Reading an ethnology museum as pedagogical space: a multitext study

Abstract

Ethnology museums have a troubled lineage as they are inheritors of a violent colonial legacy while being steeped in a positivist epistemology that seeks to order and categorize an otherwise disordered world. Educational research, similarly, is often predicated on realist knowledge principles as people are made objects to demonstrate their interactions to predict likely outcomes of various interventions. This article considers how an ethnology museum, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, can be used as a learning site by student teachers as they experience reading a museum. Student teachers, having considered examples of postcolonial theory, use this scholarship to think through and critically read AMNH. The inquiry into how student teachers read AMNH as a pedagogical space is reframed, however, by multitext interjections offered by participants themselves. The study, then, is oriented around two principal areas: how student teachers can read an ethnology museum critically and how multitexts may work to address representational problems inherent in social science research, such as education.