Inspirations: Multicultural art education

Talking with a high school art educator, the topic of multicultural art education came up when I asked, “What scholarly resources would you like to use, but aren’t aware of or don’t have access to?” And she responded: 

“I would like a resource that helps me to learn more about specific guidelines or appropriateness when teaching about art forms from various cultures. For example, when pulling art images from the Smithsonian, to teach about beaded loom work, I want to make sure that I’m showing work that is in an exhibition with the permission of the family or tribe, and not stolen art. So that is hard to know. That’s when I struggle” (High school art educator, June 2021). 

According to Joy G. Bertling and Tara C. Moore’s “The U.S. K–12 Art Education Curricular Landscape: A Nationwide Survey”, multicultural art education is one of the most emphasized approaches in art classrooms today. Last night, I was looking around for scholarly resources that would meet that teacher's particular demand and generalizing from Bertling and Moore’s survey, perhaps the demands of quite a few others. I found a few interesting articles that I may write about later. But this morning, out of the blue, I received an email from NAEA about Artura.org; open access, multicultural online database of art objects, artists, and learning resources. 

Artura.org is a project by the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, and its images are sourced from artists who participated in the BWA’s residency programs. The information in artist profiles is volunteered by the artist, and Artura.org does, when possible, include statements and descriptions directly from the artist on an art object’s page. This database is artist-centered and explicitly works to dismantle oppressive narratives in art-making. 

Registering with Artura.org, which is free and noninvasive, provides access to a PDF of the Artura.org Teacher’s Guide, which makes the case for multicultural education, discusses the purpose of the database, and provides a few examples of artworks in their collection, paired with cross-curricular items, like poetry, and some questions that align with Visual Thinking Strategies principles. 

The PDF also includes links to video tutorials on how to use the site, the first two of which-- “Artura.org Webinar - Welcome” and “Artura.org Webinar Website Demo”-- I highly recommend. Now, they’re a little over a year old, but most of what they demonstrate is still applicable to navigating the database. 

Signing up, exploring the website, and learning how to use it only took about an hour of my time, and I believe it has the potential to inspire complex and respectful multicultural lessons and projects. 

Bertling, Joy G., and Tara C. Moore. “The U.S. K–12 Art Education Curricular Landscape: A Nationwide Survey.” Studies in Art Education, vol. 62, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 23–46. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00393541.2020.1858007.

 

Inspirations and Tutorials: Math Integration

As stated in an earlier post recommending PBS Student Reporting Labs-- and I cite the same source here-- discipline-based art education, or arts integration, is one of the more common approaches to art education (Bertling and Moore, 2021). 

Arts integration was important to my undergraduate curriculum development course. Each project or lesson we designed in the class had an area of integration, but sometimes, that was a stronger influence than others. The quality of the connection relied on, partly, the quality of whatever interdisciplinary resource I was using. And one of the best resources I used was Annie Perkins’s blog, arbitrarilyclose.com. Perkins is a math teacher in Minneapolis, and her blog hosts a couple of interesting, thoughtful projects, both of which function as resources for teachers. 

Perkins’s #MathArtChallenge was a result of the initial shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. During lockdown, Perkins started doing daily posts with ideas and tutorials for math art activities, eventually reaching 101 activities, or “challenges”, by the end of summer 2021. Click here to explore her #MathArtChallenge posts. She explains the history, the structure and organization of the #MathArtChallenge, and its educational value, in a PDF that you can read here. 

A geometric design I drew using one of Annie Perkins's #MathArtChallenge tutorials. 

With each post, Perkins provides clear step-by-step instructions, at least one video of her modeling the activity, and connections to the Common Core Standards for Mathematical Practice. One of the challenges that I followed along with was Day 21’s activity, Agra Fort Islamic Design, and you can see a picture of my attempt featured above. These posts could serve as springboards for project ideas, but they’re also thoughtfully designed tutorials for approachable math art activities. 

However, a resource that can serve to inspire rich, meaningful projects with math integration can also be found on Perkins’s blog: the Mathematicians Project. Essentially, while most of the mathematicians taught in school are white men, a lot of her students aren’t, so she wanted to find role models in math that represented her students. She provides a more in-depth explanation of the project, as well as links to even more in-depth explanations of the project, here. 

This list of mathematicians (which includes information on their respective fields and contributions to mathematics) and the thinking behind it, inspired an entire project, and the instruction plan, as well as the presentation I developed for it, is one of my favorite projects from my curriculum development course. 

Make sure to check out my other Tutorials and Inspirations recommendations, and if you're a preservice or inservice art educator and you want to contribute to this blog, completing this survey should only take up 20-25 minutes of your day. 

Bertling, J. G., & Moore, T. C. (2021). The U.S. K–12 Art Education Curricular Landscape: A Nationwide Survey. Studies in Art Education, 62(1), 23–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2020.1858007

Tutorials: Drawing textbooks

A part-time art educator I talked to this summer said technical drawing books can be very helpful to teachers. “[A scholarly resource] that I use all the time is Will Eisner’s Expressive Anatomy. You know, Will Eisner is the major Disney darling of yore. It’s a great resource” 

However-- and I expressed this in our conversation-- those kinds of books can be hard to use, especially for students in art classrooms. Briefly scanning the Goodreads page for Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist reveal the numerous challenges that readers have had with the book. Bad reviews cite a lack of step-by-step instruction and call the book superficial. One review even says that readers might have more success with the book if they were led through it by a teacher. 

But that art educator understood how drawing books can be challenging for readers; “I use them mostly in cartooning because I think that takes some of the pressure off, and some of the scariness away, if you know how to use them in the right way”. 

She tried to build trust with her students, so they felt comfortable approaching these books and potentially even bringing them home. She's constantly replenishing her classroom library and she encourages students to take them, because ultimately, “They’re there as a resource that’s available to them.” 

Art teachers looking to pick up some books to add to their classroom library can consult this Indie Bookstore Finder to find bookstores near them, or they can use the Goodwill Locator to find a source for books that might be a little more affordable. 

Podiums: The Art Education Action Kit

During the National Art Education Association’s 2021 conference, I attended a presentation by Dr. Stephanie Baer. She shared her experience at the National Arts Action Summit, an event organized by Americans for the Arts where students were led through workshops where they learned about issues and policy changes in art education, all of which culminated in speaking to actual lawmakers. This presentation, along with my conversations with art teachers, inspired the creation of this blog’s Podium tag. 

The Americans for the Arts website provides many services, and as I’ve discovered while writing this post, it is a great place to read news articles and editorials regarding federal spending, reports from other organizations, like the National Endowment for the Arts, and advocacy events. One of these tools is a reading list for advocacy in art education; the Arts Education Action Kit. The kit is a reading list, with links to brief, to-the-point, and well-designed open access ebooks. 

A couple of pages from the Getting Started ebook, as viewed on americansforthearts.org.

The Getting Started ebook covers the why, when, where, and who of art education advocacy, explaining the reasoning behind their work, and providing a detailed timeline of important events in the history of the topic. You can read it on the Americans for the Arts webpage for free. 

The Mobilizing Support ebook defines lobbying, advocacy, and the surrounding rules and regulations. Like Getting Started, it’s free to read here.  Also available in the action kit is the Arts Education Field Guide, which delves into the “Ecosystem of partners, players, and policymakers in the field of arts education.” (Click here to read the PDF.) 

While the purpose of this blog is to help art educators find resources, sometimes the art educators themselves are going to be the best resource available (High school art educator, June 2021). And in the arena of art education advocacy, I think that holds true. As Americans for the Arts would say, the voices of art teachers are invaluable, and the materials they’ve produced as part of the Art Education Action Kit provide good jumping on points for educators who are interested in advocating for themselves and their students.