Museums as sites of critical pedagogical practice

Abstract

Paulo Freire’s notion that education is politics is well known to readers involved in areas of critical education, and thus a detailed rehearsal of the burgeoning literature illustrating and elaborating on this view is not necessary. After all, this view has a very long, albeit repressed, history, which anticipates Freire and those who took up the legacy of his thought and action; suffice to mention, for example, work connected with ‘‘independent working class education’’’ (Simon 1992; Waugh 2009). Significant for my purposes, however, is that an approach to education— such as Freire’s, which fore-grounds the histories and unique experiences of industrial working class and other subaltern groups—is capacious and yet critical enough to incorporate several sites of learning, including libraries, coffee shops (as in Cyprus), mining pits (‘‘reading Capital in the pit’’)1 and sporting arenas. In what follows, I want to extend this notion of education to include museums, which I suggest are an important and productive site for practicing critical pedagogy.