첥Ƶ Faculty of Education Professor Lisa Farley and her research colleagues have developed a reflection guide for museum educators to support their efforts to discuss challenging topics and ideas with children.
The guide builds on the team’s 2025 study of programming and practices at children’s museums in Canada and the United States.
Farley says museum educators are navigating increasingly constrained environments when addressing equity, diversity, accessibility and inclusion with young audiences. Often, the idea of “childhood innocence” is cited as a reason to censor or downplay controversial and challenging ideas.
At the same time, Farley says, "children live within the social and political world, and are themselves subjects of and/or witnesses to injustices, violences and inequities."
She adds that the question then becomes "not how to protect them from difficult knowledge, but what it can mean to facilitate meaningful engagements.”
Farley and her colleagues, including York’s Gillian Parekh, associate professor of education and doctoral candidate Suad Ahmed, conducted the original study in partnership with the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM). Their research found that while many children’s museums focus on exploration, play or self-expression, addressing social and historical issues with young audiences were secondary.
However, they also found that this trend is changing.
“Museum programmers and educators are thinking carefully about how to better address topics that might conventionally be considered difficult for younger audiences,” Farley says. “We found a strong desire among educators for resources that can support their efforts to represent difficult knowledge in truthful ways, while also recognizing the unique considerations involved in working with children.”
The new reflection guide is a collection of resources chosen for their currency, relevance and accessibility. Articles, videos, strategies and frameworks provide questions, issues and/or examples of programming and practices that represent controversial, diverse and/or difficult knowledge.
For example, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights offers frameworks and strategies for addressing such topics as 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, war and genocide, systemic racism and wrongful convictions, while the Museum of Toronto suggests resources to help museums become good allies in learning from Canada’s Indigenous communities.
There are also curricula developed to teach children about topics such as Black history and life, and articles offering guidance about how to broach painful experiences, such as grief and loss, with children in an age-appropriate manner.
Farley hopes the reflection guide will support museum decision-makers, exhibition creators and educators to engage difficult knowledge while also opening possibilities for children to become new people in relation to the legacies they inherit. The content of the guide has been informed by the team’s research along with the participating children’s museums.
Farley, who is also a member of the LaMarsh Centre for Child & Youth Resources at York, says childhood is a theme that runs through all of her research.
The project reflects her broader commitment to research that engages directly with communities, she says, and her drive to understand how scholarly work can support educators traversing complex issues.
“I began my career doing individual research with child psychoanalysis to foreground a productive tension between emotional conflict and transformation. The psychoanalysis part hasn’t changed, but I have branched out to work in collaboration with childhood scholars in Canada and the United States, and in this particular project, expanded my scope to include a community partner,” she says. “I was excited to see where impact can happen in community, and specifically how the scholarly interests of our research team could serve museum educators in thinking about the significance of their work.”
With files from Elaine Smith