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Teaching Studio Art to a Diverse Group of Students
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by N. Dana Collins
Illinois Valley Community College
Oglesby, Illinois
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| | (This article was originally written for a presentation at the College Art Association annual conference in San Antonio, Texas, in January 1995. It also appears in the AP Studio Art Teacher's Guide, edited by Maggie Davis.)
Broadening the Studio Art Curriculum
In addition to teaching courses in AP Art History and in AP Studio Art, I've been a Reader for AP Studio Art since 1979. This has given me a chance to observe national trends in subject matter as they make their way through the work of young people who like to make images. I've seen thousands of cartoon characters, athletes, rock stars, shiny sports cars, unicorns, frogs under mushrooms, and the current popular image -- muscular space superheroes.
Through many of these years, we also saw hundreds of portraits of earnest, gazing, young white women; in more recent years, there have been a lot of self-portraits of fierce, gazing young people who are members of ethnic minorities. It is this that I want to address.
I preface this with a student statement quoted by Martha Thompson in a recent article.1 The student was responding to a new course entitled "Social Inequality." The student said, "I'm sick of hearing about the poor, about the blacks, and about the women. Can't we just talk about regular people?" The implications of this kind of perception are -- or should be -- wide-ranging in regards to teaching.
Some changes in curricula are already mandated by law. James Banks has noted that the multicultural standard adopted by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education in 1977, which became effective in 1979, was a major factor in stimulating the growth of multicultural education in college teacher education programs.2 Most publishers now have a number of teacher education texts dealing with some aspect of multiculturalism. Some colleges have revised their general core curricula to include ethnic content or have established an ethnic course requirement. But these changes are coming very slowly at the college level. Often the training of university art faculty reflects that of the larger education culture in that it is white male dominated -- actually white European, middle-class, heterosexual male dominated -- and the more closely we model that, the more people and experiences we leave out. Changes that have already happened in urban secondary and elementary schools still seem distant from a typical college art studio.
Our need to broaden the art curriculum will, of course, increase. It's driven by the facts of demography: Numerous studies have pointed out that within the next 25 years, nearly half of the school-age population will be nonwhite.
Bridging the Gap Between Teachers and Students
At the same time, the cultural distance between teachers and students is growing. According to figures published in 1993 by the U.S. Office of Education, ethnic minorities now comprise less than 15 percent of the total number of teachers.3 The numbers drop significantly for members of school administration. Meanwhile, only 37 percent of current elementary and secondary teachers live in the attendance area of the school at which they teach. No doubt these numbers have improved since these statistics were released, but these factors, plus differences in class and family educational levels, continue to distance many teachers from their students.
This presents a particular challenge to us. If the arts are a means by which we come to know reality, then we must not only come to expect but encourage shifts in what we call art, as the culture becomes more diverse and as marginalized groups insist on being heard.
With students, the voices that are demanding inclusion in our classrooms are easy to misunderstand. They may strike us as confrontational, as dismissive, as a problem, so that the first barrier to culturally inclusive teaching is often our own attitudes.
I speak pretty much as a failure, initially, at having done what common sense indicates needs to be done. My introduction to the need for a different approach to teaching a diverse student body happened 15 years ago, when most of my college's football team enrolled in my night school pottery class. I was a new instructor there, an unknown quantity, and things began very hopefully. By midterm about half the team had dropped the class; a number had in fact left the college altogether! Those that remained got final grades ranging from B to D, and we had a pretty good time. But it was a class that I've thought back over, from time to time, and am still learning from.
I've concluded that to begin teaching all of our students, teachers in art need to understand better the sociology of our own schools and communities. I suspect that those of us whose teaching style requires that students be quiet when we talk, be on time, have the assignments done by a specific deadline, and so forth might have particular problems in this area -- because these requirements can so easily be experienced by students as an exercise in power that they may feel compelled to either challenge or withdraw from. In either case, you've lost the student. I lost a number of those football players, and only afterward did I realize that the loss of these students was my loss.
It's all too easy to think to oneself, "Well, I'm trying. Grant me that." By comparison though, I find that, when I encounter attitudes that are sexist, I am inclined toward neither sweetness nor calm understanding. I've come to realize the emotional and personal cost of letting things pass that are in fact demeaning to me as a woman. It is only fair to expect a similar lack of amiable cooperation from students with diverse backgrounds and expectations.
A Difficult Task
So, how do we build a setting, let alone a curriculum, where all students can benefit from the diversity each of us brings to the experience of the art classroom or studio?
No single course syllabus exists that will produce equity, inclusiveness, and, by the way, exciting art. This may be, in part, because once you're talking about cultural diversity and equity, you're also talking about power and the way power is distributed both within and outside the educational system.
No single individual or class plan is going to "fix" this. But to respond to the challenge of teaching art -- this thing we love -- to students who may not share our notions of art nor of life, we need to reexamine first our own training and expectations. It is not a matter of coming up with one or two well-intentioned assignments to patch up the diversity problem, so we can get on with our usual teaching. We may need to think about the links between the formal training most of us received and the assumptions behind it. In his article entitled "Multicultural Education," James A. Banks states: "The discrepancies between the Western ideals of freedom and equality, and the realities of racism and sexism, need to be taught to students."4 In a culture, the space between the ideal and the actual always serves someone's interest. We need to examine these issues with our students and not be afraid of the blank spots as we go along, places where we still don't have the answers.
One element that is occurring in art now is a challenge to the notion of objectivity. The drawing curriculum in particular has supported an approach -- when drawing that famous shoe -- that stresses rendering value gradations, the primacy of creating an illusion of three-dimensionality. The idea of trying to show whose shoe it is, what that shoe means, where it's been, who made it, and at what cost -- are left "till later; till after they learn the basic skills," which means that these areas have not been a part of the basic curriculum for most students. Perhaps we need to examine the extent to which we do this because we're used to it and it's easier to grade.
The issues raised by cultural and social differences are probably more difficult than those many of us have previously dealt with in teaching because they involve issues of power and of identity. If it is a matter of a group called "us" educating a group called "them," the changes we attempt will not work. To the extent that multicultural education is viewed from that standpoint, it reinforces stereotypes and extends the power structure that is part of the problem.
Once we begin to think about the issues involved in creating an art curriculum that is responsive to diversity, it becomes clear that superficial projects -- having the second graders make "African masks" with paper plates and markers -- miss the mark entirely by contributing to and prolonging misunderstanding.
Many of the images we think of as embodying diversity -- those masks and the native rugs and fabrics -- have already been appropriated by the marketplace and hence come to us loaded with at least a double level of meaning. We need to help students think this through and to learn to recognize a solid and unique expression against the background from which the imagery may come to us. In theory, museums can be of great help here, preserving the genuine article for quiet, thoughtful viewing -- until you bring students to the museum gift shop, where the reproduction of Egyptian faience (made in Indonesia from drawings by a New York firm) swirl the cultural waters with handfuls of dollars that may be the more significant present meaning of that little reproduction.
Focusing on the Cultural Framework
I want to conclude by sharing a few concrete possibilities for modifying existing programs. In speaking with teachers at various AP workshops and at the AP Readings, I¿ve observed that some teachers seem to be using photos in a new way, having their students bring in very old family photos along with whatever stories are part of their individual oral traditions. The sharing of those stories and images can be the starting point for highly personal compositions and can extend each student's recognition that ways of thinking, looking, acting, and behaving, which each of us may have assumed to be static and universal, are in fact cultural and variable.
As long as I've been associated with the Advanced Placement Program, teachers have used the analysis of works from art history. This can surely be extended beyond a formal analysis. The same works can also be used to teach students to recognize the impact of the cultural framework on that artist, to examine the values and beliefs implicit in the work, and to recognize the influence of our own various cultures on our experiencing of the same work. One of the very pleasant things about teaching this particular assignment is that the instructor doesn't need to and couldn't possibly anticipate the range of student response -- none of which are "wrong" -- so it really presents an opportunity for everyone to learn together. Watching a teacher learn is always a very good thing for students to do.
Students have been designing monuments for awhile -- the Vietnam Memorial was after all created by someone who was a graduate student -- and this continues to be an effective way of taking the students back into their communities with a fresh eye. The project can help students to discover their own local history and even to develop a new sense of the larger community.
A final thing that seems to be happening is that teachers are asking students to examine the presence of violence in American culture. This could surely be extended. It's a small step between producing images of violence and exploring the extent to which violence reflects power imbalances between culturally diverse groups -- why the groups with the least power are targets of discrimination, harassment, and physical and sexual violence.5 Certainly if art is ultimately about what is real, then this is an area that also belongs on the page.
From such an investigation, students may find a single idea that will take them in an entirely new direction. The resulting work may not resemble in the least any art from the culture with which they have been identified. This is fine. If the process is fruitful, their work will also not look like the things they've done before.
Keeping Tabs on a Shifting Reality
In any event, the crucial need for art programs, and for the rest of the curriculum, is to change from within, to simply stay in touch with the reality as it shifts around us. The history of art should remind us that whether or not we embrace them, changes come.
If what art does best is to give us a way of experiencing what is most real, most significant in a particular time and place, then we as artists who teach need to make sure that this keeps happening. We must strive not to teach or to be comfortable with approaches to the making of art that have become too small, too tight, too predictable, or too mute. The difficulties of developing a diversity-sensitive curriculum are worthwhile because of the work they make possible for students: images of artistic merit and personal significance.
1 Martha Thompson, "A Multicultural Perspective in the Woman's Studies Classroom," in Multicultural Education, Vol. 4, ed., J. Q. Adams and Janice R. Welsch; Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL, 1995.
2 James A. Banks, "Multicultural Education: Development, Dimension, and Challenges," in A Multicultural Prism: Voices from the Field; Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL, 1994.
3 "Schools and Staffing in the U.S.: A Statistical Profile, 1990-91," in Education Statistics (1993); Washington, D.C., U.S. Office of Education.
4 Banks, op. cit.
5 Brenda M. Rodriguez, "Creating Inclusive and Multicultural Communities: Working Through Assumptions of Culture, Power, Diversity, and Equity," in Multicultural Education, Vol. 4, ed., J. Q. Adams and Janice R. Welsch; Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL, 1995.
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