Museums, Education, and Community: A Reflection on Theory and Practice
Date
2003-10
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
The tectonic social upheavals of the 16th through the 18th centuries that produced the
bourgeois state left Western society with a new set of social institutions, including the
modem museum. With a raison d'etre simultaneously dependent on and at odds with
the march of time, the modem museum enjoys a false air of permanence, for it is clearly
an historically contingent institution and there is no guarantee as to its future.
The Wunderkammer and the princely gallery-the modem museum's important
predecessors-expose the institution's potential as a site for the expansion of knowledge
that drives social change, as well as its potential as a site for the inculcation of
traditional values and the status quo. The evolution of the educational functions of the
modem museum traces the course of a complex and increasingly tense dialectic that
highlights how much Western society has changed and how urgently its institutions
need to renegotiate their relationship with "the public."
This thesis argues that broad societal shifts of the past half-century require the museum
to abandon its established theoretical and operational models and to embrace a
community-based vision that draws on the best new museological theory. Theoretical
ballast for the argument is provided by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Jurgen
Habermas, and Michel Foucault, and also by Maxine Greene, Henry Giroux, and Paulo
Friere in their elaboration of social theory within a specifically pedagogical context.
All these theories suggest the museum acts as some form of mediating institution
between the realm of the state and the realm of the individual or citizen.
The thesis juxtaposes two cases of museum practice from the early 1990s-the Royal
Ontario Museum's disastrous Into the Heart of Africa exhibit, and the controversial
deaccessioning of human skeletal remains from the Peterborough Centennial Museum
and Archives. It analyzes the museological models and values behind each case, and
suggests that the programming undertaken in the Peterborough case provides a rich
concrete example of successful community-based museum with lessons that might be
applied by much larger institutions despite their broader mandates, and their multiplex
and far-flung audiences.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Degree
Master of Continuing Education (M.C.Ed.)
Department
Educational Foundations
Program
Educational Foundations