listeners to make changes for visitors.