Education and Activism: One and the Same?

Abstract

When Erica Robenalt, David Farrell-Banks, and Katie Markham – the guest editors of this issue – approached the Journal of Museum Education (JME) with a collection of articles on “Activist Pedagogies,” it promised to be a natural fit. The Museum Education Roundtable (MER) has long published work on the intersections of museum education and social change. In fact, its nearly 50-year publication history is a record of increasing “museum activism,” as the guest editors define it: “the practice undertaken by museums to influence and alter future practice, engaging with social needs.” The founding of MER in 1973 was one reflection of widespread activism then taking root within the growing community of museum educators, as they began to build professional networks, establish principles, and address shared challenges. With each passing decade since, it is easy to discern in the pages of the JME a deepening concern with social conditions and social change. In 1984, Mary Ellen Munley, writing on her participation in the American Association of Museum’s two-year commission study “Museums for a New Century,” noted in these pages that one of the report’s core principles was “the notion of the museum in service to society” as “a guiding force for the near future.” The conclusions of this US-based commission were similar to those reached earlier by ICOM-CECA in its 1977 colloquium “Museums and Social Life,” during which then-secretary Luis Monreal asserted that “museums are institutions that are part of their society and not marginal... the museum must serve society.” Each decade since has brought an increased intensity of focus on inclusion, representation and access in museum education, efforts which our guest editors might term “museum activism.” After the publication of “Excellence and Equity” in 1992, a chorus of voices in this journal and elsewhere argued for the importance, even the requirement, of museum educators’ engagement in issues of civic life and social justice. Growing in strength into the “oughties” and the 2010s, this “turn to activism” brought with it JME issues that focused on topics of justice and social import: “Building Diversity in the Museum” (2009); “Engaging Visitors to Create Positive Futures” (2013); “Shared Authority: The Key to Museum Education as Social Change” (2013); “Identifying and Transforming Racism in Museum Education” (2017); “Museums as Allies: Mobilizing to Address Migration” (2019); “Museums and Public Climate Action” (2020); “Queering the Museum” (2020); and “Disability Justice in Museum Education: Re-Framing Accessibility as Anti-Ableism” (2022), among others. These and other reflections of practice in the JME are one strand of evidence that museum education and activism have been closely aligned for some time. Even so, the guest editors note that museums are a place where “innovation from activists. in particular, has sometimes been suppressed.” Certainly, it doesn’t take too much memorysearching to surface instances in which museum institutions have enacted constraints on activism, whether on specific educational activities or for institutions as a whole. These constraints are especially evident where work crossed the boundary from “museum activism” – concerned with the profession and practice of museum education itself – to “museums in activism,” where the intended outcome was to produce a broader social effect, outside the museum walls.