Theorizing Equity in the Museum

Integrating Perspectives from Research and Practice

Bronwyn Bevan, Bahia Ramos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000427806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Theorizing Equity in the Museum integrates the perspectives of learning researchers and museum practitioners to shed light on the deep-seated structures that must be accounted for if the field is to move past aspirations and rhetoric and towards more inclusive practices.

Written during a time when museums around the world were being forced to reckon with their institutional practices of exclusion; their histories of colonization, both cultural and intellectual; and, for many, their tenuous business models, the chapters leverage a range of theoretical perspectives to explore lived experiences of working in the museum towards changing the museum. Theories of spatial justice, critical pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, critical race theory, and others are used to consider how the museum's dominant cultural structures and norms collide with museum professionals' aspirations for inclusive practices. The chapters present a mix of empirical research and reflections, which collectively operate to theorize the museum as a potential force for enriching, empowering, and transforming an inclusive public's relationship with some of our most powerful ideas and aspirations. But first they must change, from the inside out.

Grounded in practice and practical problems, Theorizing Equity in the Museum demonstrates how theory can be used as a practical tool for change. As a result the book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, education, learning and culture, as well as to museum practitioners with an interest in equity and inclusion.

1 Spatial justice theory

Working toward justice: Reclaiming our science center

Angela Calabrese Barton, Micaela Balzer, Won Jung Kim, Nik McPherson, Sinead Brien, Day Greenberg, Louise Archer, and the Members of the Youth Action Council

The injustice of not recognizing female scientists or anybody of Color and how we continued to reinforce that [at the science center], that seed started to grow stronger. Its roots, and the questioning, and just the feeling of “is this the right thing to do?” even though nobody had done it before. I questioned why it had not been done before.

—Olga, Science Center Director of Learning, March 2019

Introduction

Olga, a Latina and director of learning at the Science Center, offered these words as she reflected on why she was working to “reclaim the Science Center” with the Youth Action Council [YAC], a racially diverse group of about 20 youth, ages 9-16. In choosing the language of reclaiming, we call attention to the importance of centering youths’ lives and histories at the Center. As 16-year old YAC member, Bella, stated,

“Our goal is to reclaim [the Science Center] so that we see ourselves here. We also want to honor the people, like us, who came before us, but whose stories don’t get told. … We want to feel like we can be ourselves here, and not be judged for that.”

How science centers are arranged social-spatially—through images, words, and experiences—sends powerful messages about who that space is for. In this chapter, we explore how Olga, her partner educators and researchers, and youth re-imagined their Center through a research-practice partnership (RPP) initiated in 2015. Initially formed to address the design of a maker space, it was in our efforts to enact these imaginaries that, over time, we came to alter both the space of the Center and how we related to it.

Beyond equity in informal science learning spaces

The importance of science museums and science centers in young people’s lives has been well-documented. These spaces offer a multitude of opportunities and resources not traditionally available within schools, including opportunities to participate in legitimate scientific practices and ways of being beyond traditional curricular structures and constraints. Still, inclusion and participation in museum environments are patterned hierarchically (Dawson, 2014). Equity could be called the most critical challenge facing these organizations. From access and opportunity to tools and scaffolds for culturally sustaining experiences, the equity-related challenges are complex and varied (Feinstein, 2017). The wide range of informal science programs and practices that reach different audiences are often accessible, connected, or empowering for only some participants, limited, in many cases, to white, English-speaking, and high-SES youth and their families (Bevan et al., 2020).

Even when youth gain access to science centers, they often experience exclusionary patterns of practice similar to those found in formal environments (e.g., implicit bias and deficit discourses). They may also find informal curricula that do not leverage their lived experiences as valued learning resources. For example, one study shows how a large science museum presupposed a mastery of the English language and British customs in the display of exhibits, inhibiting visitors’ opportunities to use, understand, and learn from the displays (Dawson et al., 2019).

Studies such as these help researchers better understand what issues of equity look like in science centers, and the extent to which oppressions operate across both formal and informal science learning spaces. They also explain why “access” alone is not enough. Youth bring different lived histories and experiences into learning spaces. These histories and experiences are shaped by social structures and identities such as race, gender, socioeconomic and linguistic status, culture, and class. However, if informal science learning environments value white, western, masculine culture more, then many youth worldviews and lived experiences are easily sidelined. This can make daily informal science learning discourse and practice oppressive, and deny youth a rightful presence there. Having a rightful presence in informal science learning settings means that the learning community, through its discourses, practices and relationalities, support the on-going political struggle for legitimacy because of who one is, and not who one is expected to be (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020). We use the term legitimacy to foreground how people are validated through cultural systems and power (Gonzales & Terosky, 2016). We see rightfulness as claimed through presence, in the sense that youth’s whole lives—and that which makes participation in informal science learning both empowering and marginalizing—become integral to learning; and the outcomes of learning focus not only on individual gains but also social transformation that allows for presence.

The charge for changing enduring inequitable patterns of participation must fall on those responsible for the infrastructures of informal science learning, not on those who have been traditionally overlooked in the design of such infrastructures. Thus, critically transforming cultural infrastructures has become an important task for museum and science center educators and researchers.

A research+practice approach

Researchers from Michigan State University, and later the University of Michigan when some members moved, came together with informal science educators and leaders engaged in afterschool and community programs at a regional science center to form an RPP in 2015. The Center is located in Great Lakes City, a mid-sized city in the upper Midwest.

In our RPP, we wanted to understand and design for equitable and transformative science education, particularly with minoritized youth. Through on-going conversations, we developed a set of guiding equity commitments related to both informal science education and to our collaborative process. We pledged to support each other by: 1) uncovering systemic injustices manifested in our practices (e.g., structural racism embedded in programs, curricula, pedagogies, and/or outcomes); 2) centering the cultural knowledge and community wisdom youth bring; and 3) leveraging/amplifying this knowledge towards humanizing and expansive learning outcomes for youth, adults, and broader institutions.

To realize these commitments, we engaged educators and youth in research and co-design practices. One important practice of our RPP is giving witness to youths’ and educators’ experiences on-the-ground, as they seek to, and sometimes struggle to, be and belong in informal science learning settings. By integrating the ideas and experiences of youth, educators, and researchers, our RPP’s goal has been to produce more relevant and sustainable results for improving equity in research and practice.

In an effort to directly involve youth in our RPP, we formed the Youth Action Council [YAC]. The YAC met and continues to meet monthly to prototype, pilot, and revise science center spaces, exhibits, activities, and experiences. Since the YAC’s initiation, we have undertaken several annual projects, such as designing a makerspace in the Center, developing new programs/activities, and examining/redesigning areas of the Center.

This particular chapter is a result of on-going RPP conversations related to the work of the YAC. In one of our RPP sessions involving adult educators and researchers, we discussed insights from two different but related YAC projects. The first was our effort to co-identify and analyze educators’ pedagogical practices that “opened up” equitable and transformative learning opportunities. We focused, in particular, on the practices of sharing, disrupting, and transforming authority. The second was Olga’s on-going professional learning work with her staff related to critical perspectives on broadening participation (see Bevan et al., 2020).

During the session, Olga raised the idea of wanting to build on the momentum of the YAC to more purposefully co-design for reclaiming the Center. To Olga, this meant involving youth in the co-design of spaces, exhibits, activities, and experiences and explicitly naming why this mattered in the lifeblood of the institution. She noted the positive feedback her Center had received on the design of the makerspace, including the strong youth presence in that space resulting from the creative ways their work was showcased, such as through the youth-designed signs and nameplates which hung on the walls. The nameplates, as we discuss later, had become symbolic of the ways we all sought to re-imagine youth lives at the Center.

Building on these insights, Olga suggested we start by working with youth to rename the educational rooms at the Center. Similar to many other science centers around the country, the Center’s classrooms had been named after famous scientists, who were also white and male (e.g., Galileo, Tesla, Newton, et al.). Resonating with Olga’s suggestion, we co-planned initial activities to engage youth in critically examining the spaces of the Center and renaming the rooms. Most of the subsequent planning happened in collaboration with the youth during YAC sessions.

As we worked with the YAC on these activities, we continued to meet via regular RPP sessions to collectively make sense of how involving youth in reclaiming could shape progress towards our equity commitments. This collaborative process was an important way to respect all RPP participants’ accounts and practices. In engaging this process of sense-making, our RPP worked to identify moments salient to us regarding the practices, norms, and discourses toward/against reclaiming the Science Center.

We tried to unpack each moment in two ways: 1) by making sense of what happened—e.g., who participated, what they did, and what material objects and social relationships were produced; and 2) by making sense of how representation and materiality mattered during each moment such as, what messages were communicated about representation/presence—e.g., specific ideas for advancing representation/presence (whose, by whom, about what?) and what decisions, if any, were made about representation/presence. It was from these RPP conversations that we developed our framework for reclaiming the Center.

Conceptual framework

We draw upon spatial justice as a framework for making sense of how our partnership sought to reclaim the Center. We did not enter our RPP work with this specific theory in mind. However, as we began to think more together about how the social and physical aspects of the spaces of the Center shaped youths’ experiences, drawing on theories of spatial justice helped us to deepen our understandings.

Meanings of space and spatial imaginaries

Spatial justice is concerned with how relationships among people and things produce, reproduce, and/or disrupt injustices. It is also concerned with how these relationalities are enacted through discourses and practices towards the production of spatial imaginaries. First, we define what we mean by space and spatial imaginaries. Then we explain our stance on spatial justice and its relationship to the production of new spatial imaginaries.

We draw upon Massey’s (2005) conceptualization of space as a dynamic, material, and symbolic construction that acts as a meaningful and practical setting for social relations and actions. Soja (2006) similarly describes space as where everything comes together, including the social, material, historical, geographi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface: Imagining equity, theorizing change in the museum
• 1 Spatial justice theory: Working toward justice: Reclaiming our science center
• 2 Critical pedagogy and critical theory: Museum education and critical pedagogy: Re-imagining power in the art museum
• 3 Feminism, intersectionality, and decolonization theories: “The price we have to be willing to pay is ourselves”: Discussing illusions of inclusion in science centers and museums
• 4 Theories of identity in communities of practice: Centering equity and access: An examination of a natural history museum’s mentored research youth program
• 5 Foucauldian discourses of power: Discourses of dissent: How competing agendas prevent or enable sustainable change taking place within twenty-first-century art museums
• 6  Culturally responsive pedagogy and feminist theory:  Female-responsive exhibit design: Explorations of a research–practice partnership
• 7 Theories of rightful presence in socio-cultural contexts: Vicious cycles: Museums marginalize the museum educators they hire to engage marginalized communities
• 8 Social models of disability and museum research: Inclusion and accessibility in science museums: Voices from Brazil
• 9 Embodied theory and lived experience: Museums are burning: Dare we engage a liberatory imagination in practice and research?
• Index