CHRISTINE BALLENGEE MORRIS

9. CULTURAL PLURALISM – LOOKING FORWARD

ACADEMIC DIALOGUE OR SHARING OUR THOUGHTS

We, as academics, may have our positions, philosophical stances and we write from certain lenses and our ideas and ideologies are published, if we are lucky. And then we wait for some response, possibly to challenge us and our point of view, for both individual and academic growth. Mikhail Bakhtin (2004) expressed how difficult it is for some people to be answerable regarding one’s academic position without seeking defensive excuses or refusing to participate in dialogues. Being able to read Graeme Chalmers’ work gave me an opportunity to not only view his research trajectory, but it also revealed his consistent desire to encourage those in the academy to respond to his ideas in hopes of generating a scholarly dialogue. Even his writing style, which often includes a list of questions at the end of his article serves as a charge to the readers to reflect and respond. Chalmers’ focused on diversity and as part of the discussion of his work and the future of this type of work, we must first be grounded in the concept of multiculturalism. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, people have been interpreting multiculturalism through various lenses such as: sociocultural, political, academic, and pedagogical. Multicultural Education is a concept, philosophy dedicated to providing more equitable opportunities for disenfranchised individuals and groups in social, political and especially, educational arenas. Although this ideal, like that of democracy, may never be met completely; many people still understand it as a worthy and necessary educational goal for a more just and equitable society (Sleeter & Grant, 1998). Sleeter and Grant divided approaches to multicultural education into 5 groups: teaching the exceptional and the culturally different; human relations; single-group studies; multicultural education; education that is multicultural and social reconstructionist. Each approach has different goals. One of the approaches, “Teaching the Exceptional the Culturally Different,” was thought to build connections between student and school with the main goal to nurture positive relationships among school groups by dispelling stereotypes and encouraging tolerance through promoting the idea of universal experiences; which Chalmers disagreed with this type of approach. In 1987 Chalmers’ position regarding culturally based versus universally based contends that aesthetic education’s universal ideology is elitist and has influenced art education. Chalmers believes that the arts are a social process with producing and consuming groups that develop an interdependence, interrelation, and interaction. His charge to the art education field is

© KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004390096_009 C. BALLENGEE MORRIS to broaden its definition of art including popular, folk and vernacular arts and many responded to this call. He also introduces the idea of interrelationship and interaction, as an approach with students; communication styles; and scholarly writings. Multicultural education according to Sleeter and Grant (1998) entails educational policies and practices that affirm pluralism across multiple groups; whereas, critical multicultural education is viewed as varied due to the conceptual foundation as being identified as critical pedagogy influenced by the work of Freire, Giroux, McLaren and Macedo – the common tenets is the transformative nature, expanding and encouraging teaching diverse tradition and perspectives, exploring stereotypes and respecting contributions that all groups have made plus paying attention to the structural inequalities and student agency. In his 1992 article, The Origins of Racism in the Public School Art Curriculum he examined elitist and culture-bound understandings of art curricula through notions of race, which he viewed as having conditioned our understanding of art. In this article, he explores racism, prejudice, religions, geographic determinism and applied how it is practiced by art historians and taught to future teachers. His charge to us in the field is this: We need art teachers who provide a classroom atmosphere in which students’ cultures are recognized, shared, and respected. We need art educators who will develop culturally appropriate curricula materials to supplement those whose treatment of different cultural groups is limited or biased. We need art educators who will give students an opportunity to explore what they do not know or understand about the arts of other cultures. We need learning and teaching to operate in both directions and to involve parents and other community members as experts and resource people in classroom activities. (1992, p. 20) Within the multiple layers of cultural exchanges, he is again suggesting that we as educators and students develop communities of learners through a process of interrelationships and interactions. In 1995 Chalmers’ new charge focused on Global education suggesting that it could possibly bring an understanding, appreciation, and respect for cultural diversity and the artistic production of others. Chalmers was influenced by the works from Louis Lankford who named different reasons that art is valued including cultural spirit and by June King McFee’s six functions of art. His call to art educators was for art books to be re-examined and right the wrong. By 1999, Chalmers continues his exploration about pluralism and racism as it connects to art education. At this point he leans towards understanding power and colonialism as it relates to our field. Through his historical review of who was in power when the curriculum was developed, he explores it through a colonial lens, and believes that because he studied social sciences, missionary reports, political officials, that it served as an introduction to the importance of the indigenous voice. He charges us with the idea of us, as educators, needing to learn from those who are disempowered and states, “Post-colonialism is about multiculturalism, about

78