{"id":997,"date":"2026-03-16T09:19:24","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T09:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/makebelief.nl\/?p=997"},"modified":"2026-03-16T12:44:04","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T12:44:04","slug":"de-duif-de-bloem-en-de-sprekende-muur-participatie-voor-kinderen-in-het-joods-museum-junior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/makebelief.nl\/en\/2026\/03\/16\/de-duif-de-bloem-en-de-sprekende-muur-participatie-voor-kinderen-in-het-joods-museum-junior\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dove, the Flower, and the Talking Wall: Participation for Children in the Jewish Museum Junior"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aurelia Devrient
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Although, according to the information panels, I am in the house of the Hollander family, at first this space feels more like an art classroom: in the middle stands a colorful table with craft supplies, and at the back there is a counter with paint and brushes. The wall on the right is covered with colorful paper peace doves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When you step closer, you see the messages that visitors to the Jewish Museum Junior<\/a> <\/strong> have left through their peace doves. Although the instructions only explain how to craft a dove, most of the doves contain writing. The content varies: greetings from different countries, Hebrew words, or simply decorations without text. Although this installation is called the \u201cPeace Forest,\u201d not all of the doves carry a message about peace. Only a few doves contain specific reflections on peace: \u201cLove, hope and peace for the countries at war,\u201d \u201cEnd to Antisemitism in Holland,\u201d and finally a now familiar political symbol\u2014a dove with the text \u201cPeace Now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is just one of the many ways the Jewish Museum Junior uses participation, addressing both lighter and heavier themes. Various forms of participation fit into this: from pressing buttons, crafting, and watching videos to learning to write Hebrew, playing musical instruments, and baking Jewish food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we define participation as involving visitors with the subject, the Peace Forest may appear to be a somewhat less successful form of participation: many of the messages on the doves do not refer to peace. Or are the many different messages actually a sign that there are many different ways of participating? These questions make the Jewish Museum Junior an interesting case study for discussing the possibilities and challenges of what Nina Simon calls a participatory museum. To do so, I will first explain what a participatory museum entails, and then illustrate the possibilities and challenges of participation using the Peace Forest and two other installations: the \u201cGarden of Eden\u201d and the \u201cmemory wall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do we mean when we talk about participation? In 2009, Nina Simon wrote about this in her book The Participatory Museum. She argued that museums should become less passive: not a place about or for something or someone, but a place created and developed together with visitors. This means visitors bring their own ideas and contribute to the museum themselves, and they can share their experiences, which fosters a greater sense of connection with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Simon, a problem with \u201ctraditional\u201d museums was that visitors\u2019 own perspectives and contexts were often missing; participatory museums could change that. This idea was confirmed in my conversation with Petra Katzenstein, head and initiator of the Jewish Museum Junior. In 2000 she founded the children\u2019s museum because the Jewish Museum did not offer enough space for children. The first \u201cexperiment\u201d was immediately participatory: \u201cfor children it should be a place where you don\u2019t just walk past and look at beautiful things, but hands-on.\u201d In addition, there is a varied range of cultural elements that are always linked to general emotions and experiences, so that visitors can recognize themselves in them regardless of their background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically for children, play and participation are effective and enjoyable methods for learning. Children\u2019s museums, however, are not amusement parks: they are also centers of cultural knowledge. The risk of focusing too heavily on participation is that this element can be lost. Finding the balance between fun, interaction and play, and responsibly conveying information is a complex task. You have to take children seriously and trust that they understand nuance, or as Katzenstein says: \u201caddress children where they are, in an adult way.\u201d The Jewish Museum Junior indeed does this: Jewish identity is presented in its many facets, children are encouraged to ask questions and think about different interpretations of passages from the Bible and Talmud, and then share their own perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not all forms of participation lead to nuanced reflection. Sometimes they result in irrelevant or unwanted expressions, such as the doves in the Peace Forest that say nothing about peace. The most successful example seems to be the new installation, the Garden of Eden, which is fully centered around the Golden Rule. This is a first attempt at renewing the museum. Its success largely seems to lie in the directed guidance of participation\u2014also known as scaffolding\u2014which is missing in other installations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Garden of Eden on the top floor is filled with colorful paper flowers. There are several poles with QR codes for a game on VR glasses and tablets in which animated rabbis explain the Golden Rule. Visitors can then craft a flower and write on it to apply this rule. Even without the game, this installation is a successful example in which participation is central: without visitor participation there would be no flower garden, only a few example flowers. The flowers contain guiding texts that allow room for personal interpretation but not so much that visitors become distracted from the topic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like it when:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and therefore:\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This guidance was only added after it became clear that a blank sheet of paper did not work well. With limited instructions, the necessary connection between the activity and the content of an installation is missing. It can even have the unintended effect that visitors with little museum experience and visitors from other cultures experience the museum visit as stressful, for fear of breaking unwritten rules. Through the guiding texts on the flowers, children learn to apply the Golden Rule and the room gradually fills like a paradise with good intentions. Afterwards, you can take home your good intentions, along with a small bag of forget-me-not seeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This does not mean that the strong scaffolding in the Garden of Eden always produces the desired outcomes: here too there are generic \u201cgreetings from\u201d messages, and here too I noticed several inappropriate or (too) intense messages that were absent during later visits. During my first visit, for example, there was a text on the memory wall that referred to child abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This shows that there are limits to the degree to which participation and visitor experiences can be guided. People who use participatory methods try in various ways to ensure that participation leads to appropriate or successful results. Museum scholars Stefanie Steinbeck and Ana Mar\u00eda Munar, for example, describe how museums often attempt to create affective atmospheres, in which the senses are stimulated to evoke certain emotions. We see this in the memory wall: a wall with an animatronic mouth that speaks in a serious, solemn tone about its memories of the Holocaust. This tone makes it very clear: this is serious, you should sit down and listen quietly. At the same time, a wall is more abstract than a person, so the experience is not too intense for a child. In this way, visitors\u2019 emotions are guided to match the content. Emotions, however, are not static: confronting the wall can evoke not only the intended emotion but a whole sequence of emotions such as curiosity, surprise, sadness, and boredom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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