Learning to Share the World: Reckoning With the Logistics of Whiteness in Public Galleries and Museums

Abstract

This article explores moments of pedagogical disruption as children from an urban school encountered an exhibition titled “We Change the World” at the National Gallery of Victoria. In conversation with radical traditions of anti-colonial scholarship, we elaborate children’s disruptions of the gallery as a space of didactic transfer and common ownership of cultural artifacts and knowledges. We then analyze artworks created by children in the wake of their experiences at the gallery, offering alternative propositions for learning to share the world in ways that break with dominant conceptions of museum education, national collections, and the commons.