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TOOLKIT FOR CRITICAL MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

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This site is a pedagogical toolkit of resources surrounding themes and strategies for implementing critical multicultural, anti-racist education. As an aspiring arts educator outside of the traditional classroom, I hope to use these resources when creating programs and curriculum in museums and community arts settings, and to be well-equipped to collaborate with the diverse perspectives and lived-experiences of my students. I hope to enable students to look critically at the world, discern their own position within our socially constructed, hegemonic system, and unveil the inequalities that people face on an interpersonal and institutional level. Through this exploration, I want to empower students to make connections and share their own stories in the hopes of building a more equitable future.

Many of the resources found in this toolkit have been collected from presentations, projects, class discussions, and a collective Padlet from two courses at NYU: Race, Education, and the Politics of Visual Representation and Critical Pedagogy, Artists, and the Public Sphere. This collection of resources has been categorized into five different categories: Artists & Artworks, Race, Gender & Sexuality, Museum Education & Representation , and Academic books and articles. Each section consists of artworks, articles, artists, videos, photographs, academic papers, projects, and quotes, many of which overlap between different categories in order to promote an intersectional approach to practice. Artists & Artworks primarily consists of contemporary artists, as they are actively working with culturally and contextually relevant themes of identity, race, gender, globalism, and representation. Although they undoubtedly include artists and different academic writings, I have separated out Race and Gender & Sexuality into independent categories as I would like to explore these concepts in institutional settings. Race consists of resources deconstructing race and racism, as well as resources discussing the concept of whiteness. Gender & Sexuality includes topics of gender, sexuality, the construction of gender, and LGBTQ+ subjects. The Museum Education & Representation section includes projects, events, and curriculum that I am inspired by, as well as relevant issues of representation in the museum field. Finally, the Academic category consists of theories, articles, and books that I have found helpful and enlightening, and would like to be able to reference in my future work.  

This toolkit is by no means static! It is meant to be an ever-changing and evolving toolkit that will continue to grow as I come across more resources and inspiration for being an anti-racist educator.

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American Alphabets, 1997-2005


Like most everyone I know, I first encountered written language in children’s alphabet primers. Looking back, I now see that the words and visual examples used to represent letters reinforced the world view of the middle-class white girl I happened to be. A picture of a shiny new car illustrated the letter C. My father ran a Chevrolet dealership in Detroit, so I thought this example had been dreamed up with me in mind. I assumed that the congruence between written expression and one’s own experience of the world held true for all children. While the United States has become increasingly diverse since then, the culture of our schools has remained much the same as in my childhood: white middle-class. American Alphabets is an attempt to remake the buildings blocks of our language to reflect our differing cultures. - Wendy Ewald


White Girl's Alphabet:

 

Arabic Alphabet:

 

African Alphabet:

 

Spanish Alphabet:



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