For me this week of class was interesting but challenging. We had three articles to read for Thursday. The first article I read was by Olu Oguibe. This article was a very difficult read for me. In all honesty I don't like to have to read slowly. Nonetheless this article was a challenge and one that I can see as an agreeable challenge for this class. A questions that I posed after reading this article was, why did Ouattara not just start talking about what he wanted to and get what he wanted to say out? I can see that he is in a way stuck in a catch 22 but as a person I would feel like getting my opinion out, if it is something very important to me, is something I would do no matter if my name got slandered or what was reported was nothing like what I said. McEvilley sounded like an ignorant man and I gave him the title of “white power” (not a good title in my book). It seems as though he already knew what he wanted out of the interview and didn’t really care what Ouattara said. Even when Ouattara gave a small verbal protest, McEvilley didn’t seem to nudge, ponder as to why he was protesting, or even take a second for a further explanation. Why is it that so many people are still putting stereotypes onto people because of their origin, race, or gender?

One question a member in my discussion group posed that I found to be very interesting was something to the effect of, “what could I do, if anything, as a young white female with this new information to help effect change?” This question got me thinking about many things one being about how we are being taught about other cultures, their art, and livelihood in schools from k-12. I know that when we studied African art we looked at the so called “traditional” art of Africa, and needless to say from only one ethnic group in Africa. So this got me thinking about my future as an art educator and what I can do to help embark on a journey to effect change in my k-12 curriculum of art education.

There are a few things that I would consider doing in my classroom, and I am also open to suggestions from anyone. One thing I would do while teaching about cultural art would be to show past and present works along with visuals of the cultural environment. And if this culture is to lie in a much larger group of people, like Africa, I would try to explain that the works they are seeing are only from a very small part of a country. You could maybe give them some basic facts that would help the students see how diverse the population is. I believe that too many times in classrooms today teachers feel the need to rush through a learning experience because “students can’t concentrate that long”, or “they really are not listening”, or they feel the need to have them produce a piece of work every time they are in the art room. It is true that teachers are only given a short amount of time with their students in the art room and even less time when they are younger. I do believe that many teacher need to change their teaching not just k-12 art educators.

Overall the question that was posed raised more concern than just about my future teaching, including the power of the female voice in today’s society, and age and how that could effect who listens to you but I feel that in my future school and classroom is where I can make a difference as a young white female.