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Heewon Chang, Ph. D.
Eastern
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Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education Fall 2005 (vol. 7, no. 2) Theme: Multicultural Curriculum for Visual and Performing Arts
Guest Editor:
John Caruso, Jr.
With this issue focusing on the visual and performing arts curriculum for multicultural education, we will conclude the series of themes in multicultural curriculum. When we initially considered "arts" as the thematic focus of this issue, we had in mind the broad field of arts encompassing paintings, photographs, 3-D arts, music, dance, drama, and poetry. The vastness of the field makes this theme exciting but challenging. As readers will find out, some forms of visual and performing arts are discussed more explicitly in articles and instructional ideas. Other forms of arts are covered more "quietly" through reviews and authors' implications. Whichever art forms are highlighted here, the selection of those and the de-selection of others do not reflect our view on certain forms of arts. Like any journal, our choices are dictated by submissions. We hope that our appreciation of the inclusive arts curriculum in multicultural education is fully communicated to our readers through our choice of the theme. Dr. John Caruso deserves our warmest thanks for being instrumental in putting this issue together and having done triple duty as Guest Editor, Art Review Editor, and contributor of website reviews. We are pleased to present four articles and one instructional idea of excellent quality. H. Caruso's, B. Daniels', and L. Hochtritt's works bring critical perspectives to the multicultural arts curriculum. In the milieu where the multicultural arts curriculum is often equated with making crafts and singing songs from other countries or drawing people in different skin colors, these authors challenge the superficial treatment of multicultural education in the arts curriculum. They also advocate the transformative multicultural arts curriculum where present and future teachers utilize arts to help students discover self and others, understand contributions from other ethnic groups than European artists, and bring about social changes toward justice for all people. K. Skaitidis also discusses the transformative power of arts, but at a personal level. Using an ethnographic approach, she self-analyzes how her experience with Mayan painting mentors has transformed her way of teaching arts at the university. Skaitidis' self-reflective piece nicely segues way to P. Lawton's instructional idea of "artstory." Incorporating self-reflective strategies, Lawton demonstrates how this art teacher can integrate language arts with visual and dramatic arts in a teacher education course. This idea can be easily implemented in elementary or secondary classrooms as well. All the reviews--books, films, websites, and arts--reflect the theme of this issue. Six children's books and five professional books (including a journal issue) are reviewed in the section of Book Reviews; two films and 27 websites in the section of Multimedia Reviews. The Art Reviews section includes an informative review article about quilts supplemented with seven vivid photographs of quilts exhibited in Williams College Museum of Art. Many hands have helped to bring this issue to life. In addition to the Guest Editor and authors, I would like to express my profound appreciation to Dr. Linda Stine as Copy Editor and Leah Klerr as Assistant Editor. Without the unselfish dedication and services of my editorial staff and the financial support of Eastern University, EMME would not exist and could not be made available for free to national and international readers. My thanks to all! Abstracts of the articles and the instructional ideas are provided below. Full texts are accessible from the abstracts. I also like to recommend that you check out our back issues including three multicultural curriculum issues: 2004 Spring for social studies, 2004 Fall for math and science, and 2005 Spring for language arts. To honor our authors, please cite properly whenever you use our articles, instructional ideas, and reviews. Please enjoy the issue and send your comments to the editorial staff at emme@eastern.edu.
Heewon Chang, Ph. D.
CRITICAL CULTURAL INQUIRY &
MULTICULTURAL ART EDUCATION
PRE-PACKAGED MULTICULTURALISM:
ARTISTIC MENTORSHIP WITH TWO MAYAN
ARTISTS AS A
CREATING "ARTSTORIES" AS SITES OF
SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTIVISM, PERSONAL EXPRESSION, MULTICULTURAL
EDUCATION, AND UNDERSTANDING
The Art of Quilting from Folk Art to Fine Art REVIEWSLiterature for Young Readers Films and Video |
