This presentation seeks to open a discussion on current museum education practices which focuses on questioning relational processes and public engagement, and proposes an exploration of museum education as a space for critical possibilities that challenge and transform the monolithic system that, to some extent, the museum traditionally is.
Today we are witnessing a shift in institutional discourses, which seek to break down the conventional barrier between institutions and their local contexts and people. Although we may regard this as a current trend, it is important to question the processes that convey the museum as an open space but still perpetuate power mechanisms. In fact, the challenge is to consider the museum a space where there can be a flow of intermixed lines of the participants’ knowledge and experiences in creating situated actions and new meanings where there is the possibility of confrontation of different interests and points of view.
Some topics of discussion can be introduced here about how museum education can be a space of contact committed to social justice where the differences, approaches and singularities of those involved are interconnected; and what challenges and tensions are inherent in this collaborative relational dimension.
Catarina Silva Martins is the Head of the i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society and Professor at the Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade do Porto. Her research interest lies in rethinking arts education curriculum studies in the present from a historical approach focusing on the systems of reason that govern policy and research. Her previous work has examined the historical intersection of art education with cultural distinctions and divisions inscribed in notions of the artist, inventiveness, and genius that emerged at the turn of the century in Portugal.
Marta Coelho Valente is a PhD student in Arts Education at the Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade do Porto, holds a scholarship from FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, and is a member of i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society and LabEA – Research Laboratory in Arts Education. Her research interests are centred on relational possibilities and public engagement in the context of educational practices in museums, seeking to explore critical and transformative dimensions of real collective agency. She has a Master in Painting by FBAUP, and degrees in Painting by Escola Universitária das Artes de Coimbra and in Art History by Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto. From 2001 to 2014 she was a visual arts teacher and in 2014 and 2015 she worked as a special education teacher, alongside her art practice.