CRITICAL CULTURAL INQUIRY & MULTICULTURAL ART EDUCATION  

Hwa Young Caruso
Molloy College-New York
U. S. A.

Toward a Critical Cultural Inquiry

The United States became a more ethnically, culturally, and racially diverse nation after the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement. Prior to 1965, most immigrants to United States came from Europe. Today most immigrants come from Latin America and Asia. The minority population of the United States is increasing at a faster rate than the White population. According to the U.S. Census (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000), Asians constituted about 4.2 percent (12 million) of the total U.S. population of 281 million people. Between 1990 and 2000 the Asian population in the United States increased by 48 percent. Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States. Because of the changing demographics in America, cultural conflicts may resurface. It is a necessary challenge for cultural workers such as educators to understand, appreciate, teach about, and work with culturally diverse groups. Changing ethnic demographics require educators to promote a better understanding of others. In this process critical multicultural art and art education can play a vital role in social transformation. [paragraph 1]

The Role of Art/Art Education in Cultural Identity Formation

Individual life experiences can be part of artistic expression and connect art makers to who they are. According to Lippard (1990), artists express certain aspects of their identity, a foundation of their pride and self-esteem, and maintain their sense of self and cultural identity through art. In the art making process, they can search for answers about their self-identity intertwined with cultural (ethnic) identity. Art can raise profound questions about identity issues and contemporary socio-political conditions. Through the process of art making, which involves self-reflection, people can explore a sense of self and share their life experiences (Caruso, 2005). Art can help society confront historical, political, and social events that deepen individual thoughts and give meaning to individual contributions. Art educators can help students to grow artistically and intellectually so they can fully participate as citizens in the society (Cahan & Kocur, 1996). [paragraph 2]

I believe art and art education can play a significant role in addressing social issues, cultural diversity, and identity making through visual expression. In a multicultural curriculum, art educators could explain the issues of culture shock, racism, confused identity, and conflicts based on intercultural tensions. They can examine story making through art that reflects how immigrants are adjusting to life in a new country (Cahan & Kocur, 1996). Educators can teach about contemporary art and artists whose works address social issues and the questions of identity, cultural conflict, racism, and immigration. By conducting discussions about each artist’s motivations, teachers and students can analyze the expression of personal, social, or political issues. Through art and art education, educators could teach the idea of inter-connectedness between where we live, who we are, and how we express ourselves. Art projects may help students define their self-identity by constructing a sense of self. Students can make sense of their personal experiences by expressing feelings of self-affirmation and painful self-disclosure. Cahan and Kocur argue that teachers can become healers in this process. [paragraph 3]

According to Eisner (2002) the arts are a means of exploring our own interior landscape. The arts help us discover the contours of our emotional selves and understand a particular environment in which we live. Eisner argued that art provides the conditions for awakening us to the world. In this sense, the arts provide “a way of knowing.” He emphasizes experience as central to growth because experience is the medium of education. Education is the process of learning to create ourselves, and it is what the arts, both as a process and as the fruits of that process, should promote. Work in the arts is a way of creating products and performances as well as our lives by expanding our consciousness, shaping our dispositions, satisfying our quest for meaning, establishing contact with others, and sharing a culture. One aim of education is to enable individuals to become the architects of their lives and through that process to continually renew themselves. The arts are among the most powerful means of promoting “re-creation”-- the recreation of the individual (Eisner, 2002). [paragraph 4]

Educators can connect art education to each student’s everyday experiences, social critique, and personal creative expression. Art can become a vital means of reflecting upon the nature of society and social existence. Artists and educators should recognize the substantive roles art can play within the critical approaches to multicultural education. They should link cross-cultural, multicultural education to contemporary art education. Educators should build bridges to narrow the gap and develop a better understanding of the diaspora group, which generally refers to marginalized minorities in relationship to the White European center. Combining art education and practice with multicultural education will enhance the students’ understanding of their own place in society. It is important to use art as a vehicle for self-development; the critique of cultural, historic, and social events; and as a potential agent of social transformation. The art making process is an intellectually, culturally, historically, politically, and philosophically grounded practice (Choi Caruso, 2004). [paragraph 5]

Multiculturalism and Art/Art Education

Multicultural art education strives to foster self-esteem, promote group identity, reduce stereotypes, and eliminate systemic biases and prejudices. Art education has a prominent role to play in this approach to multiculturalism (Clark, 1996). Efland, Freedman, and Stuhr (1996) state that multicultural art education can change social relationships because all art, including fine art, is part of visual culture and therefore reflects multiple dimensions of culture. The political dimensions of art may override the teaching of art to further the aesthetic sensitivity of individuals. Multicultural art education can also sensitize students to issues that deal with social oppression and inequity as moral issues. [paragraph 6]

Generally missing from multicultural art education is an approach that connects everyday experience, social critique, and creative expression. When the focus is shifted to issues and ideas that students truly care about and that are relevant within a larger life-world context, art becomes a vital means of reflecting upon the nature of society and social existence (Cahan & Kocur, 1996). By forming interdisciplinary educational relationships between contemporary art, art education and multicultural education, it may be possible to make a bridge to cultural democracy. [paragraph 7]

In postmodernism, art is represented as a form of cultural production, inherently depending on and reflecting cultural conditions. Art is a commentary on and embedded within culture. In postmodern art, cultural support is given to multiculturalism, feminism and other positions that promote equity and have the potential for democratization, which emphasizes pluralism. Attention is given to the overlap and interrelation between arts and cultures. Multiple readings and many different ways of interpretation are encouraged (Efland et al., 1996). Sullivan (1993) addresses deconstruction/reconstruction which lies at the heart of postmodernist art. Whatever is socially constructed can also be deconstructed, or taken apart, to expose the social forces embedded within and predilection for multiple interpretations of meaning in art. [paragraph 8]

According to Efland et al. (1996), the arts contain representations of social reality. Artists construct representations about the real world or imagined worlds that may inspire human beings to create a different reality for themselves. Much of what constitutes reality is socially constructed, including arts. One purpose for teaching art is to contribute to the understanding of the social and cultural landscape that all individuals inhabit. [paragraph 9]

Postmodern art education shifts attention to the social functions of art, drawing attention away from the arts as valued forms of personal, aesthetic experience: the central issue in modernist approaches to art education. A postmodern conception of curriculum involves interdisciplinary content and the study of a variety of visual culture. Cultural critiques help to provide a hopeful discourse for postmodernism and postmodern education. Teachers should try to guide students toward an understanding of the influence of social life on the generation of knowledge and construction of self. An understanding of the influence of context in one’s self-creation can be a step toward understanding and accepting difference in others (Efland et al., 1996). The postmodernist concept of community of difference involves more than just respect for diversity: it also involves an extended understanding of otherness. [paragraph 10]

Developing sensitivity to otherness begins with securing a sense of self. After locating our own cultural identity we can begin world traveling, moving among and within communities different from our own (Clark, 1996). According to Rodriguez (1999), to understand and appreciate the diversity that exists among us, we must first understand our own culture. Self-awareness is the first step toward cross-cultural competence or capacity. She suggests that self-awareness begins with an exploration of one’s heritage, encounters and experiences. One’s place of origin, language, time and reasons for immigration, and location of the family first settlement all help to define one’s cultural heritage. Rodriguez emphasizes that learning about one’s own roots is the first step followed by an in-depth examination of the values, behaviors, beliefs, and customs that identified one’s own cultural heritage. It is important for educators and students to understand their own culture and how teaching and learning influence what they teach, how they teach, and how they relate to their students. Cultural self-awareness is the bridge to other cultures. To be sensitive to someone else’s culture, we must be aware of our own. Teaching about multiculturalism in America must advocate the value of intercultural understanding from kindergarten through graduate school. Art curricula can help the development of collective sensitivity to otherness in our profession (Clark, 1996). A socially reconstructed art education could enrich student understanding through the inclusion of teaching about the immense power of visual culture, the social responsibility that comes with that power, and the need for the integration of creative production, interpretation, and critique in contemporary life. [paragraph 11]

Freire (1998) stated that to teach is to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge, not to merely transfer knowledge. He sees educators as cultural workers. Teachers and art educators can provide opportunities for students to develop new ways of seeing and knowing and to be able to read and recognize their own world. Thus, art education based on critical cultural inquiry has transformative possibilities. Art has the potential to reach a mass audience in a public place such as a museum. The goal of art education is to change people or the audience from being passive viewers to questioning viewers. Educators should teach the learner to be a critical thinker through critical pedagogy. And they should each the act of self-expression and use the creative process as a profound part of individual thinking process. [paragraph 12]

Education for Social Transformation Through Critical Thinking

Nussbaum (1997) argues education should be committed to activating each student’s independent mind and teaching students to become critical learners. Critical examination and reasoning will lead to transformation of the self. Dewey (1964) stated that education should use a criterion of social worth. Subject matter should be developed under the conditions of social life. When contemplating the scheme of a curriculum, teachers must consider adapting the content to the needs of the existing community. It must intentionally select a way to improve the life people share in common. A curriculum that acknowledges the social responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and information are calculated to develop social insight and interest. Greene (1993) argues the need to reject a single dominating vision or interpretation whether it comes from textbooks, school superintendents, local religious bodies, teachers, or even students. She emphasizes the importance of including alternate visions and different voices. The curriculum emerges out of an inter-play among conceptions of knowledge, the human being, and the social order. She argues that people need to consider all disciplines as provisional and keep them open to revision. The curriculum must be responsive to changing interpretations of what exists in the contemporary world. [paragraph 13]

Freire’s (1998) pedagogy of literacy education involves not only reading the word, but also reading the world, which involves the development of critical consciousness. The formation of critical consciousness allows people to question the nature of their historical and social situation to read their world. In education, Freire implies a dialogic exchange between teachers and students, where both learn, both question, both reflect, and both participate in meaning-making process. He argues that the learner should be filled with meanings of their own experiences. Teachers have to choose the relationship between thinking and transformative action. Educators decide on the value of provoking students to speak in their own voices. Freire insists that one of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to provide the conditions through which the learners can interact with each other and their teachers and engage in experiencing a social and historical transformation. [paragraph 14]

From this point of view, an ideological critique focuses on how ideology lives within us, pervading our emotional responses. Ideology is not to be understood as pertaining only to our beliefs about social, political, and economic systems, but as something that frames our moral reasoning, our interpersonal relationships, and our ways of knowing, experiencing, and judging what is real and true. When we do an ideology critique, we try to penetrate the givens of everyday reality to reveal the inequities and oppression that lurk beneath (Mezirow, 2000). [paragraph 15]

Mezirow insists that the educational task of critical reflection is to help adults become aware of oppressive structures and practices. Adults should develop a tactical awareness of how they might change oppression and build the confidence and ability to work for collective change and a broader scale of political mobilization. Brookfield (2000) argues that the first important focus of critical reflection is the uncovering of submerged power dynamics and relationships. Focus should be on identifying and critiquing the power dynamics that permeate adult education practice. He insisted that power is omnipresent in adult education. This is evident in the process of curriculum decision-making and evaluation and in the teaching methods adopted. Adult education classrooms are not quiet streams cut off from the river of social, cultural, and political life according to Mezirow. Following Freire’s (1998) idea of the teacher as a cultural worker, Mezirow stated that we should think of adult educators as cultural activists. Freire argues that awareness of the contradictions in society and a commitment to engaging in transformation could be fostered in classrooms. The function of adult educators is to assist and help learners to reflect critically on their own. [paragraph 16]

Conclusion

These cultural workers such as visual artists and art educators could integrate their knowledge and teaching practice to socially transform and democratize society by combining art and art education with multicultural education. Critical cultural inquiry-based art education and visual art practice could become a vehicle for self-development and the formation of self-identity, while critiquing the cultural, social, historical, and political climate for a democracy. I believe that education should raise social and political awareness and enhance the learners’ potential to know about their own place and time in society through critical reflection. [paragraph 17]

Visual artists and art educators should recognize the substantive roles art can play in social change using critical approaches to multicultural education. They should link cross-cultural, multicultural education to contemporary art/art education. Educators should build bridges to narrow the gap and develop a better understanding of the various ethnic, cultural groups which generally refers to marginalized minorities in relationship to the White European center. Combining art/art education with multicultural education will enhance the students’ understanding of their own place in society. Artists and art educators should emphasize the abilities of all human beings including those who have been culturally devalued and economically deprived. I strongly believe that it is important to use art as a vehicle for identity making; the critique of cultural, historic, and social events; and a potential agent of social transformation. Incorporating critical cultural inquiry in art/art education is necessary in America characterized by its multi-ethnic and racial diversity. Art/art education can play a major role in building a harmonious nation. [paragraph 18]
 

Hwa Young Caruso, Ed. D., is Assistant Professor of Art at Molloy College, NY. She teaches studio art, art history, and art education. Her research focuses on contemporary art, issues of identity and social transformation through art.  (Contact this author at hcaruso@molloy.edu; contact the editors of EMME at emme@eastern.edu.)
 

Recommended Citation in the APA Style:

Caruso, H. Y. (2005). Critical cultural inquiry and multicultural art education. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, 7(2), 18 paragraphs. Retrieved your access month date, year, from http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2005fall/caruso.html