Six Items on the Agenda for the Eighties

Postmodern Feminisms: Problematic Paradigms

“…[16] Instead, young people should learn to be literate, above all, about those visual documents that explore the conditions and reasons for their social oppression. [17] Art education's potential as a cultural force in general is rarely linked with the dismantling of oppression in particular. The postmodernist preoccupation with style at the expense of substance compounds already existing tendencies within the art world and results in theories that are elusive and obscure, ungrounded and apolitical.…”

Celebrating Pluralism: Art, Education, and Cultural Diversity

“…In 1991, a local newspaper's claim that at least 40 percent of Canadians have racist attitudes, coupled with observed racist behavior within area schools, prompted some Burnaby, British Columbia, art, theater arts, and English teachers working with ninth and tenth graders to develop a unit called "Art against Racism" (Scarr and Paul, 1992) Vincent Lanier (1969Lanier ( ,1980 In an essay in which she discusses a pedagogy for multiculturalizing art education, Heard (1989) draws upon the work of Bowles and Gintis (1976) and claims that "the notion of multicultural education is implicit in an education that takes as primary the integrity of the individual"(p. 12). In such a setting, "the individual is seen as a carrier of culture and ... educators recognize that culture resides in the individual" (p. 12).…”

Artistic Perception: the Cultural Context

“…Inasmuch as art educators tend to come from that tradition, and to have uncritically internalized its values, it is hard for them to change and too easy for them to passively accept those values and study only the type of artistic perception defined as important by so-called 'serious' artists, their audiences and promoters (Gronow, 1971). Fortunately for art education we have the publications of Chapman (1978), Feldman (1976), Lanier (1980), and McFee (1966) as well as groups such as the U.S. based Caucus on Social Theory in Art Education to keep us on track. (See particularly Hobbs (1977) and Jagodzinski (1981)).…”