“Good for you, but I don’t care!”: critical museum pedagogy in educational and

curatorial practice

Dr Bernadette Lynch1

Abstract

The museum is failing…failing to support people’s rights as active agents, much less

to realise the institution’s political potential as a site of anti-hegemonic discourse;

failing to facilitate the bridging of divergent relationships, and support people’s right

of resistance. For at their core, museums continue to retain the two basic

competencies left over from colonial times – they collect and they exhibit (Ashley

2005:31). And as Boast importantly reminds us, they also educate – a further leftover

from colonial times, and for the past decades a core goal of the new museology

(Boast 2011). Meanwhile, contemporary educational and exhibitionary practices alike

remain saturated with colonial and neo-colonial ideologies (Hickling-Hudson,

Matthews and Woods 2004; see also Willinsky 1998).

From her recent extensive research of professional practice across the UK, Lynch

reviews the feeling of being ‘stuck’ (as expressed by museum educators and

curators alike). Despite genuine attempts at democratising museum pedagogical

practice, Lynch’s research has shown that museums still attempt to control the

dialogue, to contain and divert resistance, and any form of unrest. (Lynch 2011a,

b,c,d). She argues for a constructive deconstruction of the museum’s educational

and exhibitionary practices that are, she argues, more intertwined in their

pedagogical assumptions than we may realise. (Lynch 2013, Lynch and Alberti

2010).

1 Dr Bernadette Lynch is an academic and museum professional with twenty-five years’ experience in

senior management in UK and Canadian museums. Formerly Deputy Director at the Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, she has developed an international reputation for ethical, innovative participatory practice and for her writing and research and advisory work on public engagement and participation. She publishes widely on all aspects of participatory democracy in museums and galleries and lectures internationally. She is Honorary Research Associate at University College London (UCL). Her work is freely available online: ucl.academia.edu/Bernadette Lynch

Opening museums up to the possibility of a revived critical pedagogy as praxis-

oriented social movement (Shor 1992:129) she proposes a practice that openly

draws together educational and curatorial practice around a combined purpose

centred on ‘social justice’. She provides examples of museum curators and

educators working together, attempting to work with the public towards a joint project

centred on notions of collective struggle. Thus she challenges the “learning” role of

the museum and points instead to the beginnings of an emancipatory rather than

conciliatory decolonization of museum practice.

Introduction

I would like here to consider kindness and generosity at the heart of the cultural

sector in its dealings with the public, and the problem with it.

There are a number of moments in the Somalian author, Nuruddin Farah’s (1993)

wonderful book, ‘Gifts’ (when Duniya, a single mother, a nurse working at the

hospital in Mogadishu, has cause to question the generosity of others. You see,

Duniya distrusts givers.

And a culture of ‘giving’, doing ‘for’, ‘on behalf of’, still, I maintain, runs throughout the

cultural sector, infecting both curatorial and educational practices alike. . For, as has

been noted, at their core, museums continue to retain the two basic competencies

left over from colonial times – they collect and they exhibit (Ashley 2005:31). And as

Boast also importantly reminds us, they also educate – a further leftover from

colonial times, and for the past decades a core goal of the new museology (Boast

2011).

As philosopher, Jonathan Ralston Saul (2014) wrote in a Canadian newspaper,

The actual problem is [that people] have ‘rights’, and they’ve been removed

[or never allowed],” he says. “If they had their rights... in the full sense of the

word, you wouldn’t have to feel sympathy. Sympathy is a way of not dealing

with the central issues of [social inequality].

Such sentiment at the heart of public engagement and participation results in

undermining those on the receiving end because it regards them as passive victims

and erodes their dignity, active-agency and self-determination. Frequently the effect

is anger or indifference by those whom we wish to persuade to be on the receiving

end of the museums projects and programmes. As one young participant put it, the

result of all our efforts at inclusion and recognition are more likely to be, “Good for

you, but I don’t care.” 2

The extensive action research I have undertaken around the UK over the past four

years includes, Whose Cake is it Anyway?, the influential report for the Paul Hamlyn

Foundation looking at the impact of engagement and participation in UK museums

(Lynch 2011a).

The overwhelming experience of museum participants has been one of

‘empowerment-lite’ (Cornwall and Coelho 2007). Co-creation or co-curation is thus,

often unmasked as shallow political gesture. What we find are too often token

consultations without authentic decision-making power and relationships that

disempower and control people. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of ‘service’, continues to

place the subject in the role of ‘supplicant’, ‘beneficiary’ or ‘learner’ and the provider

(the museum and its staff) in the role of ‘teacher/carer’, perpetrating a ‘deficit’ model

which assumes that people, ‘learners’ have ‘gaps’ which need filling or fixing through

2 This negative response to being in the position of the museum’s ‘beneficiaries’ is amply supported in my extensive recent research into engagement and participation across the museum sector (Lynch 2011a)

museum intervention, rather than a theory of change that places people at the

centre, as active agents in their own right.

It is therefore unsurprising that the museums’ community partners and participants

frequently convey frustration and dissatisfaction, finding themselves on the receiving

end of museum practices that demonstrate a profoundly disabling view of the

individual as existing in an almost permanent state of vulnerability. Community

participants soon come to realize a few hard lessons, which they may or may not

have suspected at the outset. Being included in what Fraser memorably calls ‘invited

spaces’ (Fraser 1992) is no guarantee of participation. Similarly Cornwall reminds us

that simply:

having a seat at the table is a necessary but not sufficient condition for

exercising voice. Nor is presence at the table [on the part of institutions] the

same as a willingness to listen and respond (Cornwall 2008:13).

The problem in this continuing situation is that the notion of centre/periphery/ “us”

and “them” is still alive and well, and it continues to undermine the learning and

participatory efforts of these well-meaning museums and their staff members. By

placing people in the position of beneficiaries, the museum exercises invisible power,

and thereby robs people of their active agency and the necessary possibility of

resistance. Thus museums continue to be stuck within what Mark O’Neill coined a

‘welfare model’ (O’Neill 2010).

A welfare model of museum educational and exhibitionary practice

Over recent decades, there has been much discussion of the perceived conflict

between education and curatorship in museums with curatorship posed as a

conservative force in terms of opening the museum to public engagement. More

recently there has been a deliberate blurring of the boundaries of curatorship and

education as the educational turn took hold within the new museology.

In the UK, since the 1990s, museums found themselves part of a public sector that

was increasingly committed to, and actively engaged in, soliciting public input on

public services: in health, education, housing, social services, for example, through

engagement boards, or representation on project boards. Involving communities in

more direct collaborations has increased in museums in the light of expectations for

a greater degree of public participation and deliberation in civil society in the UK,

and globally, as exemplified by the massive growth of social media. Under pressure

from the UK government funding bodies and local authorities, the engagement

process in museums expanded, with expectations from government funding bodies

that museums include large-scale consultation on their capital development projects

as well as public input on re-displays of collections and the co-development of

policies and strategies for practice. Involving communities in the active role of the

museum within the regeneration and development of its local area also became a

key factor in the funding of museums in recent years. Sustainable community

strategies included proposing more embedded partnerships. Thus, depending upon

the individual museum response to such demands, the perception of the relationship

with the public quickly or gradually, enthusiastically, or very, very reluctantly,

began to shift from ‘users and choosers to makers and shapers’ (Cornwall and

Gaventa 2001).

Ever since, museums in the UK have been increasingly under pressure to deliver on

opportunities for public participation. But, as we shall see, there was always a

degree institutional resistance; in many cases tensions and contradictions that ran

throughout these collaborative processes.

Largely influenced also by James Clifford’s work on the museum-as-contact-zone

(Clifford 1997)3, a postcolonial museum practice has been consciously pursued by

many museums in the UK and elsewhere where there are large indigenous or

diaspora communities. A decade ago, Ruth Phillips noted for example, that the “new

models of partnership and collaboration…are creating ever more opportunities for

Aboriginal intervention into the traditional orientation of the Western museum.”

(Phillips 2005, 96-97).

The participatory turn in museums is best understood from within the context of a

focus on museum ethics (Marstine 2011), and preceding that, the larger movement,

3 It was James Clifford (1997) who applied anthropologist, Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992) notion of ‘contact zones’ to

a museum context in order to propose museums as places of contentious and collaborative relations and interactions. This became very influential has been extensively debated over the past decade. On the one hand, this conceptual vision has been critiqued as being merely a reconstruction of the reformist agenda of the state (Bennett, 1998). Other research has shown that a museum can function as a site where a complex web of demands and articulations is expressed, negotiated and contested (Macdonald, 2002, McCarthy, 2007, Witcomb, 2003). Yet other perspectives have also critiqued the content and form of contact zone museum collaborations (Boast, 2011), and the relationship between process and product (Lynch and Alberti, 2010) within the context of the museum.

as mentioned above, to make museums more socially inclusive and responsible as

well as engaged as civil society institutions (Sandell 2003, 2012). For the past few

decades, through a widespread move towards establishing a ‘collaborative

museology’, museums have been attempting to open up knowledge and the

participatory interpretation of their ethnographic collections through developing and

maintaining relationships with communities near and far (Marstine 2011; Kreps 2009;

Simon 2010). Yet much participatory practice has been criticised as essentially

flawed, providing an illusion of participation while in reality, consensual decisions

tend to be coerced, or rushed through on the basis of the institution’s control of

knowledge production and its dissemination, or on the basis of its institutional

agenda or strategic plan, thereby manipulating a group consensus on what is

inevitable, usual or expected (Graham, Mason and Nayling 2013; Lynch 2010,

2011c; Marstine 2011; Sandell 2002, 2003, 2011). Recent debates have questioned

the effectiveness of participatory practice in museums, in particular, its failures to

overcome institutional power (Crooke 2007; Lynch and Alberti 2009; Peers and

Brown 2003). Despite well-meaning intentions, participation is not always the

democratic process it sets out to be; rather, it more frequently reflects the agendas of

the institution where the processes, such as the final right to edit content, are tightly

controlled y the museum (Fouseki 2010; Lynch 2011a).

Thus the imagined museum-as-contact-zone was always, according to Boast, “an

asymmetric space where the periphery comes to gain some small, momentary and

strategic advantage, but where the centre ultimately gains…” (Boast 2011, 66)

Throughout this ‘participatory turn’ in this, the new ethical, democratic, dialogical

museology, museum education has been on the front line of delivering these

participatory practices. It has been seen to be at the forefront of an emancipatory,

decolonising practice, often in conflict with curatorial practice in this regard,

particularly in the area of the interpretation of ethnographic collections. But it turns

out museum education is not necessarily the representative of popular emancipation

as it might like to think. Here I would like to consider not the difference, but the

similarity between those working in education and curatorship in terms of

perpetuating a situation of dis-empowerment.

Two relatively recent experiences in the UK - the 2012 Olympics Stories of the World

project, and the Engaging Curators project significantly support this view.

Stories of the World was the largest ever youth project in UK museums.4 It focused

on multiple partner museums working with young people in interpreting and

exhibiting world collections. Despite the emphasis on collections, the work was led

not by ethnography curators but by museum outreach and education staff, and this

fact directly led to the Museums Ethnographers Group creating the Engaging

Curators project.5

Pursuing a “contact zone” agenda, as referred earlier to in Clifford’s notion of the

museum-as-contact-zone (Clifford 1997), museums participating in Stories of the

World actively attempted to link their local participatory work with their curatorial

research (and partnerships) with both Diaspora and originating cultures from around

the world. At the same time, the museums involved in Stories of the World tried to

create space for young people to make choices and have the freedom to conduct

their own research and curate their own exhibitions with access to the world

collections from their respective museums.

Thus, these museums attempted to bring these three ‘communities’ together into a

dialogue mediated by the museum: local diaspora and overseas originating

communities, with young people attempting to act in a curatorial role. Thus there was

a three-legged stool, and a rather unsteady one at that.6 It quickly became evident

that the museums themselves were unclear about the ethics and efficacy of any one

of these particular practices, making it very difficult to mentor and support the young

4 Stories of the World: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/our-priorities-2011-15/london-

2012/stories-world/ (accessed 29th June 2015). 5 See Engaging Curators project’s original intentions here: http://www.museumethnographersgroup.org.uk/en/projects/329-engaging-curators.html (accessed 29th June 2015). See the project’s international case-studies pf participatory practice here: http://www.museumethnographersgroup.org.uk/en/resources/400-engaging-curators-case-studies.html (accessed 29th June 2015). 6 The three-legged stool:1) indigenous & diapora communities; 2) the 'institutions' staff members (education and curatorial - as we shall see, not that disparate); and 3) the young people

people in taking the responsibility for the consequences of such a complex and

sensitive interchange.7

As one staff member (involved in the delivering the project in one part of the UK)

reported, there was “ a power problem,” so that those involved felt ill-equipped and

powerless to challenge the existing museum hegemony, and the young people were

sometimes left somewhat adrift.” (Anonymous staff member). At the end of the

project (following the development of the ‘co-produced’ Stories of the World

exhibitions – a requirement of the funding), in some areas of the country, the young

people engaged in the project expressed that they always felt the museum’s

presence in their decision-making.8

There was evidence throughout the process of what Gaventa called, ‘false

consensus’ (Gaventa 1980, 3), the museum’s sense of pedagogical responsibility not

allowing it to step away from subtly leading the young people towards what Giroux

calls ‘correct thinking’, thus following the dictates of institutional authority (Giroux

2009, 4).

Curators dis-engaged

Shortly after the Stories of the World programme ended, the connected experience

of MEG’s Engaging Curators project showed that both curators and education staff

are too often equally confused in terms of participatory, decolonizing practice.

Reacting negatively to the Stories of the World project, the UK’s professional

association of museum ethnography curators, the Museum Ethnographers Group

(MEG), re-stated the ‘importance’ of curatorial expertise. MEG challenged the

authority that had been given to Learning’ and ‘Community Outreach’ colleagues in

7 See evaluation by Dr Bernadette Lynch of the Stories of the World project in the northeast region of the UK, entitled Journey of Discovery, and involving Tyne and Wear Museums in Newcastle and a group of regional museums working with the region’s young people: http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/geisha/assets/files/Journeys%20of%20Discovery%20evaluation.pdf (accessed 29th June 2015) 8 For an impressive and deeply reflective analysis by those directly involved in delivering Stories of the World in the Northeast of the UK, see Morse, N., Macpherson M., and Robinson, S., 2013

museums around the country to lead on such a high-profile, national project that was

focused on ethnographic collections.

MEG countered by creating a national project to discuss and re-state the role of

curators in evolving participatory practice in museums, calling it the Engaging

Curators project. Yet this project inadvertently unearthed as many uncertainties in

‘decolonizing’ practice as those of their colleagues in ‘Learning’ and ‘Community

Outreach’ had done with ‘Stories of the World.9

Engaging Curators sought to promote personal and institutional reflection upon the

abstract and actual nature of collaborative practice, particularly in regard to curatorial

involvement with community work. Two challenging workshops (at the Horniman

Museum, London and at the Great North: Hancock Museum, Newcastle) were held

during 2013. The aim was to think through and document how ethnographic collections

are used in community engagement, and the role of curators within that. The

workshops included international invited speakers to discuss current issues around

community engagement in museum worldwide, as well as initiate face-to-face contact

between non-specialists, experts and MEG.

Within the two national workshops, it was evident how much the language of the

commitment to collaboration in museums still situates the institution at the centre,

conferring suitability, or ‘legitimacy’ on ‘informants’ or ‘learners’ when working, in

‘partnership’ for example, with originating or diaspora/local communities on the so-

called ‘shared’ interpretation of collections. Once again the institution evidently

continued to be operating within a centre/periphery model, and, as one workshop

participant put it, found itself “tied up in knots”. (Anonymous Engaging Curators

workshop participant).

Throughout the MEG project, one was struck by how the museum curators continued

to define the rules of engagement. As Boast puts it, “No matter how much museum

studies have argued for a pluralistic approach...the intellectual control has largely

remained in the hands of the museum” (Boast 2011:60). In spite of itself, from the

comforting perspective of the colonizing gaze, the museum’s perspective remains

largely "panoptic and thus dominating" (JanMohamed 1992:10). Perhaps we in

9 The title ‘outreach’ itself of course reveals a centre-periphery model. ‘Public Engagement and

Participation’ has replaced this in many museums.

museums have to, to borrow from Borsa, take leave of the cultural, theoretical, and

ideological borders that enclose us within the safety of "those places and spaces we

inherit and occupy, which frame our lives in very specific and concrete ways" (Borsa

1990, 36).

Some of the museum professionals participating in the two, well-attended Engaging

Curators workshops (held in two well-known museums with strong ethnographic

collections at either end of the country – see above) suggested that the problem is that

the notion of 'us' and 'them' still exists within many institutions, and it continues to

undermine the collaborative and participatory efforts of these well-meaning museums.

They posed the following questions: “Who are ‘we’? – individuals? – institutions? What

about thinking of the museum as part of community, or an emanation of community –

not as needing to connect to ‘it’ ?” (Anonymous Engaging Curators workshop

participant).

Both the Stories of the World and the Engaging Curators projects showed that

attempts at collaborating with people outside of the museum do not always prove to

be an effective challenge to institutional habits of mind. In fact, such well-meaning

efforts by museums more often demonstrate a situation where the museum is

committed to social change but as an institution has difficulty in changing itself.10

Why can’t museums decolonise their practice?

Why is it that it was so difficult to develop a clearer understanding of the museum’s

evolving mission? And why were there were so many questions left unanswered at the

conclusion of the Stories of the World and the Engaging Curators projects? What is at

10 It should be stated here that there are notable exceptions where some museums, particularly among the Engaging Curators case-studies, are consciously trying to change the culture of their institution, and are admirably open about the difficulties: http://www.museumethnographersgroup.org.uk/en/resources/400-engaging-curators-case-studies.html (accessed 2nd July 2015). A particularly interesting example is the National Museums of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden: The State of Things www.varldskulturmuseerna.se (accessed 2nd July 2015). (See the film from this project).See more on the project: http://www.humanas.unal.edu.co/colantropos/baukara/la-creacion-del-museo-de-lacultura- del-mundo-gotemburgo-suecia-tentativas-de-cambio-de-paradigma-ypracticas- museales (accessed 2nd July 2015)

the heart of the museum’s uncertainties in relation to this work? Robert Young argues

that museum educational practices that runs throughout all the museum’s work

have themselves been implicated in the long history of European colonialism

and…continue to determine both the institutional conditions of knowledge as

well as the terms of contemporary institutional practices. (Young 1990: viii)

What has become clear is that both museum education and curatorial practice

continue to be similarly implicated in the politics of colonialism in Western museums,

as revealed in the continued processes of recognition, representation and outreach,

all still entrenched in practices of social inclusion that continue to place the museum

at the centre, engaged in the European enlightenment project. Contemporary museum

education practices and systems remain saturated with colonial and neo-colonial

ideologies (Hickling-Hudson, Matthews and Woods 2004; see also Willinsky 1998).

The museum has not moved beyond the safety of ‘social inclusion’ practices. As one

museum educator put it, “We’re stuck!”

So where does this leave critical pedagogy in the museum-as-contact-zone?

In past decades, the UK’s museum education took much of its inspiration from “critical

pedagogy”, inspired by the progressive education theories of the 1970s, most notably,

Paulo Freire (1972) 11

The problem is that, like James Clifford’s (1997) ‘contact zone’, when applied to

museums, Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy (Freire 1985, Freire and Faundez 1989;

Freire and Macedo 1987) was misunderstood and misapplied in terms of the entirety

of its decolonizing, democratic and ‘activist’ message. This is hardly surprising if we

consider the traditional role of the museum in relation to the state. As Young reminds

us – Freire’s work is often appropriated and taught

without any consideration of imperialism and its cultural representation. This

lacuna [gap/missing bit] itself suggests the continuing ideological

dissimulation of imperialism today (Young 1990:158).

11 Later taken up by educational theorists such as Henry Giroux (1988, 2001, 2009, 2011a, b, Giroux

and Witkowski 2011c; 2012) and museum education theorists, most notably Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1994).

What appears to be lost to memory within critical pedagogical practice in museums is

that it was never only a theory and a philosophy of education but was also a praxis-

oriented social movement (emphasis added) (Shor 1992:129). Based in Marxist

theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other

movements that strive for what they describe as social justice.

Critical Pedagogy faces today a very strange situation. While being positioned

in a seemingly comfortable position and warmly received by so many liberals,

post-colonialists, multi-culturalists, postmodernists, and feminists…it is being

domesticated, appeased, or even castrated by the present order of

things…(Gur-Ze’ev, 2005:6)

Critical Pedagogy, for all its importance and it is so important in so many ways, can

now unfortunately, as Gu-Ze’ev puts it, “be considered much more as part of

normalising education and less as part of worthy counter-education.” (Gur-Ze’ev

2005:8)

Revisiting critical pedagogy as permanent struggle

“I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it's humiliating. It goes

from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns

from the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

Eduardo Galeano, (2004: 146)

Decolonisation cannot be divorced from a politics that looks to bring about global social

justice based on solidarity with others. It is about mutual empowerment rather than

exploitation, through sustainable social change developed from local knowledge

systems and resources.12 It is about solidarity, activism and struggle. We may need to

re-invisage the role of both educators and curators to mobilise a revived form of critical

pedagogy, using the museum, to borrow from Mouffe, as a vibrant sphere of

contestation where different views can be usefully confronted (Mouffe 2005, 5), based

12 Robert Young’s conception of the postcolonial is as an aspirational politics with both activist and theoretical elements. (Young 2003).

on the notion of creative struggle through which new identities as active agents may

be forged

Thus, the prime task of a ‘return-to-the-political’ approach to critical pedagogy in the

museum is not to eliminate conflict, or, as Mouffe puts it, ‘passion and partisanship’,

but rather, to mobilise them for democratic ends, museum professionals and

community partners working together to create collective forms of identification around

democratic objectives (Mouffe 2002: 9). 13 In museums, there is thus a need for a more

emancipatory rather than conciliatory process of decolonisation and, in this troubled

world in which we in museum find ourselves, it is our responsibility to come together

(curators and educators, in collaboration with others from inside and outside the

museum) and get behind critical pedagogy as praxis oriented social movement (Lynch

2014a).

Dr Robert Janes, eminent Canadian museum professional, wrote a book called

Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse (Janes 2010).

Janes reminds us that a failure to clearly understand their public mission in such

troubled times will soon leave museums out in the cold and irrelevant to those with

whom they are trying to collaborate. There is therefore an urgent need for a thorough

review of what a decolonising, social justice practice actually means in the museum,

and with it, the critical pedagogy required to develop the critical skills necessary to

begin to put it into action.

This new trend is reflected strongly within museums that are adopting a more

reflective practice (Lynch 2011d) and a much more overt social responsibility, or

‘social justice’ approach that includes a focus on the necessity for the museum to

change its own culture so as to be fit-for-purpose in taking up this responsibility.14

The only way to ensure engagement can both be embedded and effective

in museums is through this constant cycle of reflective practice.15 Reflective

13 Mouffe notes that Carl Schmitt attacked the ‘liberal-neutralist’ and ‘utopian’ notions that politics can be removed of all agonistic energy, arguing conflict is embedded in existence itself (Mouffe 1999) 14 See Museum Social Justice Alliance http://sjam.org/ (accessed 2nd July 2015) 15 Reflective practice is ‘the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous

learning’, which, according to Schön,

7

practice in museums is about deepening individual and collective self-awareness in

terms of how our socially derived knowledge and values shape the quality of our

relationships with others and the power relations that underlie these. It is not navel

gazing. It’s about facing up to hard talk between museum staff and community

partners – building trust/building bridges so there’s less of an ‘us and them’

relationship, and the museum becomes less of a separate entity and more of an

emanation of communities. Preparation for such collaborative reflexivity must include

the development of new tools of analysis in such areas as social justice, participation

and conflict, as well as new forms of participatory communication (dialogue and

debate) drawn from a wider range of academic specialties, professions and social

agencies. Closer attention must be paid to the discourses of which the language we

use in relation to participation forms a part (Hajer 1993, 45). Such new skills, as

Tuhawai Smith (2005) reminds us, must include learning to look and listen (and

maybe speak) finding a place from which to speak. This means, as Spivak points

out, “listening seriously, not with [a] kind of benevolent imperialism.” (Spivak 1990,

60)

With the museum as participatory sphere institution at the heart of civil society,

community participants are no longer seen and ‘beneficiaries’, but rather as ‘critical

friends’. Thus the museum becomes a sphere of contestation, in line with Amartya

Sen’s call to help people find their voice and develop their ‘capabilities’ (Sen 2010)

Cornwall and Coelho note the necessity of understanding the complex set of

interactions required in order to stimulate participation in this way from below, so that

collaborations are much more than rubber stamping exercises (Cornwall and Coelho

2007). A substantive form of democratic engagement experienced through

participation in museums becomes instead, one in which people might begin to

the originator of the term, is ‘one of the defining characteristics of professional practice’,( Schön 1983)

but not as an end in itself – always so as to inform further planning and action. It is widely practised,

for example, by health and education professionals.

exercise their political agency as citizens, and might include processes of

mobilisation and local cultural and social activism.

In terms of, radically addressing such change in the culture of museums, the Our

Museum programme16, (currently funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation), is a large-

scale experiment in this regard – a cultural change programme over four years

working across nine museums in the UK (among them large national museums) that

aims to embed this new focus on participation and reflective practice within and

across museums.17 (See Lynch 2014b Five Year Review of the programme’s

progress to date). Thus, the Our Museum programme is not ‘just’ about participation

and engagement – it aims also to address museum sustainability through

significantly raising museum self-awareness about public participation and social

responsibility.

Such a renewed focus on the politics of the museum, its values and practices, paves

the way for a critical pedagogy that, as philosopher John Searle characterizes it in

another context, aims ‘to create political radicals’, thus highlighting what we can

begin to understand as the contestable and antagonistic, moral and political grounds

of museum education as a social force (Searle 1990). Such a process requires

working collaboratively to examine, as the Our Museum is now doing, what critical

pedagogue Ira Shor defines as:

habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface

meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements,

traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep

meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of

any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject

matter, policy, mass media, or discourse. (Shor 1992:129).

16 Our Museum http://ourmuseum.ning.com/ (accessed 1st July 2015) 17 The four Our Museum evaluation criteria (derived from the Whose Cake is it Anyway? Report by the author, noted earlier) are outlined in detail and are available to download as a pdf from the Our Museum website here: http://ourmuseum.ning.com/page/evaluation-1 (accessed 1st July 2015)

The end result of such a process of organisational self-examination and change, is

one in which museum education and curatorship, to borrow from Giroux, may actually

begin to work together with their community partners in developing exhibitions and

education programmes that in the process, draw attention to and makes overt

questions concerning who has control over the conditions for the production of

knowledge, values, and skills. (Giroux 2011a). This collaborative critical analysis may

then begin to illuminate how knowledge, identities, and authority are constructed within

particular sets of social relations, including those of the museum itself.

It means that it is our responsibility to consciously work together, museum curators

and education staff, dissolving those artificial professional boundaries to create a

space in which dominant social relations, ideologies, and practices that make us

immune to the [sometimes protesting] voice of the other might finally be effectively

challenged and overcome. It means re-visiting what such empowerment might look

like for all of us, museum staff and their collaborators, in collectively addressing the

future.

There is urgency in developing such an honest, reflective, collaborative practice in

order that we can more effectively deliver on our social responsibilities, making use

of our global, public institutions – and to do it, as colleagues, working together.

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