Black History Month and African Caribbean Student Learning in Art

This article looks at the concept of Black History Month and its implications for teaching and learning in art and design education. It argues that the concept of Black History Month should be discarded because it tends to promote a separatist notion of culture and that it deflects from an understanding of culture as a plural and intermeshing process. The paper interrogates history as a discourse, problematising our use of the word. The article then looks through the eyes of two groups of African Caribbean young people at Black History Month, as a curriculum initiative. The first group was interviewed at a south London gallery and the second at a conference for African Caribbean learners in Oxford. Two art and design educationalists who participated in the research project that included the south London young people make a significant contribution to the paper. It concludes with a personal interpretation of movements in art and the practice of a contemporary artist whose work endorse the key philosophical position posited in the text that culture is always a process on interweaving.