ETA 10 (3) pp.

303–316 Intellect Limited 2014

International Journal of Education through Art

Volume 10 Number 3
© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.10.3.303_1

Joni Boyd Acuff

The Ohio State University, USA

(Mis)Information highways:
A critique of online resources
for multicultural art
education

Abstract Keywords
This article calls to attention hegemonic online resources for multicultural art educa- critical multiculturalism
tion. The author suggests that art educators carefully critique multicultural art lesson multicultural art
plans published online, as the Internet is increasingly a primary resource teachers education
use to make pedagogical and curricular decisions. The author demonstrates how multicultural art
some multicultural art education resources offered online contribute to an ‘us–other’ lessons
dichotomy, and contradict with the current progressive critical multicultural art curriculum
education scholarship being published by contemporary art education scholars. The development
author asserts three contentions of support that illustrate how these online curricu- teacher education
lar resources maintain ‘liberal’ multiculturalism, exoticize cultural groups, produce
surface knowledge about difference and fail to question power. This article concludes
with a call to action in which art educators are encouraged to explicitly acknowledge,
discuss and work with students and peers to build counter-curriculum that work
against these damaging online multicultural art education resources.

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As an undergraduate art education student, I taught summer art camps

to children ages 4 to 9 years old. I titled one of my camps ‘Around the
World from A to Z.’ It was specifically labeled in the camp brochure as a
‘multicultural art class.’ The curriculum that I created specifically for this
class included activities such as molding ‘wooden’ shoes from Holland,
sewing colorful berets worn in France, creating African masks and Kente
clothe replicas from construction paper, constructing Chinese dragons,
making Persian rugs from Persia and creating necklaces that were worn
by Aboriginal peoples in Australia (Figures 1–5). Most of these activi-
ties were retrieved from KinderArt.com, a long-standing, well-known
website used by most of my classmates at the time. At the time, I did not

Figure 1: Collaged image- Clockwise: Wooden shoes from Holland and French
berets representing France; African Kente clothe made from cardboard and
construction paper; Persian rug from Persia; Aboriginal necklace; Chinese dragons.

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realize that I was a proponent in maintaining cultural stereotypes. The 1. Spring 2012 Semester
(January–May 2012). My
hegemonic curriculum truly exoticized other cultures, and the informa- tenure at UNT was from
tion that I presented to the young children was antiquated and hardly in August 2011–May 2013.
line with the contemporary situations of the countries discussed.
(Author, Personal Communication, 2001)

Introduction
In a sample of approximately 2400 teachers who instruct 9–18-year-old
students, 68 per cent claimed that they use the Internet to obtain informa-
tion and resources for lesson planning (Becker 1999). Maloy and Getis add,
‘New teacher candidates told us that while they expected no single database
to be comprehensive, they needed a variety of resources as starting points for
curriculum planning…. [and] searchable databases were seen as ways to enli-
ven and extend class discussions and textbook reading assignments’ (2002:
Par. 27). In an impromptu surveying of my class of 27 art education pre-service
teachers at the University of North Texas1 (UNT), in Denton, Texas, USA, 100
per cent claim to always use or frequently use the Internet to find lesson
plans or ideas for curriculum development. As a teacher educator, recognizing
and considering my students’ dependence on technology for curriculum and
pedagogy development has initiated the reconstruction of my course curric-
ulum. Furthermore, with the increased utility of the Internet and its role in
teacher education comes increased responsibility of critically examining online
content. There is no way to control information disseminated online, nor verify
its authenticity or accuracy. Therefore, art teacher educators must be proactive
in engaging in dialogue and frank conversations with their art education, pre-
service students about online content and its place in teaching, pedagogical
construction and curriculum development.
As an art educator and scholar whose pedagogy and research is heav-
ily situated in critical multiculturalism, I am particularly cognizant of how
my students are influenced by the information circulated on the Internet
as it pertains to multicultural art education. The above personal narrative,
which articulates my very first experience teaching art to children, is demon-
strative of how online resources can facilitate an educational experience in
which ‘students vicariously voyage to a smorgasbord of selected and safe
exotic places to make trite and decorative copies of decontextualized crafts’
(Chalmers 1999: 178); consequently, transferring oppressive knowledge and
supporting a multicultural framework that is oppressive, instead of trans-
formational. The objective of this article is to critically examine the avenues
through which this oppressive, damaging, ‘liberal’, multicultural art education
continues to override critical multicultural art education in classrooms with
help from online curricular resources. I understand a primary avenue to be the
praxis-oriented multicultural art education websites that are geared towards
providing art teachers, and in many cases pre-service art teachers, curricular
resources.
To guide my critique, I offer three contentions of support: (1) cultural
homogenization, (2) the unauthorized representation of a culture’s art or
aesthetic and (3) the utilization of the additive approach to multicultural art
education. Furthermore, these contentions are undergirded by personal narra-
tives and firsthand experiences from my art education classroom. To conclude,
I propose strategies for helping art teacher educators combat the hegemony
evident in the multicultural art education resources found online.

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Critical vs liberal multicultural art education

In order to fully comprehend the problems associated with online resources
for multicultural art education, it is imperative to first outline the differences
between critical multicultural art education and liberal multicultural art educa-
tion. Art education scholars have provided research, literature, empirical data
and theoretical approaches to help develop and nurture the specific area of
multicultural art education. For example, Patricia Stuhr et al. (2008) under-
score the need for a critical approach to multicultural art education. These
scholars suggest ways for art teachers to create learning spaces and curricula
that ‘helps students to view images in a thoughtful manner so they develop
democratic ways of thinking and become informed consumers’ (Stuhr et  al.
2008: 93). Dipti Desai (2000), another critical multicultural art education
scholar, suggests that the art classroom is an ideal space for investigating how
and why certain images are created and maintained. Activities that facilitate
this investigation include dissecting damaging stereotypes of groups, study-
ing media construction of certain populations, as well as exploring the unfair
museum practices that erase or silence certain voices of people (Desai 2000;
Stuhr et al. 2008). Accordingly, students will begin to question ‘who controls
the means for representation, who controls cultural artifacts, and who controls
the methods of displaying and exhibiting these artifacts in cultural institutions’
(Desai 2000: 120). This act of critical questioning is a primary task in critical
multicultural art education.
On the other hand, liberal multiculturalism abdicates recognition of the
unequal power relations that underpin inequity. Its goal is to develop aware-
ness and appreciation of multiple cultural ethnicities and their histories and
foster intercultural respect (May and Sleeter 2010); however, this untidy objec-
tive leaves out the much needed critique of issues like cultural subjugation,
cultural capital and the systemic disparities that sustain economic inequity.
Liberal multiculturalism fails to identify power and privilege as chief concepts
of interrogation (Jay 2003; May and Sleeter 2010). In art education, liberal
multiculturalism appears in the forms of Native American dream catchers,
African masks, sand paintings, eating ethnic foods, reading folk tales, singing
and dancing (Chalmers 1999; Jay 2003; Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995). These
celebratory activities do not incite a critique of power, nor do they recognize
how racism, heterosexism and other discriminations are ‘enmeshed in the
fabric of our social order’ (Ladson-Billings 1999: 213; also see Inglis 2011).
Instead, the result is educators constructing indigenous and minoritized learn-
ers in deficit terms, disregarding the racialized, institutionalized policies and
practices that disadvantage them (Inglis 2011; May and Sleeter 2010). May
and Sleeter write,

Multicultural educational approaches that both essentialize and depolit-

icize culture – treating culture as a thing, while at the same time ignor-
ing the wider social and political context – are thus inherently delimited.
As Kincheloe and Steinberg (1997) comment, a key problem is their fail-
ure ‘to see the power-grounded relationships among identity construc-
tion, cultural representations and struggles over resources.’ Rather,
such approaches engage ‘in [a] celebration of difference when the most
important issues to those who fall outside the white, male and middle
class norm often involve powerlessness, violence and poverty’ (p.17).
(2010: 6)

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Liberal multicultural art education teaches us to treat each other civilly and to 2. http://www.dickblick.
com/multicultural/
tolerate diversity instead of addressing the economic exploitation of groups. lessonplans/.
The problem with ‘tolerance’ is that we are encouraged to endure differences,
3. http://www.hsv.k12.
not embrace them and work to understand them (Nieto 2004). Fortunately, al.us/schools/art/
art educators such as Garber (2004), Gude (2007), Hicks (1994), hooks (1995), dixon/multicultural.
htm.
Hutzel (2005) and Knight (2006) have offered research that advances a more
critical multicultural art education by using theoretical lenses like social justice 4. http://www.kinderart.
com/multic/.
theory, critical theory, postcolonial theory and multicultural and social recon-
structionist theory. In addition to applying critical theories in art education,
these scholars call for critical pedagogies and praxis in art education that rejects
liberal multicultural art practices and ‘confront[s] the racial class, gender, and
homophobic biases woven into the fabric of society’ (Stuhr et al. 2008: 83).

Critiquing content: Three contentions to consider

While the reformist ideas presented by the aforementioned scholars are note-
worthy, unfortunately, there is a disconnect between scholarship and infor-
mation on the websites that provide practicing and prospective art teachers
with resources and lesson plans. This is problematic because students use the
Internet more frequently than they do textbooks and research articles; and
they do so with little to no regard of the accuracy of the information (Graham
2003). Consequently, most of the critical literary work art educators have
offered is overshadowed by the online educational resources that communi-
cate exactly the opposite. The resources are heavily hegemonic in that they
position cultures within a Eurocentric framework, supporting the status quo
(Chin 2011). I believe art educators and art teacher educators should consider
these contentions alone, and alongside their art education students and pre-
service teachers.
In the following sections, I discuss three primary contentions that support
my tension with these curricular resources: (1) cultural homogenization, (2)
the unauthorized representation of a culture’s art or aesthetic and (3) the
utilization of the additive approach to multicultural art education. For ancil-
lary evidence and practical examples that support these contentions, I refer
to actual multicultural art lesson plans that can be found online. I employed
an exploratory Internet search in which I entered the keyword phrase
‘Multicultural Art Lessons’ in the Google search engine. I utilized lessons
from only the top three sites, as the order of results appear according to rele-
vance to the entered keyword or phrase. Blick2 was the first result from the
search. Blick, formally Dick Blick, is a world-renowned art supply company
for art teachers and artists. Blick is a major sponsor of School Arts magazine,
‘a nationally circulated resource that teachers often turn to for lesson ideas’
(Chin 2011: 303). The Blick website is strategically featured in each School Arts
magazine and on its website, which means Blick’s overall public visibility is
vast. While the Blick website is a location primarily used for purchasing art
supplies, it offers a resource section titled ‘for educators’ that includes hundreds
of free lesson plans. The lessons are listed by featured disciplines, in which
‘Multicultural’ is one. The second result from my Google search was Huntsville
City Schools Multicultural Lessons3. This school website held portions of the
elementary art curriculum for Huntsville City Schools in Huntsville, Alabama,
USA. The multicultural art lessons in particular were noted to be authored by
Ms Ginny Dixon, elementary school art teacher in the Huntsville City school
district. Lastly, the website that resulted third was KinderArt.4 This website,

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whose slogan is, ‘We Make Teaching Easier’, offers free lesson plans for
‘school teachers, art educators, after-school program directors, future teach-
ers, college students, artists and homeschoolers’ (KinderArt 1997). Like Blick,
the KinderArt website has categorized lesson plans for teachers’ convenience;
Multicultural Art is listed as a category. KinderArt encourages people, not
necessarily educators, from around the world to submit lesson plans to be
reviewed and possibly published on their website.
Significant about each of the three Internet resources, Blick, Huntsville
City Schools and KinderArt, is that other art education curricular websites
that resulted from my Google search identified these three websites as ‘Some
of the Best Free Art Lesson Plans & Resources on the Net’. A few of the
websites from the search, such as www.ArtMuseums.com, www.edchange.org
and www.freelyeducate.com, suggest that Blick, Huntsville City Schools and
KinderArt are ‘outstanding art lesson resources around the Internet’ and have
hyperlinked either one or all three of them on their own webpages. These
top three websites have been identified by their peer sites as reliable, effec-
tive online resources for multicultural art education. With this in mind, utiliz-
ing lesson plans from these particularly world-renowned websites in order
to illustrate and support my contentions with online resources for multicul-
tural art education strengthens my argument for much needed reconstruction.
In addition, the widespread dissemination of this supposedly ‘multicultural’
education material is justification for further critical analysis, as the circulation
of inaccurate educational information has repercussions not only for a disci-
pline, but for the groups of people simultaneously (mis)represented.

Contention 1: Homogenization
Many online multicultural art lesson plans homogenize cultures. Cultural
homogenization is a term that is used to describe the act of situating several
distinct cultures under one group umbrella; for example, people who are Puerto
Rican, Mexican American and Cuban are often considered Hispanic or Latino/a
(Saldivar as cited by Garber 1995). Homogenization is damaging in that it does
not allow the individual cultures to be transient, diverse and ever changing
(Garber 1995; Chin 2011); they are designated to one simplified idea that has
been established by a western conceptualization and US mainstream culture
(Chin 2011). Demonstrative of this practice is the multicultural lesson plan, titled
‘Oriental Fan’, found on the Huntsville City Schools website. Ms Ginny Dixon,
the author of the lesson plan, states that China, Japan and Korea are all under
the ‘Oriental’ umbrella and that ‘they’ make fans from bamboo, silk, wood and
beautiful paper. Uniting these cultures into one ethnic unit is irresponsible of
the author and reduces three countries, with dynamically different historical and
cultural narratives, to one representational object. Likewise, illustrating homog-
enization even more, Blick and the Huntsville City Schools website designates
a single African mask as African art under their multicultural art lessons section.
There are numerous regions of Africa, wherein countless types of masks were
used for diverse reasons (Finley 1999). There are different significances associ-
ated with the diverse cultural practices in all parts of Africa; and they all do not
include masks. Kader writes, ‘The rich variety of art forms created in Africa have
inevitably been excluded, to the detriment of student learning’ (2005: 79). The
multicultural lesson plans on these websites exemplify this omission, as they
work to essentialize Africa to a mask and stereotype an entire continent. Their
presentation ‘hegemonically erases diversity (and a number of nations) within

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the region and its arts’ (Chin 2011: 304). It also dissolves the mask’s original
functionality and redefines it, as well as its meaning (Kasfir 1999).
Homogenization places parameters around cultural identity (Garber 1995).
As educators, we must consider how this influences people from various
cultural groups. There is no room for a personal identity of self to emerge from
these generalized cultural conceptualizations. These online multicultural art
lessons silence cultural voices. If staying in line with critical multicultural art
education, the art lessons should support the articulation of diverse narratives
and the schizophrenic nature of culture. Cultures should be able to orches-
trate, modify and resituate themselves, and simply exist as they truly are, not
be reduced to an imposed, stagnant representation. Culture is and always will
be in transition (Stuhr et al. 2008).The multicultural art lesson plans that are
accessible online should work hard to communicate this understanding, just
as our art education scholars have worked to do.

Contention 2: Cultural (mis)representation

The multicultural art lesson plans on these websites make little to no distinc-
tion between a culture’s historical and contemporary context. The art products
that result from the lessons are consistently utilitarian or directly relational to
things like historical rituals, religion or mythical belief systems, e.g. African
masks, Indian masks, African drums, Middle Eastern drums, Native American
dream catchers, Native American story necklaces, Mexican ponchos, Persian
and Navajo Rug bookmarks, and South American rain sticks. Consequently,
this easily communicates to students who complete the projects that these
often non-secular derived cultures are primitive, as their art deviates far
from the norm (Eurocentric standard) (Chin 2011; Oguibe 1999). African, pre-
Columbian, Oceanic and Native American’s often get the brunt of this primi-
tive designation (Chanda 1992; O’Brien et al. 2013).
In these lesson plans is the complete absence of the actual visual art that
is produced by the various cultural groups from around the world. Instead,
we see elaborately decorated items created by non-artists from presumably
uncivilized nations (Chanda 1992; Oguibe 1999). Based on unilateral, biased
cultural values, westerners have selected what is considered to be the visual art
of non-western cultures (Chin 2011; Hassan 1999). Illustrating this assertion
perfectly is a personal narrative from a doctoral student who I advised at UNT.
This young lady, from Cameroon, West Africa, recounted a visual art museum
experience that left her feeling misrepresented and culturally silenced. Some
of her peers suggested she visit a very specific art exhibition that displayed
Art from Cameroon, as they knew she was from the West African region. She
emotionally described her visiting experience as one of shock and disgust. The
student explained how none of the displayed Art was Cameroonian Art, as
she described the objects as antiquated ritualistic items that had no meaning
to her and certainly did not represent contemporary or modern Cameroonian
Art. She noted that the Art aesthetic that the objects communicated was an
imposed one established by Americans; thus supporting the assertion that
the African art discourse is an establishment of western hegemony of Africa
(Hassan 1999; Meier 2010).
The doctoral student also shared that Art in Cameroon looks similar to
Art in America because most West African artists adopted aspects of the west-
ern aesthetic centuries ago. Herein lies the problem; the dominant group does
not want to know or accept this information because if this fact is indeed

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acknowledged, there is no longer an Other aesthetic to dominate (Garber

1995; Kasfir 1999). Misrepresentations in art education are not accidental; they
are structured intentionally (Clarke 2002). Kasfir (1999) asserts that ‘authentic’
African art is conceived from western taste; therefore the ‘Indigenous’ aesthetic
is preserved. To accept what my student asserted as truth, means that cultures
are not as easily exoticized and hierarchies are harder to establish. Power is at
stake (May and Sleeter 2010). Albers (1999: 11), states the following about our
role in this problem: ‘Educators must not ignore the propensity of the visual arts
to make visible ideologies that position some groups as more privileged than
others’. But unfortunately, just as the museum exhibition did, the current multi-
cultural lesson plans on these websites work to ‘preserve the concept of primitive’
(Thompson 1975: 25); and thus, assist in maintaining the us–other dichotomy.
They do not challenge power, nor do they question the creation of knowledge as
critical multicultural art education recommends (Stuhr et al. 2008).

Contention 3: The use of the additive approach to

multicultural education
The lesson plans on these websites support an additive approach (Banks 1989,
2006; Banks and Banks 2012) to multicultural art education. James Banks (1989:
192), multicultural education pioneer, describes the additive approach as one
in which ‘content, concepts, themes, and perspectives are added to the curricu-
lum without changing its structure’. Books, lessons or units about various ethnic
groups are added to the otherwise hegemonic, ‘mainstream-centric’ curriculum.
The additive approach is easily identified in art education. Teachers have
culturally themed weeks, often times in conjunction with months in which
certain groups are recognized (Banks 1989, 2006; Banks and Banks 2012), i.e.
Black history month, Hispanic heritage month, Thanksgiving and Women’s
History month (Steinberg 2009). Many of the multicultural lesson plans found
online support such an approach to multicultural art education. For exam-
ple, to celebrate Black History month, KinderArt presents a project titled ‘Box
of Crayons’ in which students collaboratively create a drawing that celebrates
diversity and tolerance; it was influenced by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. During
Halloween or even Hispanic heritage month, teachers can take advantage of
KinderArt’s ‘Day of the Dead Skull Mask’ project that informs students about
this holiday practiced by Mexicans and Latin Americans. In teaching these
lessons, how are students taught to consider the complexity and relationships
of power amongst cultures? The content of the online multicultural art lesson
plans do not have any transformational facets that structurally alter and/or
challenge traditional curriculum’s foci on western perspectives and under-
standings of the world (Banks 1989, 2006; Banks and Banks 2012; Jay 2003).
Most of the lesson plans are simply fragmented and lack objectives, guid-
ing essential questions and overall significance. The absence of such integral
components of lesson plans is not only pedagogically irresponsible, but disre-
spectful to the cultures at the centre of the lessons.
Ultimately, the use of the additive approach to multicultural art educa-
tion sustains liberal multicultural art education. While liberal multicultural art
education may recruit diverse people and introduce different curricula, it stead-
ily maintains the normative culture verses subcultures paradigm (Mohanty
1990 as cited in Snider 1996; Howe and Lisi 2014). This adversely affects the
advancement of critical multicultural art education, and our students’ compre-
hension of the theoretical framework.

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Advancing ‘Critical’ multicultural art education online

The authors who develop the curriculum on these websites may defensively
claim that the lesson plans simply offer craft projects that practicing art
teachers would not realistically use to teach Art. To counter this argument,
I claim that regardless of whether or not the lesson plans produce Art or a
craft object, the ideas that they circulate are damaging, not only to art educa-
tion, but to various cultures that are being misrepresented and exploited. Art
teacher educators need to have conversations with students about hegem-
onic tools like the lessons on these websites; it should be a curriculum objec-
tive. Together, art educators and students need to engage in critical analyses
of the contents of the multicultural lesson plans, including what they do
well (if this applies) and what needs reconstruction and reconceptualiza-
tion. Teach students that in order to be critical in multicultural art educa-
tion, instead of us asking, ‘How can we accurately or authentically represent
another culture?’ instead we should ask ‘What can we know about another
culture?’ (Desai 2000: 115). This type of question may enhance art educa-
tors’ capacities in multicultural education. Critical multiculturalism helps us
acknowledge the partiality of representation and highlight how knowledge
is shaped historically and culturally. We have to acknowledge our location
and position when teaching about diverse cultural groups (Desai 2000). Use
these websites as discussion prompts that initiate dialogue stressing this
goal of multiculturalism.
After engaging in dialogue with students, empower them to take action.
In an art education seminar I taught, titled ‘(Re) Constructing cultural concep-
tions and practices in art education’, the students’ final assignment was to
write a scholarly, well-referenced letter to the authors of the multicultural
lesson plans that were present on the three websites, Blick, Huntsville City
Schools and KinderArt. In addition to the letters, the students were required
to develop a lesson plan that translated the theoretical ideas behind critical
multicultural art education into practical, accessible lessons that could be used
to teach children ages five to eighteen. The students in my course submitted
the completed lessons to the website authors to be considered for publication
on their site.
This course project taught the students in my course how to problema-
tize curricular and pedagogical material found online, especially informa-
tion claiming to be multicultural or be guided by multicultural goals. This was
demonstrated through the arguments they made in the letters to the lesson
plan authors. For example, a portion of one letter read:

We reviewed your current site and wanted to address a few things we

observed. For example, in the Molas Indians lesson we feel it is impor-
tant to identify the Cuna’s Panamanian heritage because it culturally
links them to a geographic location. Additionally, describing their cloth-
ing as ‘bathing suits’ seems an inaccurate description. Does this give
[American] students the wrong visual image? What value judgments
are presented in your terminology? Arizona State professor, Teresa L.
McCarty states, ‘Inaccurate representations are at odds with lived expe-
rience, perpetuate pejorative stereotypes that falsely depict all individu-
als in a particular group as having the same attributes, and exaggerate
differences between groups.’ How might you reframe your approach to
incorporate a non-secular viewpoint?

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5. Approximately two As illustrated in the above excerpt, my students began to critique dominant
months after the letter
and lesson plan was
knowledge, and they were empowered to be change agents in their field. It is
sent to the Huntsville imperative that art educators evaluate and confront systemic injustice through
City Schools website, art education, and foster these critical acts in their classrooms.
I was no longer able
to find the lesson Another objective for this course assignment was for my students’ lesson
plans online. I assume plans to replace one or multiple lesson plans on the websites. I referred to these
the lessons were student orchestrated lessons as ‘counter-curriculum’ because they critiqued
removed from the
website; however, the and disrupted the hegemony that the existing lesson plans disseminated.
web address is still The ‘counter-curriculum’ functioned as a resistance tool, a counternarrative,
advertised on other
art and art education
that negated the myopic, oppressive content that subjugates various cultures.
websites that claim Adams et al. (2007: 25) assert, ‘counternarratives dramatize and give voice to
the Huntsville City the experiences of people of color’, as well as those who have been silenced
Schools webpage is an
ideal online resource because of marginalized group status. Counter-narratives and counterstories
for multicultural art work ‘to destabilize dominant explanations and ideologies’ (Torre 2009: 111),
education. revise normalized narratives and modify universalized truths; this allows every
group to place their cultural frames of reference at the forefront, guiding and
supporting diverse perceptions of the world. It was my hope that my students’
letters and lesson plans influenced the websites’ lesson plan authors to reex-
amine the implied ideas that were present in their work.5
Having conversations with students to identify the problems with online
multicultural art curriculum is only the first step, as effective interventions
to combat cultural mis-representation, hegemony and oppression in these
resources should include more than dialogue (Aboud 2011). The World Wide
Web is only growing larger yet, no one can control what is disseminated, nor
consistently assess information for authenticity. There will always be prob-
lematic material available to our art education students and art teachers that
may not be in line with the current progressive theoretical positionings of
multicultural education. Because of this, it is imperative that we help students
understand that there are certain online resources available that are not valu-
able in art learning or in helping one understand how to be a multicultural
educator.

Conclusions
In the United States, ‘public school demographics nationally show a major
increase in the number of students of color; [however], still the majority of
public classroom teachers, over 80 per cent, are white. This raises important
questions, especially around so-called multicultural education’ (Rodriguez
2009: 97). Multicultural art education will continue to run into challenges
simply because it has reformist and reconstructionist goals (Banks and Banks
2012). Ladson-Billings and Tate write,

One of the things that make developing a multicultural curriculum so

difficult is the fact that multicultural education is as much an ideal as it
is a reality (Banks & Banks, 1989). Like democracy, it is never finished.
However, this more esoteric nature of multicultural education does not
absolve educators from the responsibility of working toward developing
relevant and multicultural curriculum.
(1995: 333)

With this assertion in mind, my primary goal is to continue to be diligent and

rigorous in my research and practice as a critical multicultural art education

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scholar. I encourage us all to think more comprehensively about multicultural

art education; this task includes continuously engaging in critical examinations
of all the ways in which information is delivered to and used by our future and
practicing art teachers. Oppression is maintained by using spontaneous (or
voluntary) consent and hegemonic tools (Adams et al. 2007; Bonilla-Silva 1997;
Gitlin 1994; Gramsci [1930] 2004; Omi and Winant 2000; Storey 2006) such as
classroom texts, curriculum and even teacher preparation (Adams et al. 2007;
Ladson-Billings 1999 as cited in Blanchett 2006; Mills 1997). The multicultural
art lessons offered on these websites are indeed hegemonic tools. I urge art
educators to investigate why these websites continue to exist. The implication
of their presence is not only maintenance of the status quo, but it also depreci-
ates the scholarly and practical work being done by those in the area of multi-
cultural art education. Even more importantly, since our students and some
practicing teachers use the Internet to support their learning and guide their
teaching, they could potentially pass along insular, inaccurate representations
of other cultures. The consequences of this dissemination are damaging.

References
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Suggested Citation
Acuff, J. B. (2014), ‘(Mis)Information highways: A critique of online resources
for multicultural art education’, International Journal of Education through Art
10: 3, pp. 303–316, doi: 10.1386/eta.10.3.303_1

Contributor details
Joni Boyd Acuff, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Art Education in the
Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State
University. Acuff’s scholarship attends to critical multicultural art education,
critical race theory in art education, culturally responsive teaching, pedagogy

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Joni Boyd Acuff

and curriculum development. Acuff has over 13 years of art teaching experi-
ence in traditional and non-traditional classrooms. She’s worked with students
with special needs, youth who identify as LGBTQ, and students from varying
racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Contact: The Ohio State University, Department of Arts Administration,
Education, & Policy, 1813 N. High St. Sullivant Hall, 2nd floor, Columbus, OH
43210, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]

Joni Boyd Acuff has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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