Re-writing our own curriculum to enact change: Decolonizing museums for professional development and post-graduate programs
Laura Phillips
Authorship: Academia conditions us to accept and aspire to lone authorship. While I have written (typed) this text, and write from my own experience, my name is not indicating this is only my work. All of my experiences described reflect conversations and engagements with colleagues, peers, supervisors, scholars in my daily life. I’m particularly grateful for my collaborations with Nathan Sentance and Heather George as described in the section about the course we co-teach, who reviewed this article before it was submitted. To me, my / our names indicate the base of an inverted pyramid of experience and community that shape every outcome and output.
Introduction
This article discusses strategies to promote decolonizing mindsets in white Euro-descended settlers like myself, working within museums in so-called North America, and other countries whose recent histories include the ongoing violence of European colonization. The hard work of decolonizing museum spaces is in its infancy as far as applying decolonizing principles in practice, through self-reflection by individuals and institutions, as we move towards understandings of how these spaces can be transformed. This process starts with educating/re-educating the existing white settler museum workforce, many of whom may unwittingly be promoting white supremacist and/or colonial-centered views in our work and in our daily lives as we learn to recognize the extent that the Enlightenment era inheritance continues to shape museology.
In 2017 I started a Ph.D. in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University, in what is now known as Ka’tarohkwi/Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I realise it is an incredible privilege to be in the economic situation to even contemplate ceasing to work full time for four to five years and live off student grant funding, and that this is not something that all mid-career museum professionals can consider. This is why I sought opportunities to share what I have learned through my Ph.D. with my peers. To address existing decolonizing challenges in museums, I wanted to develop a part-time professional development course for museum professionals that would look at ‘decolonizing museums in practice’, and to ensure future practitioners are equipped with decolonizing frameworks from the start of their careers, I tried to incorporate decolonizing principles into my university teaching opportunities. In both courses, the format and the methodology have centered aspects of decolonizing frameworks, especially collaboration and iterative processes. I’ll share examples of the core themes, texts, course materials, learning outcomes, class activities for these courses, with the hopes that these may be useful or inspiring for others teaching in both Museum Studies and professional development spheres.
The main argument presented here is that institutions are constructed and maintained by the people within them — people are policy writers, action takers, and interpreters. People are responsible for everything that happens within and outside of a museum, so any discussion around calls for decolonizing these spaces must start with educating and re-educating the people ourselves.
Positionality
I’ll backtrack a bit now to share some information about myself to show my positionality in all of this. As explained by Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson (2020), positioning ourselves in relation to our work allows us to identify the bigger contexts that shape our ways of being and understanding:
Positionality’s importance derives not from its prevalent use as a confession or admission of guilt. Instead, its usefulness is predicated upon a step beyond the simple recognition of individual intersectional identity. That step involves understanding positionality not as a static construct, but as a process or state that fundamentally guides our actions and perception. Specifically, to shift from the reified construct of “settler” and toward forms of action that effect more than merely “unsettling” structures requires understanding of how the “settling” of settler positionality functions. (p. 39)
Applying these to myself, I position myself as a CIS gendered, able-bodied, white settler. My ancestry is Western European, mostly Irish and Welsh. As shown on the website native-land.ca, I grew up in the southwestern Ontario Treaty 2 (McKee Purchase, 1790) / Treaty 6 (London Township Purchase, 1796) / Treaty 21 (Long Woods Purchase, 1819) area. These treaties overlay and intersect with the territories and current homes of the Oneida Nation of the Thames, Chippewas of the Thames & Munsee-Delaware Nations, around what is now London, Ontario. I had the privilege of choosing to live and work in England from 2000–2010, Qatar from 2010–2013, Miami Beach in 2014, and Eeyou Istchee from 2014–2017. In all of these locations, I was employed by museums, heritage, and memory institutions. I am currently based in Ka’tarohkwi / Kingston, in what is now known as Ontario, Canada, on the territories of Anishinaabek and Haudenosaunee Nations.
An early ‘ah-ha’ moment in my own Reconciliation Journey was realizing the hard work that needs to be done to change the settled way of being on this Land is through the re-education of settlers ourselves — and this is the work that I need to be part of. Instead of ‘Reconciliation’, I prefer to say ‘perpetual conciliation’, after Métis scholar David Garneau (2016: 31). What I learned from Garneau was that ‘Reconciliation’ tends to be presented as an end goal, when it is actually an ongoing process that will never end — a perpetual process. Secondly, the term reconciliation implies there was a period in the past when Indigenous and settler-colonists were ‘conciled’, which is not the case. Thus, it is not possible to return to a time that did not exist. Instead, settlers need to be learning the ways of this land, respecting the Indigenous Nations who are our hosts, and understanding that we are uninvited guests (Garneau 2016: 28–31). Actually internalizing these words into our daily ways of being is what museums and museum education can facilitate for society — all of which is about 500 years overdue.
Theoretical Groundings — Praxis & Praction
Daniela Fifi, one of the editors for Viewfinder, suggested Paulo Freire’s ‘praxis’ as one of the theoretical structures she sees these courses demonstrating and way of theoretically grounding this discussion. By ‘praxis’, Freire describes ways to transform what we see around us through our actions and our reflections, which is indeed what I hope to activate through these courses, and through sharing their development here. I’m also reminded of the notion of ‘praction’ shared by Tagalaka scholar Victor Steffensen in a story he recounts in ‘Putting the People Back into the Country’:
It was the word for teaching and applying traditional practical knowledge to everything in the natural and cultural world. It was the doing of applying responsibility to our everyday activities of living with culture, people, and country… learning by doing the action and the praction
(Archibald 2019, p. 226).
In the examples shared below, I see both praxis and praction as attempts to incorporate and embed decolonizing principles into the everyday-ness of teaching: how we teach, what we teach, and how we apply these lessons personally in our daily lives.
A Part-Time Course for Museum Practitioners: collaborating with Nathan Sentance and Heather George
The initial challenge to developing the course for museum practitioners was figuring out a foundation for the course that could be built on and changed over time. I had an excellent list of readings from my PhD research — most of which were not directly about museums but contained approaches from critical disciplines that could easily be applied and thought through in relation to reformulating museums in decolonizing ways.
After putting together an initial course outline, I confirmed a venue for the course (museumstudy.com), then moved on to the essential task of finding Indigenous co-instructors/facilitators who were well versed in the work of museums and memory institutions. Nathan Sentance (Wiradjuri), author of the ‘Archival Decolonist’ blog and Head of Collections, First Nations, at the Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney agreed to join as a co-instructor. Heather George joined as co-instructor for our second session in November 2020. Heather has a mix of settler and Kanien’kehá:ka ancestry, and many years of experience working in museums, including the Canadian Museum of History and the Woodland Cultural Centre.
Course Structure & Outcomes
The course is structured into four key themes:
● Understanding your Place on this Land;
● Critiquing Written and Unwritten Narratives;
● Museums, Authority and Authenticity;
● Imagining New Futures for Museums.
Some of the intended outcomes for the course include:
● understanding the importance of positioning statements;
● appropriate terminologies;
● critiquing written and unwritten narratives through decolonizing approaches;
● creating texts, labels, and exhibit content using decolonizing ways of thinking;
● developing strategies for building relationships and long-term partnerships;
● critiquing authenticity and authority in museum settings;
● applying a ‘road map’ created by Terri Janke (Wuthathi/Meriam) to evaluate what comes next for institutional decolonizing aspirations.
Class Structure
My original hope was that the course would change over time to reflect our facilitating voices and as equal contributors, which is how the course has evolved over the last 18 months. Our collaborative approach to this course means we add readings, change the delivery format and methodology, and check-in with each other regularly to see how we can support each other to ensure the course reflects and activates the bigger picture of what we are working towards in our daily lives and working practices. Collaboration is a facet of decolonizing work and has been an essential part of how we develop and deliver the course.
Our current class structure is divided into two different session types: one is a Response circle, where we more formally share responses to the readings using a ‘sharing circle’ format which we ground in the writings of Métis / Cree scholar, Fyre Jean Graveline from Circle Works: Transforming Eurocentric Consciousness (1998, pp. 136–137). In these circles, each person is invited to share their thoughts and reactions to the readings in this non-hierarchical method of communication that encourages sharing, deep listening, and gratitude for the brief time we have together.
Alternating weeks we have a ‘Reflection’ circle, where Heather teaches us beading and we have a less formal discussion of the readings, for which we mail each participant a basic beading kit. We invite guest Indigenous artists and curators to these sessions. As of our August 2021 session, our guests have included Emma Rain Smith (Anishinaabe), Armando Perla (Latinx), Natasia Mukash (Whapmagoostui Eeyou / Abenaki), Jodie Dowd (Noongar), Myles Maniapoto (Te Aitanga a Hauiti, Ngāi Tūhoe, and Taylor Gibson (Cayuga, Turtle Clan).
Texts / Readings
Each week there are a variety of readings on these topics, and readings from the course ‘textbook’, Stó:lō scholar Jo-ann Q’um Q’um Xiiem Archibald et al.’s Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology (2019). This book, like many of the course resources, does not speak specifically about museums but is an embodied example of what the course is about, and acts as a background through-thread activating decolonizing concepts.
Class Activities
To illustrate how the course is structured and delivered, I will take you through the material for our first theme, Understanding your place on this Land.
Theme 1: How we can understand our place on this land
The first topic we cover is how we position ourselves in relation to the Land we occupy. Part of this is understanding whose territory/ies we live and work on, and how museums can expand into being in relationship with what and who is around them (Land and peoples).
Theme 1: Teaching Materials — Texts/ Readings
One of the readings that resonated with participants is settler scholar Laura Murray’s article (2018), “Settler and Indigenous Stories of Kingston/Ka’tarohkwi: A Case Study in Critical Heritage Pedagogy”. This article was selected as a model for settlers to think through and analyze, in a personal way, our privilege. Murray presents her history and ancestry — showing how the decolonizing process works on a personal level of self-interrogation and private reflection, and discusses how she has applied this in her teaching. Murray includes place-based activities in her own teaching, including what is known as ‘treaty pedagogy’, whereby the treaty (if one exists) of a particular area is interrogated from different perspectives for the purpose of making visible their contemporary relevance. The core themes Murray centers are essential for participants to keep in mind throughout the course, especially — “Look Around You, Look to your Ancestors, Don’t Finish” (p. 262).
Other examples of materials we look at include blog posts. Nathan’s Archival Decolonist blog posts can help settler professionals working in museums, libraries, archives, and museums understand the many ways we cause harm and demand additional burdens from Indigenous colleagues. In ‘On Being a First Nations worker in GLAM’, Nathan outlines challenges he faces in his professional career that are due to his First Nations membership.
Settler scholar Paige Raibmon’s post on ActiveHistory.ca, “Provincializing Europe in Canadian History; Or, How to Talk about Relations between Indigenous Peoples and Europeans”, forces us to assess the implied meanings behind word choices. Raibmon gives examples like ‘modern’, ‘natural resources’ and ‘wilderness’, demonstrating that these words have implied values that promote colonialism and racist views, and call for precision in words and meanings. We circle back to the specificity of language in a course assignment, where participants are tasked with identifying erasures in the ‘official‘ story of where they live and re-writing it to be more accurate, after researching who was present before the European settlement of their area (which is inevitably where the ‘official’ colonial narratives start) — thus using place-based reflections that are unique to wherever we happen to be.
Some participants’ motivation in taking our course is to learn more about Land acknowledgments. We look at sources that bring different perspectives to this practice: from the Baroness von Sketch show’s Land acknowledgment done at the start of a play, alongside reflections from Indigenous and settler scholars presented in Robinson et al. (2019), all of which inspire reflection on performative aspects of land acknowledgments. This is meant to introduce the idea that Land acknowledgments should be active rather than scripted, and we need to think carefully about what we are asking words to do instead of taking action ourselves.
Continuing our Relationships
As a way to continue and renew our relationships with each other over time, the administrator for the course platform (museumstudy.com) has organised a Google Group for our course alumni, and bi-annual ‘catch up’ meetings by Zoom.
Decolonizing ‘Curatorial Practice’
Alongside educating museum professionals, I am interested in educating students in Museum Studies programs as well as other graduate and undergraduate pursuits. In Autumn 2021, I had the opportunity to develop the curriculum for, and delivery of, ‘Curatorial Practice’ in the University of Toronto’s Masters of Museum Studies program. This was a new challenge for me. I had plenty of curatorial experiences during my many years of working in museums, but I wanted to find a way to normalize decolonizing principles as part of curatorship, as museums move from ‘temple’ to ‘forum’ based venues, as envisioned by Cheyenne Arapaho scholar W. Richard West Jr. (2019). To me, this shift is what I hope will become a different way of being within all museums (and this different space may even require the creation of a word other than museum to name these spaces), rather than a temporary alteration or exercise of ‘inclusion’ within otherwise colonial institutions as discussed by Armando Perla and María Acaso in ‘The Activist Museum’ (2022).
Kolb Framework
I structured the course using the KOLB experiential learning framework that centres concrete experiences, active experimentation, reflective observations, and abstract concepts. I was fortunate enough to learn these techniques as part of my own professional development and training from Management Savvy’s Danielle Bienvenue. I planned curatorial learning activities based on the premise that students learn and retain information by doing, rather than passively sitting through lectures. This is often referred to as the ‘Learning Pyramid’ (which is not without critics). Based on my own personal experience of learning, and my own learning preferences, especially for teaching about museum practices, I felt that active learning was an effective method for this class of future curators to learn ways to transition museums from the aforementioned Euro-Enlightenment ‘temple’ spaces to re-structured and re-visioned spaces of ‘forum’.
Class Activities
In addition to weekly readings that included diverse curatorial projects, experiences, and positionalities, the class activities encouraged learning and engagement through visual, auditory, and hands-on or kinesthetic techniques. These are some examples of our class activities:
Classroom Curation
In our first class, students were instructed to bring something special to them that they could speak about as part of their introduction. We wrote labels for our belongings, and placed them together on a table, making a curated space within our classroom from Day 1.
For part of their assignment marks, the class presented ‘5 Things’, from themselves and a classmate. Students submitted photos of ‘5 Things’, knowing they would have to give a 5-minute presentation about them later in the term. Another student was anonymously matched with their classmate’s ‘5 Things’. In presentation weeks, presentations of the ‘Other’ 5 Things were followed by the ‘Self’ presentations of the same ‘5 Things’.
Giving thanks to the Land
The class was divided into small groups to deliver personal land acknowledgments at the start of each class, based on Robinson et al. (2019) and Nerida Blair’s (2019) ‘Acknowledgement of Country’.
A COVID-19 era Field Trip
We were lucky enough to have a window between covid variants in October 2021 that enabled me to organize a field trip to the Distillery District, a recently ‘gentrified’ area of Toronto, Canada where toxic land from pig farms and warehouses spaces had been converted to luxury condos, shops, and restaurants. This trip gave the class an opportunity to have conversations about the curation of urban spaces, and how urban ‘revitalization’ for some people means areas become inaccessible to others. Part of this trip included visiting the Resilience II exhibition at the Canadian Sculpture Gallery where we had a tour from curator/director Judi Michelle Young. Young explained her own piece Just-Us (exhibited under the name Tsuii Yiin) through her father’s experience of being a Chinese worker on the railway in the 1870s who was then barred from immigrating to Canada because of the 1923 Exclusion Act.
We went to the public art installation, The Garden of Future Follies, where one of the creators, Hadley Howes, met us for a discussion about their career trajectory, the circumstances that led to the sculpture, their current work, and challenges around monumental sculpture they discuss in “EVEN NOW THE SUN: Monuments to Impermanence” (2021). The Garden of Future Follies specifically speaks to the dismantling of colonial statues that abound in cities, and visibilizes the ways public spaces have sanctioned remembering that may be incredibly painful and violent for some, invisible or overlook-able to others. As artists and curators, the students reflected on public art commissioning, versus artist-run centres and how self-determination and self-sufficiency mean freedom for art-based conversations, particularly through site-responsive art practise and the relationship between our ancestral stories and how these develop our relationship to this land.
A Learning Exercise
In one of our classes, I led an exercise based on the TRIZ learning activity, from the KOLB experiential learning toolkit. We listed ‘opposites’ of desired behaviors, answering ‘How to ensure curatorial projects result in ‘temple’ outcomes’, and then used the information generated to inform what a Manifesto for ‘forum’ based curatorial practice should include. I wrote up our results as a class publication which we then submitted to Fwd: Museums for consideration.
All of these activities, whether for marks or not, were meant to demonstrate the wide variety of tasks undertaken by curators, as well as ways that curators strive to reflect and respond to contemporary societal conversations including decolonizing practices.
Conclusion
These examples demonstrate how we can incorporate theoretical concepts like Freire’s ‘praxis’ and Steffensen’s ‘praction’ into application in real world teaching situations when we build decolonizing curricula:
● structuring classes to centre collaborative approaches, multiple authorities and non-hierarchical learning;
● sharing space in purposeful ways and resisting (or confronting) existing practice of centering ourselves as scholars, curators and museum professionals through self-interrogation, self-reflection and refusal;
● selecting texts that are written by scholars presenting both Indigenous and settler positionalities from a range of critical disciplines that can easily be applied to the changes needed in museology and that give the students the opportunity to make the connections to their own lives and museological practice (and/or aspirations);
● creating class activities that put the texts into conversation with day-to-day approaches to decolonizing work that demonstrates achievable milestones.
This article has presented methods to enact change from where we are now, to different futures, using the hypothesis that museums are well placed to revise our understanding of the past 400 years, and this revisioning process is essential to changing our futures. For museums to do this work, the people working within them now, and in the future, need to have a critical understanding of what is put forth as ‘received’ knowledge and dominant narratives. As a white settler occupying space on stolen land, I feel there are unique conversations that need to happen with other white settlers because we benefit the most from the current structures of oppression that most museums participate in. Applying decolonizing principles on a personal, real-life, level, means thinking through each thought and assumption, and unraveling it so it can be put back together, or re-shaped, in a good way, a better way.
Fyre Jean Graveline in Circle Works: Transforming Eurocentric Consciousness (1998, p. 136–137):
Laura Phillips
Laura is a white settler of European ancestry. She currently lives as an uninvited guest in Ka’tarohkwi / Kingston at the edge of Niigaani-gichigami.
Endnotes
- Another resource that is useful for circle pedagogy, and discusses the use of circle sharing by non-Indigenous teachers is “Let’s Sit Together: Building Classroom Community”, facilitated by Tyendinaga Mohawk scholar Lindsay Brant from Centre for Teaching and Learning at Queen’s University.
References
Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem, Jo-Ann, Jonny Bol Jun Lee-Morgan & Jason De Santolo (Eds.), Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology. Zed Books.
Blair, Nerida. ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ from Lilyology as a transformative framework for decolonizing ethical spaces within the academy. In Jo-Ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem, Jonny Bol Jun Lee-Morgan & Jason De Santolo (Eds.), Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology (pp. 217). Zed Books.
Garneau, David. (2016). Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing. In Dylan Robinson & Keavy Martin (Eds.), Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (pp. 21–41). Wilfred Laurier University Press.
Howes, Hadley. (2021). EVEN NOW THE SUN: Monuments to Impermanence. PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling: Arts-Based Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures, 64, pp. 148–159. https://doi.org/10.1386/public_00079_1.
Letrud, Kare. “A Rebuttal of NTL Institute’s Learning Pyramid.” Education, vol. 133, no. 1, Project Innovation (Alabama), Sept. 2012, pp. 117–25.
Murray, Laura J. (2018). Settler and Indigenous Stories of Kingston/Ka’tarohkwi: A Case Study in Critical Heritage Pedagogy. Journal of Canadian Studies, 52 (1), 249–79. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.2017-0052.r2.
Robinson, Dylan. (2020). Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minnesota University Press.
Robinson, Dylan, Kanonhsyonne Janice C. Hill, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Selena Couture & Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen. (2019). Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement. Canadian Theatre Review, 177, 20–30. https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.177.004.
West, W. Richard. (2019). Cultural Interpretation in the 21st Century: Transformational Changes in Museum Practice. Museum International, 71 (1–2), 48–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/13500775.2019.1638028
