TRANSFORMING PERFORMING ARTS CURRICULA INTO EFFECTIVE MULTICULTURAL PEDAGOGY:
An African American Perspective 

Bob Daniels
Virginia State University
U. S. A.

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A Zen abbot was interviewing a convert from the United States, illustrating the difference between Eastern and Western spirituality; the abbot placed two small, apparently identical, legless Japanese dolls in front of the interviewee.  However, one doll was weighted in the head and one weighted in the base.  The monk pushed the doll that was weighted in the base; it fell and bounced back up.  When he pushed the doll that was weighted at the head, however, it fell and remained on its side.

                                                                                      (Bradfield-Kreider, 1998, p. 215)

Conventional vis-à-vis Transformational Teaching

The above allegory offers several insights related to transformational teaching. On one hand, it points to the need for teachers to be consciously aware of who they are as pedagogical instruments in the most humanely diverse nation in the world. On the other hand, it points to unexamined epistemologies or mindsets that work against teachers when they experience dissonance as they interact with students who are culturally different from themselves. Transformational teaching provides quality academic, humanistic, and pragmatic education for the present and future generations of students through introspection, retrospection, conviction, courage, and commitment. There, however, must be an awareness and conviction that the conventional wisdom which has monopolized the preparation of teachers is counter productive to the holistic education and progress of our multicultural nation. Once internalized, there must be the courage and commitment to deconstruct this archaistic self-serving system of the dominant culture and replace it with the construction of teacher preparation curricula that produce transformative teachers for our rapidly changing American social order. Moreover, this deconstruction raises the questions of what teachers teach, why they teach it, and the degree of effectiveness of the teaching-learning process they design and facilitate.  [paragraph 1]

The transformative teacher subscribes to critical pedagogy: i.e., instruction which recognizes how different forces affect and influence educational curricula, policies and practices. The transformative teacher embraces the central tenet of critical pedagogy: that power, politics, history, culture, and language determine and shape how reality and meaning within and outside the classroom are defined and understood. By failing to acknowledge that educational decisions are made based on ideologies not grounded in educational theory, but rather on beliefs influenced by politics, history, culture, language, and above all power, we are all ultimately affected adversely. The interrelated nature of these influences is so pervasive that traditional education does not acknowledge them (Corson, 1993; Cummins, 1995; Darder, 1995; Elsasser & John-Steiner, 1987; Finlay & Faith, 1987; Greene, 1998; Shor, 1987; Wallerstein, 1987; Walsh, 1995; Wink & Almanzo, 1996). Using Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom et al.,1956) as a template, the present research will examine these phenomena from an African American perspective, although the pedagogical strategies and assessments relating to other non-Caucasian ethnic groups in American PreK-12 schools and teacher preparation institutions are disseminated in similar and varying socio-political ways. [paragraph 2]

The degree to which the teaching-learning experience is effective depends upon interdependence between teachers and learners. Criteria to measure this degree of effectiveness must include assessments in the cognitive, psycho-motor, and affective domains. In the performing arts it is quite possible to excel in teaching or learning in all of these domains and still fail an objective holistic assessment on the overall educational and human value of such an experience. For example, teachers can teach and students may learn lessons on Colonial America which include such myths as: (a) our nation has never lost a war, (b) the “father of our nation,” George Washington, never told a lie, and (c) the indigenous population, unlike the Puritans settlers, was irreligious and savage. In the cognitive domain teachers reward students who respond affirmatively on quizzes that assess their knowledge of the lessons they taught. In the psycho-motor domain teachers further reward their students for participation in plays and skits that depict the indigenous people accordingly. These teachers often recommend technology (i.e., television, movie DVDs, videos, and the Internet) as supplements to their lessons. Not only does this application of technology reinforce and defend the perpetuation of myths and stereotypes by utilizing colorful art, graphics, music, dance, drama, and costumes; it presents additional benefits. Propped up by an educational and patriotic façade, it almost always generates economic and political profits for numerous non-educational agencies that provide essential goods and services. [paragraph 3]

In the affective domain teachers and students have cultivated a negative mind set toward the indigenous population which they accept without question. They have preconceived notions when they read about or see portrayals of human conflict between European settlers and the indigenous people of the continent; i.e., they internalize the conflict as one between good and evil involving God-fearing civilized settlers and savage heathens who should be destroyed. [paragraph 4]

Atonality and Harmony in the Performing Arts: The Cultural Interface Between Europe and Africa

The United States has evolved over the past several centuries as the world’s most multicultural nation. Until the 21st century, its majority populations were descendents from the continents of Europe and Africa. We sang the hymns of Fanny J. Crosby and the gospels of Thomas A. Dorsey; we delighted in the choreographic creativities of George Balanchine and Alvin Ailey; and we marveled at the piano virtuosity of Van Cliburn and Andre Watts. Historically, however, the contributions to the performing arts arena by descendents from these two continents have been and continue to be an unfinished symphony of a rare atonality which sounded the initial discord upon which our nation was founded; i.e., its contradiction between freedom and slavery. Over a century ago W. E. B. DuBois (1903) wrote: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (p.xi).  In 1935 he authored a thought-provoking article, appealing for a transformational and sympathetic approach to teaching Americans of African descent, entitled “ Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” Unfortunately, at the beginning of the 21st century, the color line which DuBois referred to over a century ago remains deeply infused in the American psyche and social order, especially its PreK-12 schools and teacher preparation institutions. [paragraph 5]

African American Cultural Roots in the Performing Arts

Carpentier (1957) and Bontemps (1945) noted that 5,000 years prior to Jesus Christ’s sojourn on earth, a Negro empire existed in the northeastern part of Africa in what is now Egypt and Ethiopia. A century before Columbus “discovered” America, the cities of Timbuktu, Gao, and Djenne were cultural learning centers of the world. In spite of slavery, share cropping, Jim Crowism, de facto and de jure segregation in the archives of American history, African Americans have richly contributed to the cultural landscape of United States in the performing arts. [paragraph 6]

The following table illustrates some of these contributions:

Table I: Some African American Choreographers, Dancers, Dramatists, Musicians, and Playwrights

[paragraph 7]

In order for our nation to remain democratic, it must embrace the practice of multicultural education and significantly modify its Eurocentric-based curricula in its PreK-12 school and teacher preparation institutions. Table I can serve as a starting point for both African and European Americans whose education has been isolated and limited by such a narrowly-focused set of curricula. Utilizing the principles of transformational pedagogy, researching the salient contributions of the performing artists listed in the table will ascertain that this population of European and African Americans will understand, appreciate, internalize, and take pride in teaching about these African American artists just as they have been programmed to take pride in teaching about the contributions of Mozart, Gershwin, and Schumann. [paragraph 8]

There is universal consensus that language is culture. Of all the languages utilized by the peoples of the world, music is universal. Musicologists concur that whether a symphony is composed in Europe, Asia, Africa, or any other continent, it can readily be read and performed. This is only possible, because of the culture of music as a uniform system of tones, symbols, and notations; i.e., Middle C whether notated on a treble, bass, or tenor clef will be interpreted the same and produce the same tone anywhere in the world. Accordingly, each of the 88 keys on a piano keyboard is inextricably related by its unique tonal quality, enabling any combination of tones to produce beautiful melodious and harmonious music. It would therefore seem only axiomatic that music in and of itself provides the perfect multicultural model for transformational pedagogy. Only a cursory glance at our nation’s conservatories, symphony orchestras, ballet troupes, and opera houses is necessary to realize that the performing arts arena continues to struggle with issues of multiculturalism. The assemblage of this almost exclusively European American mosaic began in the PreK-12 schools and teacher preparation institutions. Instead of recognizing and embracing the gestalt and synergism implicit in constructing multicultural curricula representative of the human diversity in our nation, the majority of teacher preparation institutions still continue to view cultural assimilation of African and other non-Caucasian Americans as central to their mission. In fact, these institutions perceive multiculturalism as problematic, instead of valuing the richness of human diversity and human potential. [paragraph 9]

After Brown v. Board of Education (1954), many Caucasian educators opted to terminate their careers in desegregating public school systems in favor of assuming positions in private and parochial schools. A half century later a historic juxtaposition between Caucasian and non-Caucasian PreK-12 students and Pre-service teachers has evolved. There are more PreK-12 African and non-Caucasian Americans enrolled in our nation’s schools than ever before in its history. Conversely, there are fewer African and non-Caucasian educators in PreK-12 schools than anytime in history. Caucasian Americans constitute the overwhelming majority of pre and in-service teachers. These data proportionally transfer into the performing art arena, an arena that can and should be in the vanguard of developing transformational teachers. [paragraph 10]

Demographically, our nation’s pre-service and in-service teacher preparation programs seem to ignore the facts: (a) that the number of African American teachers is rapidly decreasing and the number of Caucasian teachers teaching African American students is higher than ever before in history; (b) American schools are becoming more racially segregated; and (c) student learning in teacher preparation institutions is assessed on white middle-class values and standards. Wittingly or unwittingly, schools transmit and preserve the dominant European American culture, even in schools whose majority is not white (Books, 1994; Burkhart, 1997; Goode, 1997; Hickey, 1998). Up to the 1940s, immigrants predominantly originated in Europe, using their fair skin as their passport for belonging. It allowed them the privilege of “losing their culture and first language” and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps” (Nieto, 1999). None of these privileges applied to African Americans, although they brought the same (but unique) human cultural attributes from their continent. Conversely, African Americans were unwillingly transported to America as fearful, dehumanized captured slaves—unlike optimistic European immigrants in search of a better life. The slaves (like their European counterparts) spoke several different beautiful languages. They were musicians, dancers, sculptors, and painters. Yet, they were legally denied the right to practice any aspect of their African culture and forced to learn English and adopt European standards of servitude. Since the legalization of African American education, African American PreK-12 schools and teacher preparation institutions have always operated on Eurocentric curricula and pedagogies just as their Caucasian counterparts. The combination of these two critical educational components in all American institutions is so narrowly focused and entrenched that the Eurocentric model serves as a fulcrum of miseducation for all students regardless of race and culture. Examples of this ubiquitous miseducation are:

• students can graduate as music majors, having been required to study the compositions of such great European composers as Bach, Chopin, and Rossini but not required to research (or even become aware of) composers of African descent such as R. Nathaniel Dett, Samuel Coolridge Taylor, and Eubie Blake;
• students learn of Michelangelo Buonarroti, but are never made aware of African American painter, Romare Bearden.; and
• students develop an appreciation for the innovative choreographic contributions of Martha Graham, but are not introduced to the novel choreographic contributions of Arthur Mitchell. [paragraph 11]

This should not be surprising because the performing arts cannot escape the consequences of an American history characterized and conflicted by its obsession with skin pigmentation, political power, Puritan ethics, and economic exploitation. Implicit in this obsession is the early European settlers’ deeply-rooted contradiction between democracy and slavery. Their first cross-cultural encounters were with the indigenous people whom a lost European, Christopher Columbus, had earlier mistakenly named Indians. These native people had their own socio-cultural institutions. Since their skin pigmentation was distinctively darker compared to light pigmentation of the Europeans; their music and dance were different from the Gregorian chants and gavottes; and their arts and crafts were stylistically and colorfully different from European frescos and laces, the white settlers devalued and declared the entirety of the indigenous cultural artifacts and traditions savage and inferior. [paragraph 12]

The European settlers’ initial cross-cultural encounters with Africans were fermented by the slave trade economy which made Africans legal human chattel. As with the indigenous people, they rejected the Africans’ ebony pigmentation, their syncopated rhythms and music, and their hand-crafted masks, labeling them as uncivilized and inferior. These racist attitudes derived educational, economic, and political endorsement by the renowned French political theorist and statesman, Alexis De Tocqueville (1848). In his four-volume work, Democracy in America, he wrote:

“The Negro has lost all property in his own person, and he cannot dispose of his existence without committing a sort of fraud. But the savage is his own master as soon as he is able to act; parental authority is scarcely known to him; he has never bent his will to that of any of his kind, nor learned the difference between voluntary obedience and a shameful subjection . . . civilization has had little hold on him”  (p.332). [paragraph 13]

When De Tocqueville’s work initially appeared in 1848, it was the first comprehensive study of “democracy” in America and regarded as the greatest work ever written on one country by the citizen of another. It was acclaimed at a time when it was illegal to teach African slaves to read or write, illegal for African slaves to speak their native languages, illegal for slaves to practice any of their cultural traditions, including religion. Conversely, Caucasian students and Caucasian Americans in general were not being encouraged or educated to think critically about the American experiment with “democracy.” Instead its educational institutions implemented distorted curricula and ignored any responsibility for teaching human egalitarianism. For example, they continued to teach that Columbus “discovered” America--- not that the indigenous people discovered a lost stranger from Europe, Columbus, wandering on their property. This kind of distortion has been perennially perpetuated by a form of historical imbalance in various curricular materials and approaches. For example, although the institutions of slavery occurred on American soil and the atrocities of the Holocaust occurred on European soil, there is an imbalance in curricular material and instructional approaches covering these horrific chapters in human history. [paragraph 14]

The combination of the above and other factors prompted the National Association of Multicultural Education to issue the following resolution on November 11, 2001:

WHEREAS teacher admission and certification/licensure tests have been found to have questionable content, concurrent, construct, criterion-related, and predictive validity; and
WHEREAS teacher admission and certification/licensure tests have been found to have psychometrically indefensible methods for establishing cutoff scores; and
WHEREAS teacher admission and certification/licensure tests disproportionately eliminate Asian American, African American, Latina/Latino, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, other candidates of color, and individuals with disabilities: and
WHEREAS teacher admission and certification/licensure tests are a chief obstacle to the national interest of recruiting a culturally, racially, and linguistically diversified national teacher force;
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED THAT THE National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) call for the elimination of teacher admission and certification/licensure testing until such time as testing instruments have been designed that can predict candidates who will be academically successful in teacher education programs and who will be competent teachers in the school classroom. [paragraph 15]
 

Conclusion

In summary, courage and conviction for multicultural education in the performing arts arena are pivotal in the nurturance of the diverse human spirits and potentials in our rapidly growing American social order. Transformative teachers are inspired by the courage and talent of African American contralto, Marian Anderson, who was denied the right to sing in Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Rather than yield to the arrogance and inhumanity of that exclusive organization, Marian Anderson chose to make a statement for democracy by relocating her recital to the Lincoln Memorial where approximately 75,000 people assembled to hear her on Easter Sunday in 1939. West (2004) reminds us that the best of American life has always been embodied and enacted by courageous figures who chose democracy. Like James Baldwin, he frightfully reminds us that we either choose democracy now or ultimately witness the fire this time! [paragraph 16]

Dr. Bob Daniels is recently retired from Virginia State University where he served as Chairperson of the Department of Educational Leadership. Prior to serving at VSU, he served as Associate Provost and Dean at Kent State University.  (Contact this author at bob_d23836@yahoo.com; contact the editors of EMME at emme@eastern.edu.)

Recommended Citation in the APA Style:

Daniels, B. (2005). Transforming performing arts curricula into effective multicultural pedagogy: An African American perspective. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, 7(2), 16 paragraphs. Retrieved your access month date, year, from http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2005fall/daniels.htm