Opening up the world: A portrait of an intercultural art teacher.

摘要

This study concerns the enactment of cultural understandings by a global-minded high school art teacher in southern Indiana. Recognizing a gap between theoretical approaches to art education and actual practice, I proposed an intercultural approach to art education, comprehensive of multicultural, global and community-based educational concerns, and then conducted this single case study to gain insights into the experience of interculturality from the field. The art teacher selected was well-positioned to contribute insights into how a teacher who has lived and taught abroad might bring his international experiences back to his hometown, and connect his local community to the larger world in the process. Through observation, interviews, document analysis and other qualitative methods, I examined how his intercultural perspective was manifest in his teaching during a transitional period in the history of the art department at his school. Traits that I had anticipated seeing, such as a sense of cultural relativism, familiarity with technology to cross cultural borders, a passion for other cultures, compassion for students, and informed respect for local cultural traditions, were evident to a greater or lesser degree depending upon community response, actual or expected. An unanticipated finding was how much this teacher's self-identity and teaching philosophy had been shaped by early professional socialization into the Japanese educational system, where he taught for three years. As a result of this study, I amended the proposed framework for intercultural art education to reflect insights gained into issues such as teacher identity, idea diffusion, and cultural wealth.