Beyond Museum Neutrality and Innocence: Toward a “not-so-perfect” Pedagogy of Implication

• In Event: Critical Theories of Children's Museums: Unforgetting Institutional Harms and Imagining Equitable Futures

Abstract

Purpose: Questions of representing difficult knowledge with children are often mediated through developmental constructs of innocence and readiness that presume an already-privileged child audience and can be used to downplay or censor challenging or controversial topics. In this paper, we shift the lens to consider how museum directors, educators, and curators conceptualise their own learning and development in their efforts to represent diverse and difficult content as a productive alternative to the defense of innocence.

Theoretical Framework: The “difficult return” of history hooks into what Deborah Britzman (1998) has called “difficult knowledge” (p. 118), a term that refers to both the content of representations that testify to violence and breakdown and the complex reception of such representations. Defenses against difficult knowledge can take various forms, such as in origin stories of the nation that “forget” the violences on which the state is built (Dion, 2009, p. 5). Defenses can also take shape in representations that stereotype traumatic experience and miscast entire communities as “victims living a damaged life beyond repair” (Simon, 2013, p. 132; Tuck & Yang, 2012) or in calls for censorship that refuse to represent historical truths, often justified in the name of childhood innocence (Garlen, 2019; Kelly & Brooks, 2009). Susan Dion (2022) further examines how claims of innocence function as a defensive position for White settler educators. To this end, Dion (2022, p. 19) offers a theory of the “perfect stranger,” which refers to a distancing strategy made from performances of unknowingness. By contrast, Dion (2022) offers a “not-so-perfect stranger” position that she defines in terms of “wanting to know” while “reflecting on common points of resistance” that defend against knowledge (pp. 19-20). For us, Dion’s (2022) “not-so-perfect” position represents a critical starting point from which to transform defenses into collective responsibilities and thus to use implication as a catalyst to do better “beyond information” and innocence (p. 129).

Modes of Inquiry/Data: Our analysis is based on qualitative responses of a survey of over 100 respondents working in children’s museums across the United States and Canada. We apply Dion’s twin constructs to examine museum educators’ reflections about the varied layers of their implication in the difficult knowledge they sought to engage with children. For the respondents of our study, social positionality mattered, sometimes taking shape in denials and appeals to universalised ideals and at other times in critical efforts to account for privilege and analyse the impacts of lived experiences.

Conclusions: We found that when educators reflected on their own learning, they focused less on the defense of innocence and more on the multifaceted qualities of their obligations as shaped by lived experiences and race privilege, as well as tensions made from perceptions of museum neutrality and their implication in colonial legacies. Our findings underscore the importance of creating spaces where educators can reflect on their own learning as a site of critical inquiry in a larger effort to disrupt and transform dominant narratives of history, childhood, and learning.

Authors

• Lisa Farley, York University

• Debbie Sonu, Hunter College - CUNY

• Sandra Chang-Kredl, Concordia University

• Gillian Parekh, York University