Museums, Cultural Politics And Adult Learning

Abstract

Museums are not often included in the list of sites of adult education, though on close examination they do indeed serve a strong non-formal education function (Chadwick & Stannett, 1995, 2000; Taylor & Neill, 2008; Taylor & McKinley Par- rish, 2010). In this chapter, we will regard the museum as a site of cultural politics and public pedagogy and show that as sites of "public pedagogy" (Giroux, 2001) museums play a role in the politics of knowledge and representation. They represent a selection from the cultures of society, which raises the obvious question: In whose interest has the selection been made? This situation is similar to that concerning the curriculum. Both the museum and the curriculum are repositories of what counts, and does not count, as official knowledge (Apple, 1993).