ABSTRACT
In The Educational Role of the Museum Eilean Hooper-Greenhill states, ‘The development of a critical museum pedagogy that uses existing good practice for democratic purposes is a major task for museums and galleries in the twenty-first century’ (Hooper-Greenhill 1999: 4). I take her remark to be a reference to critical pedagogy – an educational philosophy initiated in the 1960s by Paulo Freire, which enacts particular teaching techniques for socially activist purposes (Freire 1995). Among the educational practices in which museums engage, the task of applying critical museum pedagogy to the development of educational exhibitions is particularly challenging insofar as critical pedagogy has been conceptualised historically as classroom practice that relies on the presence of a dynamic teacher acting as a democratic facilitator working towards social justice. Unlike classrooms, museum exhibitions typically teach without the benefit of full-time instructors responding to visitors’ ideas. Thus, the objectives of critical pedagogy applied to exhibit development may diverge somewhat from the objectives of enacting critical pedagogy in a classroom context.
