Archival Difference

For this presentation, I will address two documents from the early 90's:

1. A flyer by NAEA and the Committee on Multiethnic Concerns (COMC) for recruiting multiethnic art educators. This document is from 1990.

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2. A document by the National Coalition for Education in the Arts (NCEA), titled "Arts Education and Cultural Diversity in the Nation's School". This document is from 1992.

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Both of these documents address the need and advocate for a greater diversity among art educators, in light of the increasing diversity of the American school population, and they both note the importance of arts education in the formation of students. These 2 documents were published during the same period (1990 and 1992), by 2 different organizations. This is not to be overlooked, because it speaks of a historical impulse towards a goal, pursued by more than one organization. Of course, this is still not enough to call it a "movement", but it is at least indicative that this advocacy for a greater diversity in art education was not the effort of a lone wolf going against the tide.

Analysis of the documents

I will analyze the 2 documents under the proposed framework for analysis provided to us, in order to find evidence of:

  A. Building coalition consciousness.

While both documents advocate for a broader and more diverse participation in arts education, they differ in their emphasis. The document from NAEA and COMC (from here on, "N&C") is more focused in individuals' contributions, in relation to their background culture, to the art education landscape. It does make a call for educators to encourage students not only to consider career paths in the arts and art education, but also to join organizations such as NAEA or the National Art Honor Society, in order to foster their involvement in the arts. This suggests that, more than raising consciousness about building coalitions, this document is making a call for individuals to join or integrate to already existing forces, always keeping the emphasis on the value of individual contributions to the field.

The NCEA document, on the other hand, has a stronger component in this regard. It highlights in different paths the importance of collaboration, and makes a call to learn from organizations already engaged in the pursue of a broader diversity in art education matters, as well as calling for the collaboration among organizations in the field. While this is not addressing the need for building coalitions among different social groups towards a common goal, it does suggest that collaboration among organizations and a broader participation of most (not all, as we will see next) social actors in their decision-making processes is of great importance to enhance the quality and reach of arts education.

  B. Revealing (e)race(d); Inclusive frames of address

Both documents highlight that there is a lack of diversity in the arts education field, and both address the fact that this lack of diversity has an impact on the curricula being taught in schools. This curricula is usually defined as portraying mostly (if not only) the dominant culture: "white, European, English-speaking" (NCAE document, p. 2). This, as is recognized or implied in the documents, leads to an erasure of diverse students' culture and experiences from the classroom, thus offering them curricula that does not fulfill their "aesthetic and academic needs" (N&C document, p. 2), and which results in students disengaging from their education due to a lack of connection with the issues discussed. While this erasure from the currently existing curricula (in the early 90's) is indeed addressed by both documents, the emphasis is mostly in race/ethnic diversity. Women are mentioned as an underserved group only once in the NCEA document, and gender identity and expression, social class, and ability are never even mentioned in neither of the 2 documents, thus perpetuating their invisibility within (and for) the art education field. In this sense, both documents present a narrower idea of "diversity" than what we have today, thus making inclusion harder to achieve. Moreover, it is not even clear if the intent of these documents pointed to the inclusion of diversity in our field, or more to the integration of diversity. I will expand upon this idea later in this post.

  C. Presenting struggles within and against systems of oppression; Questions about the perceived normative

The NCEA document, being longer than the N&C one, takes some time to advocate for system change, and addresses some systemic issues, such as the elitism present in the existing art education field. This advocacy and address of systemic problems can be found as implied ideas in the N&C document, but since that was a recruitment flyer only, there was not much space to develop a written reflection about these issues. However, there is no evidence pointing to either of the documents recognizing the larger systems of oppression that act upon minority students, and which are undoubtedly related to their erasure from curricula and educational experiences. In this sense, both documents seem overtly focused in their own field, calling out inequalities within it, but not as much within society at large (the NCEA document does, however, relate a broader diversity in arts education to improvements in social relations among different groups).

  D. Strategies in the contact zone

There is no addressing, in both documents, of the issues that arise when difference meets in the same room, nor of the strategies to face such issues. This might be related to point A above, and the lack of advocacy for coalitions among different social groups to be formed. Both documents do mention, however, that an increased diversity of both art educators and art education experiences would contribute to a better and greater understanding and recognition between different groups.

  E. Practices that decolonialize spaces

Both documents advocate particularly for a broader racial/ethnic diversity among art educators, and suggest that their value is precisely in their ability to bring their own world views and culture to the education of young Americans. In this sense, there is a call for developing practices that decolonialize the spaces in which art educators move, in terms of which (or whose) culture is being displayed and taught in the classroom. The call of these documents is for the –hopefully– increasingly diverse body of art educators to develop these practices, rather than proposing the practices in what would have been, precisely, a colonizing strategy.

Connection to the present

It called my attention that, when I visited NAEA's website for its Task Force on Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (from here on, the "Task Force"), there were many similarities between their goals and those of the organizations behind the two documents. The N&C document presents not only NAEA's purposes, but also those of the COMC, which are quite aligned with the Task Force's goals (or at least some of them). Moreover, we can find in the Task Force's website a very similar call to that of the 2 documents:

Taken from https://www.arteducators.org/community/national-task-force-on-equity-diversity-inclusion

Although the Task Force's idea that "true inclusion embraces individuals from all facets of society and cannot be defined by a finite list of qualifiers" contrasts with the ideas in the 2 documents analyzed here (which provide quite a finite list of qualifiers for their "diverse" art educational force), we can see that a broader diversity among art educators is still pursued, and moreover, the argument of representing the population's diversity is the same as almost 25 years ago, indicating that, after all that time, lack of representation is still a undefeated beast. What happened, then? Did the efforts from the early 90's fail? If so, why? Or did diversity simply increased (or became increasingly recognized, to be more precise) at a higher rate than the diversity of art educators?
I believe it is important to mention that, while NAEA remains a huge organization, both COMC and NCEA seem to have become rather irrelevant actors. COMC has moved its focus to community-driven efforts (although keeping its foundational purpose definition), as shown in the COMC Report from 2018 (figure on the left), the only document available in the NAEA entry for this interest group in their website. The information about COMC, in NAEA's web at least, is quite scarce (very different from their Task Force's website), perhaps indicating their decreasing influence. NCEA, on the other hand, seems to have gone more underground: a quick Google search showed as the most relevant finding about the organization, an entry at the "Americans for the Arts" website, where the NCEA is merely mentioned, and only if one dives deep enough into the site (figure on the right).

I bring this up because I am wondering what happened with the ideas put up by these groups. Perhaps their apparent disappearance is related to the failure of their advocacy. But, if after 25 years NAEA is still advocating for the same issues (although with a broader scope), why did these organizations' efforts failed? Maybe COMC's shift from only multiethnic to also community-driven initiatives is a sign of changes in the ways diversity and inclusion are understood today, a change that might in turn be indicative of whether and why the efforts portrayed in NCEA and N&C's documents did not quite thrive.

Inclusion / Integration



via GIPHY

Analyzing the 2 documents closely, we can find multiple calls to become part of existing arts and art education organizations. While the NCEA document does highlight the need to stay alert about the practices within these organizations (recognizing the possibility of inequalities and erasures in them), the N&C document completely neglects this idea. Their call for recruiting makes me wonder about the kind of involvement they expected from their diverse art educators. Although there are mentions, specially in NCEA's document, about the importance of art educators bringing their background to the classroom (as well as including the background of their students when planning their lessons), the ways in which this contribution would be made is never even addressed, much less as a potentially problematic practice. How are these art educators expected to include diversity in their curricula? If they were to normalize (or humanize) traditionally othered populations, showing them as an active, unique yet also interconnected part of the social fabric, then inclusion may have been the pursued outcome, but nothing in the language of either document suggests such a view. If, on the other hand, the new diverse body of art educators were to teach the world views and experiences of minority populations as precisely that ("minorities' culture", in a way), then this would be closer to an integration model, rather than an inclusion one. This way, the normalization/humanization of minorities' cultures and experiences cannot take place, precisely because they are being taught or referenced only in connection to their belonging to a particular group, and therefore they remain othered: for instance, I have seen, even today, many courses where all the readings from authors who belong to a particular social group (based on race, ability, nationality, etc.) are grouped together in one or two sessions, while the readings from white writers are separated thematically. This is like saying: "white people talk about all things, but other people talk about otherness", which of course we know is not true. This leads me to think that, if we can find this today, probably the efforts from 25 years ago were pointing in a similar direction, well-intentioned as they might have been. In this sense, and in light of the apparently new winds driving the Task Force's ship (which point more to inclusion practices where everyone has the right to be seen as more than a background, identity, or condition), it could be concluded that the previous efforts from NCEA and N&C might have been going in an unfruitful direction and that that is the reason of their apparent failure, although there are many positive things to point out from their early 90's documents, as we have discussed here.

"The Mountain Giants presents Lear" (Chilean theatre play)

Some links to material on this theatre play which was written and co-directed by Chilean actor Alberto Vega, who lost all his ability to move in an accident at a relatively young age. However, he utilizes a special machine which tracks his eyes' movements and helps him write and communicate.

https://vimeo.com/106866970 (Visuals for the play, which portray Vega as an actor before the accident he had)

http://www.cedeti.cl/galerias/los-gigantes-de-la-montana-presentan-lear/#! (Photos)

http://temporadasanterioresteatrouc.uc.cl/Los-gigantes-de-la-montana-presentan-Lear.html (Video trailer of the play, to be found at the bottom of the page)

I wanted to share this because it was at working with Alberto that I realized how much physically-able people tend to reduce people with disabilities to such a condition, as if it dominated their lives. Yet, even though it does determine the form of the interactions with others (humans and non-humans), after spending an evening correcting the visuals for the play with Alberto (and his assistant, who would pass his instructions and responses to my questions), I felt that I was working with just another director, and that, more than being disabled (from the deficit point of view), he was an equally abled director (in comparison to others, as directors) that could also bring a unique point of view to the table, which physically-abled directors could not.

The play was exhibited in two different kinds of sessions: in the first, at the request of Vega, special access was provided for people with physical disabilities by not only adding special accommodations for wheelchairs, but also a video screen with transcripts of the play for deaf people, sign language translation of the dialogues, audio descriptions of the actions and elements of the play for the blind, among others. These sessions, apparently, were mostly full. The other kind of session was a regular show of the play (where special access was limited to ramps for wheelchairs).

Vega is also writing a movie script about how his life after the accident that took his mobility away, in which he emphasizes how he needs to resolve or close some of the personal issues he had before the accident (mostly about his personal and family relationships), while society has encaged him within the notion of "disabled", where everything ends up being related to his physical disability, as if he did not have the same issues than everybody else.

With these two pieces (the play and the film), Vega also addresses the notions of moving/static as constructed by the society of the physically-abled. These notions carry within an imposition from the part of the physically-abled, where movement and its opposite are defined according to how movement is understood by humans who can walk and move without major impediments. Yet, such definition denies people such as Vega the possibility of moving by themselves (instead of only being moved by somebody or something else), thus denying their possibility to unfold as themselves in accordance to their particular way of moving. In the case of Vega, although his body cannot transport itself from one place to the other, his movement (which he as a human is entitled to) is expressed through his ability to move both his own and his fictional stories (many times intertwined) forward.

Mapping Difference Activity

For an easier reading (and after several attempts at making a single readable image), I decided to dissect my identity map into multiple word clouds.

The color key is the following:


Blue - Social identities are privileged by oppression of others.
Red - Forms of privilege by oppression.
Yellow- Social identities that are targets of oppression by unearned privileges granted to others.
Green -Forms of oppression experienced by the targets of oppression.

And here is my first word cloud, containing all of my answers to these questions:

Then, I proceeded to divide this word cloud into smaller ones, according to my relationship with the words on the clouds. First, these are the identities and forms of privilege/oppression I have never experienced:

These are the identities and forms of privilege/oppression that I have experienced in Chile:

And then, there are the identities and forms of privilege/oppression I have experienced in the U.S.:

Some Reflections...

As I reflected on my own identity, as well as how privileged and/or oppressed I am, I realized how much these issues depend on the context you are situated in, which in turn reinforces, for me, the idea that identity is nothing but a social construct that can change, for instance, with a plane ticket.

In Chile, I am a privileged member of the society. There, I am the white heterosexual male from the upper class who has always have access to most of the privileges the country has to offer. I went to private school and was taught that I could achieve anything in life (unlike what is taught to children in public schools), I followed the path designed for someone from my social class and entered college, and, even though I studied an art-related career (filmmaking) in a poor country with very little resources for such activities, I managed to get both teaching and film-editing jobs even before I graduated. Ever since I left high school, and as I progressively left the social circles (bubbles) I grew up in, I became increasingly aware of how privileged I am, and how absurd the idea of my accomplishments being mine alone is. Not only have I had help from particular people in my path, but I had (almost) the entirety of the economic system supporting me by oppressing others, both at home and abroad (considering that, in a capitalist system, what a country has is what other countries do not).

When I came to the U.S., however, this situation drastically (and also not drastically) changed: not even my skin color (a physical trait that I assumed would not be subject to much change) morphed as I stop being considered "white" and began to be seen as a person of color (although a few times being light-skinned has made people think I am a citizen from a rich country). Moreover, I even became -quite literally, in the official government's language- an alien. "Alien" is a hard word to be described by, because it somehow implies you are essentially not even a human being. As I spent time in this country, I quickly realized my identity here was far away from the privileged man I was in Chile. Here, I am an alien, someone who speaks a strange language some people are upset just by hearing, someone whose visions of the world are absent from the public sphere, someone from a country only heard of because of its massive earthquakes (and good wine), and someone for whom a simple mistake could lead to an escalade of misunderstandings and end up in trouble with the law-enforcement forces (a constantly scary thought in a country in which there is a high level of police brutality against non-white people). This last issue is one I never thought much about before: in Chile, poor people and indigenous people fear the police, while I never had before. I might have known this intellectually, but now I believe I understand a little more how oppressive fear truly is.

While the transition between being privileged and being not made me realize how fragile and fluid identity is, I also can still recognize the privileges I have in the global scale (I have somehow become more aware of this while in the U.S.). In the global setting, I feel that to even use the expression "non-privileged" is somehow embarrassing for me, considering I am a Ph.D. student (only about 0.8% of the world's population has such a degree) in a U.S. university which sits among the world's top-50 higher education institutions (the best Latin American university is ranked around the 400th place), and while my income here might considered to be rather low, I have never had to work in sweatshop, a mine, or any sort of assembly line where people do not even have the right to go to the bathroom every time they need (not to mention wages). Also, even within the U.S., a Ph.D. immigrant student usually holds a different status than an illegal immigrant, or a legal one who has had no access to good education and is somehow likely to remain inside the cycle of inequalities of this country. In that sense, the possibility to emigrate back to privilege is a privilege in itself as well.