Arts
Art is the perfect subject to battle xenophobia. The fact that we even call it ‘Non-Western’ art points to how ingrained Western bias is in art education. An entire planet’s worth of cultures and artistic traditions are defined by what they aren’t instead of by what they are. The only way to change the paradigm is to do the hard thing, the right thing: Introduce our students to artworks by artists from across the world, even if we never learned about them, and have classroom discussions about how art historians have traditionally labelled and discriminated against art from other cultures. When I teach Non-Western art, I always start the unit with a lesson on cultural sensitivity and ethnocentrism. Students may call something "weird" or laugh at a work by someone from a different culture. When our students (and we do it too sometimes; I don’t think anyone is really immune from this) make judgements about the artworks of other cultures using their own Western perspective, they are deepening the divide between cultures and people. It’s vital that we address the subject with our students and there are ways to do so across grade levels. When we teach art in a thoughtful, inclusive way, our students learn to recognize and combat bias in themselves and others. In this episode, I share the lesson that I go through to introduce my students to these concepts!