Public Curriculum as Ethical-Political Self-Understanding: The Case of Museum Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Popular Culture and Public Curriculum: Critical Questions in Nontraditional Spaces

Abstract

As a public curriculum case study, Bosnia and Herzegovina provides an opportunity to examine how museums both [de]stabilize and [mis]direct the formation of democratic values and civic pluralism in times of radical social change, political complexity, and post-war recovery. Beyond important efforts to develop progressive pedagogical practices and be responsive to community input and needs, museums must critically understand their role in providing access to “an ethical-political discourse of collective self-understanding” (Habermas, 2001, p. 37). In order to develop such an understanding, museum educators must critically engage genealogies of the public sphere, assumptions about the nature of civil society, and the instrumentalized discourse of cultural heritage.

Author

• Patrick Roberts, National Louis University