In Her Hands: Women's Educational Work at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Canadian National Exhibition and the Art Gallery of Toronto, 1900s-1950s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Women educators initiated, shaped, developed and practiced experiential, multisensory or object-based education in art galleries, exhibitions and museums in Toronto. Examining women educators' roles in developing educational programming in three sites, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), the Art Gallery of Toronto (now known as the Art Gallery of Ontario or AGO) and the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), sheds light on women's work to make museums and galleries accessible to more diverse publics. Educators were white middle class women, often university educated; their work during the first half of the twentieth century in the development and practice of educational programming was geared to broader publics and ultimately resulted in institutional change. Women working in museums, galleries and exhibitions tailored their programming to: women; children and youth; newcomers to Canada and differently abled community members. By working within the gendered hierarchical structures of large cultural institutions, these educators were able to exercise their own agency and independence through the programming they developed. This gendered geneaology of museum education practice enables us to understand the history of many of the pedagogical practices in place today within these institutions. Coupled with a deeper understanding of museum education origins, this study also reveals that women played integral roles in establishing and developing educational practices that were aligned with progressive education reforms, thereby situating museums and galleries as crucial sites for these pedagogies. These learner-centered experiential pedagogies broadened museum and gallery publics and laid the groundwork for social inclusion in cultural institutions today. This study adds important recuperative historical narratives to the story of Canadian museum education and clears a space for new historical understandings of Canadian museum and exhibition practices. By historicizing museum education, and acknowledging the gendered and racialized nature of these educative spaces, this study will address how issues of access and public education have played out in the city of Toronto.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".