Museum Practitioners’ Beliefs and Assumptions about Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Diversity; Minoritized Learners’ Sensemaking; and Their Institutional Context

Villanosa, Krystal

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-cavq-v368

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Museum Practitioners’ Beliefs and Assumptions about Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Diversity; Minoritized Learners’ Sensemaking; and Their Institutional Context

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This dissertation aims to: 1) characterize the range of beliefs museum practitioners have about racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity; 2) their understanding of the role of race, culture, and ethnicity in minoritized learners’ sensemaking; and 3) the areas of tension and symmetry between practitioners’ values and their perception of their institution’s values concerning the priority that is placed (or not placed) on institutional diversity work. Taken together, this work seeks to better understand the context for museum practitioners’ pedagogical practices when designing for racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse communities. Although we know something about what it means to design for diversity (Cazden & Leggett, 1976; Moll, Amanti, & Gonzalez, 1992; Lee, 1995, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Gay, 2000; Gutierrez, 2008; Paris, 2012), the majority of what we know uses schools and the formal classroom environment as a context so less attention has been paid to informal settings like museums (see notable exceptions including (but not limited to) Bang & Medin, 2010; Nasir & Hand, 2008; Cole, 2009). Similarly, while we have some ideas about how beliefs about diversity influence instructional practices (Garmon, 2004; Walker et al., 2004; Hyland, 2009; Gay, 2010), this work has primarily focused on K-12 teachers so we know very little about the role designers’ beliefs play in the design of informal learning experiences for any audience, let alone a diverse museum audience. This dissertation attempts to fill in these gaps through discourse analyses of interviews with museum practitioners about the minoritized publics (e.g. Black, Latino, Asian, Native American) they, and their museums, seek to engage.

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