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:
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| 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.
