Museums and galleries as performative sites for lifelong learning: constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of audience positions in museum and gallery education

摘要

In recent years community-based voluntary adult education has been underincreasing pressure from neo-liberal discourses concerning the problems andbenefits of globalization. Learning in museums traditionally connects to 'soft'humanist ideals of lifelong learning such as popular enlightenment, personaldevelopment and active citizenship, similar to those of the Scandinaviantradition of youth and adult education. However, even museum and galleryeducation has difficulties in resisting the introduction of discourses that, throughnew and subtle techniques of power, act in favour of individualized and marked-oriented constraints. In this article I take a critical constructivist approach tostudying audience positions in lifelong learning as it is found in contemporarymuseum and gallery education. I use examples both from my own research ingallery education and from the case-studies of lifelong learning in museums andgalleries reported at the homepage of the European consortium Collect & Share.I frame the discussion by using three key concepts: construction, deconstructionand reconstruction