Toward sustainable museum education practices: confronting challenges and uncertainties

Museums are complex, dynamic, and empowering learning environments that have great potential for informal and lifelong learning. Museum educators make museums more relevant for visitors. However, the museum’s educational function is a contested arena and the museum educator’s profession is in constant flux. In this article, I review literature spanning 35 years in relation to the contested educational function of museums and argue that as a profession, museum education faces serious practical and theoretical challenges within the organizational structures of museums, leaving museum educators in a precarious position. I ask what conditions and qualities contribute to sustainable and pedagogically successful museum education. I contend that museum education practices need to shift focus and to situate the profession within a broader theoretical context. Discussing the findings through three lenses – looking back, looking at, and looking toward – I propose sustainable museum education practices that require supportive organizational structures and the adoption of museum learning theories, and that encourage empowerment of museum educators as change agents.