Presencing the Politics of Public Pedagogy

• In Event: 46.023 - Becoming Public: A Symposium on Research on Public Pedagogy, Representation, and the Public Sphere

Abstract

The systematic collecting and displaying of cultural ‘others’ have supported the development of social scientific discipline of anthropology. Displaying cultures through objects depict and implicitly state particular groups of people as savage, simple and relegated to a distant past (Dias, 1994; Maleuvre 1999, 269). I am interested in how ethnology museums define ‘otherness’ through objects, texts, and spaces, and how these combine to present a narrative of others. Ellsworth has referred to this as the pedagogical address, which includes analyzing whose stories are authorized, how these identities are presented, and what is made of those representations by the public (Ellsworth, 2005). This paper presentation examines various pedagogical concerns related to utilizing objects in a museum, including the use of objects that bring it into presence in a museum and the attendant absence this presence implies, the interpretive space that surrounds objects in museums, and the necessary distortion that objects create in their effort to conjure another, displayed reality. These pedagogical concerns are not unique to objects, as any representation bears similar burdens. The focus on museums, considered a significant place of objects that offer a repository of insights that can be brought to bear on other institutions including public school classrooms.
I use the notion of ‘presence’ to highlight the tension between an object standing in for another and realizing the impossibility of bringing anything into the presence fully in an unmediated and direct manner (Macdonald, 2012). I content that ethnology museums utilize objects to suggest past racial and ethnic identities, which can be used as a starting point to realize how objects from the past hold different meanings in the present. To take seriously the notion that a public educational institution like an ethnology museum offers pedagogy that is to be critically interpreted suggests educators need to consider such representations as both a remedy and a danger. The remedy lies in an effort to educate the wider public about how racial and ethnic ‘otherness’ is constructed for particular purposes at a specific time. The danger lurks in that same presencing, where objects turn groups of people into static beings.
I draw data from student teachers exploration of the American Museum of Natural History and how race and identity are constructed through objects and the learning that resulted from these representations. This study was conducted over three years of teaching a specific course (Study of World History and Geography). Of the 60+ students who took the course over the three year period, over 80% were engaged as students teachers in New York City. Through the observations and interviews, I argue there are two ways, among many, to consider the public pedagogy of this museum: the way in which the AMNH positions visitors to know, and how students considered the museum as pedagogical but also as an example from which to raise critical questions about how racial identity is defined and to develop a sensitivity to the way the museum orients learning.

Author

• William Gaudelli, Teachers College, Columbia University