“I Teach How to Look for What Is There and What Is Missing”: Women’s Testimonies of Resistance at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario, 1970s–2000s

This chapter examines the history of gender and museum education. The author addresses the ways women educators, who taught in two Ontario museums—the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)—contested dominant colonial and patriarchal historical narratives within the museum. The findings are based on oral histories gathered from 46 women who worked in museum education between the 1970s and 2000s. The interviewees reflect on their pedagogy, their community work with disability communities, and the kinds of historical narratives they constructed or deconstructed in their lessons. The chapter demonstrates that even when asked to embody the knowledge and scholarship of the institution they represent, women museum educators challenged dominant patriarchal historical narratives from within.