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What’s Wrong with this Picture? Interrogating Landscapes of Inequity in Art Education

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The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education

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Abstract

This chapter discusses an ongoing arts-based research project that maps relationships between race, socioeconomic status, and measures of school quality in order to visualize systemic educational inequities and interrogate art education’s role in perpetuating them. The project is informed by critical race theorizations of Whiteness as property and explores relationships between socioeconomic stratification, school segregation, and art education. Conceptualized as an activist intervention, the project used the public forum of a painting exhibition in a university art gallery to make connections with art education stakeholders, open up public dialogue, and instigate critical reflection. Through this writing, the project also entailed a critical self-study of the author’s investment in White property as evidenced in the project’s methods and conceptual framework and in her art education practice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This exhibition was supported in part by a New Faculty Research Grant from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

  2. 2.

    In this chapter I capitalize Black and White as proper nouns referring to groups of people. When quoting other authors’ work, particularly that of critical race scholars of color, I honor their choices regarding capitalization of racial terms, leaving their original language as is.

  3. 3.

    This designation refers to Title I—Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged—of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), which provides supplemental funding for schools with high concentrations of students living in poverty, along with fairly strict accountability measures designed to promote the academic achievement of every child.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA

    Sunny Spillane

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  1. Sunny Spillane
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Art, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Amelia M. Kraehe

  2. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

  3. School of Visual Arts, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    B. Stephen Carpenter II

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Spillane, S. (2018). What’s Wrong with this Picture? Interrogating Landscapes of Inequity in Art Education. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_32

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65255-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65256-6

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