This doctoral thesis is a qualitative study drawing upon practitioner enquiry, action research methodology toward curriculum development in Initial Teacher Education. The research project is concerned specifically with the preparation of pre-service secondary art teachers across two universities in the North West of England undertaking the Post Graduate Certification of Education with the following aims: 1. To explore issues of institutional racism in established strategies of teaching cultural diversity in secondary art education. 2. To provide an account of how trainee teachers develop their understanding of cultural identity in relation to the art curriculum and their own creative production. 3. To develop an interpretative model of critical studies in art teaching that promotes an anti-racist teaching approach in initial teacher training. 4. To develop an action research methodology which supports the validation of different ways of constructing and understanding knowledge within the context of curriculum development and plural perspectives. This study critically reviews literature across three main fields including critical and contextual studies in art education, concepts of culture, and Critical Race Theory in support of a reflexive account of the author's established and emerging practices that problematises the teaching of cultural content within the art and design curriculum. It challenges the ethics of working with trainee teachers as research participants and the appropriateness of practitioner enquiry within a curriculum development scenario in Initial Teacher Training, developing a co-researcher programme for future research. The Visual Reflexive Journal has been developed through this study offering a multimodal method for collating a wide range of data in a variety of forms and a framework for creating new knowledge through systematic reflection. This framework provides a clear, rigorous and systematic analysis of initial and subsequent journal entries that responds effectively to prior concerns voiced within the action research community that an uncritical approach to reflective journals is being perpetuated within Higher Education. In challenging chronological research journal writing, the Visual Reflexive Journal offers a process of engagement and re-engagement between entries around key themes emerging through the document as it is constructed. It goes beyond the limitations of monomodal journal accounts to create an illustrated rationale of how multi-layered, inter-textural journal entries can provide the basis of, and the trigger for, reflexivity at the deepest level within the context of practitioner enquiry action research.