Celebrating Pluralism Six Years Later: Visual Transculture/s, Education, and Critical Multiculturalism

Abstract

In this lecture I examine changes in my thinking, and in multicultural education, since the publication of Celebrating Pluralism: Art Education and Cultural Diversity (Chalmers, 1996). We need to move from “celebratory” to “critical” or “insurgent” multicultural art education and to increasingly acknowledge and embrace changing transcultural migratory experiences. While continuing to teach about art in a variety of cultures, art, and art education, need to be used to make a difference. The unjustness of injustice needs to increasingly permeate our work. It is not so much “where we're from” that matters, “it is where we're at.” An alternate subtitle for this lecture could be borrowed from a new documentary film supported by the Australian Centennial Fund. Parra (Ang & Goldman, 2001), about a diverse group of Lebanese-Australian teenagers at a shopping center in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney, is subtitled: It's not where you're from, it's where you're at.