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

Prisoners constitute one of the most marginalized groups of society and prison education as a field remains under-researched and under-theorized (Szifris et al., 2018). Regarding European policy documentation it “has been surprisingly invisible” (Czerniawski, 2016, p. 202). This thesis seeks to contribute to the field of prison education policy research. It critically examines prison education documents of the UK, Norway and Ireland. The theoretical framework draws from critical theory, critical discourse analysis (CDA), critical pedagogy and critical adult education as well as neoliberalism in education. CDA serves hereby both as theory and method that allows us to uncover the different ideologies and assumptions underlying the documents.  The research suggests that the policy document of the UK follows a neoliberal and narrow approach to education where the value of education is exhausted by the fact that it can fill workplace shortages. Further, prisoners are portrayed one-sided with being an offender as the main characteristic. On the other hand, Norway and Ireland represent prisoners as persons with different backgrounds, needs and feelings. Both reflect notions of critical pedagogy and critical adult education thus emphasizing the importance of fostering critical thinking through education and education for personal development. Further, it stresses the alleviating function of education in prison. However, in the Norwegian document the language remains unassertive when it comes to the applicability of the right to education to foreign prisoners in Norwegian prisons. The Irish document leaves unclear from which perspective their objectives and concepts in education are considered. Additionally, the thesis also critically discusses the need for a wide curriculum in prison, perceptions of self-responsibility and problematizes the over-reliance on measurement in education.

Museums as colonial institutions and agents in nation building have constructed, circulated and reinforced colonialist, patriarchal, heteronormative and cisnormative national narratives. Yet, these institutions can be subverted, resisted and transformed into sites of critical public pedagogy especially when they invite Indigenous artists and curators to intervene critically. They are thus becoming important spaces for Indigenous counter-narratives, self-representation and resistance—and for settler education. My study inquired into Cree artist Kent Monkman’s commissioned touring exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience which offers a critical response to Canada’s celebration of its sesquicentennial. Narrated by Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, the exhibition tells the story of the past 150 years from an Indigenous perspective. Seeking to work on unsettling my “settler within” (Regan, 2010, p. 13) and contribute to understandings of the education needed for transforming Indigenous-settler relations, I visited and studied the exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. My study brings together exhibition analysis, to examine how the exhibition’s elements work together to produce meaning and experience, with autoethnography as a means to distance myself from the stance of expert analyst and allow for settler reflexivity and vulnerability. I developed a three-lens framework (narrative, representational and relational/embodied) for exhibition analysis which itself became unsettled. What I experienced is an exhibition that has at its core a holism that brings together head, heart, body and spirit pulled together by the thread of the exhibition’s powerful storytelling. I therefore contend that Monkman and Miss Chief create a decolonizing, truth-telling space which not only invites a questioning of hegemonic narratives but also operates as a potentially unsettling site of experiential learning. As my self-discovery approach illustrates, exhibitions such as Monkman’s can profoundly disrupt the Euro-Western epistemological space of the museum with more holistic, relational, storied public pedagogies. For me, this led to deeply unsettling experiences and new ways of knowing and learning. As for if, to what extent, or how the exhibition will unsettle other visitors, I can only speak of its pedagogical possibilities. My own learning as a settler and adult educator suggests that when museums invite Indigenous intervention, they create important possibilities for unsettling settler histories, identities, relationships, epistemologies and pedagogies. This can inform public pedagogy and adult education discourses in ways that encourage interrogating, unsettling and reorienting Eurocentric theories, methodologies and practices, even those we characterize as critical and transformative. Using the lens of my own unsettling, and engaging in a close reading of Monkman’s exhibition, I expand my understandings of pedagogy and thus my capacities to contribute to understandings of public pedagogical mechanisms, specifically in relation to unsettling exhibition pedagogies and as part of a growing conversation between critical adult education and museum studies. / Graduate