Students Online as Cultured Subjects: Prolegomena to Researching Multicultural Arts Courses on the Web

Online education comprises a most visible feature of a changing "landscape of teaching and learning" defined by "the penetration of new, learner-centered practice" aimed at serving the "digital-age learner" (Barone, 2003, p. 47). For better or worse, online learning "has already staked out a permanent place in education. Its role will be as lasting as that of the computer itself (Maeroff, 2003, p. 283). Art educators are becoming "cyberfaculty" as well (Stankiewicz & Garber, 2000). "The Web can be used to create art, to post art images, and to exchange conversations in both words and pictures" (Koos & Smith-Shank, 1997, p. 33). By investigating teaching arts online, art educators elucidate the broader meaning and culture of online courses.Art education can contribute to analyses of online learning through its attention to "culture." Scholarship about multicultural approaches to teaching and learning abounds, and art educators have also advocated "visual culture" and "cultural studies" approaches (e.g., Duncum, 2001; Lai & Ball, 2002). 1 If the discipline has experienced the same "cultural turn" as the arts, humanities, and education in general, art educators attend to culture in diverse ways. Some argue the importance of self-reflexivity, intercultural communication, and critical sociocultural inquiry (McFee & Degge, 1980; Wasson, Stuhr, & Petrovich-Mwaniki, 1990; Stuhr, 1995; Stuhr, Krug, & Scott, 1995; Freedman & Liu, 1996; Krug, 1996; 2000); others argue the importance of cultural contexts of artworks and artistic practices in teaching (e.g., Freedman, 2000). Many argue that educators should teach arts of diverse cultural groups, facilitate inquiry through arts about students' own and others' cultural contexts, or ask students to investigate inequitable power relations and contemporary social conditions in relationship to diverse art worlds.2 Scholars emphasize intercultural communication and other processes of "cultural translation" (Krug, 1997) that link the diverse cultural contexts of arts studied with those of the students. And, they view these processes as mechanisms through which students, teachers, and researchers themselves become agents of collaborative meaning-making, which also (re)constitutes such cultures (e.g., Stuhr, Krug, & Scott, 1995; Irwin, Rogers, & Wan 1999).Whether motivated by an "ideology of cultural pluralism" (Desai, 2003, p. 150), by "social reconstructionism" (Efland, Freedman, & Stuhr, 1996, p. 82), or "critical multiculturalism" (May ,1999; Chalmers, 2002, p. 295), many multicultural approaches to art education encourage students and teachers of diverse groups to share, explore, and/or critique their own cultural experiences, identities, assumptions, and interpretations.3 This is not to say that students belong to static social and cultural groups (McCarthy, 1998, p. 154), or that multicultural educators should essentialize cultures by pursuing their "authentic representation" (Desai, 2000, p. 114). Rather, it is to recognize pedagogical value in attending to students' performances and interpretations of cultural identities in class, in recognizing the constitution of students as cultured subjects (gendered, racialized, ethnicized, sexualized, nationalized, regionalized, aged, etc.)-as "having" a cultural background or as "representing" certain social and cultural assumptions-and in developing pedagogies that take advantage of this recognition.Face-to-face, students perform and interpret each other's cultural backgrounds through a variety of mechanisms utilizing many of the senses. What happens, though, when students cannot see each other's body type, hairstyle, clothing, skin color, gestures, and mannerisms? When they cannot hear one another's accent? When they cannot smell each other's cologne or body odor? Is their constitution as cultured subjects impoverished in text-based online courses where they "appear" to one another as names (or usernames! …