Multicultural art education: Voices of art teachers and students in the postmodern era

This dissertation examines current multicultural art teacher practices and their student perspectives, to make implications for art teacher preparation in the postmodern era. The study addresses four interrelated challenges in art education: the postmodern framework on knowledge and learning, disagreements in higher education about future directions, the construction of the theory-practice gap, and the absence of teacher and student voices, especially from urban and marginalized communities. A review of the literature of modern and postmodern art historical contexts points to a web of tensions in the multiple worlds of art and art education. Those tensions guide a theoretical framework rooted in the dynamic intersection of postmodernism and multicultural education which is explored in a review of the literature regarding visual culture art education (Duncum, 2001, 2002). These frameworks led the Arts-Based Educational Research (Barone & Eisner, in press) to be presented in a series of "collages" (Bode, 2005) with an a/r/tographer's perspective (Irwin, 2004) into how teachers' roles and student participation might reinscribe (Derrida, 1994; Lather, 2003) the direction of art education programs. From four art classrooms, in settings where the participants indexed race, ethnicity, language and poverty in discourses of multiple identities, the voices of art teachers and their students highlight the role of visual culture in resistance to hegemony and in pursuit of academic achievement. Art teacher preparation may include such studies as a vehicle for in change art education communities that reconsider the role of art and art teachers.