Imaging Difference the Politics of Representation in Multicultural Art Education Summary

The National Association for Multicultural Education

Advancing and Advocating for Social Justice & Disinterestedness

What is the potential of multiculturalism in fine art?

"In my classroom, we exercise multicultural art projects all the time. Nosotros make fine art representing cultures from all effectually the world, from African masks and drums to Mexican sand paintings. I recall I have fine art covered."

Do these statements sound familiar?

---

Unfortunately, art teachers sometimes employ essentializing fine art curriculum that really helps to maintain a dominant narrative about marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Fourth dimension and again, art education scholars critique the kind of multiculturalism frequently found in K-12 school fine art classrooms (Acuff, 2014; Knight, 2006; Stuhr, Ballengee-Morris, & Daniel, 2008). This kind of multiculturalism -- liberal multiculturalism -- celebrates diversity and develops sensation and appreciation of cultural ethnicities. What could be wrong with that, you might wonder?

Liberal multiculturalism fails to recognize and critique unequal power relations that underpin inequity (May & Sleeter, 2010). Additionally, liberal multiculturalism essentializes civilization, pregnant that is turns circuitous and dynamic cultural practices into a static "thing." Art educators practice liberal multiculturalism with projects such equally Native American headdresses and dream catchers (shown here in the ii figures), African masks, African drums, Alaskan totem poles, Mexican ponchos, Japanese fans, and sand paintings, to proper name a few. With artmaking, it can be easy to fall into the trap of "celebrating differences" while simultaneously perpetuating racism and misinforming learners well-nigh those outside of the dominant group.

Multiculturalism in art education, at times, has get an effect in which "students vicariously voyage to a smorgasbord of selected and safe exotic places to make trite and decorative copies of decontextualized crafts" (Chalmers, 1999, p.178). Art educators may build this type of depoliticized curriculum with good intentions, simply it is not what multicultural art teaching should look similar in the 21st century. Contemporarily, multiculturalism in the art classroom should critique power. Visual imagery and cultural representation can produce dominant narratives, and thus play a critical role in sending letters from the point of view of dominant social groups about the world and the people who inhabit information technology. Therefore, it is imperative that art educators not passively interact with visual imagery because the outcome is the passive acceptance of messages that the images disseminate.

Acuff (2014) writes, "While liberal multicultural art education may recruit diverse people and introduce dissimilar curricula, information technology steadily maintains the normative civilisation versus subcultures image" (p. 307). There are many critical issues to consider and reflect upon as one reimagines multiculturalism in art and in the art education classroom. A couple of problems at the fore of the critique of liberal multicultural art pedagogy include: Western constructed aesthetics and hegemonic curriculum.

Western Constructed Aesthetics

What makes creating Native American dream catchers, African masks, African drums, Mexican totem poles, and Southward American rain sticks in the art classroom problematic? Nada, if you are teaching students about the ethnographic history of a civilisation and its practices. Nonetheless, if your goal is to teach almost some of the aesthetics and facets of "Art" inside a culture, introducing such projects is troublesome because presenting these objects as "Art" actually perpetuates a colonial structure of subjectivity (Okeke-Agulu, 2010). These art lessons produce utilitarian objects and those related to things similar historical rituals, religion and/or mythical belief systems. Pinder (2012) writes, "The toilet paper totem pole and paper mache African masks correspond early on attempts to bring multiculturalism to the fine art classroom at a time when well-meaning classroom teachers did not fathom how truly archaic their understanding of the and then-called primitive cultures was" (p.436).

How many times take you seen Native American dreamcatchers as key chains or ethnic trinkets that hang from a auto'due south rear view mirror? These types of objects are not idiosyncratic creations by artists, rather they are done past craftsmen as commodity (Kasfir, 1999). Labeling such objects as "Art" does several things, such as: communicates that these cultures are primitive and exotic and their Art deviates far from the norm (Eurocentric standards) (Chin 2011; Oguibe 1999); excludes actual modern and gimmicky Art created past artists from around the earth (Hassan, 1999; Kasfir, 1999; Meier, 2010; Okeke-Agulu, 2013); and homogenizes and essentializes cultures by designating a unmarried object to represent a continent, civilisation, or race (Acuff, 2014).

Art didactics scholars have argued that Westerners, more than specifically White people, see themselves equally authenticators of indigenous and non-dominant groups of people and their art forms (Bequette, 2009). Acuff (2014) writes, "Based on unilateral, biased cultural values, westerners have selected what is considered to exist the visual art of not-western cultures..." (p.309). Westerners have adamant the "Fine art" that represents certain groups and thus have created an "Indigenous" aesthetic (Kasfir, 1999). James Luna, who identifies as a Native American contemporary creative person, can be used to introduce elementary aged learners to Art with a Native context while also honoring the accurate phonation from a civilization. Utilizing the work of global contemporary artists like him is an platonic fashion to introduce young, uncomplicated aged learners to varying cultures, while also addressing tough topics like racism and inequity, a goal of critical multiculturalism. The textGlobalization, Art, and Educational activity is a tremendous literary resource for art educators who are seeking out ways to develop curriculum that appreciates the multidimensionality and multiplicity of culture, and simultaneously investigate systems of power.

It is overwhelmingly of import and necessary to learn and engage in global arts and cultures; nevertheless, it becomes problematic when "forms of cultural re-presentations" are misappropriated or used in a method that misrepresents and devalues particular social groups (Ballengee-Morris, & Stuhr, 2001, p. 10). Scout as Amalia Mesa-Bains discusses this upshot at length:

She suggests the fine art museum as a tool for educators to explore and generate dialogue around civilisation and cultural evolution. It must be an art educator's goal to challenge the "Ethnic" artful that has been developed and maintained for those outside of the ascendant grouping. To claiming the maintenance of such cultural subjugation, one must ask: Where is the historical context that positions these objects to be ethnographic stories instead of the Art of that civilization?

Hegemonic Curriculum

Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Michelangelo, Édouard Manet, Leonardo da Vinci and Paul Cézanne are all very familiar, world renowned artists that even the average person can call out when asked to proper name a famous artist. Westerners have deemed these artists, equally well as hundreds of other White, European men, the " One-time Masters" of Art.  It is non unusual for these White, European men to be the leading foci of an art curriculum throughout the school year. Multiculturalism in the fine art room is often times a supplemental component that is added to this "standard," Eurocentric curriculum.

Some fine art teachers believe introducing artists of colour, women artists, or artists with disabilities into the curriculum at one point in the school year exhibits multiculturalism. Most of the time, these "points" in time are conveniently during celebration months, such as Black History Month, National Hispanic Heritage, Chinese New Twelvemonth, or Women'southward History calendar month, for example. Such curriculum positions non-dominant cultures within a Eurocentric framework and "helps to maintain the dominance of popular mainstream academic cognition" (Jay, 2010, p. four).  This is how curriculum begins to function as hegemony.

Hegemony, coined by Antonio Gramsci, refers to the way in which a ascendant grouping maintains ability over others by establishing a item manner of being and seeing the world every bit common sense, a natural gild (Bell, 1997).

Hegemony presents itself in non only the curriculum, simply in classroom texts, artwork used in the curriculum, instructional practices, and even behavioral management strategies (Adams, Bong, & Griffin, 2007). However, hegemonic curriculum is particularly harmful in that oppression has been embedded in a systemic educational tool. Educators must be cognizant of the harm that happens when hegemonic curriculum is not deconstructed and redeveloped to exist multicultural and culturally relevant from formulation to completion. While curriculum has the power to support the status quo, information technology also has the power to question it (Acuff, 2015).

The Potential of Multiculturalism in the Fine art Classroom

What might multiculturalism look like in the art classroom? Primarily, at that place is a push to adopt critical multicultural fine art educational activity, which is a political turn from liberal multiculturalism (Acuff, 2015). Disquisitional multiculturalism includes the post-obit components:

• Questioning power structures
• Critiquing systemic oppression on the macro-level, as well as the micro-level
• Attending to cultural subjugation and identifying race at the crux of institutional oppression
• Fostering critical consciousness by working to dismantle dominant, master narratives (May & Sleeter, 2010)

Addressing both Western synthetic aesthetics and hegemony, disquisitional multiculturalism initiates questions, such as, 'Is information technology true? ... Who says so? Who benefits near when people believe it is truthful? How are we taught to accept that information technology is true? What alternative ways of looking at the problem tin can we see?' (Sleeter & Grant 2007, p. 260).

For example, using this critical questioning format, art teachers tin utilise intentional and pointed inquiries to guide their curriculum evolution and pedagogy. For case:

• How and why are certain images of certain groups of people created and maintained in the media? Whose noesis is privileged in art museums and in art history books?
• "Who controls the means for representation, who controls cultural artifacts, and who controls the methods of displaying and exhibiting these artifacts in cultural institutions" (Desai, 2000, p. 120).
• What does a visual image of the "Former Masters" (European White men) and their art communicate most the fine art of people of color and the art of women?
• Who has the power to identify some artists every bit "Masters," while other artists continuously residuum at the periphery of the art world?
• How do entire groups of people go erased from art history and art education narratives?

Critical multiculturalism in the art classroom means teachers are thinking near "the social contexts, virtually the students, about the curriculum, and about instruction" (Ladson-Billings, 2011, p. 34). Additionally, they are thinking about the ways in which racism is embedded and institutionalized in the educational systems that work to secure cognition cosmos and knowledge dissemination. Consequently, teachers end upward developing these very thoughtful inquiries that get to the cadre of systemic oppression. This is a primary task of critical multicultural art instruction. Fine art projects based on such critique and deep reflection cease up resembling the images here, instead of the images shown to a higher place.

Have a expect at this example headed by Judy Baca in Los Angeles, California. What's wonderful about this project is that information technology engaged youth, especially gang members, in working with local communities to inquiry the history of LA from the perspectives of people of color. The project culminated with the restoration of the wall forth the LA river; the images on the wall made the community's history visual and public. This art project nurtured the creation of a community's counternarrative, created to supervene upon the deficit master narrative that had been imposed upon an entire ethnic culture. Non sectional to this example, contemporary art practice provides a platform to button and advance the destabilization of dominant ability and to consequence change.

A heightened level of consciousness is required to deconstruct the power structures that influence and maintain educational inequity (Howe & Lisi, 2014). Social justice consciousness is a developed skill that requires a shift in our agreement of "ourselves and our self-locations; our relationships with other humans and with the natural world; our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race, and gender; our body awarenesses, our visions of alternative approaches to living; and our sense of possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy (Freedman, 2010, p.3). Critical consciousness alters the style of existence in the world. It is the ability to perceive varying permutations of oppression and act against those ways of oppression (Freire, 1970). For example, in art pedagogy, instead of asking, 'How can nosotros accurately or authentically stand for another culture?' instead art educators should ask 'What can nosotros know well-nigh some other civilization?' (Desai, 2000, p. 115). What is the reason/goal for attempting to represent other groups of people? How practise I sympathise Art from unlike cultures? Is the Art positioned in a historical context? Have I considered the contemporary Art that exists within these cultures? Am I placing the Western artful in a position of power?

---

Self Check and Reflect:

Read this news article about how a controversial pupil artwork was removed from brandish in a Denver, Colorado, public school. The educatee's art depicted a police force officer, in KKK attire, shooting a small Black child with his hands raised in surrender.

• Consider the way art was used every bit a medium through which social justice was attempted, considered, and/or fifty-fifty questioned.

• Write a list of reflective questions that examine the power struggles embedded within the circumstances of the event. Sample questions include: how does a visual depiction of the lived reality of one grouping of people become a threat to some other group of people? How is social club forcing art and those who create art to follow, function, and perform inside a racist organisation? What does this tension say about the power of visual soapbox?  How does the narrative of 1 grouping of people sometimes silence the narrative of some other group of people? Keep generating questions.

• Share this news article and your listing of questions with colleagues, then discuss.

Lookout this news clip that details an incident in which Honors arts students at Oxon High School in Oxon Hill, Maryland, were forced to take downward their collaborative artwork that centered around social justice.

The artwork, which is a 3D rendering of a police and a youth with his hands raised to the sky, was aimed to bring to light the historical and contemporary strained relationship between law enforcement and Blackness people. The students' work demonstrates the use of fine art to provoke, question, and motion the community to activity. In the video, one Oxon High School student is seen speaking to the schoolhouse board about the power of fine art and its ability to bring up a questions that implicate race in the final decision to remove the artwork. At the video's 2:05 mark, the young female person educatee asserts, "Our educators didn't teach us what our art expressed, America did. Order did. And this suppression of our liberty of expression is continuing to teach us. Art is supposed to provoke. But if this art offends them, mayhap they should enquire themselves why they are not offended behind the reality of the art instead."

• Consider this student's statement and write a response that y'all might give if you were the pupil'south art teacher. How would you lot back up the students' arguments in their presentation to the lath?

These types of incidents are happening all around the United states. How can art educators be agents in supporting students desire to utilise fine art for change and social justice initiatives? These stories provide examples of what critical multicultural projects tin can look like. They critique ability and suggest activity.

Act:
The students' artworks that were described above be as counternarratives that negate the media'due south story that the police are the victims, while those killed are the ones to blame for their untimely deaths. In line with the media, the police have seemed to work overtime to construct a persona that is not overtly racist, while still acting and reacting in racist ways. Developing counternarratives back up cocky affirmation for people of colour and strip power from oppressors who simply have regard for maintaining hierarchical social constructions of race.

It is critical to consider what actions art educators can take when mental, emotional and physical violence enters the lives of learners. One suggestion is to create a counter-curriculum. A 'counter-curriculum' functions as a resistance tool, like a counternarrative, that negates the myopic, oppressive content that subjugates various cultures. Counter-curriculum dramatizes and gives vocalization to the lives and experiences of people of color.  Counter-curriculum is counter hegemonic and destabilizes dominant ideologies and beliefs concerning ways of performing, interacting with and constructing knowledge.

Counter-curriculum objectives may include:

1. Encourage students to be aware that the "isms" (e.thousand., racism, sexism) are continually being redefined in order to keep existing equally society changes-analyze systems of oppression and critical questioning (Sleeter & Grant, 2007)

2. Teach political action skills and a consciousness that affirms human being worth (Sleeter & Grant, 2007)

3. Capeesh and nurture unlike ways of constructing knowledge and identifying learning>

4. Create a democratic infinite in which collaboration thrives

5. Reveal how representations play a function in maintaining oppressive systems and place how art can be used to counter oppression

6. Promote activity that attends to racial and cultural subjugation.(Bell, 1997)

Curriculum functions as a organisation that constructs, negotiates, and re-presents knowledge to diverse audiences. This knowledge circulates not only within the classroom, but also outside into local communities and beyond.  Counter- curriculum can disrupt normalized (mis)conceptions and "truths" about groups of people, specifically those labeled as minority.

---

References

Acuff, J. B. (2014). (mis)Information highways: A critique of online resources for multicultural art education. International Journal of Didactics through Art, 10(three), 303-316.

Acuff, J. B. (2015). Failure to operationalize: Investing in critical multicultural art education.Periodical of Social Theory in Art Education, 35(ane), thirty-43.

Adams, K., Bell, L. A., & Griffin, P. (Eds). (2007). Instruction for diverseness and social justice. New York, NY: Routledge.

Ballengee-Morris, C., & Stuhr, P. (2001). Multicultural art and visual cultural education in a changing world. Art Education, 54 (four), 6-xiii.

Bell, L. A. (1997). Theoretical foundations for social justice education. In M. Adams, L. A. Bell, & P. Griffin (Eds.), Teaching for diverseness and social justice (pp. iii-15). New York, NY: Routledge.

Chalmers, G. (1999). Cultural colonialism and art pedagogy: Eurocentric and racist roots of fine art educational activity. In D. Boughton & R. Stonemason (Eds.), Beyond Multicultural Education: International Perspectives (pp. 173–84). New York: Waxmann.

Chin, C. (2011). Critiquing ordinarily available multicultural fine art educational activity resources. International Journal of Education through Art, 7(3), 299–313.

Desai, D. (2000). Imagining difference: The politics of representation in multicultural art educational activity. Studies in Fine art Pedagogy, 41(2), 114-129.

Freedman, P. (2010). Planktonic awareness and transformative learning communities. Come across: Education for Meaning and Social Justice, 23 (1), 2-5.

Freire, P. (1970/1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum Publishing.

Hassan, S. (1999). The modernist experience in African fine art: Visual expressions of the self and cross-cultural aesthetics. In O. Oguibe & O. Enwezor (Eds.), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (pp. 214-35).London, Institute of International Visual Arts.

Howe, W., & Lisi, P. (2014). Condign a multicultural educator: Developing sensation, gaining skills and taking action. Thou Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Jay, M. (2003). Disquisitional race theory, multicultural education, and the hidden curriculum of hegemony. Multicultural Perspectives, 5(4), 3-9.

Kasfir, S. (1999). African art and authenticity: A text with shadow. In O. Oguibe & O. Enwezor (Eds.), Reading the Contemporary: African Fine art from Theory to the Market (pp. 88-113). London: Institute of International Visual Arts.

Knight, W. B. (2006). Using gimmicky art to challenge cultural values, behavior, and assumptions. Fine art Education, 59(4), 39-45.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2011). "Yes, but how exercise we practise it? Practicing culturally relevant pedagogy. In J.Grand. Landsman & C.West. Lewis (Eds.), White teachers/Various Classrooms: Creating inclusive schools, building on students' diverseness, and providing true educational equity (pp.33-46). 2d Ed. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

May, S., & Sleeter, C. (2010). Disquisitional multiculturalism: Theory and praxis. New York: Routledge.

Meier, P. (2010). Authenticity and its modernist discontents: The colonial encounter and African and Centre Eastern art history. Arab Studies Journal,eighteen(1), 13-46.

Oguibe, O. (1999). Art, identity, boundaries: Postmodernism and gimmicky African art, in O. Oguibe, & O. Enwezor (Eds.), Reading the Gimmicky African Art from Theory to the Market (pp. 16-29). London: Found of International Visual Arts.

Okeke-Agulu, C. (2010). Nka Roundtable Two: Contemporary African art history and the scholarship. Nka: Periodical of Contemporary African Art, 26(1), 80-151.

Okeke-Agulu, C. (2013). Modern African art. In E. O'Brien, E. Nicodemus, Grand. Chiu, B. Genocchio, B.M. Coffey, R. Tejada (Eds.), Modern fine art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An introduction to global modernisms (pp. 26-38). West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Pinder, Due south.O. (2012). American multicultural studies: Diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Sage Publications.

Sleeter, C.E., Grant, C.A. (2007). Turning on learning: five approaches for multicultural teaching plans for race, form, gender, and inability. New York: Merrill Publishing Visitor.

Stuhr, P., Ballengee-Morris, C. and Daniel, V. (2008). Social justice through curriculum: Investigating issues of variety, in R. Bricklayer and T. Eca (Eds.), International dialogues about visual culture, pedagogy and art (pp. 81-95). Chicago, IL: Intellect Books.

Torre, Thou. (2009). Participatory activeness research and disquisitional race theory: Fueling spaces for Nos-otras to research. Urban Review: Issues and Ideas in Public Education, 41(1), 106-twenty.

meiersequir.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.nameorg.org/learn/what_is_the_potential_of_multi.php

Share this post