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Public art galleries and museums have been mandated to become more relevant and useful to the lived experiences of the broad communities they claim to serve. Adult education has long been part of the work of these institutions, although historically the relationship has been uneasy, and they seldom feature in the adult education literature. To fill this knowledge gap, we developed a cross-national comparative study that employed individual interviews, focus groups and observations to explore the adult education perspectives and activities of adult educators in art galleries and museums in Canada, England and Scotland. Findings show inconsistencies in understandings around education and learning, disconnections between internal and external activities and lack of institutional support. However, a plethora of socially responsive activities to tackle racial and religious intolerance, or explore power and identity, illustrate that despite tradition and other constraints, these adult educators are making valuable contributions to social justice and change.

Arguing gender inequity remains one of the biggest challenges of our time, and framed within the concept of "pedagogic contact zones", our article shares findings from a five-year feminist, cross-national study of women adult educators and community practitioners in public museums and art galleries in Canada and the United Kingdom. Findings show a general lack of feminist consciousness and pedagogical skills amongst these women, problematic essentialist depictions of women educators that contrast portrayals of curators, and an equation of feminism with "bias". Yet there is a growing number of women who identify as feminists and take up women's issues in a variety of ways. Museums have the ability to be sites of feminist adult education and make contributions to gender struggle.

Does it matter where the academic home of the study of adult education is? In this paper we share our reflections on the implications of the institutional location of the discipline of adult education within universities in Canada and elsewhere. We speak of the historic tensions between the less structured and often transformational vision of adult education and the highly regulated learning contexts of schooling, and we suggest adult education theory and practice can be found in many other disciplinary clusters in all our universities. Wherever the formal study for adult education is located, its purpose is always to strengthen capacity for resistance and transformation.

Increasingly, practices of collective arts-based learning are being used by adult educators and community organizations as creative and participatory ways to respond to contemporary social or environmental issues. Investigating the potential contributions of arts-based learning to cross-cultural and antiracisms adult education was the aim of this qualitative comparative study in Ontario and British Columbia. Through the lens of antiracisms theories and from data obtained through open-ended interviews with project participants and artist-educators in three diverse arts projects, this article highlights some of the characteristics that make arts-based learning a culturally appropriate and effective, imaginative tool. But it also draws attention to the risks involved in creating public art and tackling difficult issues such as racism in contemporary Canadian society.

This chapter explores participatory visual practices in museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]