• NAEA Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Commission
• Call to Art Unconference

Cindy Ingram:
Hello, and welcome to the Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and the Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delight to creativity to a messy mishap that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.

Cindy Ingram:
Hello, everybody. This is Cindy Ingram and thank you for joining me for the Art Class Curator Podcast. Today, I have a very special guest, Dr. James Rolling Jr. who is the president-elect of the National Art Education Association, as well as the chairman of the Task Force of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in NAEA. We sat down for an interview for the Call to Art Conference that happened at the beginning of April and I have decided to take that interview and post it here as a podcast because I really felt it was a great conversation, a lot of good stuff about curriculum and the importance of equity, diversity and inclusion.

Cindy Ingram:
So, thank you again for Dr. Rolling for the interview and allowing me to post this on the podcast as well. I hope you enjoy our conversation. And if you’re still interested in participating in the Call to Art Conference, I know it’s over now, but you still can access the recordings. So if you go to learn.artclasscurator.com/cta, you’ll be able to buy the on-demand pass to access the other 49 presentations from that week.

Cindy Ingram:
All right. Well, I am so excited to welcome Dr. James Rolling Jr. to The Call to Art Conference. Thank you for joining me today.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Sure, Cindy. Thank you for having me.

Cindy Ingram:
So before we get started, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your professional journey as an art educator?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yes, sure. So, just in general, I’m a former elementary school art teacher. I’m currently a professor at Syracuse University where I’m a teacher educator preparing new art teachers who got into the world. I’ve been here at my alma mater, as a matter of fact, because I did my MFA here many years ago. I’ve been here since fall 2007.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
I’m also currently the president-elect of the National Art Education Association. That’s it in a nutshell my background as a kid from the… I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and still an East Coast kid. And then probably identified as an artist since I was a child given that I grew up in a household with an art studio in it. My father being a practicing professional artist and art director and graphic design.

Cindy Ingram:
Wonderful. Yeah. So, you see the power of being introduced to the arts very early in your life makes a big difference. Wonderful. So how long have you been involved with NAEA?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Oh, gosh. I was a student at Teachers College, Columbia University and did my doctoral work there between 19… finished in 2003. Just prior to that, my mentor in the field, Dr. Graeme Sullivan, just recently retired, introduced me to the conference. My first conference presentation at NAEA was probably I think in 2002 to 2003, one of those. I think it was 2002. So that was when I first got introduced to it. I was a K-12 teacher prior to that but I wasn’t involved with the NAEA at that time so I became involved as a doctoral student.

Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. So, you are the chair of the Commission on Equity, Diversity & Inclusion which is brand new to NAEA.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Brand new.

Cindy Ingram:
Just this year?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cindy Ingram:
So, can you tell us a little bit about how that got started and what the role is of that commission?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Sure. Well, it goes for me, my connection with the work is personal having oftentimes gone to schools from when I was bused as a kid to pretty much an all-white school in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, from my neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as New York City was attempting to address inequities in terms of schooling. But ever since then I’ve gone to schools where I was typically one of a handful of persons of color there. So, the work first of all is personal but as far as doing it professionally, doing it for NAEA for the National Art Education Association.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
From 2018 to 2019, I was a part of the NAEA ED&I Task Force. ED&I is equity, diversity & inclusion. And that was a task force which was put together by NAEA to deal with the charts, to really take a close look at the demographics and the histories of NAEA, as well as similar initiatives like ED&I initiatives by other organizations and to try to assemble a research base record with practical recommendations to advance ED&I work throughout NAEA and all its affiliate organizations.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so ultimately out of that work, which was a little over a year, as the task force came up with about 16 recommendations to help make the work that NAEA wanted to do, was committed to doing, sustainable, all right, and measurable. The first of those recommendations was to develop a standing commission similar to the research commission for NAEA, that was the first recommendation. And so, when I got elected as president-elect, partly because of my history with the task force and partly because it was one of the roles that I was asked to take on in my duties as president-elect, what I do is different than what the president does which is different than what the president-elect, sorry, the past president does.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So in that role, I helped to lead a very rigorous and very confidential process of reviewing applications from across the nation. We got 74 applications to take seats, to draw from that 10 inaugural commissioners, ED&I commissioners. Each commissioner serving either a two-year or a three-year term and so they rotate off and then we’ll elect new folks and they’ll come on board. But we convened for the first time this past December in Alexandria, Virginia at NAEA headquarters. And so I’m honored to serve as the inaugural chair of this new commission.

Cindy Ingram:
Wonderful. So what are some of the things that, and I’m sure this is an evolving commission since as you only met one time, and even with the-

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Let me clarify. We met for the first time in December but we’ve been meeting-

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, okay.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
… by group since then.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay, good.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
We have virtual meetings because the work is ongoing as you mentioned. So I want to clarify that we’ve met two to three times since-

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, perfect.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
… our inaugural convening convening and we were set to meet again in Minneapolis but of course everything was canceled for obvious reasons in terms of the global crisis, but we will be having another meeting next week-

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, cool.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
… and to meet regularly.

Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. So what are some of the things that y’all are… that you’re working on creating for the NAEA right now if it’s not-

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
I like that y’all by the way. We say y’all in Brooklyn too by the way.

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, okay. I’m in Texas so.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They had in Brooklyn too, okay. So, the two things I would say in my mind are primary goals. Other goals will be generated by talking with NAEA divisions and constituents and leaders and membership to sort of get a sense about what from the ground up folks want to see doing in their localities, in their regions, in their organizations but first and foremost, as I alluded to, was there’s still 16 recommendations from the ED&I Task Force. Our goal is to carry those forward. I’m not going to list them all here. Those can be found on the NAEA website-

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, we’ll link to that below.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yes, yeah. That’d be a great thing to do. But the whole purpose of all those recommendations is to help dismantles certain structural and institutional inequities that have been a part of the association in spite of its best intentions and meant also to help with the cultural shift towards greater ED&I vision and strategies that will aid our field in terms of greater equity, greater diversity, greater inclusion, greater accessibility.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so, towards that last point is where I would say secondly where our goal is to serve as a catalyst for the work of the affiliated state organizations, any partners, for individual members who might look at themselves as field workers within this effort to prioritize and brainstorm and enact sustainable structures and systems for infusing ED&I and accessibility into their workplaces or into their art institutions, or into their museums, or their communities of practice. So those are, I would say, are the two primary goal.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, it’s interesting to think about from the perspective of that hierarchy of NAEA to all the state organizations to then all the schools and all the museums and everybody underneath it, and then all the individual teachers that every part has a different role to play.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I would say the-

Cindy Ingram:
So most of… oh, go ahead.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well, just to add real quickly is that we’ve already had the opportunity in the roles of president, past president and president-elect to go out to state organizations and talk about this and start getting, so priming the pump so to speak as different regions and their regional conferences, leadership conferences, we’re beginning to think about, okay now, what do we do with this now, these recommendations? How do we adopt them and turn them into actionable practices?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So, we’ve already begun that work of going out and sharing what the recommendations were and what we could begin doing as the organization itself is currently beginning to develop a new strategic pillar along with organizational vibrancy and advocacy and research, a pillar for ED&I work so, well, things are converting, so-

Cindy Ingram:
That’s awesome.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. So, when it comes to these recommendations, and I actually did a podcast episode recently about where I went through and talked about some of my favorite ones. So what do you think is the biggest area for growth when it comes to… especially what an individual art teacher can do because a lot of people who are watching this right now are practicing teachers, that’s their main role at the moment. What are some of the things that they can be thinking about right now?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Okay. So, well, I want to say one thing in particular which is that to my mind, and this is something that I’ve… the way I conceive of diversity initiatives in general. Whether you’re enacting things that will change things in five years, 10 years, 20 years, whatever. In general, diversity to me is an organizational growth strategy. I also do this work, I should mention, here at Syracuse University, the director of diversity, equity and inclusion for our College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
We tend to think about diversity, some folks think about it in a negative way, some folks are neutral about it. I think it is a total opportunity so sort of the same way that biodiversity makes for strengthen ecosystems naturally. We’ve talked about economic growth, the need for diversification. We talked about how genetic diversity within the social groups helps to make those social groups more adaptable when changes happen and makes them a stronger species. And so, we think about diversity in those other realms and we get it, right?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
But sometimes we don’t get that it has exactly the same purpose in terms of associations and organizations that actually help strengthen organization and helps it to grow in ways that can’t necessarily be anticipated. So I think that just in general, wherever you are, whether you’re working in a school or working at an association or museum, if you are thinking properly about diversity initiatives, it’s not something that needs to be done just for the sake of checking out boxes. It’s not a dangerous thing. It’s actually a way of growing and strengthening who you are, who your association is, and who your community is.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. I know that… I’m thinking about. I kind of have a question for you in my head. It’s trying to get itself together but it hasn’t quite happened yet. So, when we’re talking about diversity, I just kind of want to break it down. So, we’re talking about diversity in like, what are the different levels of diversity that we’re thinking about in terms of diversity of the staff, diversity in terms of your curriculum? Is there some pillars here that are not against?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well. So, you asked an interesting question because when I’m dealing with this at a college level, we’re thinking about diversity as it pertains to students but it’s systemic, right? Because you should bring students in and they don’t see folks who look like them as mentors or leaders or to help infuse their experience with life experiences that they find commonality with or share. Those students feel alone and they don’t feel supported and they’re leaving because oftentimes they deal with not just intentional racism that does exists but sometimes the microaggressions that come from folks just not getting it and not really seeing them.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So what I’m getting at is that you almost have to deal with a lot of these things almost at the same time. Like if you were Thanos and you had a glove and you could snap and change everything at once of the ideal but that’s not the way it works. So you’d have to sort of figure out the different levels depending on what your institution is in terms of what it is that needs to be done in order to allow for whatever changes you make to take so that you don’t start something.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And then because you haven’t thought systemically about it, think about the many different levels of change that might need to happen to support one new change brought in because, I mean, your faculty can be brought in for instance or instructors. And if they’re not supported within a community, say it’s a very homogenous community just in terms of where they have to live and bring up their kids, they may not see it happens, folks don’t feel like to stay. And then all of a sudden you have a faculty member who you bring in and they’re gone in the next few years because they didn’t feel welcomed.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They didn’t feel like this was a community that really prioritized or valued their presence. All these things have to happen sometimes simultaneously. So I tend to think about it though and maybe this is helpful, I don’t know. I don’t think this is something where you top-down edicts to get it done. I don’t think you hire a chief diversity officer and they’re in charge of it and nobody else has to think about it.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
I think it’s actually something where everybody has to be involved in the work of looking over the shows like in the kindergarten like where I think ultimately everything that we need to do… anybody needs to know about diversity, equity, inclusion, we learn in elementary school. When you look out for the kid who was being bullied or the kid who wasn’t being included in the game and didn’t want them to feel left out and you looked out for the person who was over your shoulder. So like it becomes a community effort.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Someone’s like we have to deal with it at a community level so that everybody values it, understands that it helps everyone, everybody wins if our world becomes a little bit more diverse, a little bit more equitable, a little bit more inclusive. So, I do think about that part of the work is to help everyone understand that it’s not one person’s job, it’s everybody’s job, right? And then everything becomes a lot easier that way.

Cindy Ingram:
So, I’m a very like logistical process oriented thinker. So I’m just like, “Okay, how do you do that? I mean, that’s your job, you have to figure that out.” But like for someone who’s a teacher in a school that is not embracing this goal, what can that one teacher, how did they get that started?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well, since one of the places that I visited, I won’t name the state organization that I went to. When I talked about this work to them, there was a couple of folks who stated in a very, it wasn’t pushback, it was almost like, “Well, we don’t have any diversity here in our state, we have very little.” So it’s like where do we start, right, if there are very few people of color here, it’s a very homogenous state. But I also know a couple of folks who are on the ED&I, commission which is very diverse, who also live in states like that, right, but are totally committed to the idea of if nothing else, starting with what they teach right?

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Because a part of what oftentimes happens in communities where there isn’t any much diversity in the first place, it’s sort of like out of sight, out of mind. It’s not an important thing because it doesn’t affect their everyday lives. They don’t see it, they don’t taste it, they don’t touch it. And so it becomes something that’s on a way, on a shelf, were in a high shelf, and maybe you pull down a project that you… your multicultural project for the semester.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
But I think you can begin to combat that or pushback against that or make some changes when, first of all, you recognize that the content that we have in our curriculum for learning, right, we sometimes think, “Okay, I got to pull this off the shelf, we got to pull this out of the book,” and that’s what the curriculum is. So you feel like you’re responsible for giving it and imparting it. But we forget that kids come into classrooms with classroom content that’s already preloaded. They have life experiences, they live in their local worlds, they have intersections and conversations with folks that maybe we’ve never encountered as teachers, as instructors.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And I speak once again as a former elementary school teacher and I was one of those teachers who one of my… I remember a fourth grader who wants to talk to me about how he loved coming to my class because he loved learning about social studies. And what he was getting at was that we talked about stuff that was happening in society in our classroom. It wasn’t just about teaching skills. It wasn’t just about teaching, how to cut and looking at works of art from history but we actually also made art based on stories that were important to them, a family stories, cultural stories, stories that they that… even if you just have one or two students in your classroom who come from background who’s very different from others.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And then you begin to realize that everybody’s got stories that is totally unlike one another. It’s not just about persons of color being present in the room. But once you begin to understand that your curriculum content is not just the stuff that you pull out of your book, you begin to think differently about what you look at and what you use as a source or a prompt for creating an activity. And not just depending on what you know, you have to do something so things that are new as new people come in, new stories come to the fore.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And in general, if you make a class irrelevant to kids in that way so that they’re engaged because they recognize it, they understand it’s about real life, it’s not just about stuff to do, it’s not just about things to cut. It’s about real life and it’s about the way the arts have always been in central to cultures and civilizations, right? And it becomes much more relevant. And when it becomes much more relevant, classrooms become easier to manage because students understand that they’re invested in it and that this has to deal with who they are and who we are as opposed to what it is, right?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So, I think it’s just a different mindset. I recently gave a talk at the Corning Museum of Glass where I was sharing from the former NAEA president, F. Robert Sabol, I’d say a long time, maybe 10, 20 years ago, he wrote an article called Studying art history through the multicultural education looking-glass. And he was talking about this… thinking about curriculum differently through matrix.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And I’m going to read something here, it talks about looking at it through looking at the history of art, through the history of classified objects, through the history of competing forms, through divergent styles and universal ideas, through changing cultures, through varying symbol systems, looking at artists as influencers and looking at the personality traits that make an artist. But I will also add to that, just looking at the life experiences of artists who are coming from a diverse background, and the more varied that matrix is, the more ways you can combine and mix and match and create different kinds of approaches to your curriculum and make it just much more richer.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And if you begin to look at curriculum differently, I think it begins to open up ways for you to affect what you are getting kids to talk about and share about and engage about and that can be a starting point. Because one teacher can’t necessarily change the hiring practices of the school or the museum but they can change the stories that they tell and look at through an art’s lens.

Cindy Ingram:
That was beautiful. It was just like preach over here. That was amazing. I loved it. I just wanted to write it all down. Yeah, I just think that those-

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They’re recording it.

Cindy Ingram:
… the people that practicing cutting and the zigzag lines and the things that a lot of teachers focus on. Yes, those things you can include, but I think we do such a disservice to our world when we limit art to skills like that.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yup. Skill is important but it’s not the only thing that the arts comprise of. They’re comprised of our identity, our stories, our family ties, our current events. It’s materials but it’s also questions. It’s also a communication of information about who we are and what we experienced in a particular era in human history. It’s all these things. It’s not just objects and skills. That’s just a thin slice of what the arts should be defined as.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. And I think even to when you are opening up your curriculum to discussion and conversation and story that even if you don’t have diversity in your classroom, you’re teaching kids the skills to have those conversations when they’re older. You’re teaching them to be open. You’re teaching them to be vulnerable. You’re teaching them to recognize difference and you’re teaching them all of that even if you’re not in a diverse situation, so it’s only going to make the world better.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah. You teach them to make connections and to make relationships and find relationships and to take the second and the third look as opposed to just one look and glance and then be done with it. No. When you teach those kinds of values or mindsets, when students finally encounter difference or encounter things that they don’t understand, encounter things that they’ve never really seen before in juxtaposition, they don’t look at it and go and shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t know what to do with this and so I’m not going to think about it at all.”

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They’re actually more ready to make the connection, find the meaning. Art is a meaning making activity, right? They’re more ready to engage and to grapple with and to interrogate and to question as opposed to turning the other way or being in curious, not asking any questions at all, right? And it gives them much more agency, right, which is what I think ultimately way, way back when I first started teaching, I began to understand myself as not just as an art teacher but as a creativity teacher.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And as a creativity teacher, my responsibility is not just to expose them to the world of art and design but to expose them to their own sense of agency as human beings. We forget that the root word of education is to educe, to draw out of, as opposed to putting stuff into students, right? So that’s the root word of everything that we do, right, to educe, to draw out what’s already there, to help develop what’s already there. And so, we can’t leave agency on the table, part of what we do as teaching folks how to be creative, and to be creative forces in the world is to help them to understand that they have the agency to make changes and to find the change that needs to be made, so to speak.

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, I love that. I’ve never heard that educe thing. I’m going to use that one. That’s really good.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well, I was one of those kids who like read the dictionary when I was growing up.

Cindy Ingram:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So etymology is a no friend to me.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. I really love that because that’s one of the things I talk about is that nowadays we are so trained to look for answers somewhere else rather than inside. And so that’s really cool. Okay. So, I love this conversation. Also, I’m wondering, what I see, I think I’m seeing at myself. I was trained this way to rock any boats, to keep quiet, to not offend anybody. And so, you get stuck in this to where then you’re afraid to speak up or you’re afraid to get something wrong so you just don’t say anything at all.

Cindy Ingram:
Do you know where I’m going at with that like, how do we… I know that’s the wrong tactic to take when it comes to having this kind of hard conversation, like what are some things we can do to help ourselves and our students be brave enough to have these sorts of conversations?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well, so I would say, Cindy, that it’s very much about modeling that behavior ourselves, human beings. Well, just like all sorts of creatures, we need models to live by, stories to live by, models to extrapolate from that’s why we have mentors, teachers can be those. But if we’re asking certain things of students to be the one who’s daring to ask the question, the one who is willing to look out when everybody else is turning the other way and if someone’s being bullied, well, even if everybody else is bullying that person, how does someone feel the agency to be the one to step in.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They probably have seen it modeled by parent or by a friend or by someone they respect. We have to model that ourselves. We have to be willing to, like I say, take the second look and the third look and talk about it with our students. So as I’ve said, oftentimes to me the best teachers are those who are not performing teacher but are practicing relationship with their students. So, if they’re having a bad day, the students know that they’re having a bad day. If they’re frustrated, the students know that they’re frustrated. If they’re happy or something is worth sharing, they sit down in a circle and talk about it.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So, you have to practice it and model it for your students. Otherwise, they don’t know that it’s a thing to do or that it’s valued. So it’s about building a culture where… a classroom culture just within your own classroom to start with, right, where you’re willing to do such things, talk about things that are important to talk about and are… Obviously, you understand the needs of… you’re not trying to, just for the sake of tipping over the applecart.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
What you’re doing is looking out for the best interests of your students and their families. And so that sometimes means being a voice in the wilderness. Hopefully, you’re not that lone voice but sometimes you have to be. And if you model that, I think that the students will see it and recognize if… At least in this place, it’s safe to talk about certain things.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I love that. But I do think a lot of teachers walk around in fear of what the parents are going to say, what the administration is going to say. So on our class curator, we share all sorts of types of works of art and I get comments sometimes, they’re like, “Oh, I can never show that to elementary kids.” I’m like, “Yes, you could.” And then they can handle all of this stuff, they can handle these topics, but they’re so worried about getting in trouble or having a fight with the parents so that they choose to play it safe.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah. So I cannot just say, well, just one quick thing because I know we’re running out of time. But I remember one of my favorite projects with my, I would say, it was my third graders. This was many years ago. I haven’t taught in elementary school for quite some time. But I did a cartoon project on political cartoons. Typically, folks do that kind of work in high school, middle school, but I knew that my… I started by prompting my students to talk about things that they have opinions about.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
What is something that you wanted to change or do in the world, something you see in the world that needs to be fixed or needs to that we can do better at or something like that just to get their… because I knew that there were opinions and ideas in the room that were never given an opportunity to be voiced. And so part of the project was showing them political cartoons, the history of it. We happen to have a family, a parent, who was a well-known political cartoonist and we had to do a little workshop on what he did, right?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And ultimately, the whole goal was to get to the place where students would work from their opinions about the things that were important to them to see changed, to then express that in the form of their own political cartoon, understanding that to be critical is to be political, right? And understanding that political cartoons were never just about politics. They were about being observant about things that needed to be changed or fixed or that we could do better at as a society. And so it turns out that every kid had their own opinion about something that was important to them.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so in the end when we put a little gallery of political cartoons up online, no parent could quibble with it because these were the ideas of their kids. I didn’t tell one of the students in my third grade classrooms what they should draw about or what they… It all came from them, right? So, the parents could only be proud, right? They couldn’t have trouble with it, right?

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I love that. That’s really good. Love that. Okay. So, we’ve completely gone off all the questions, which is totally fine, that always happens. I just write them just to make myself feel better. I know it always goes somewhere else. So to wrap up, I think that what I really loved about this talk on curriculum was that it’s not about just doing another multicultural project this semester, that you can infuse every lesson with these sorts of conversations and it’s just not about adding in-

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And I’m checking it, not about checking a box. It isn’t.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a complete, yeah, framework for how you come view every single lesson that you do in every classroom.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah. So I can have you switch out, allows you to switch out lenses so that you’re seeing… you know how sometimes with the red filter and you see certain things, with the green filter and you see certain things, but allows you to change out those filters and be aware that things are being filtered out. Sometimes those unconscious biases that we have, sometimes we need to put in a new lens every once in a while and see something through another person’s story or another person’s expertise to even our student’s expertise with their own life stories, right? And allow that to see our curriculum differently and to rework it.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And we use this because we’re all artists, right? So, we should be used to it and if we’ve forgotten that it’s all a work in progress then let’s get back to that mindset that it’s not static, your curriculum is not a static thing. It’s something that’s a work in progress and that shouldn’t be changed from time to time, moment to moment, as is needed and as is possible in order to keep it relevant and to keep it current and to keep it inclusive.

Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. Okay. I think that was a very good ending. So to wrap it up, I’m going to ask you the question that I asked everybody on my podcast so I’m asking in here too because we’re doing an interview. And that is which artwork changed your life?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
It’s an interesting question because I’m not a… I grew up in walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum, which is actually a world class museum on Eastern Parkway. And I used to love that museum. But the works of art that I could speak about, a Rembrandt that affected me with this. But I’m going to go back to something I mentioned earlier on in this conversation that I grew up in a household where art was being made. I grew up in a household with an art studio in it. It’s a second floor apartment but there was an art studio that was always there.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And my father was always working and he allowed me and my brother, who also became an artist, a graphic designer. We all went to the High School of Art and Design. My father went to what was called the High School of Industrial Art. But when I was five years old, six years old, I identified as an artist and so my father did a portrait of me as a child, which I still use for different reasons and publish about it.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
But that image is one of the longest image or the oldest images of me, that portrait that he did of me which he saw something in me in terms of my ability and my willingness and my peculiarity to make connections in sort of in my head. Instead of just like my natural hair texture, he created it as sort of like this network of lines and designs that suggest lots of connectivity happening like he was almost like x-raying into my head. And that particular image stays with me and I’ve used it over and over again. And I’m in my 50s now.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so I would say that the image, the artworks that changed my life were artworks that nobody else knows about, they’re in my home, except for me sharing them in a publication. So my father wasn’t a famous artist. He doesn’t have any work with me at any museums but I guess that’s something which is important to me, which is that every human being is a creative being. And sometimes we are more aware of that creative gene and sometimes we’re less aware of it. Sometimes it gets schooled out of us. Sometimes we get convinced that those people over there are creative and I’m just like, what? I don’t know. I’m not creative.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so many of our students think that way. And I think that I learned by the fact that I grew up in a household full of artwork that nobody will ever know about. They will never be famous but they were part of my everyday life, right. And I think that notion that my creative ability is supposed to be a part of my everyday life, just like it was a part of my father’s everyday life, my brother’s everyday life. I think that’s what has changed me and made me who I am today.

Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I love that. And to get me started on art is only good if it was in a museum. So that’s wonderful. And do you have a link or somewhere that we can share a picture of that artwork?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Oh, sure.

Cindy Ingram:
Do you have it?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah.

Cindy Ingram:
Okay.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
I can send it to you after the call.

Cindy Ingram:
Cool. We’ll put it in the links below.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Oh, sure. Yeah. I think I have a LinkedIn article actually of all things, a LinkedIn article that features that particular image so-

Cindy Ingram:
Wonderful. We’ll link to that below. And last question is what can art teachers do to support your work? Is there a place they can watch what you’re doing on social media or is there any sort of things that they can help with?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah. So, this is a good question. So just in general in supporting the work of our commission, Commission on Equity, Diversity & Inclusion for NAEA. First of all, I don’t know if anybody in your audience is not an NAEA member. I would encourage folks to become NAEA members if they aren’t already or to renew their membership. But part of what I asked folks to consider doing at their locality, I asked folks to think about themselves, to transform themselves into ED&I field workers because everybody wins that way.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
When I went to a recent state conference, I asked folks to think about four different things as thinking about ED&I as something that wasn’t, something that somebody else did, but something that I did as a teacher, right? So ask yourself as a teacher, what are the needs in your school, your organization, your institution or state association in order to bring about greater equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Secondly, I asked folks to think about what is most needed at present in order to shape or advance a viable ED&I initiative in their own organization or their local region that will grow or strengthen their professional community? I asked them what are one to three ED&I ideas that you yourself as a teacher can present to your principal or to your state leader or to your colleagues for discussion and development and commitment over the next year so you can have a small incremental change instead of thinking big giant picture.

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And finally, what are the steps or extra steps in order to execute one of those ideas and to sort of like break that idea into steps in order to get something done, right? And so basically I’m asking folks to think about themselves differently as a worker towards bringing… to create a diversity which to my mind is greater strength to their school or museum or wherever they work. And then to work with others to figure out how to get those things done. You can’t do it by yourself, right? Because like I said right from the very start, it’s a work that everybody has to do as a community in order to do it well, right?

Cindy Ingram:
Awesome! That’s great. Do you mind if I type that up and put that below this video too, those five recommends?

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Sure. I will just email it to you so you can just cut and paste.

Cindy Ingram:
Perfect. Yeah. So we’ll link to that just so people can go back to that because I know I wanted to rewatch that part to make sure I got it all down. Wonderful! Okay. Well, thank you so very much for joining us today. It was-

Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Thank you, Cindy [crosstalk 00:48:13].

Cindy Ingram:
Awesome.

Cindy Ingram:
Thanks again to Dr. Rolling for that amazing interview. And if you’re interested in watching the rest of the presentations from Call to Art, remember, you can go to learn.artclasscurator.com/cta to get the on-demand pass to access the 50 sessions from that amazing online conference that you missed back in April. Thanks again. I’ll talk to you next time.

Cindy Ingram:
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator Podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend. Do you have a work of art that changed your life? If so, send me your art story. You can send it to support@artclasscurator.com or leave a voicemail to (202) 996-7972. Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter, Your Weekly Art Break.

Cindy Ingram:
Recent topics include how to support English language learners, why we should teach artworks from black artists even if it isn’t February, and how to deal with teacher burnout. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/artbreak to receive six free art appreciation worksheets. Today’s art quote comes from Bruce Gerbrandt and he says, “Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day!