Museum Hacks with Darlene Clover

Faculty of Education

Darlene Clover is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies at UVic. Her research and teaching focus on adult education in community spaces. In this episode, Clover discusses “museum hacks,” an alternative way to teach and learn in a museum setting. She encourages students to think about the stories that are not being told and to challenge their own assumptions about the works in the museum. Who is represented in the museum? Who isn’t? And, most importantly, what might this mean? Clover uses the example of women in art galleries. She notes their lack of representation both as subjects and as artists, and explains how adult educators can encourage the populations they work with to think critically about social and gender issues through museum representations. “We’re asking them to take note of the absences and the presences,” says Clover. “These series of questions ask us to look more deeply at the displays, at the artworks themselves, at the stories, the narratives, and the language.”