This chapter explores participatory visual practices in museums.

This chapter explores how museums, as educational and cultural institutions, can become agents of socioecological transformation. The ideas of critical museum studies and environmental adult education are reviewed, and three examples of environmental adult education in museums are discussed.

Although burdened by legacies of elitism, exclusion and paternalism, some public museums are attempting to respond to the socio-environmental problems currently facing our planet by developing critical non-formal educational activities to foster consciousness and change. This article explores one such response; a six-week non-formal course…

Historically, pubic art galleries and museums have a well-deserved reputation for elitism, colonialism and exclusion and they are, therefore, frequently omitted from the discourse of adult education. However, the escalating social, cultural and ecological problems of this new century have placed pressure on these public institutions to change and…

Arguing gender inequity remains one of the biggest challenges of our time, and framed within the concept of "pedagogic contact zones", our article shares findings from a five-year feminist, cross-national study of women adult educators and community practitioners in public museums and art galleries in Canada and the United Kingdom.…

Public art galleries and museums have been mandated to become more relevant and useful to the lived experiences of the broad communities they claim to serve. Adult education has long been part of the work of these institutions, although historically the relationship has been uneasy, and they seldom feature in the adult education literature. To…

Using a content analysis approach, this article shares the results of scholarly adult education study on museum and library adult education and learning as represented in peer-reviewed publications over the past 60 years. Findings show a paucity of studies in general, but particularly around libraries. The majority of publications on libraries…