Art, Artists and Pedagogy

Philosophy and the Arts in Education

Christopher Naughton, Gert Biesta, David Cole, Christopher Naughton, Gert Biesta, David Cole, Christopher Naughton, Gert Biesta, David R. Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351387354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume has been brought together to generate new ideas and provoke discussion about what constitutes arts education in the twenty-first century, both within the institution and beyond. Art, Artists and Pedagogy is intended for educators who teach the arts from early childhood to tertiary level, artists working in the community, or those studying arts in education from undergraduate to Masters or PhD level.

From the outset, this book is not only about arts in practice but also about what distinguishes the 'arts' in education. Exploring two different philosophies of education, the book asks what the purpose of the arts is in education in the twenty-first century. With specific reference to the work of Gert Biesta, questions are asked as to the relation of the arts to the world and what kind of society we may wish to envisage. The second philosophical set of ideas comes from Deleuze and Guattari, looking in more depth at how we configure art, the artist and the role played by the state and global capital in deciding on what art education has become.

This book provides educators with new ways to engage with arts, focusing specifically on art, music, dance, drama and film studies. At a time when many teachers are looking for a means to re-assert the role of the arts in education this text provides many answers with reference to case studies and in-depth arguments from some of the world's leading academics in the arts, philosophy and education.

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Philosophy and pedagogy in arts education

Christopher Naughton and David R. Cole

Introduction

Art, artists and pedagogy are too often treated as separate and sometimes irreconcilable activities. This book brings these three key creative capacities together by deploying philosophy at its most impactful, as truly creative thinking ‘in the now’. The theme of this book is ‘arts education as philosophy’, and it is to teachers working in whatever capacity, from early childhood to tertiary level, to researchers, artists in the community, or those studying arts in education that this combined text is aimed; it has been brought together to generate ideas and provoke discussion on what constitutes arts education in the twenty-first century, both within the institution and beyond.

There are two primary sources that form philosophical points of reference in this arts education text. Gert Biesta provides the first chapter from his book The Rediscovery of Teaching (2017), a phenomenologically informed work, that is questioned and reworked in each chapter through the introduction of the second philosophical stream that works through the text, that of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence provides a theoretical platform for a shift in thinking around the arts in education in terms of the conceptual. Biesta’s work enables educational thought connected to concepts that he introduces such as ‘grown-up-ness’ and ‘the middle ground’. Each chapter, building on these philosophical streams, is designed to be informative and challenging, offering ways to re-think arts education from these two intellectual perspectives.

Deleuze and Guattari: curriculum and affect

Deleuze wrote many texts with Félix Guattari (1930–1992), and their combined work has become the basis for studies in the reconceptualisation of pedagogy as they offer alternative, shifting bases of relationality. This is in part a reconciliation of any perception of ‘the child’ seen as a potential ‘unit of production’ (de Alba et al., 2000), or subject in the field of capitalist exploitation of surplus value. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) provide us with a sophisticated analysis of the ways in which capitalism captures the imagination from an early age and potentially commodifies the arts as part of this ‘apparatus of capture’. The juxtaposition of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) with Gert Biesta’s (2017) chapter in the same volume creates a unique opportunity for a provocative rethinking of the arts along philosophical lines by reconciling art, artists and pedagogy.

For those unfamiliar with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), it is valuable to first consider one of their key concepts, ‘territoriality’, and think how it relates to the arts. In education, the notion of territoriality has been usefully employed by such writers as Olsson (2009) and Sellers (2013), when observing children creating their own versions of a song or inventing make-believe characters in their dramatic play. Deleuze invented the term ‘deterritorialisation’, which explains the process of taking a territory and remaking it differently, such as the song or characters, to suit the child’s context. Having deterritorialised the song or dramatic play, children then ‘reterritorialise’ as they settle on a new set of characters or new version of the song, as they invent and reinvent, often with others, before the process begins again. While capitalism decodes, recodes and distributes products for sale through the exploitation of surplus value, including those psychic codes present in education as learning, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) simultaneously present deterritorialisation as a potentially singular and/or collective form of engagement, that can be characterised as inquiry of a multiple nature leading to social, political and personal change. In effect, the term, deterritorialisation, which is central to capitalist functioning, has many levels, and is not solely exploitative, therefore opening up the concept as a potential arts-based fulcrum for understanding key processes in the world from an innocent and playful perspective.

This small example of the concept of territory serves to show how Deleuze and Guattari (1987) ask educators to think with and deploy new concepts, and to constantly exercise their imaginations in coming to terms with a philosophy which is always in flux. What is especially valuable for teachers and researchers is the idea that Deleuzian scholars are determined to remove and deny the constant reiteration of binaries in education. For example, labelling children as successful or failing, correct or incorrect: in art – ‘a good likeness’ or ‘not a good likeness’; in music – ‘in time’ or ‘not in time’; in drama – remembered your ‘words’ or forgot your ‘words’; in dance – the ‘correct step’ or the ‘incorrect step’. Instead, the application of Deleuzian concepts to arts education allows for a connected middle ground to emerge, around the ‘and … and … and’, instead of the ‘either … or’.

Another problem faced by arts educators and the various curricula are the strict definitions and hierarchies produced for the student in assessment. For example at the launch of the ‘Task Group on Assessment and Testing’ (TGAT) in 1988, a dance teacher asked Professor Paul Black: ‘How can you evaluate a dancer moving to the floor in the terms of the National Curriculum?’ The answer was simply to reiterate the curriculum orders, to reduce the dancer and her actions to a description of the ‘elements’ of height, speed and duration. This short exchange typifies the way in which at the outset – since the TGAT report became the basis of the National Curriculum for England, the affective in the arts has been removed. One could say that affect and to be affected could have interfered too much with the assessment process. Thus the move to the floor was not seen as affect, but became, as Deleuze would describe it, an ordered, striated response, that could only be seen in terms of a curriculum descriptor, and by proxy as maintaining the legitimacy of the State machine.

What Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offer is a means to reinstate affect and to be affected in arts education. Not to close doors on what the artwork can be, but to go beyond it. Rather than work always ‘within boundaries’, a favourite riposte by those seeking closure, Deleuze and Guattari see the arts as going beyond boundaries, where new striations or limits form within new territories, in part through the concept of immanence (1994) – a state of constant change where there is no beginning, or end, and only a coming from the middle.

The primary set of philosophical ideas in this book comes from Gert Biesta, who provides not only two chapters and an extended interview in this publication, but a set of ideas to which each author responds. Biesta (2017) offers a different but complementary philosophical position from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), which sets up an anomaly and disjunctive synthesis within the same book, as a productive difference or philosophical position. To acknowledge difference fosters debate, something with which arts educators are starting to engage far more readily. Biesta elaborates on philosophical ideas taken from Dewey, Levinas, Foucault, Arendt, Derrida and Heidegger. His work has been widely read and valued by practitioners seeking a philosophical means to stem the tide of global standardisation and the capitalist enfeeblement of education.

What does this book have to offer by way of insight into the role arts can play in education? Art, Artists and Pedagogy is not a literal ‘how to teach’ the arts book; the ideas presented here are to encourage the educator to question practice and to reinvent pedagogy along philosophical lines. The book is not a philosophy text per se, in that the concepts do not remain in a space of pure philosophy; it is philosophy applied to arts education. Different theoretical framings by each contributor show what they see as productive and critical in the context of the twenty-first century and arts education. Above all, this book consistently works with difference to (un)recognise how we view the world, and sets up arts-based thinking practice that informs art, artists and pedagogy, without embracing what is tired and/or what has gone before.

Gert Biesta, in Chapter Two, reflects on the absurdity of education locked into an endless cycle of measurement and competition. Biesta produces an argument for the arts that avoids the pitfalls of individual expression and creativity. Referring to ‘creativity’, Biesta shows how the arts have been instrumentalised – to ‘only’ be seen as serving some other attributes, be it mathematical skill or other area of learning. Biesta continues by maintaining that the view of art as a place to ‘express yourself’ is a deception, when the reality is an insignificant amount of time offered to subjects in diminishing supply. Bound by rigid assessment procedures, this ‘express yourself’ lobby achieves little for the student. The choice of what the student engages in as art and the quality of that art are taken up by Biesta who asks, how do we ensure quality, and what or who governs such quality? In turning to the subject, Biesta suggests the we becomes in and with the world. This implies an acceptance of living with others, acknowledging our own as well as others’ desire. Likening this existing to a dialogue with the world, Biesta touches on the need for resistance in how we engage with others, where to be grown up, we must accept a ‘middle ground’ in coming to terms with desire. As a corollary, to not undertake this task is characterised as ‘infantile’. This chapter usefully begins our discussion of Art, Artists and Pedagogy in education, confronting two of the most pressing claims that educators face on a daily basis: how to resist the repeated mantras that amount to a fabrication such as ‘creativity and expression’, and the courage necessary for teachers to take a risk, and encourage students to an encounter with the world.

In Chapter Three, ‘Dicing the meat’, David R. Cole undertakes a detailed analysis of several Deleuzian concepts in the context of art taught in school. Taking as a point of reference Portrait of Michel Leiris by Francis Bacon, Cole considers Deleuze’s concept of ‘rhythm’. Rhythm is the ‘dynamic movement’ between space and process, providing for ‘co-constitution’ or the opposite, the potential to disintegrate. Rhythm is not easily quantified or measured; it is something that is felt, in the onlooker and artist. This depiction of rhythm includes the myths and legends that may surround a subject, brought into play in Bacon’s portrait. Cole then employs the concept of the ‘body without organs’ where the sensation of the artwork is felt, a process, Cole suggests, that can form practice in the classroom – looking for the affective in a painting through unconscious feelings. This working with art removes the predictable, to see what may come next. In a reference to Deleuze, Cole suggests that examining a painting such as Bacon’s Michel Leiris is a chance to engage with and not to deny sensation. Finally, Cole produces a number of recommendations for what can be done at this point in schools given the curriculum restraints. These include working with teachers to examine Bacon’s paintings to see what might work in extraordinary ways, with extraordinary objects, in a cross-disciplinary context.

The theme of visual and tactile art forms the basis of Chapter Four by Mary Ann Hunter. Although there might be conventional attitudes to artists working in schools, Hunter carefully observes how the two artists that she selects, Selena De Carvalho and Laura Hindmarsh, work in a quite a different manner, not aiming to bring something to do with the students, but looking to engage with students in the school environment. The presence of the artists and how the artists work with the students holds a fascination for Hunter, who looks at the way that interruption – taking her cue from Biesta – absorbs her in what makes education good, beyond curriculum frameworks. This area of the work process that the artists engage in has received little attention according to Hunter, who follows the artist moving from a teacher, and multi-purpose individual, to one who is in the school being an artist rather than performing a teaching-instructor-training role, allowing for the potentialities of what may arise in the school space, and allowing for change and to be changed by what occurs. In a discussion of the tensions between the valuing of personal knowledge and the school, Hunter cites the pressures of the high stakes testing regime, and the need for a counterbalance in line with an understanding of ‘grown-up-ness’. Countering the terms of achievement, Hunter asks if the curiosity aroused by the artist is the gift that is offered, which makes the interruption matter.

Turning from visual art, Christopher Naughton, in Chapter Five, looks at Deleuze and Guattari’s last book, What Is Philosophy? (1994). Identifying the three areas that form the subject of the book – ‘percepts, affects and concepts’ – Naughton examines the non-human impact in the derivation of the artwork. Percepts are seen as the primordial, the before man, Deleuze and Guattari seeing the materiality of the artist’s engagement with an as yet unclear work. This first process leads the artist to the experience of ‘becoming’ as the material envelops the artist, as in Cezanne’s landscapes or Thomas Hardy in his depiction of the moor in his novels. Affect is the transformation of the initial percept into a form, and here ‘blocs of sensation’ become recognisable. At this point the recognition of affect occurs so that colours, feelings, mood – create affect. An illustration is given that places dance in a context where making is allowed to become, with the material interaction of the dancers. The impact of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in relation to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is examined, where the conditions for making are linked to profound thinking in relation to fixed and non-hierachical states of being. This argument is then worked back to pedagogy and the impact immanence may have on what it is to teach beyond the imposition of curriculum taxonomies.

A pedagogy of improvisation becomes the theme in Chapter Six on jazz improvisation, by David Lines. Citing his own experience in playing jazz, Lines, with reference to the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) by Deleuze and Guattari, discusses the act of improvisation and the sense of not knowing where the improvisation will go. Affirming a form of making that can be seen as an apprenticeship, each player unsettles the taken for granted in responding to each other in the music. Seeing free jazz as a way of life, an embodiment, Lines refers to this as ‘cultural work’, stimulating movement. Alluding to Biesta, Lines sees an act of responsibility played out in free jazz improvisation, where players lose their sense of direct control, or as Lyotard described it, a ‘synchronic’ relation connecting to the music requiring an openness and a ‘grown-up’ approach. As in Biesta, Lines suggests that we be alert to the ‘middle ground’ where resistance is actioned between others. With reference to the origins of jazz, Lines sees the politics in the rhizomatic, nomadic movement away from capitalist enslavement transforming the educational process. It is through art that Lines suggests we may challenge educational theory, exemplifying this through his illustration of musical elements. Lines calls for a re-appraisal of relations in education, an alertness to the political and cultural educational space and the unforeseen, so that a new image of thought may arise to capture transformation as it occurs.

The subject of dance, in Chapter Seven, forms the discussion of art in Nico de Vos’ writing on connectedness and intercorporeity. De Vos writes that it was Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) who first saw the body in relation to a pre-reflective level of consciousness – while the subject remained at the centre. De Vos leads from Merleau-Ponty to Jean Luc Nancy (1940–), in whom he finds meaning only in the gathering of more than the one – where the body becomes singular and plural, touch emphasising the materiality of the dance. De Vos then refers to Jean Francois Lyotard (1924–1998), and how the affective is explored as the observation of the artwork, occurring before thought, having a physiological effect on the reader of the work. The final point from de Vos is to affirm the value of the relationship in contrast to the ‘I’ and ‘we’ of Cartesian thought, to advance that for students, it is vital to learn the value of the inter in relations, the ‘between’ that physical movement in dance can achieve.

In a paper entitled ‘Thinking school curriculum through Country with Deleuze and Whitehead: a process-based synthesis’, David R. Cole and Margaret Somerville, in Chapter Eight, consider the parallels between Deleuze and Alfred Whitehead (1861–1937) in the context of an Australian Aboriginal perspective and the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Philosophy and pedagogy in arts education
• 2 What if?: Art education beyond expression and creativity
• 3 Dicing the meat: Bacon in the middle of an arts-based sandwich
• 4 Artists, presence and the gift of being unteacherly
• 5 The implications of ‘percepts, affects and concepts’ for arts educators
• 6 Jazz departures: Sustaining a pedagogy of improvisation
• 7 Bodily connectedness in motion: A philosophy on intercorporeity and the art of dance in education
• 8 Thinking school curriculum through Country with Deleuze and Whitehead: A process-based synthesis
• 9 From the artist to the cosmic artisan: The educational task for art in anthropogenic times
• 10 Towards ‘grown-up-ness in the world’ through the Arts as critical, quality pedagogy
• 11 Authentic teaching assessment in graduate teacher education: Becomings of pedagogical artistry and leadership
• 12 Beyond belief: Visionary cinema, becoming imperceptible and pedagogical resistance
• 13 Flight from flight: Composing a pedagogy of affect
• 14 Weak subjects: On art’s art of forgetting—an interview with John Baldacchino by Gert BiestaJohn Baldacchino and Gert Biesta
• 15 Walking the museum: Art, artists and pedagogy reconsidered
• Index