This study explored how workers in two small museums on Vancouver Island were responding curatorially and pedagogically to the social issues of our times. It was inspired from my own work in a small museum, as well as the idea that museums can be agents of change in our deeply troubled world. Specifically, I investigated how these small museum workers integrated new critical and creative practices into their daily work and the challenges and constraints they faced. Adopting institutional ethnography as inquiry, I used interviews, participant observation and focus groups to explore how the study participants navigated community relations, historical discourses, exclusions and institutional restrictions. My findings show the participants tackling issues of power and privilege by enacting cultural democracy through shared curatorial authority; actively engaging with a diversity of communities; integrating women’s lives and issues in the exhibits; using the archives to share lesser-known histories; and employing a variety of aesthetic and embodied practices to raise awareness and engage community. While some visitors and members were resistant to the changes, my study suggests that most welcomed the new stories and practices, which speaks to how the participants mobilisd pedagogies of challenge and care. Challenges remained in the forms of a gendered bureaucracy; lack of funding; and job precarity. I conclude this study with recommendations for how small museums might be further supported in this important curatorial and pedagogical work. These include the development of regional and collaborative learning frameworks; the re-imagining of governance; and the adoption of ‘decent work’ principles in these institutions. / Graduate

This study examines how adult education can facilitate learning towards the full realization of human potential. It synthesizes two theories of human development, and applies this to the practice of community-based adult education carried out by trained facilitators who do not have formal degrees in the field of mental health. The first part of the methodology used modified analytic induction to carry out a synthesis between the works of William Hatcher (1935-2005) and Roberto Assagioli (1888-1974). The second part of the methodology works with the goals, principles, and practices which emerged from the "lens" provided by this synthesis, and applies these to an analysis of the Integrated and Systemic Community Therapy (CT) approach to community-based adult education, in Brazil. The impetus for this study was a desire to move beyond limitations of the humanistic orientation in adult education towards a more holistic theory, which draws on and combines both scientific and spiritual views of human reality. The study theorizes that learning which supports the full realization of human nature should actively seek to a) foster a person's ability to take action in the `outer world' of human social relations (interpersonal dimension) while b) aligning one's `inner world' (intrapersonal dimension) with an emerging implicate order, which is the origin of the structure of reality. Based on its relevance to the expanding Community Therapy approach, the conclusion of the study is that the "lens" of a Hatcher-Assagioli synthesis deserves to be applied and explored further.