In the educational domain, digitization has been often conducted in a tension towards techno-solutionism, thus feeding commodification and financialization mechanisms (McLaren, Jandrić 2015, Grimaldi, Ball, Peruzzo 2023). This presentation moves from the assumption, shared by many scholars, that this is just one of the possible unfoldings of digital technologies in education. Here, in fact, they can as well provide numerous spaces for contradictory practices (Rose 2015); enable new ecologies of participation and meaning making (McLaren, Jandrić 2015); and set up a fertile ground to open many different routes for human learning (Hayes 2015).

This study tries then to walk through one of these: specifically, that which encounters art and museum education. If art education calls on us to embark on a path of unlearning (Baldacchino 2019), opposing the positivistic approach and the developmental narrative not seldomly attached to digitization, contemporary museum studies suggest to acknowledge the museum as a potential site for critical pedagogical practices (Mayo 2004, 2013). As research shows, digital technologies, by supporting more open and flexible museum experiences (Hein 1998, Hooper-Greenhill 2007, Tallon, Walker 2008), can help unlock this potentiality, thus triggering a virtuous circle in which the digital museum educational experience rises as an occasion for collaborative knowledge construction and co-production of difference.

Drawing upon such a position, this presentation gathers the initial results of a two-year study, which attempts to explore how art and museum education can be areas from which to envision and enact a different account of educational digitisation.  Namely, one that evades from the common normative stance and technocentric approach, and instead centres and shapes around the pedagogies it cherishes. The study consists of three stages: a transdisciplinary literature review, aimed at reassembling a theoretical framework which combines the ideas of different scholarships, such as critical pedagogy and networked learning (McLaren 1995, Jandrić, Boras 2015) with critical museology and art education (Byrne et al. 2018, Irwin 2015); a context analysis, engaging with the selection and exploration of some existing case studies; and a participatory action research, addressed to design a digital museum educational project in collaboration with a group of higher education students. In this presentation I will discuss some findings from the second stage, i.e. context analysis: assuming the intertwining of action and reflection necessary for further transformation, which is inherent in the notion of praxis (Mayo 2004), my aim is to explore a set of case studies that shed further light on the theoretical insights voiced through the literature review.

The presentation will draw on the analysis of three existing projects proposed by European museums from 2020 to the present, as we recognize the Covid-19 pandemic as a decisive threshold for digital innovation in cultural and educational institutions. For the selection of the case studies, we coupled the use of digital technologies with the criteria traced by the Arte Útil movement, and above all with its shift from spectatorship to usership, conceived as a way to expand the notion of education through an act of emancipation (Saviotti 2022, Byrne, Saviotti, Estupiñán 2022). Crafted in this way, the resulting sample comprises three case studies: The Uncertain Space virtual museum by the University of Bristol; the Deep Viewpoint web application by the IMMA of Dublin; the project Collections of Ghent developed by the Design Museum of Ghent in collaboration with other actors of the city. Though encompassing different digital technologies, all three projects use them as resources to replace spectators with users and advance new uses for art within society, thus re-establishing art as a system of transformation. Adopting critique as a mode of analysis that interrogates texts, institutions, and social practices to reveal how they relate to the current hegemonic script, we investigate the case studies through document analysis and interviews with key informants. We then discuss them in reconnection with those dimensions that, according to our relevant literature, inevitably entangle with teaching and learning. First, the knowledge construction process they endorse, focusing on the degrees of decentralization, collaboration and horizontality, and as well on the epistemological values they embody (or refuse), for example regarding the notions commonly tied to technology, such as speed and objectivity. Second, the identities they allow to narrate, drawing upon the act of (self-) narration as a space of subjectivation, agency and empowerment, and likewise on the interplay between inclusion and exclusion at stake in every cultural representation. Last, as we uphold critical pedagogy’s refuse to separate culture from systemic relations of power or the production of knowledge and identities from politics, we must engage with the power relationships which are continually (re)negotiated through teaching and learning, looking at this latter as crucial nodes in the articulation of a wider democratic project (Giroux 2011).

Both digitization and art have been often misread for quick learning fixes. Rejecting such ideas, the field of museum and art education is a sensitive territory to harvest the recommendations of a more conscious and open education, less biased towards a developmental domestication of knowledge. Accordingly, we would like to unveil how it could become a worksite for a reappropriation of educational digitization, challenging the positivistic posture which in this process flattens education in a series of stimulus/response interactions and predetermined patterns. The study here presented, then, through the selected cases, aims to demonstrate how from different methodological grounds it is possible to find alternative trajectories for digital educational practices. In other words, we argue that, when performed from a specific perspective – in our case that of art and museum education – technology can decentralize and democratize power relationships, promote access to knowledge and encourage symmetrical, horizontal peer learning relationships (Peters, Jandrić 2018). Moreover, the case studies, while rejecting the common appetite for growth, standardization and fastness often associated with digital innovation, will also come as an example of the possibility to evade from the disciplinary boundaries of traditional higher education, thus taking care of its civic dimension and restoring its connection with self-formation and collective life – also known as Bildung. In this way digitalization, (un)learning from art and museum education, could be recoded as a process which facilitates the production of situated and antihegemonic knowledges, which arise from and foster traditionally marginalized theoretical viewpoints and methodological sensitivities.

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