Sustaining Cultures through Critical Art Pedagogy.

 

Michael Brzozowski

Graduate School of Education, Culture and Society 

University of Utah

Critical Theory & Cultural Studies in Ed.

Literature Review

 

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy works to preserve and advance, to support a diversity of languages, through educational spaces such as schools, community centers and homes where knowledges are exchanged. Cultural knowledge maintains its independence in hegemonic educational institutions through loving, caring, compassionate critiques of social change. (D. Paris 2017) The Tucson Ethnic Studies demonstrates this by using the indigenous knowledges of Nahui Ollin, the four movements to being a good human being.  Texcatlipoca requires critical reflection that reconciles, and forgives in transforming to become whole in creating change through positive action.   Learning in CSP is planting rather than extracting, fulfilling rather than defeating, asset driven through embracing learning strengths rather than fearing losing one’s cultural knowledge to a deficit driven educational system.  Culturally sustaining pedagogy exist wherever education maintains the vitality of communities who are pushed to the margins in the American school system. This struggle to sustain culture has been found in all marginalized cultures who have had to assimilate to the White/Anglo cultures.  This includes the assimilation of indigenous knowledges that are meant to heal, cause reflection, and to create positive action.  The visual arts is a primitive language that has been used in sustaining cultures that are endangered to becoming homogenized into the White/Anglo cultures.  This Literature review is intended to uncover some of the precious knowledges that visual arts has given to sustain marginalized cultures. 

 

     

 

Introduction to Critically Sustaining Pedagogy

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in schools requires safe spaces that retain the relevant cultural ontologies of marginalized communities of color.  Unfortunately school spaces can be rather intimidating, and isolating spaces that harm students of color.   CSP (Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies) is reactive in resisting the colonial epistemologies that invoke fear and discomfort in the classroom.  CSP problematizes the current dissemination of racist substructures that underlie the foundations of public schools to create solutions to counter the hegemonic systems in education. 

Culturally sustaining pedagogy dedicates its efforts to empower communities through healing practices that use relevant, unfiltered, organic knowledges. Gloria Ladson-Billings warns of the common misconceptions in relevance, as almost always being corrupted. Relevance goes beyond the cultural stereotypes that involves dedication towards student learning, developing student’s cultural competence and supporting their critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings, 2017).  Incorporating unbiased lens that removes myths of meritocracy, shameful stereotypes and cultural deficits that generates an achievement gap in marginalized youth.  A focus on re-centering cultural knowledges has the potential to teach creative asset driven understanding of universal languages, such as in the visual arts, in the praxis of communities of color.

The teaching of Multi-Literacies is used to liberate cultures sustenance on a single form of pedagogy.   The ability of having multimodal teaching methods that defies the White ivory tower of educational hopes for the future well-being of all students, acts to reclaim community-rooted forms of teaching and learning.  The aim of pedagogy to make positive change for youths of color is to establish agency and strengthen identity that is autonomous from the standardized hegemonic norms, found in schools. 

So called educational integration has always presented achievement through a well presented hidden curriculum of unidirectional assimilation into whiteness.  Critically reflection on this whiteness allows for possibilities that use creative thought to effect change through positive action.  Teacher’s ability to be care-givers to marginalized students involves using their real lived experiences as transforming knowledges that are used for social justice in exposing the different worlds they must interact with.  These transformative experiences are sacred spaces that reflect on the humanizing experience of struggling with truths that resist the artificial knowledges that alienate them from who they are.  Educators have to be social activist that encourage and convince students that through positive action can they find harmony that sustains them, and gives them the tools to remove Whiteness from their sacred space of culture, language and learning.

In using the literature on culturally sustain pedagogy by Django Paris, 2017 I will examine how the visual arts honor the dynamic, fluid state of youth culture that centers on relationships that effect positive change in education.  Through helpful synthesis of various literature in the field of visual art education, analysis of artwork by artist of color, community programs that are sustaining cultures through art I intend to find solutions that uses literacies in the visual art to open dialogue on social justices that critical reflects on the counter-narratives of marginalized youths caught in the inequitable American school system.

The rationale for this literature review is to use the knowledges of culturally sustaining pedagogy set forth by D. Paris, 2017 in synthesizing the literature into a visual art praxis. It is my aim to use the literature to intersect the lived experiences of minority youths, with the expressive visual languages found in the arts.  I am hoping to find ways of providing safe dialogues that acts to strengthen marginalized students voice using visual art as tool for social justice.  By using contemporary artists of color and their skillful ability to communicate through visual storytelling, I will include how the visibility of their art supports the claim that art can be used to expose some of the social injustices that young marginalized students live with every day. I believe the visual arts provides an alternative stage that humanizes marginalized youths to be visual storytellers that honors their visible culture in helping them achieve in school.  I am confident that the literature will play an important role in establishing a positive relationship between culturally sustaining education and the visual arts.

I think the holistic epistemologies involved in culturally sustaining pedagogies is often attacked by the hegemonic, standardized pedagogies that in turn marginalize the languages and literacies that young minorities students connect with.  This is seen in most marginalized communities around the United States such as the Mexican-American ethnic studies program in the Tucson, Arizona.  I hope this literature review will shed light on visual arts ability to help counter this oppressive practice found in education.

My aims of this literature review is to look at what can help to answer questions regarding what type of art curriculums can help support students’ of color academic and social success.  My objective is to closely address specific issues of culturally sustaining pedagogies that uses a visual art framework that looks into cultural histories, literacies that have been assimilated into the standard white imperial knowledges.  The specific targets that I aim to accomplish with this literature review is to, 1.) Review the Literature in culturally sustaining pedagogies.  2.) Research the pioneers of color in visual arts education that have been marginalized from the white standardized curriculums.  3.) Research visual culture pedagogy in connection with culturally sustaining pedagogies. 4.) Recognize contemporary artists of color as educators of culturally sustaining pedagogies. 

I believe this literature review on culturally sustaining pedagogies using a visual art framework is critical to finding solutions that empower and attract youth’s interest.  The common removal of the visual arts in marginalized communities of color shows how art can create divergent paths away from the assimilated white Eurocentric curriculums that are threatened by arts radical ability to change perspectives.  Additionally the value of critiquing the visual culture creates meaning in helping students navigate the chaotic visual frontiers they live in, gives them the ability to see how people are controlled by the visual culture.  I believe education should honor the alternative perspectives/knowledges that are exhibited in the images and artifacts created by artists of color as authors to the visual culture that has a tremendous effect on student learning. “Freire’s concepts of magical, naïve, and critical consciousness, for example, often, do change the way students view the world”( Cannella 2014) In gathering relevant literature that sustains cultures thought the visual arts I am determined to find visual art pedagogies that sustain cultural identities.

 

Pioneers of Color in Visual Arts Education

It is essential to recover the histories of Black art educators to provide a comprehensive, fair picture of American art education.  The history in art education is rich with innovative, empowering educators that were some of the first to bring art education into the public schools.  Thomas Watson Hunster (1851-1929) was the founder of art education for Black K-16 learners in Washington, DC.  The history of Hunster as well as other Black American art educators has mostly been left out and over shadowed by a segregated system that favored the white histories of art education.  Hunster inspired to develop quality art curriculums, and opportunities in the arts while overcoming racist conflicts.  Instruction during this time in the Black public high school, was excellent and “became one of the best academic high schools in the nation, black or white.” (Roe, 2004, pg 29)  During the first 80 years of the high school, the brightest Black scholars/educators shaped generations of high achieving, highly educated students.  Due to laws that prohibited Blacks from gaining employment in their specialized fields, these highly qualified Black scholars became educators in the Black public schools.  A reorganization of the Black schools by the majority white board of education reduced the amount of autonomy in the schools.  Department heads and directors in the Black schools were reduced to assistants, losing their control over their schools.  This reorganization in leadership during 1900 began an era of apathy toward the needs of Black students that continued through desegregation. (Lawton 2017)

The first drawing curriculum for Black public schools was introduced during the 1872-1873 school year, two years before being introduced to the White public schools.  The two segregated drawing curriculums were basically the same except for examinations and prizes for students in the White normal schools.  In 1875, Thomas Hunster was hired as the third art educator for the Washington, DC, Black public schools in as many years since its induction to schools.

This article on Hunster uses the method of Critical Portraiture to reveal the historical significance of Thomas Hunster.  Critical Portraiture uses narratives that evaluates context, voice, relationship, connections between historical and contemporary art pedagogies and use of archival sources. (Lawerence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997)  In the author’s position on relationship, the importance of being a role model as an educator of color provides a Black perspective to students and colleagues.  The relationship between the author and Hunster is in sustaining a personal art practice and designing art education curriculum relevant to students’ lives.  Hunster stressed the importance of relevance of art to students’ lives and the value of exhibiting students work for praise. Hunster’s 1919 report emphasized the importance of art to career development.  His challenge to students was to draw themselves engaged in occupations that interested them. This lead students to learn drawing in a way that had personal meaning to themselves. (Lawton pg. 108, p. 262)  “Through students’ powerful stories, both in visual and written stories shared, they helped me see the important contributions art can have in relation to culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogies” (San Pedro, 2017). Hunster was described to blend culture with the practical in his teaching methods, developing a learning philosophy that required students to learn by making art.  Hunster valued drawing from observation and viewing professional works of art was critical to an effective art curriculum.  Black Washingtonians were prohibited to arts and cultural institutions.  To counteract these inequities Hunster created a museum that exhibited artworks by pre/in-service teachers.  The inequities that Black school children faced outside of the public schools was having no access to cultural institutions or further training to develop as artists and pursue careers in the arts.  This struggle to gain access to cultural institutions outside of the public schools would eventually find a place in Black communities in the north.

The history of Hunster gives a glimpse into his innovative practices that is relevant in today’s contemporary art education.  Hunster was aggressive in exhibiting students’ art in every available space in the buildings throughout the schools.  The annual exhibition was promoted in the media and praised by all the Washington newspapers.  The determination to have student’s artwork visible in their academic institutions is critical in giving students agency and pride in their schools.  The positive publicity within the community advocating the art exhibits opened the outside community into the school, acknowledging and praising the achievement and accomplishments of students’.  Hunster valued creativity and criticized drawing manuals that encouraged copying over drawing from observation. It seemed Hunster foresaw how learning manuals were beginning to corrupt education.  Hunster advocated the efforts to integrate art with other subjects that helped attract students’ interest and understanding in other subjects. He encouraged students’ to be self-expressive in their art, and used critical reflection as a tool for self-empowerment. Emphasis in critical pedagogy, relevance, academic integration, and self-empowerment was directed by Hunster as a vehicle to sustain the counter-narratives found in students of color artwork.

The histories of educators of color is critical to art education.  Their service to teach cultural competence and visual literacies to sustain students of color achievement in education demands recognition.  The shortage of Teachers of color currently in pre/in-service teacher training has an unsettling effect towards having role models who share similar racial, ethnic, and cultural competences.  On the other hand White pre/in-service educators rarely have the opportunity to learn from art educators of color.  This problematizes how in-coming White art educators distort these cultural competences in affirming and encouraging students of color in learning.  The “color” needs to be emphasized in art education as does the histories of art educators of color.

A key figure in the African American art movement of the early twentieth century, Augusta Savage was a very influential artist that established a community art center known as the Harlem Community Art Center.  Augusta Savage was responsible for battling racial/gender inequalities and developing a flourishing art center where she taught some of the most prominent African American artist of the 20th century.  Augusta Savage struggle throughout her life to be recognized as a professional sculptor but in sacrificing her love to be a professional sculptor, became a community activist/educator that would sustain an imperial cultural center providing artistic opportunities for future generations of African Americans.

African American artists and art educators in the early 20th century trained mostly under White/European context.  I would argue that this method is still a current trend in most American schools.  However during the New Negro Movement during the 1930s, educated African American artist began to mentor and teach children and aspiring artists. (Bey 2017)  As the great depression forced most art programs out of the schools, after-school instruction increased because of the federal arts project that was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s new deal programs.  This federal art program provided relief to working visual artists to be employed as teachers in community art centers.  During this time experienced artists began to share their creative influence. African American students benefited by working directly with these artists of color who were advocates to social progress and racial uplift.  This period in American history does not get recognized as an institution or a place of study but scholars/historians refer to this period as the Black Academy (Holland, 1998).  

Augusta Savage was best known for her sculpted portraits of famous Black leaders in the Black Academy.  Savage ability to find support with key philanthropist and important leaders during this era made her have a profound influence on the history of African American art education.

Racial prejudice in education prohibited African Americans from gaining scholarship in higher education.  This led Savage to begin her quest for social justice in education.  Upon being rejected from a scholarship to a women’s art school to study abroad in France, Savage was determined to expose the racial biases of the all-White male selection committee.  It was revealed that racial discrimination was the main factor.  Interviews from the southern White women felt it was inappropriate to travel with a colored girl on the same boat, and to share housing abroad.  Savage’s calling out the committees racial discrimination got the attention of eminent African American leaders condemning the racist actions as well as bringing national attention to Savage.  In Savage’s fight to gain equal opportunity to study abroad she received mostly negative threats “warning her to not to force herself on the White race” (Leininger-Miller, 2001 p. 171).  Savage response, “Isn’t it rather odd that such people should always suppose that when a colored girl gets a chance to develop her natural powers it must be that she will want to become White” (as cited in Leininger-Miller, 2001 p. 171).  The idea of W.E.B Dubois double consciousness reminds me how African Americans multi-identities were “distorted through the prism of Whitness” (Gladson-Billings, 2017).  Savage’s expertise in writing on personal experience created transformation that would empower her fight for social justice.

Savage’s ability to document the social injustices of White supremacy in her writings allowed her to publicly communicate the hypocrisy of the color blind mentalities.  This gave her a national platform to voice her views on the racial hurdles many people of colored faced.  Savage’s activism into critical race dialogue introduced her to some of the socio/political African American leaders on the time.  Savage used her writing as a literacy weapon to engage in the racial battles that promoted social change.  During the New Negro Movement some artists had conflicting attitudes, to avoid imitating White culture, “African Americans must reject everything that might be interpreted as deriving from the White American experience” (Hughes 1926). Savage was deeply disturbed by the institutional racism in the art world that positioned Whites with no experience in the arts, to judge African American artists, on who would get selected for exhibitions.

 

Cultural literacies in Art Education is an asset in culturally sustaining pedagogies.

Visual culture art education needs to be considered as an important element in culturally sustaining pedagogies. The knowledge that we gather from our everyday learned experiences is in reacting to the visual imagery that helps to construct culture and how one navigates through it.  The ascendancy of words over images is common among scholars as it is limiting in its ability to compete with the knowledge that words contain in linguistics.  Images debase words in a power struggle of position in controlling civil society.  Intellectuals distrust the image as anything but real, stressing the dangers of a visual culture that manipulates content through aesthetic form and its ability to be a misinterpreted language.  

Culturally sustaining pedagogy has the responsibility towards making the invisible street cultures that relates with urban youth experiences into transforming, meaningful pedagogies that reveal the expressive and learning opportunities in making this underground culture visible. By artfully revealing invisible culture the advantage in introducing socially engaged visual language secures the artistic habitats that encourages discussion that inspires further dialogue and reflection. (Darts 2011)

The visual language of pictures has not replace the literacies of words, but the influence of what we know about the world and how we think, has an enormous impact on how we interact with the world. Visual communication creates new paths in navigating through the semiotic landscape of American society. Students need to be visually iterate in questioning how this language affects them on a daily basis. The critically thinking skills required in reading images and there seductiveness to dominate societies relates to how cultures can be sustaining and resistant to the hegemonic visual propaganda that attempt to homogenize and normalize cultures.  

The difference between visual literacy and visual culture art education is that visual literacy focused primarily on the image as a text, visual culture is concerned with the context of texts, the real, and the material conditions of image production, distribution and use.(Duncan, P. 2005)  Visual cultural art education has more similarities to critical pedagogy and another branch of art education called cultural literacy.  The inclusive use of images and artefacts, how we examine images and artefacts, conditions under which we look, and the sensitive study of images within their context as part of social practice are the main threads to visual culture art education.

Visual culture recognizes the multi-literacies and emphasizes the multimodalities in the diverse communicative forms involved in contemporary visual culture. Problematizing visual cultures understanding that images main purpose is to serve normative communicative functions, disregards the complexity that images have in generating symbolic and communicative meaning, rejecting the mechanical functions that is complacent to traditional definitions in art education.

Peoples lived experiences and their subjectivities in understanding the world around them, relates visual culture art education with culturally sustaining pedagogies.  Cultural materialism uses images to study the actual lived conditions in their production and usage.  The purpose is to understand peoples social relationships in the meanings created through images and the acceptance, resistance in negotiating of meanings that are contextualized. Social context of images that create conflict between opposing social groups is important to understand the power struggles that reveal the institutions that seek to divide these groups.  Critical study’s into the visual structures of images and their interconnection of meanings between individuals and various social groups corresponds to the emphasis on literacy found in cultural sustaining pedagogies.  Critical perspectives in cultural literacies is an asset to culturally sustaining pedagogies by going beyond the visual texts to focus on the various learning contexts that are phenomenological, institutional, and historical.

Visual Culture art education develops critical consciousness and transformative action.  Through making images students learn about visual culture as a practitioner, acquiring insight into the thinking process of the artistic culture and capitalistic society that designs the images. Creating images using a visual cultural framework positions students to discover their own personal insights in relation to questions and issues specifically of cultural experiences.  The application of making images would assist students to understand the reconstruction of their identities using their subjectivities to represent themselves as a valued member of society.

Visual culture curriculum is based around dialogue that problematizes society and how we confront issues that question how visual culture represents race, class, gender and inequities that are unrepresented and why. Visual cultural literacy questions the imagery itself, and the contexts, including the experience of viewing imagery.  The remixing of art education as a critical pedagogy to further explore the narratives of imagery that give us meaning sustains our cultural practices in the process of making images.

I would like to assume that the study of visual culture and images provides a stage in resisting the oppressive contexts that has sustained communities of color battling the racial policing throughout history. Rethinking visual art act as a resource to combat the pain and suffering, to revitalize a language that is literally colorful in expressing the joys and happiness in symbiosis with traditions of resistance that heal communities of color.  Art education that is asset driven is transformative in sustaining minds and bodies of color within institutions that have the opposite goals.  The role of the visual arts strengthening critical consciousness to be used as instruments to disrupt and dismantle conditions of oppression, empowering students of color to speak through images and be seen.  Culturally sustaining pedagogies need to ensure that the complete stories of young people and their communities are being told (Wong,Pena 2017).  Art relies on visual elements and principle of language in communication.  The importance in young people of color stories being told requires a creative space that embraces community’s sustainability. The arts allows an outlet that change is possible in having agency over shaping lives.  As culturally sustaining educators we have to provide spaces for student art to be exhibited and seen, giving them a valued presence in the community.  Artist’s ability to channel pain to work beside joy is part of how art is proactive in existing alongside discomfort and pleasure.  Culturally sustaining pedagogies can use art to engage in students’ daily realities in life by affirming ways that do more than sustain their culture, but sustains their lives. 

 

Recognize contemporary artists of color as educators of culturally sustaining pedagogies.

Artists are storytellers that create socio-historical/political narratives that engage viewers to reflect and critically critique the realities being represented. The silent medium used by visual artist relies on the visual experience of viewers to read the artwork.  Artist’s ability to be cultural activist that educate viewers on social justice creates a transformative experience.  Artists of color practice critical consciousness that brings awareness in sustaining culture. Through the aesthetic experience artists of color untangle the socio/political injustices found throughout institutions.  It is important to recognize artists of color as holistic educators that sustain communities of color.  

Kara Walker is an African who examines visual narratives that reveal the unsettling histories of African Americans using large scale black-and-white silhouetted figures.  Her startling work draws viewers into a dialogue about the dynamics of race, sexuality, and violence in both the antebellum South and contemporary culture.  Her disturbing cut out figures draws attention to the horrors of slavery.  Kara Walker’s dynamic art sustains the cultures of African Americans by remaking and retelling of the oppressive histories.  Walker intentionally problematizes viewer’s sensibilities with striking images of violence and racial stereotypes. Walker resists the normalized accepted racial discourses and questions the ideas of social responsibility that earlier generations of African American strived for in the civil rights era.  Walker joins other artists such as Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, and Michael Ray Charles as African Americans that focus on the haunting affects that people of color endure.  The bravery in confronting the violent culture of racism is critical how people of color navigate through this hostile landscape. 

Kehinde Wiley is a prominent African American artist who uses conceptual realism (Hobbs, 2011) to paint large scale realistic representations of young African Americans males.  Wiley represents streetwise themes of hip hop and fashion, recontextualizing them into traditional European settings originally reserved for the empowering secular and religious figures of the past.  Wiley’s paintings questions representations of power.  His painting reveal the double consciousness of African American dialogues that combat racism through critical pedagogies.  His work references the African American studies of W.E.B DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folks, 1903” and Frantz Fanon “Black Skin, White Masks, 1952” in how critical theory applies to his paintings that liberate black people from the dominant White culture. The racist ideologies of colonialism and Whiteness’s impact on Blackness is central in his work, playing with ways that decenter the visual hegemonies of Whiteness.  Wiley’s portraits of young African American men remixes contemporary urban style with symbolism of power that retells the story of riding off to battle, and the attached racial political stereotypes that oppress.  It’s a twist on art history that liberates through visual play in storytelling that recreates alternative narratives that empower and sustain young black identities.

Kerry James Marshall is a contemporary painter whose work is provocative, politically confrontational that attracts viewers with grandeur presentation.  His work uses personal narratives that transforms experience into understanding.  The beauty of his large scale painting uses built up expressive layers of color that define the story being told.  His textural use of paint build scenes of the African American urban experience.  His landscapes involve community in family life, public housing projects and middle class Black urbanites that tell of relationships of social order and disorder, myths and draws on memories.  His vivid dreamlike scenes give the impression of a social mirage that is distant to the visible dominant culture.  Marshalls paintings is full of meaning that is not shy in communicating the strong relationship of symbolism that resist the passive activism in challenging normalized perceptions of beauty.

Conclusion

Culturally sustaining pedagogies balances the lived experiences of marginalized communities of color with the sacred knowledges that strengthen social agency, community and education in the criticalness of social justice. San Pedro, 2017 argues that when relationships rooted in culturally situated respect, reciprocity, and responsibility are created, fostered, and nurtured, they lead to classroom discussions rooted not in academic debate, where conversations are won or lost; rather, it leads to the co-creation of sacred truth spaces rooted in humanizing dialogue, where meaning is made in the spaces between our stories because of – and not in spite of --- our differences. Visual art education provides a sacred truth space that communicates the stories that affect change and transformation in marginalized students of color.  Art reinvest vulnerability into education through the show and tell of sharing each other’s visions and the beauty of the human spirit.   Critical consciousness is achieved through reading the images and words of struggle and redemption.  Integrating the visual arts into culturally sustaining pedagogies involves a historical, political, and social framework that uses counter narratives to create meanings and discussions of equity and justice in moving beyond the marginalized experience.

In reviewing the literature, that relates culturally sustaining pedagogies with the visual arts, the research and artwork continues to grow on how race has a role in how we see and interact with the world.  The flaws in culturally sustaining pedagogies is that visuals art and visual culture takes a backseat to the dominate language of linguistics. Visual art encompass, feelings, attitudes, and perceptions that represents the fluid nature of culture.  Visual culture is viewed as a mirror towards the social realities that practice racism, and other social injustices that are revealed as whitewashed and blanketed into hidden landscapes. Moxley & Feen argue that, the arts can contribute to social action in which people who bear the negative effects of social issues use the arts for creative expression of how they experience those issues.

This literature review has sparked many insights as well as new directions for researching visual art and culturally sustaining pedagogies in researching comic books and graphic novels as resources in furthering the benefits of a critical art pedagogy that strengthens multi-literacies and counter-narratives that work to sustain marginalized cultures who are being force feed a white supremacy curriculum in the public schools.  It is my hope that this literature review is a stepping stone into further research into art education.

 

References 

Bey, S (2017) Augusta Savage: Sacrifice, Social Responsibility, and Early African American Art Education,                             Reston, VA: National Art Education Association

Lawton, P.H. (2017) Hunting for Hunster: A Portrait of Thomas Watson Hunster, Art Education Pioneer in the District of Columbia, Reston, VA: National Art Education Association

McGinnes, E. I. (Producer) & Palos, A. L. (Director) Precious Knowledge, 2011

Paris, D.,& Alim, H. S.  (2017) What is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Why Does it Matter? Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies:  Teaching and Learning for Social Justice in a Changing World. New York, NY: Teachers College Press

Wong, C. & Pena, C. (2017) Policing and Performing Culture: Rethinking “Culture” and the Role of the Arts in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Social Justice in a Changing World. New York, NY: Teachers College Press

Marshall, K. J. & Sultan, T., & Jafa, A. (2000) Kerry James Marshall.  New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers

Hobbs, R. (2011) Kehinde Wiley’s Conceptual Realism. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications

Shaw, D. G. (2004) Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Darts, D. (2011) Invisible Culture: Taking Art Education to the Streets. Art Education

Duncum, P. (2005) Chapter 11: Visual Cultural Art Education: Critical Studies in Art and Design Education. Intellect Books Ltd  

Leininger-Miller, A. T. (2001). New Negro artists in Paris: African American painters and sculptors in the city of lights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Hughes, L. (June, 1926). The Negro artists and the racial mountin. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/negro-artist-and-racial-mountain

Holland, M. J. (1998). Narratives of African-American art and identity: The David C. Driskell collection. San Francisco, CA: Pomegrante.

San Pedro, T. J. (2017) “This Stuff Interest Me” Re-centering indigenous Paradigms in Colonizing Schooling Spaces. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Social Justice in a Changing World. New York, NY: Teachers College Press

Cannella, C. (2014)  Expanding on Freire: Enriching Critical Pedagogy with Indigenous Theory toward a Pedagogy of Humanization, Cammarota, J. & Romero, A. Raza Studies: The public option for educational revolution. University  of Arizona Press. 

Ladson-Billings, G. 2017, The (R)evolution will not be standardized: Teacher education, hip hop pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Social Justice in a Changing World. New York, NY: Teachers College Press

Moxley, D. P & Feen, H. 2017. Organizing for Arts-Based Social Action in the Helping Professions. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education Vol. 34