Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School

A companion to school experience

Nicholas Addison, Lesley Burgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317613428
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School is established as the key text for all those preparing to become art and design teachers in the secondary school. It explores a range of approaches to teaching and learning and provides a conceptual and practical framework for understanding the diverse nature of art and design in the secondary school curriculum.

Written by experts in the field, it aims to inform and inspire, to challenge orthodoxies and encourage a freshness of vision. It provides support and guidance for learning and teaching in art and design, suggesting strategies to motivate and engage pupils in making, discussing and evaluating visual and material culture.

The third edition has been comprehensively updated and re-structured in light of the latest theory, research and policy in the field and includes new chapters surveying assessment and examinations, and exploring identity and diversity in art and design. Essential topics include:

• 
  
  

• Ways of learning in art and design

• 
  
  

• Planning for teaching and learning

• 
  
  

• Critical studies and methods for investigating art and design

• 
  
  

• Inclusion

• 
  
  

• Assessment

• 
  
  

• Issues in craft and design education

• 
  
  

• Drawing & sculpture

• 
  
  

• Your own continuing professional development.

Including suggestions for further reading and a range of tasks designed to encourage you to reflect critically on your practice, Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School addresses issues for student teachers and mentors on all initial teacher education courses in Art and Design. It will also be of relevance and value to teachers in school with designated responsibility for supervision.

1 Introduction

Nicholas Addison and Lesley Burgess

• What is the purpose of art, craft and design in education?

• Why is the status of the subject art and design contested?

• How can the subject be developed to acknowledge changes in contemporary practice?

• What is the potential role of art, craft and design in the twenty-first century?

What does art and design do?

Art, craft and design defines a set of practices that are fundamental to society, a network of useful, pleasurable, challenging and potentially transforming acts that shape the environment in which we live. It could be said that artists, craftspeople and designers provide us with tools to adapt, enhance and enjoy our surroundings; their activities make visual and material culture. But they also contribute to the propositional world and the making of meaning, a process that helps us to imagine what could be, diagnose what is troubling or at fault, and invent what might lead to the good. As a specialist who works within this field, you will be aware of the extraordinary range of historical and contemporary practices that has become available, an almost limitless resource that provides a diverse and rich field with which you can engage the interests of young people. By acknowledging this position you can provide opportunities for pupils to make and investigate art, craft and design in both creative and discursive ways. This understanding of art and design enables you to go beyond conventional ‘school art’ (Hughes 1998a; Downing and Watson 2004; Atkinson 2011) to participate in broader social and cultural practices that have deep value: imagining the possible, visualising identities, making a beautiful and sustainable environment. You can help pupils to develop this understanding by placing practice in context, by considering audiences, sustainability, uses and provocations. In this way, pupils will begin to recognise how art, craft and design can be more than self-expression, that it functions on different levels to support, critique and, significantly, produce shared meanings and cultural values.

As a student teacher, it is therefore important that you organise opportunities for pupils to engage in art, craft and design as an outward-oriented practice as well as a means for personal expression. Such an orientation acknowledges potential audiences and/or users of learning activities, for example: utilising recycled materials to design furniture, cooperating in a public performance or collaborating in the construction of an online gallery. The significance of such outcomes lies in the uses to which they are put: utilitarian and symbolic, affective and discursive, physical and spiritual. But their significance also depends on context, when and where they were produced and by whom. It is therefore not surprising that the field has generated contested discourses, from the construction of hierarchies and histories to their no less exacting deconstruction and revision. This book helps you to plot a route through these complexities so that the learning experiences you design for pupils can be seen to bypass recreational activities to develop critical, investigative and transformative practices.

Key Stage 3 (KS3) is the first sustained period when it can be guaranteed that pupils are taught by a specialist art and design teacher; therefore this experience is crucial. Increasingly, art and design in primary education is seen as a vehicle for supporting curriculum priorities, an adjunct to literacy, numeracy and science, specifically those subjects audited by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This extrinsic, instrumental role, the ability of the subject to contribute to the whole curriculum, can be beneficial, but we would advise you not to allow this service role to negate the intrinsic place of art and design, making and interpreting visual culture as a different way to engage with and come to know the world (Read 1943; Eisner 2002; Ofsted 2012; CLA 2014). Nonetheless, contemporary practice in art, craft and design often blurs the boundaries between art and other forms of cultural production: the art object is no longer exclusively to be found in the gallery, the practitioner is no longer limited to a studio. Just as the sites of practice can be anywhere, from the natural environment to cyberspace, its methods can be interdisciplinary, from the anthropological to the psychoanalytical. As a student teacher taking on board an interdisciplinary approach, you are invited to consider the methodological resources of other subjects in the school curriculum, not as a means to serve them but to work alongside and with them; Media studies and semiotics, geography and ecology, religious studies and interculturalism. It is important that you are aware and open to such possibilities and recognise the potential reciprocity between art and design and other areas of the curriculum.

Transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborations do not usually characterise practice in secondary schools; we and others have discussed such possibilities in other publications (Burgess 2010; Trowell 2010). It is therefore important to characterise what does go on. In 2004 we identified continuing approaches within the art and design curriculum (11–18) (in Hickman 2004). The categories are not exclusive, rather they indicate:

approaches that can be combined. For example, genre-based outcomes can be managed through formalist, perceptualist or expressive means: although in some schools a single approach dominates. However, there are two which are no longer evident: basic design, a cogent programme in the 1960s and 1970s, lost because its workshop-based strategies, if not its holistic philosophy, were subsumed by technology; anti-racist art education, promoted in the 1970s and 1980s, lost because it was no longer perceived as urgent in a postapartheid era. However, with the publication of the Macpherson Report (1999) on the death of Stephen Lawrence, this was, with hindsight, premature…

1 Perceptualist: mimetic procedures, a search for the ‘absolute copy’ reduction to appearances (Clement 1993);

2 Formalist: a reduction to the visual elements, exercise driven, representational and/or abstract (Palmer 1989);

3 Expressive: intuitive making through affective and/or material exploration: privileging the essential and individual (Witkin 1974);

4 Genre-based: preconceived types perpetuated by teacher expertise and the imitation of exemplars, the successful work of past students, e.g. still life, life-drawing, landscape, CD covers, ceramic figures;

5 Pastiche: the imitation of canonic exemplars, occasionally assimilating the postmodern practice of parody (SCAA 1996 now QCA);

6 Technical: the development of a succession of discrete technical skills: drawing followed by printmaking, followed by batik, etc.;

7 Object-based: a response to common – sometimes themed, often spectacular – artefacts in the form of a big still life/installation, e.g. natural and made forms; a multicultural potpourri (Taylor and Taylor 1990);

8 Critical and contextual: an investigation of art as a means of social and cultural production privileging cognitive and analytical procedures (Field 1970; Dyson 1989; Taylor 1989);

9 Issue-based: an integration of the personal with the social, political and moral through responses to current and contentious issues (Kennedy 1995a);

10 Postmodern: promoting plural perspectives and approaches and embracing the new technologies (Efland et al. 1996; Swift and Steers 1999).

(Burgess and Addison in Hickman 2004: 18)

Little can be added to this list in the intervening ten years. However, digital technologies (already apparent within the last category), increasingly add to the technical possibilities of practice and to its content (see www.nsead.org/ict/about/about18.aspx, accessed 26 July 2014). At first, digital resources were used in imitation of school art but, gradually, digital advances have encouraged what is termed the ‘digital imagination’ (Erstad and Sefton-Green 2013; Gardner and Davis 2014). This disposition has encouraged the integrated use of graphics, typography, photography and moving image (including animation) to produce multimodal assemblages. These practices now appear alongside traditional media as viable and accessible additions including at KS3. This has resulted in an expansion of frames of reference, embracing popular and artistic practices that were significant in twentieth century art (see www.ubuweb.com, accessed 16 July 2014) but central to the twenty-first. In relation to contemporary practice, the expanding field of art, craft and design therefore offers challenges and possibilities beyond the technical and formalist orthodoxies that have tended to dominate secondary art education. Makers and critics are questioning traditional boundaries, and many collaborate on interdisciplinary projects (Kester 2004; Bishop 2012); similarly, your own art practice may question historical distinctions you no longer consider valid. However, it is vital that you reflect on your own practice and relate it to the histories of art education (Dalton 2001; Addison 2010a). In this way, the relationship between the past, present and future can be understood as a form of dialogue in which the differences between traditions and theoretical positions are negotiated rather than placed in opposition.

When considering the traditions within which this dialogue can take place, we have identified four approaches to educational practice in art, craft and design. We do not wish to suggest that these approaches are antithetical, rather that they work in dialectical and dialogic relation, namely: a vehicle for creative action; a conduit for tradition; a space for transgression; a locus for critique. Let us explore each in more detail.

A vehicle for creative action

It is important to differentiate between creative and other forms of activity in art and design in order to ensure that you enable rather than inhibit its use (see Robinson 2007). Vygotsky (2004) clearly identifies two basic types of activity:

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him [sic] … One type of activity we could call reproductive, and is very closely linked to memory; essentially it consists of a person’s reproducing or repeating previously developed and mastered behavioural patterns or resurrecting traces of earlier impressions …(p. 7)

Aside from reproductive activity, we can readily observe another type of activity in human behaviour, what can be called combinatorial or creative activity … activity that results not in the reproduction of previously experienced impressions or actions but in the creation of new images or actions is an example of this second type of creative or combinatorial behaviour. (p. 9)

If you wish to enable creative activity, it is vital that you find out what pupils already know and can do. You can build on this knowledge but also extend pupils’ frames of reference, introducing novel and challenging technical and processual experiences to provide a field of possibilities for pupils to explore, combine and develop in ways new to them. In Plate 21, we can see AS students working with their teacher Vic to construct drawing machines. Together they use mathematical knowledge and constructive techniques to produce highly proscribed drawing apparatus but with unintended, aleatory outcomes that transgress the regime of accuracy and expressivity which tends to dominate in schools (Atkinson 2001).

It is also vital that you do not label pupils too soon as creative and non-creative types. Addison (2010b) has looked at ways you can lay the conditions for creativity, setting up environments and situations that invite creative responses through sensory exploration, play, the transformation of materials and/or spaces, problem posing/solving, working with language as a material or as a mediator, and so on. Such activity often requires time for rehearsal, consolidation and reflection, so not all activity is or should be creative, but creative action is a goal.

A conduit for tradition

Art, craft and design are also reproductive vehicles, ways of valuing, perpetuating and refining material and symbolic practices (e.g. representations, memorials and histories). It is unsurprising that pedagogic sites – from the home, through schools to religious communities and universities, are sites for the perpetuation and development of cultural values; any community wishes its beliefs to be preserved. But such sites do not necessarily have to be oppressively reproductive. History and its cultural sedimentations are a resource that provide tools with which agents can mediate their cultural inherence, both perpetuating and gradually transforming conditions for the ‘common good’ and for social justice (Atkinson and Dash 2005; Trowell 2010; Johnson Unit 9.2). For example, Kara Walker (Camden Arts Centre 2014) deploys figuration by adapting traditional methods (indebted to eighteenth-century silhouettes) but engages with issues such as the interrelations between southern whites and African Americans during the antebellum, the last gasp of US slavery, in non-didactic and ambivalent ways. To borrow from Rogoff (2004), such work acts ‘as an interlocutor’, harrying its viewers. More recently the artist/film director Steve McQueen (winner of the Turner Prize in 1999) has brought to the screen 12 Years a Slave (2013) (winner of ‘Best Picture’ at the 2014 Academy Awards), which examines the same historical circumstances based on the testimony of Solomon Northup (1835). The interpretation of such work in dialogic situations can invite participants to explore troublesome territories distanced from the culture of confession that dominates popular formats on TV or the Internet (Burgess 2003; Addison 2006).

Less confrontationally, Othman Abdullah works with found objects (Plate 13) – here an East African fabric called the kanga – and other supposedly discrete practices such as Arabic calligraphy, pattern and abstraction to produce hybrid configurations that integrate difference. He hopes to produce beautiful things ones that exemplify the diasporic condition of ‘in-betweenness’, a state according to Hall (1990) of ‘becoming rather than being’. Othman sometimes works with local communities in London, young and old, inviting participants to use the script of their ‘domestic tongue’ as the basis for making.

A space for transgression

Art can also be a space for (ritualised) transgression, providing the license to think ‘other’, offer alternatives, parody, invert and rupture: what we would term social, symbolic and affective action. For example, rather than relying on criteria for assessment as the primary discourse in formal education it is vital that pupils’ work, at whatever level, is acknowledged as a site for meaning-making, taking young people’s art seriously. Pupils can interpret each others’ work rather than assess it in terms of quality, enabling the maker to experience the ways her/his work is understood by others. Pupils might write explanations for one another, produce a catalogue of their work for exhibition, either actual or on a department website. This process takes pupils out of their normative role as young people subject to assessment to one in which they take ownership of the production, reception and evaluation of their work (Burgess and Addison 2007).

The artist Annette Krauss has developed a project called ‘Hidden Curriculum’ that is designed to engage young people (ages 16–19) in an investigation into the norms that constrain them. In the context of different educational contexts (schools, communities, galleries, etc.) she invites participants to search for the taken-for-granted forms of kn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of tasks
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Art and design teachers’ professional development
• 3 Learning in art and design education
• 4 Planning for teaching and learning
• 5 Assessment and examinations in art and design
• 6 Issues in craft and design education
• 7 Attitudes to making
• 8 Critical studies
• 9 Inclusion in art and design
• 10 Towards a plural curriculum
• Bibliography
• Name and author index
• Subject index