Cultural University || Multicultural Issues: Dilemmas and Hopes

National Art Education Association

Multicultural Issues: Dilemmas and HopesAuthor(s): Peter SmithSource: Art Education, Vol. 47, No. 4, Cultural University (Jul., 1994), pp. 13-17Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193484 .

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and~~~~~~ ~opes

Mul ~ulticulturalism is an inevitable feature of future school curricu- lums in America.

Dramatic changes in the makeup of the school population alone-to say noth- ing of equity policies-will make this undeniable (Hodgkinson, 1989) even to those who resist change most vehe- mently. Sooner or later, practices of the schools must reflect the will of a changing population.

Change is not a new thing in curricu- lums. In Europe, after the third century, the rise of Christianity added the study of a scripture of Middle Eastern origin, to the traditional curriculum of Greek and Latin authors. In North America the invasions of Europeans caused Native Americans to revise their necessary fund of learning. From the seventh century, the rise and spread of militant Islam brought about drastic change in the type of knowledge to be acquired from Samarkand to India, from China to Andalusia. From the first movement of peoples to the lat- est migrant worker's crossing of the United States-Mexican border, the types of knowledge required of mem- bers of a society, the content of what

BY PETER SMITH

the young are taught, in school or out, has everywhere and always undergone periodic changes. In a few societies, long periods of isolation allowed for the buildup of the delusion that one body of knowledge constituted the sine qua non of education. Even these societies eventually had to face change, as can be seen in the history of China after the triumph of Chairman Mao.

When change came about, in all like- lihood it took place with little foresight, haphazardly, and without building conceptual foundations well-adapted to the environment in which change was needed. The introduction of multiculturalism in art education could be one exception to this apparent rule that growth and change is unplanned and structureless. To this end, we should examine the meaning of multiculturalism in our society, its historic role in art education, and its possible role in learning about the arts in the schools of the future.

AMERICAN SOCIETY AS A SET- TING FOR MULTICULTURALISM

Bob Milgrom, of the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, at a conference in 1992,1 made the statement that American culture is multicultural. It does not need a plethora of references to recognize that our culture is, indeed, eclectic, but that is only an admission that the heritage of the United States is an aggregate of diverse ingredients. It seems to have been bound together by something and that binding agent is probably what multiculturalists call the dominant culture (Collins & Sandell, 1992). Whether this dominant culture glue is a toxic agent for some pieces of the mixture is a matter of debate; some see the loss of this dominant agent as a death sen- tence forAmerican society. I believe Milgrom would claim that the metaphor should be a tossed salad rather than an aggregate. Bits and pieces flavor each other; the whole equals American culture.

If we grant that there is a dominant element that not only binds together

JULY 1994 / ART EDUCATION



disparate elements of our culture, but also affects them in some strong way, is this effect necessarily "toxic"? Does the dominant culture necessarily destroy the integrity of the parts it has included?

Unfortunately, to answer that ques- tion well, I would need to stand outside my own culture. The United States was founded during the so-called Age of Enlightenment, and white Americans in general have internalized certain enlightenment notions. Among these is the idea that persons can somehow stand outside their own life experiences (Bridges, 1991). Is this in itself a Western imperialistic notion? If it is, then certain strands in multiculturalis- tic thinking are a priori tainted.

To illustrate how deeply embedded in culture certain notions are and how un-universal they are, I can paraphrase the words of a graduate student from a traditional Islamic country who described to me his difficulty in adjust- ing to American higher education. In particular, he found the taken-for-grant- ed requirements for critical discussion and expression of personal opinion and interpretation went against his own internalized cultural values. Open ended discussions, he informed me, are an expression of our open society. In his society, the ability to repeat received information, not the development of critical intelligence, marks the progress of education.2

I was somewhat bemused by this student's analysis since I held an opinion shared, I would guess, by many American academics, that there is too much rote learning and too little critical thinking encouraged in American education. Apparently that is a relative con- dition. Freedom to make those choices of behaviors and values is a requisite for development of multicultural educa-

Sooner or later,

practices of the

schools must

reflect the will of

a changing population. tion among some groups, but is unac- ceptable to others.

The student from the traditional Islamic country came from a society based on a foundation of belief in revealed truth. Such a society cannot accept the differing values of other societies as valid. God cannot be in error. His revealed word (scripture) cannot err. Any society in which social struc- ture and class are based on truths considered to be divinely revealed, therefore unquestionable, cannot accommodate "truths" which deny the basis of the claims to authority of its own structures.

The difficulties encountered when religious beliefs are in collision with those of other religions or with secular value systems are numerous (Smith, 1992). Art's historic association with religion can make it vulnerable to religious intolerance and opposition. Imagine the Islamic student teaching about Greco-Roman art, or the art of Tom Wesselman, in his nation's schools. Or, closer to home, imagine discussing Perugino's Presentation of the Keys to St. Peterin a class full of Protestant fundamentalists (See Hurwitz, Wilson & Wilson 1987)-or Greco-Roman art, or Tom Wesselman, for that matter. It seems that even secular art is an expression of values, what- ever the society or group culture within which it develops. Witness, for exam-

pie, the discussion of deKooning's Marilyn Monroe as an expression of exploitation of women, therefore pornography (Blandy & Congdon, 1990).

MULTICULTURAL STANCES Multiculturalism must somehow be

defined. This is not an easy task. Multiculturalists not only advocate diversity, but they have diverse opinions about what multiculturalism should be and these opinions are not always easily fit together (Collins & Sandell, 1992).

Advocates of multiculturalism are usually pluralists. According to Ubbelohde (1977) pluralism in curriculum planning is in one sense an admission ofweakness. Not being able to find one conceptual framework with sufficient moral-ethical or politically authentic authority to pronounce what the curriculum should consist of, curriculum writers opt for an inclusive non- judgmental curriculum. Yet, a moment's consideration betrays the impossibility of including everything, every group's cultural heritage within the curriculum.

Collins and Sandell (1992) sketched four multicultural goals that help to introduce the conceptual complications of multiculturalism.

Attack multiculturalism. The dominant culture is criticized by contrasting it with other, more benign cultures.

Escape multiculturalism. The dominant culture, regarded as malevolent, is neglected in favor of study of other more interesting, perhaps more color- ful, or more satisfying cultures.

Transformative multiculturalism. The best elements of various cultures (but perhaps not of the dominant culture) are selected and gathered together to form a new and more humane culture.

ART EDUCATION / JULY 1994



Repair multiculturalism. The self- images of students are improved by study of their ethnic heritages.

All four goals or approaches view the dominant culture in a negative light. They imply that Milgrom's declaration about the culture of the United States as multicultural is either a false diagno- sis or, if there does exist a multicultural American society, the parts are too tainted by the pervasive dominant culture to be worth considering as a healthy society. None of the approaches presumes that no value judgment on the present dominant culture needs be made, because a new culture will evolve simply through changes in demographics. The old dominant culture (which I suppose would be described as Anglo-Saxon, or at least Euro-centric, white and largely Christian) will become an expression of a minority. The majority will have other heritages and other cultures. The exigencies of a future technologi- cal age may produce a global society in

which everyone is divorced from past cultures, but the current news seems to indicate a re-emergence of smaller and smaller units of nationalism, if not trib- alism, and a re-emphasis on culture dif- ferences.

Cultural heritage in many cases is not a matter of choice. The Navajo of 1800 had little choice as to behaviors considered good or bad. Their own were all they knew. The Iranian revolu- tion of the 1970s attempted to recreate a society of sharply limited choice, although alternative models were illicit- ly available even within Iran. Comic Englishness, a staple of a great deal of Western humor writing for the last 200 years, was based on the incongruity of a hitherto isolated island people coping (or not coping) with unfamiliar alternative behaviors in foreign lands.

While alternative surface behaviors, fashions, or the outward appearance of exotic art works are easily adapted, the heritage of language is not so mal-

Photo courtesy of the Saint

Louis Art Museum

leable. Language shapes ways of thinking and self-expression (Mills, 1939). It is the sound and, in some ways, the content of a culture. To a degree it restricts the embrace of values developed within the parameters of another language. For example, elsewhere it has been argued that a too ready acceptance of art education forms developed in Germanic culture has been a factor in the lack of congruence between American school art and the art world in the United States (Smith, 1989).

Art education has a multicultural heritage, exemplified in Arthur Wesley Dow's interest in oriental art (Efland, 1990), and Lowenfeld's teaching use of African art (Simons, 1968). Pedro deLemos, editor of SchoolArts in the 1920s and 30s, wrote frequent articles on Native American and Hispanic art. Art education has had its guilty moments of surface multiculturalism. There have been many instances of




"doing African art for the next two weeks," or ice cream container totem poles, milk carton kachinas. These not only trivialized images that were impor- tant visual expressions of beliefs within their cultures, but inadvertently told students that art was something pecu- liar from far away. In any case, within the boundaries of moder English, a language flattened and desiccated by several centuries of Western rational- ism, how could the art teacher explain a whole different culture's thought processes?

CRITIQUE OF MULTICULTURALISM

Of the four approaches to multiculturalism in the Collins-Sandell catego- rization, three seem to me to be politically dubious, probably impossible to fully achieve. These are the attack, escape, and transformative models. The four approaches are probably never neatly separated in reality and perhaps combinations of them might succeed, but individually I see the three just named as suspect on several grounds.

In the Spike Lee movie Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam used a combination of attack and repair for its educational program. "White culture" is pictured as demonic, but Black culture is pictured as beneficent, or as the 1960s slogan had it, "Black is beautiful." This approach had the tonic effect of bring- ing African Americans to see them- selves as inherently healthy, but victimized by a vicious system, including a system of negative imagery. While few would argue against the historic need for the assertion of worth and identity by the African American

community, what is shown by Lee3 is advocacy of a monocultural, not a multicultural approach. The attack approach, isolated and without con- comitant auxiliary approaches, is very difficult to turn into positive action within a pluralistic society. The United States has many groups holding many value systems and unless self-ghettoiza- tion is a goal to be sought, attack is a double-edged weapon. The victim is very likely to counter attack-never mind notions ofjustice, balance, or some form of righteous retribution.

As anyone who has worked in schools can testify, school people are not known for fondness for controver- sy. Attack is by name and nature con- frontational.

The escape approach suggests presentation of a succession of Shangri Las. It seems a rather shallow notion, in which critical examination of ideal- ized other cultures can never be under- taken. After all, every culture (most certainly including the "dominant culture") has its negative side. A culture may be aesthetically appealing, but may prove to be repressive of individu- ality, or may reduce portions of the population to subservience. Indeed, the harmony of parts and pervasive identifi- able quality that characterize the aesthetic, at least in Dewey's thought (1934), cannot be the characteristics of an open pluralistic modem society. Escape multiculturalism is, therefore, hardly a serious approach to curricular multiculturalism. It belongs to the romantic thinking that created Lost Horizon or Dances With Wolves, beautiful in a sense, nostalgic, projecting a sense of loss, but in the end not sug- gesting a course of action beyond regret and sadness.

Transformative multiculturalism sounds like social reconstruction a la Dare the School Build a New Social

Order (Counts 1934). Such notions imply that those who control the schools will elect to discard the culture in which they, the controllers, hold an interest. Moreover, the selection of the good from various cultures requires an unimaginable moral-ethical authority, not to mention the overwhelming scholarly research required to analyze many cultures. If the worth of cultural values and heritages is to be deter- mined by political power, multiculturalists may not care for the results. For example, in a town in Indiana in which the Ku Klux Klan is active, does any multiculturalist want the community to make a selection of values from other cultures? Do we want Nazi propaganda films such as The Triumph ofthe Will shown for ethical content?

The fourth multicultural approach, repair, is probably the simplest and most practical. Indeed, a respectable precedence for it exists in art education history. Lowenfeld's practice in his Hampton Institute years (Smith, 1988) and the work of N.R Cole (Cole, 1940) in inner city Los Angeles demonstrated use of repair multiculturalism. A teacher using this approach sees to it that presentations are given in class that show the cultural heritage of the various students in a positive light. The student's self-image is strengthened through self-identification with the culture presented. This can, of course, dwindle into trivalization ("Bring in a menorah for Chanukah to put next to 'our' Santa Claus cutouts"), but it can be a rewarding approach in the classes of sensitive teachers who research the backgrounds of their students with intent to go beyond gimmicky quick lessons (Wasson, Stuhr, & Petrovich- Mwaniki, 1990).

ART EDUCATION / JULY 1994



Such an approach has as its goal something other than increasing the sophistication of students in relation to some abstract world of art (Clark, Day, & Greer, 1987). Its goal is extra-art, psy- chological. However, the repair approach can have a parallel goal which includes increasing knowledge about various cultures' ideas about art, art historical knowledge, and consideration of diverse aesthetic systems, including those not evolved in Western white cultures.

Aside from the danger of trivalization, a problem with the repair mode of multiculturalism is that students may refuse to identify with a heritage whose origin was in an environment different from modem America. In the popular play, Raisin in the Sun, the author used one character to show that identification with a "parent" culture may be impossible in any profound sense. The character became an absurd figure. In the case of African American heritage, accessible identification might be more feasible through the study of great musicians and visual artists who grew up in American culture. John Biggers, the outstanding African American artist and student of Viktor Lowenfeld, made a trip to Africa to seek out his heritage (Biggers, 1962). Elizabeth Catlett has created sculpture that recalls the work of Egypt's Amarna period. Both artists offer channels for African Americans that lead to the remote African mother- land.

Perhaps other groups may find identification with their ancestral cultural heritage more immediate. Many African Americans have ancestors who came to North America more than three hundred years ago. Native

Americans were "here" to begin with. Most WASPs are relative newcomers. Many Hispanic Americans have nearby motherlands and some Asian Americans have established communi- ties that are virtually self-sufficient re- creations of their ancestral settlements. To such groups avoidance of forced Americanization may lead to perpetua- tion of some cultural heritage, but extra-school pressures may dilute and eventually dissolve identification with that heritage, despite school practices aimed at keeping it alive.

Finally, technology and media, in the hands of those institutions or corpo- rations with the greatest economic clout, may produce a monoculture. The horror of that possibility alone should bring all art educators to serious and constructive concern for multiculturalism.

Peter Smith is Associate Professor, Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.

NOTES 1Milgrom is co-editor of the journalArts &

Academe. He made this impromptu statement during the discussion period of a ses- sion on multicultural issues.

2One student from a traditional Moslem country told me he could not criticize his culture and was obviously shocked by Americans' freewheeling serious or humorous remarks about U.S. culture, society, and political leaders.

MThese comments are made in reference to Lee's film, not from the historical records related to Malcolm X or to the Nation of Islam.

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Art Education, 32(1), 6-16. Bridges, T. (1991 February). The dizzying

dialectics of multiculturalism: A conversa- tion in two parts (Part 2). Inquiry: Critical ThinkingAcross the Disciplines, pp. 6-7.

Clark, G., Day, M., & Greer, D. (1987). Discipline-based art education: Becoming students of art. Journal ofAesthetic Education, 21(2), 129-196.

Cole, N. (1940). The arts in the classroom. New York: John Day.

Collins, G. & Sandell, R. (1992). The politics of multicultural art education. ArtEducation, 45(6), pp. 8-13.

Counts, G. (1978). Dare the school build a new social order? Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1934.)

Dewey,J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Co.

Efland, A. (1990). A history of art education: Intellectual and social currents in teaching the visual arts. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.

Hodgkinson, H. (1989). (Title not given in conference program.) Presentation at the annual conference of the National Art Education Association, Washington, D.C., April.

Hurwitz, A, Wilson, B. & Wilson, M. (1987). Teaching drawingfrom art. Worcester, MA: Davis.

Mills, C. (1939). Language, logic and culture. American Sociological Review, 4(5), 670- 680.

Simons, A. (1968). ViktorLowenfeld: Biography of ideas. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Smith, P. (1992). The paradoxes of multiculturalism. The Journal ofAesthetic Education, 26(2), 93-99.

Smith, P. (1988). The Hampton years: Lowenfeld's forgotten legacy. Art Education, 41(6), 38-43.

Smith, P. (1989). Lowenfeld in a Viennese per- spective: Formative influences for the American art educator. Studies in Art Education, 30(2), 104-114.

Ubbelohde, R. (1977). Aneo-conservative approach to curriculum. In A Molnar and J. Zahonik (Eds.), Curriculum theory (pp. 22-34). Washington, D.C.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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Cultural University || Multicultural Issues: Dilemmas and Hopes