Art Education in Canadian Museums: Practices in Action

This collection considers how Canadian art educators are engaging with a new range of unique approaches to museum education.

With the overarching concept of relationality between art museums and interdisciplinary perspectives, authors consider methodological, philosophical, experiential, and aesthetic forms of inquiry in regional museum contexts from coast-to-coast-to-coast that bring forward innovative theoretical standpoints with practice-based projects in museums. In so doing, they articulate how museums are shifting and why museums are evolving as sites that mediate different and multiple knowledges for the future. Informed by social justice perspectives, and as catalysts for public scholarship, each chapter is passionate in addressing the mobilization of equity, diversity, and inclusivity (EDI) in relation to practices in the field.

Organized into three sections, this collection reconceptualizes museums to consider accessibility, differences in lived experiences, and how practices create impactful change. By weaving the learning potential of interacting with artworks more fully within situated and localized social and cultural communities, the authors present a distinct socio-political discourse at the heart of teaching and learning. Rupturing preconceived ideas and sedimentary models, they suggest a discourse of living futures is already upon us in museums and in art education.