Un-disciplining the Art Museum: Museum Educators, Institutional Structures and Processes of Change

Abstract

Within this dissertation I explore the experiences of art museum educators (including me) who are working to bridge education and curation in the museum space. I find inspiration for this research in my own experiments with curatorial projects, the recent body of literature that calls for more integrative approaches to education and curation, and the call for museums to create more relevant content with and for audiences. Over the course of nine months I interviewed four educators, visited and documented museum sites, and reflected on my own practice in order to understand how museum educators are navigating new modes of working. In the following pages, I share the experiences and perspectives of the art museum educators who participated in this research. I then analyze the findings through two disparate frameworks in order to explain why change in museums is often difficult due to institutional structures and how art museum educators create opportunities for change through acts of un-disciplining and re-imagining museum work. Through this research, I hope to present new and different ways of understanding the work of museum educators, highlighting how their approach to the projects investigated in this project reflect significant potentiality in shifting museum ideology and practice.