“I entered each of

these phases of my

career feeling well

prepared, only to be

repeatedly

chagrined at my

racial ignorance and

humbled by the

extent to which my

whiteness shapes

my attitudes and

assumptions about

race.”

Correspondence concerning this article should be

addressed to the author: srspilla@uncg.edu

SUNNY SPILLANE

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

This article explores failure from the

perspective of a white art educator interested

in social justice and educational equity.

Interconnected notions of failure are

explored, including: the author’s learning

from personal failure as a process of

professional growth over the course of her

career; the specter of “school failure” and its

impact on K-12 students’ educational

opportunities and experiences; entrenched,

systemic inequities in public schools and

their failure to serve marginalized students

and communities; and the potential

complicity of the author’s individual

professional failures – if left unaddressed –

in perpetuating racialized inequities in art

education. Whiteness, or white power,

knowledge, and privilege, is implicit in all

these failures, both in the ways it shapes the

uneven landscape of public education and in

the author’s own process of professional

growth as an art educator. The article is

structured as a personal narrative that

highlights salient professional failures over

three phases of the author’s career,

including: her early years as an elementary

art teacher in a low-income African

American community in Florida; her work

as a doctoral student, which was informed

by critical race theory; and her evolving

practice as a university art educator working

with racially diverse pre-service teachers.

The Failure of Whiteness in Art Education:

A Personal Narrative Informed by Critical

Race Theory

Many interconnected notions of failure

contextualize and inform my practice as

white art educator who is deeply invested

educational equity for marginalized and

underserved students. Among the most

salient of these are: my own learning from

personal failure as a process of professional

growth over the course of my career

specter of “school failure” and its impact on

K-12 students’ educational opportunities and

experiences; entrenched, systemic inequities

in public schools and their failure to serve

marginalized students and communities;

the potential complicity of my individual

professional failures – if left unaddressed

in perpetuating racialized inequities in art

education. Whiteness, or white power,

knowledge, and privilege, is implicit in all

these failures, both in the ways it s

uneven landscape of public education

(Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), and in my

own process of professional growth as an art

educator. I began my career as an

elementary art teacher in a low-income

African American community in Florida

This experience shaped my scholarship as a

doctoral student, which employed

race theory (CRT) in order to understand

systemic, racialized educational inequities

that impacted my former students and others

like them. My K-12 teaching experience

and my scholarship continue to inform my

evolving practice as a university art educator

working with racially diverse pre

and novice teachers. I entered each of these

phases of my career feeling well prepared,

only to be repeatedly chagrined at m

ignorance and humbled by the extent to

which my whiteness shapes my attitudes and

assumptions about race. This writing

discusses interrelated personal and systemic

failures of whiteness over three phases of

my career, and some of the insights

failures yielded for my own work

any interconnected notions of failure

textualize and inform my practice as a

who is deeply invested in

for marginalized and

Among the most

my own learning from

personal failure as a process of professional

over the course of my career; the

specter of “school failure” and its impact on

12 students’ educational opportunities and

entrenched, systemic inequities

in public schools and their failure to serve

marginalized students and communities; and

individual

if left unaddressed –

racialized inequities in art

or white power,

ilege, is implicit in all

the ways it shapes the

n landscape of public education

, and in my

own process of professional growth as an art

I began my career as an

income

ty in Florida.

This experience shaped my scholarship as a

employed critical

in order to understand the

educational inequities

that impacted my former students and others

experiences

and my scholarship continue to inform my

evolving practice as a university art educator

diverse pre-service

I entered each of these

phases of my career feeling well prepared,

only to be repeatedly chagrined at my racial

extent to

shapes my attitudes and

. This writing

personal and systemic

of whiteness over three phases of

and some of the insights these

failures yielded for my own work, with

implications for racially equitable art

education practice.

Failures of Whiteness in Art Education

Personal Narrative

F(l)ailing as an Elementary

I came to art education from a fine

arts background. When I started my first job,

through an alternative certification program,

I had an MFA and a lot of enthusiasm but no

classroom experience or preparation

naively relished the opportunity to facilitate

meaningful art learning for my student

quickly realized I had no idea how to

actually make this happen. I struggled

even the most basic aspects of

management and teaching. I marveled at my

colleagues’ facility with such

taking attendance, getting students’

attention, making transitions from one

activity to another, distributing materials,

and minimizing class disruptions

which were confounding mysteries to me

My classroom management skills were so

poor, in fact, that fistfights occasionally

broke out in the art room during my first few

years of teaching. But my biggest struggle

was against time. With a class period of only

30 minutes, it was easy for me to spend half

or more of my instructional time on

discussion, attendance, and giving

directions, leaving a pathetic

less for my students to work independently

The end of class always came too soon

cleaning up always took longer and was

more confusing and contentious than I

anticipated. Not surprisingly given the

chaotic classroom climate and minimal work

time, my students’ artistic achievement was

mostly lackluster, which posed serious

challenges in grading their work

my first years of teaching, I

many days in tears and wondered

despairingly what my students could

possibly be learning from me.

equitable art

in Art Education: A

Elementary Art Teacher

I came to art education from a fine

When I started my first job,

through an alternative certification program,

an MFA and a lot of enthusiasm but no

experience or preparation. I

naively relished the opportunity to facilitate

meaningful art learning for my students and

quickly realized I had no idea how to

I struggled with

aspects of classroom

I marveled at my

such things as

taking attendance, getting students’

on, making transitions from one

activity to another, distributing materials,

and minimizing class disruptions, all of

which were confounding mysteries to me.

My classroom management skills were so

occasionally

the art room during my first few

But my biggest struggle

With a class period of only

30 minutes, it was easy for me to spend half

or more of my instructional time on

discussion, attendance, and giving

g a pathetic ten minutes or

work independently.

always came too soon, and

ays took longer and was

more confusing and contentious than I

Not surprisingly given the

e and minimal work

my students’ artistic achievement was

, which posed serious

grading their work fairly. In

went home

many days in tears and wondered

despairingly what my students could

ssibly be learning from me.

59

As with my veteran colleagues’

teaching and classroom management skills,

their cultural competence and connectedness

with the school community impressed me.

Teaching in a predominantly African

American context made me acutely aware of

my race as a white person and painfully

conscious of my lack of cultural knowledge

about my students and school community.

Because people of color, and particularly

African Americans, outnumbered me in this

context, I assumed this must be similar to

being a person of color in a predominantly

white context. What I did not understand at

the time was that whiteness is not just

another racial category; it is the axis around

which other races are constructed in

hierarchical relations of power and both

material and psychological privilege (Haney

Lopez, 2006; Wildman, 2000). After

reviewing a century of legal decisions

related to prospective immigrants’ racial

identities, and living his own life on the

margins of whiteness as a multiracial Latino,

Haney Lopez (2006) concluded the

following:

Whiteness exists as the linchpin for

the systems of racial meaning in the

United States. Whiteness is the norm

around which other races are

constructed; its existence depends

upon the mythologies and material

inequalities that sustain the current

racial system. The maintenance of

Whiteness necessitates the

conceptual existence of Blacks,

Latinos, Native Americans, and other

races as tropes of inferiority against

which Whiteness can be measured

and valued. (p. 132)

Other critical scholars, particularly those

whose work is grounded in critical

pedagogy, have discussed social class as

another axis of power, with middle-class and

upper-class status, mores, and values,

positioned as normative (Aronowitz, 2009;

Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2009;

McLaren, 1989). However, it is important to

note that critical race scholars have asserted

that whiteness in and of itself is a category

of privilege that shapes public discourse

around such interrelated topics as race,

poverty, crime, and education (Haney

Lopez, 2006; Wildman 2000). In order to

understand the impact of racial

discrimination, it is important to recognize

its function in securing and maintaining

white privilege. This may be a challenge, as

many whites – including myself – are

neither accustomed to nor comfortable with

thinking about ourselves in racial terms

(Haney Lopez, 2006). Writing from her

perspective as a white CRT legal scholar,

Wildman (2000) described the many ways

whites are privileged, including the privilege

to ignore race, and to choose which racial

battles to fight. Although I was numerically

a racial minority in my particular teaching

context, I have the privilege of ignoring race

in other contexts – a privilege people of

color rarely have, in any context. In the

midst of my cognitive dissonance as a new

white teacher in a predominantly black

school, I failed to understand the difference

between being a raced individual and

experiencing racial discrimination.

During my first year of teaching I

entered my district’s mentoring program for

first-year teachers, where I connected with

many skilled veteran art educators who were

eager to help me succeed. However, not

many of these folks had experience teaching

in schools like mine, in which 95 percent of

my students were African American and 97

percent of my students received free or

reduced lunch. Those who did seemed to

attribute many of the challenges I faced to

my students’ backgrounds and the school

culture rather than to my own failings as a

new teacher. And nearly all of them were

60

now teaching in schools in affluent suburban

neighborhoods that enrolled far fewer

students of color and low-income students

than the Title I schools where they began

their art education careers. Their negative

perceptions of my students and school

community implied several things to me at

the time: I should not really expect good

behavior or strong academic performance

from my students because of their racial,

socioeconomic, and/or cultural backgrounds;

even if I improved my teaching skills, I was

not fully responsible for my students’

learning because of their limited educability;

I was in a hopeless teaching situation where

success was impossible; and my

professional life would only improve by

transferring to a “better” school. While I did

not completely buy in to this mindset, I

certainly was overwhelmed and

underprepared for teaching. At times I felt

hopeless. Combine these feelings with my

acute sense of being a racial outsider at my

school, and my veteran colleagues’

perceptions did not seem too outrageous. It

was not until I encountered critical race

theory, and particularly Valencia’s (1997a,

1997b; 2010) work, during my dissertation

research that I understood these perceptions

and assumptions as deficit-based.

The construct of deficit thinking as

elucidated by Valencia (1997a, 1997b;

2010) and others (Foley, 1997; Menchaca,

1997; Ronda & Valencia, 1994) was a

“threshold concept” (Meyer & Land, 2006)

that changed my thinking about social

justice and educational equity. Cousin

(2006) described threshold concepts as:

transformative, irreversible, integrative,

bounded, and “likely to involve forms of

‘troublesome knowledge’” (p. 4) that are

counter-intuitive or defy commonsense

understandings. Deficit thinking is at the

core of the most pervasive and damaging

“commonsense understandings” about

marginalized students and communities.

Deficit theories attribute social inequities,

such as the disproportionate experiences of

school failure among low-income students

of color, to their own supposed internal

defects of intellect, moral character, culture,

or familial socialization (Shields, Bishop,

and Mazawi, 2005; Valencia, 2010). By

essentially blaming the victim, deficit

thinking masks the role of societal factors,

such as under-resourced public schools and

systemic discrimination, in placing these

students at risk of school failure (Bastos,

Cosier, & Hutzel, 2012; Duncan-Andrade &

Morrell, 2008; Kraehe & Acuff, 2013; Nieto

& Bode, 2008; Pollack, 2012; Shields,

Bishop, & Mazawi, 2005; Valencia, 2010;

Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman,

2011).

This kind of deficit thinking is

especially damaging when it plays into the

“commonsense” notion of meritocracy.

Meritocracy is the idea that in the United

States, education is the great equalizer that

levels the playing field so that anyone who

works hard enough can achieve every level

of success in life. This idea has considerable

allure, especially in the era of Barack

Obama’s presidency. Indeed, Zamudio,

Russell, Rios, and Bridgeman (2011)

described the meritocracy as one of the most

powerful master narratives in United States

society. However, they declare meritocracy

to be a myth because of the glaring

inequities in the allocation of educational

resources between schools in affluent, white

(mostly suburban) areas and schools in

poorer (mostly urban) neighborhoods that

serve predominantly students of color.

Kozol (1991) most notably exposed these

“savage inequalities” in his searing expose

of the insufferable conditions of inner-city

schools in St. Louis, Chicago, and New

York, compared with the well-heeled

suburban schools in neighboring districts. In

the contemporary educational rhetoric of No

Child Left Behind (2001) urban schools

61

such as those that Kozol profiled are

characterized as “failing schools.”

However, given the disparities in the

allocation of educational resources (funding,

facilities, teachers, educational materials)

between urban and suburban public schools,

Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2008)

asserted that urban schools are not failing

but are “doing exactly what they are

designed to do” (p. 1) – preserve the status

quo in an inequitable, racialized social

hierarchy.

Like many schools serving low-

income communities, and particularly

communities of color, my school bore the

brunt of high-stakes accountability measures

under No Child Left Behind. Although our

school was not among those identified as

“failing” based on standardized test scores,

we fought hard to maintain our academic

standing and reputation against the threat of

restructuring and lost funding. The pressure

to avoid school failure created a high-stress

educational environment for students,

teachers, and administrators in which arts

education was marginalized in favor of rote,

skill-and-drill learning from scripted

curricula in language arts and mathematics,

or what Haberman (1991) described as “the

pedagogy of poverty.” Against this

backdrop, I felt an acute sense of

responsibility to my students because of the

ways the specter of school failure impacted

their educational experiences and quality of

life at school. If they were able to have only

30 minutes of art class each week, those 30

minutes had better be spectacular.

Over time, and with support from

many mentors, I did grow to develop a

relatively healthy teaching practice that

included productive relationships with my

students and colleagues. As my teaching

skills improved, so did my students’

behavior and artistic achievement. I settled

into the school community and felt more and

more at home and less and less an outsider. I

also felt as though I was succeeding more

often than I was failing, and that I might

have something to offer as an art teacher

educator. This general feeling of success,

which I then defined as competent

classroom management, curriculum

planning, teaching skills, and productive

relationships, and my sense of responsibility

to my students informed my decision to

pursue a Ph.D. in art education. I started a

doctoral program intending to focus my

research on art education in low-income

communities.

Engaging Critical Race Theory as a

White Doctoral Student: New

Frameworks for

Understanding “Failure” and Cringing

Reflections on “Success”

When I entered graduate school, my

experiences of practice shock (Hagiwara &

Wray, 2009) as a new art teacher were still

fresh. These formative experiences

influenced my early scholarly work, which

attempted to identify “best practices for

working with urban students” (Spillane,

2010). Although I acknowledged my

personal failures as a new teacher, my early

scholarship made the implicit assumption

that the challenges I faced were unique to

the context of my school and the

characteristics of my students. In my case,

my deficit-based common sense

understanding was that teaching in urban

schools was hard work and teachers needed

adequate preparation for the conditions they

might encounter in order to succeed in these

contexts. My perspective was self-centered

and disproportionately focused on

supporting white teachers, without

consideration of teachers and students of

color. This is not surprising given that the

deficit-based “culture of poverty” notion,

exemplified in Payne’s (2005) A Framework

for Understanding Poverty and heavily

critiqued by scholars such as Foley (1997)

62

and Valencia (2010) formed the cornerstone

of my diversity training as a public school

teacher. I also failed to connect teacher

(under)preparedness to the systemic

inequities that contribute to conditions of

chronic “underservedness” (Kraehe &

Acuff, 2013) that impacted my former

students and school community. In sum, my

participation in deficit discourses prevented

me from critically examining my complicity

in unjust social structures, making it

unlikely that my work could meaningfully

transform them.

Critical race theory (CRT) shaped

my understanding of deficit thinking and its

role in systemic, racialized educational

inequities. CRT is an interdisciplinary body

of scholarship developed primarily by

scholars of color with roots in critical legal

studies (Bell, 2000a, 2000b; Crenshaw,

1995; Delgado, 2000a; Delgado &

Stephancic, 2001; Espinoza & A. Harris,

2000; Gotanda, 2000; Haney Lopez, 2000,

2006; A. Harris, 2000; C. Harris, 1995;

Perea, 2000; Wildman, 2000). Scholars in

many fields who are concerned with human

rights and social justice have since adapted

and expanded CRT’s tenets to address

racialized social inequities in education and

other areas of society. Critical race theory

recognizes racism as a normal and ordinary

part of life in the United States, although

one that is often difficult to recognize and to

remedy except in its most egregious

manifestations (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001).

Racism serves the interests of whites by

securing and maintaining white privilege.

Although CRT characterizes racism as a

normal part of life, it holds that the concept

of race is socially constructed, with no basis

in biology or genetics. Not only does society

create races, it does so differentially,

racializing different groups of people at

different times in response to different

societal needs, such as the labor market.

CRT rejects racial essentialization,

recognizing that all people have overlapping

and intersecting identities and allegiances

beyond their race, including gender,

religion, language, sexual orientation, and

social class, among others, some of which

may result in intersecting experiences of

oppression. At its core, critical race theory is

concerned with effecting social change and

eradicating discrimination of every kind. As

such, it is not purely theoretical; rather, it

emphasizes activism and the practical

applications of social theory.

Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995)

introduced critical race theory to the field of

education because of their conviction that

race and its role in educational inequality

were undertheorized. Contemporary

education scholars have built on Ladson-

Billings and Tate’s work, recognizing that

CRT offers a powerful framework for

understanding and redressing the persistent

educational inequities impacting students of

color (Acuff, Hirak, & Nangah, 2012;

Bagley & Castro-Salazar, 2011; Brown-

Jeffy & Cooper, 2011; Desai, 2010a, 2010b;

Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Kohli &

Solorzano, 2012; Knight, 2006a, 2006b,

2013; Kraehe, 2015; Kraehe & Acuff, 2013;

Lopez & Parker, 2003; Lynn, 2004; Milner,

2008; Parker, Deyhle, & Villenas, 1999;

Parker & Stovall, 2004; Solorzano & Yosso,

2001, 2002; Preston & Chadderton, 2012;

Stovall, 2006; Yosso, 2005; Yosso, Parker,

Solorzano, & Lynn, 2004; Young, 2011;

Whitehead, 2012; Zamudio, Russell, Rios,

& Bridgeman, 2011).

According to Solorzano and Yosso

(2001), “critical race scholars in . . .

education acknowledge that schools operate

in contradictory ways with their potential to

oppress and marginalize co-existing with

their potential to emancipate and empower”

(p. 3). My readings in critical race theory,

and particularly Valencia (1997a, 1997b;

2010) and others’ (Foley, 1997; Menchaca,

1997; Ronda & Valencia, 1994) scholarship

63

on deficit thinking, helped me look beyond a

narrow focus on mitigating new teachers’

practice shock to see teacher performance as

a component of educational equity. These

frameworks helped me reconceptualize the

knowledge, skills, and dispositions pre-

service art teachers may need in order to

work successfully with low-income students

and students of color and moved me into the

next phase of my career as a university art

educator.

Failing as White Art Educator Working

with Racially Diverse Pre-service

Teachers

When I began my current art

education faculty position two years ago, I

felt much more prepared to succeed than I

did as a new elementary art teacher. I had

six years of public school teaching behind

me and substantial theoretical grounding to

do the work I wanted to do: preparing pre-

service art educators to successfully teach a

diverse student population and help them

understand and fight their complicity in

systemic educational inequities. My own

process of engaging with critical race theory

and rethinking my practice was quite recent,

and I looked forward to discussing these

issues with my art education students. I also

was excited to share some of the specific

insights I gained through critical (race)

reflection on my years as an elementary art

teacher, which included:

• Understanding individual teachers’

failures in relation to systemic

educational inequity as a factor

contributing to the marginalization of

low-income students of color.

• The impact of deficit frameworks on

school re-segregation and white

teacher flight from “failing” schools.

• Valuing failure as a learning

opportunity for K-12 students,

especially in the kinds of complex,

creative problem-solving often found

in quality art education.

• Viewing failure as a natural part of

learning and growth instead of an all-

or-nothing proposition.

With these grand ambitions, I was

thrilled to discover that my first Foundations

of Art Education class comprised a racially

diverse group of pre-service teachers evenly

split between white students and students of

color. In addition to this favorable racial

dynamic, I was lucky to have a particularly

engaged and thoughtful group of students

who undertook the readings and discussions

earnestly and respectfully. Over the course

of the semester however, several students of

color pointed out in frustration that many of

the assigned readings were written from a

white perspective and seemed intended to

prepare white teachers to work with racially

diverse students. Kraehe (2015) supports my

students’ perceptions, noting “when race is

addressed in the scholarship on becoming an

art teacher, it is often within the context of

supporting primarily White students’ racial

knowledge (e.g. Briggs, 2012; Desai, 2010a;

Knight, 2013)” (p. 200). Additionally, after

reading several articles focused on African

American artists, students, and school

communities, a Latina student in my class

commented that there are more races than

black and white and more complex racial

dynamics at play in the contexts of public

schooling.

These failures were humbling, but I

addressed them openly with my students,

asked for their continued feedback, and

adjusted the remaining readings for that

semester in an attempt to redress their

legitimate concerns. Because of this, I felt

even better prepared to teach this course in

my second year. But this was not to be. The

new class was skewed toward a

predominance of white students, with one

student of African descent and one Asian

64

American student. Although I felt better

prepared to address racial issues in my

second year as an assistant professor, the

racial dynamic(s) at play in this particular

class proved challenging for all of us to

navigate. One student of color expressed to

me privately that they felt particularly on the

spot, as though all eyes were on them during

any discussion of race(ism). At the same

time, several of my white students expressed

privately that they were uncomfortable with

such things as an art exhibition focused

exclusively on African American

contemporary artists. Although I tried to

create a safe atmosphere for discussing race

in art education, I failed to understand that a

“safe space [rarely] exists for people of

color when it concerns public race dialogue”

(Leonardo & Porter, 2010, p. 139). For

white people, discussions of race are often

intellectualized and detached; whereas for

people of color, race(ism) is a lived

experience. According to Leonardo and

Porter (2010):

By sharing their real perspectives on

race, minorities become overt targets

of personal and academic threats. It

becomes a catch-22 for them. Either

they must observe the safety of

whites and be denied a space that

promotes people of color’s growth

and development or insist on a space

of integrity and put themselves

further at risk not only of violence,

but also risk being conceived of as

illogical or irrational. Thus, white

privilege is at the center of most race

dialogues, even those that aim to

critique and undo racial advantage.

(p. 140)

These failures revealed some of the

many ways whiteness continues to obscure

my ability to discern racial inequity. These

failures included: (1) centralizing whiteness

in diversity pedagogy, using my own

experience reckoning with white privilege

and my complicity in deficit thinking as

indicative of all my students’ needs; (2)

discussing race in terms of a black-white

binary, a construct critical race scholars

(Perea, 2000; Espinoza & Harris, 2000) have

critiqued; (3) creating classroom conditions

that essentialized the experiences and

perspectives of students of color; and (4)

failing to appropriately scaffold white

students’ learning about racialized

educational inequity.

It is well documented that the public

school student population is growing

increasingly diverse, and that this diversity

is not equally reflected in the teaching force

(Davis, 2009; Hagiwara & Wray, 2009;

Kozol, 1991; National Education

Association, 2003; Zumwalt & Craig, 2008).

Pre-service art teachers, like most pre-

service teachers, are predominantly white,

middle class women (Galbraith & Grauer,

2004). However, teaching to the white

majority of pre-service teachers “imposes a

standpoint that disregards and subordinates

the worldviews and educational needs of

non-Whites” (Kraehe, 2015, p. 200) and

further entrenches white art teacher identity

as normative.

Conclusion

I began writing this article, in part, as

a way of modeling a “growth mindset”

(Dweck, 2006) for my students, discussing

my personal failures in order to scaffold

their understandings of some of the systemic

failures of whiteness in art education, and to

own my complicity in them. This resonates

with my day-to-day teaching practice, in

which I encourage my students to embrace

failure as a natural part of learning and

growth, especially in such complex learning

processes as those involved in becoming an

artist and/or a teacher. Artists and theorists

have also written about the generative

65

possibilities and radical freedom inherent in

failure as an artistic practice and way of

being (Halberstam, 2011; Le Feuvre, 2010).

Unfortunately, failure is rarely understood or

experienced as a natural part of racial

learning and growth, but rather as a high-

stakes, all-or-nothing proposition – and for

good reason. Not only does whiteness shape

the uneven landscape of public education,

including access to and quality of arts

education, it tends to hijack the very racial

dialogues intended to dismantle its power.

Nevertheless, as Kraehe (2015) argues:

Prospective art teachers…need

opportunities to acquire critical

conceptual frameworks in order to

understand their own personal and

professional identities in relation to

racialization and other intersecting

sociocultural processes. Without

such opportunities, important aspects

of art teachers’ identities are

suppressed. This is not only

invalidating to preservice teachers of

color, but it also diminishes the

capacities of all prospective art

teachers to teach equitably and

reflexively in the context of social

inequality. (p. 209)

As this narrative demonstrates, failure

permeates the complex and deeply personal

learning processes involved in developing

nuanced critical race understandings. Merely

acknowledging the role of failure in racial

learning, however, is not enough.

Transforming the racial landscape of art

education demands that we all assume

responsibility for the failures of whiteness as

we continue to grow as individual art

educators and as a profession.

.

References

Acuff, J.B., Hirack, B., & Nangah, M. (2012).

Dismantling a master narrative: Using

culturally responsive pedagogy to teach the

history of art education. Art Education,

65(5), 6-11.

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