(Mis)Information highways: A critique of online resources for multicultural art education

This article calls to attention hegemonic online resources for multicultural art education. The author suggests that art educators carefully critique multicultural art lesson plans published online, as the Internet is increasingly a primary resource teachers use to make pedagogical and curricular decisions. The author demonstrates how some multicultural art education resources offered online contribute to an ‘us–other’ dichotomy, and contradict with the current progressive critical multicultural art education scholarship being published by contemporary art education scholars. The author asserts three contentions of support that illustrate how these online curricular resources maintain ‘liberal’ multiculturalism, exoticize cultural groups, produce surface knowledge about difference and fail to question power. This article concludes with a call to action in which art educators are encouraged to explicitly acknowledge, discuss and work with students and peers to build counter-curriculum that work against these damaging online multicultural art education resources.