This qualitative inquiry focuses upon the challenge facing art museum educators as they attempt to dismantle the European canon in response to the dictates set forth by the American Association of Museums in Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. Interviews with twelve New England museum educators constitute the basis for the study which concentrates on the educators' own feelings about and responses to cultural pluralism within their institutions. The process of ethnographic analysis is interpretive and integrates a variety of perspectives. Themes emerging from the interviews are categorized and discussed in relation to the barriers to practice of multiculturalism in art museum settings. While museums, to varying degrees, labor to remove physical and environmental barriers to access, findings indicate that educators practice four kinds of multiculturalism: dogmatic, agnostic, exegetical, or dialectical as they struggle with emotional, cultural, and perceptual barriers directly related to their own past experience. Their degree of success in achieving cultural pluralism is linked to how well they have developed patterns of creative thinking and problem solving: tolerance for ambiguity, convergent-divergent thought processes, and metaphoric tools. Coupled with active participation in other cultures through bisociation, creative problem solving helps to reduce barriers so that individual capacities for understanding and accepting others may be enhanced.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8849 |
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
| Creators | David, Honore Salmi |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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