From Encounter to Enclosure: Reframing the Museum Visit as Informal Immersive Learning

This perspective paper argues that museum visits are not only encounters with collections but spatially organized learning experiences in which immersion emerges through sociocultural interaction. It brings into dialogue the Sociocultural Interaction Model (SCIM), which explains museum interaction through motivation, context, and actuation, and the Enhanced Spatial Experience Model (ESEM), which explains spatial experience through encouraging, enabling, and enclosing. Read separately, each model explains only part of the museum visit. Read together, they clarify how visitors move from curiosity to participation to cognitively and emotionally meaningful closure. I use this integrated framework to argue that museum experience is best understood as a spatial experience in which presence‐based and flow‐based forms of engagement can support informal immersive learning. I conclude by outlining implications for practice and research and by briefly illustrating the framework through two museum examples.