A Feminist Conversation About June King McFee’s Critical-Raising Foundation for Culturally Responsive Education

Performing feminist conversation in non-feminist contexts is activism that draws attention to how gender—intersected with race, class, sexuality, and ability—is constructed, represented, and treated in affordances of power and privilege. Feminist conversations are integral to feminist pedagogy in which participants recognize the conversations as teaching in a way that includes the vantage points of those who have been excluded from knowledge production, while revealing the perspectives of those in positions of power.

This essay represents a feminist conversation that developed during a critique of June King McFee’s work. The conversation took place as one of the 2016 Penn State colloquium sessions, a series of presentations about the landmark 1965 “Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development” held at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). In 1965, only a few women and people of color were invited to the seminar table. June King McFee was the only woman, along with 15 men, invited to give a presentation (Mattil, 1966). In her speech, she challenged White middle-class art educators and scholars to be aware of their White privilege and bias as she asked them to embrace diversity.

Together, we have offered a personal yet very rich and powerful set of experiences concerning the impact of one person’s work on so many individuals, and how that has spiraled out and affected so many art programs and lives, both nationally and internationally. June King McFee’s impact within art education and beyond has been significant.