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 respond. Using selective examples, this article attempts to illustrate public arts and cultural institutions as contested, problematic, challenging, yet equally progressive, critical and creative pedagogical spaces that play an important role in the struggle for social and environmental change. Through exhibitions, artworks, objects, workshops and seminars, these institutions trouble identity, decolonize, mock, revisualize, tell alternative stories, reorient authoritative practice, interrogate intolerance and privilege and stimulate critical literacies. We must continue to expose and critique traditions that perpetuate inequalities and maintain the status quo but in a world starved of hope, these sites provide new pedagogical possibilities.

In this article, we position museums as ‘pedagogic contact zones’, sites fraught with both problems and potential. Using five stories drawn from our work and engagement with public museums over the past five years in Canada, England and Scotland, we illustrate how contemporary practices of critical cultural pedagogy work to construct, deconstruct, reconstruct, disrupt, dislocate, interrogate and decolonise. We argue that the critical and creative adult educators in museums today, coupled with new exhibitionary practices, make museums important, complex and engaging sites of adult education that are alive with visual, performative and experiential practices of social and self critique in the interests of justice and change.

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 entitled Art and Slow Violence hosted at Tate Modern and Tate Britain galleries in London. The course was centred around a variety of artworks and multimedia representations aimed to stimulate dialogue, reflections and meaning making about the social and ecological impacts of the aftermaths of climate change, war and conflict. As a participant researcher, I gathered data through observations, journaling, and interviews. Findings show tensions between learning and education, expert-teacher and novice-learner, audience wants and knowledge assumptions, instructor and organisations expectations and challenges vis-à-vis self-direction around the artworks. Yet the course was powerful, particularly the informal gatherings following each class and the stories the artworks told and represented. Together, these served as means to question critically, reflect, debate and comprehend differently, the complex, contentious, but often ‘invisible’ socio-environmental challenges of our time.

Using Myths and Mirrors Community Arts, a feminist adult education and development organization, this article argues that paying attention to the aesthetic dimension of politically-oriented pedagogies can add to knowledge and understanding of community development and social learning theory and practice. Imagination and creativity are powerful tools inherent to all human beings that enable risk-taking, the reclamation of public space, and the simultaneous exercising and contesting of power within the neo-conservative landscape. Moreover, feminist aesthetic practice of community development augments cultural leadership by creating new cultural actors and agents of change.