Artist-Teacher Practice and the Expectation of an Aesthetic Life

Creative Being in the Neoliberal Classroom

Carol Wild

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032259406
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000607819
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores why and how the personal creative practice of arts teachers in school matters. It responds to ethnographic research that considers specific works-of-art created by teachers within the context of their classrooms.

Through a classroom-based ethnographic investigation, the book proposes that the potential impact of artist-teacher practice in the classroom can only be understood in relation to the flows of power and policy that concurrently shape the classroom. It shows how artist-teacher practice functions as a creative practice of freedom tending to the present and future aesthetic life of the classroom, countering the effects of neoliberal schooling and austerity politics. The book questions what the artist-teacher can produce within that context.

Through the unique focus on artist-teacher practice, the book explores the changing nature of the classroom and the social and political dimensions of the school. It will be key reading for researchers and postgraduate students of arts education, critical pedagogy, teacher identity and aesthetics. It will also be of interest to art and design educators.

Part 1 Classroom ways-of-being

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285755-2

Introduction to Part 1

Where to begin? Deleuze and Guattari warn that there is no real beginning; we are always, already, in the middle of action. Though it might feel desirable to have access to a point of departure outside the ‘action’ from where a clear and uncluttered way forward can be identified, they suggest instead that it is only in the action that potential is found. They state that ‘The middle is …where things pick up speed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 25). Massumi, translator of their book A Thousand Plateaus, explains the difficulty of translating milieu, which in English becomes ‘middle’ but in French is threefold, meaning ‘surroundings’, ‘medium’ and ‘middle’. Massumi cautions that Deleuze and Guattari reference all three (1987, p. xvii). For artists, ‘medium’ is not a point in the middle, but the material used (paint, pencil or clay) and specifically in relation to painting to the substance that carries pigment, giving the paint the ability to flow and bind, whether acrylic, oil, water etc. Pigment requires a medium through and within which it becomes effective. A painting medium acts as a carrier for the pigment, the pigment is within the carrier, surrounded by it, but it does not stay still. Thus, the middle or ‘midst’ may not be a static location from where the field is surveyed but the surroundings in which one begins to feel ‘carried away’, where one finds momentum. This book argues that it is only through understanding artist-teacher practice within the milieu of the classroom that its potential or momentum as a productive force is found. Without the classroom artist-teacher practice as an idea simply peters out, like water-colour pigment on a brush with too little water. Part 1 therefore entangles with the classroom and the ways-of-being it makes possible in order to understand the entangled relations that give artist-teacher practice momentum. As well as drawing on the practice of teachers in this study, published examples of artist-teacher practice are also referred to, to suggest that artist-teacher practice is a way to re-enliven and trouble the instrumentalised movements of habitual classroom relations.

References

• Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Turn 1 Artist-teacher practice, site-responsiveness and the classroom as aesthetic movement

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285755-3

Artist-teacher-practice is a site-responsive way to return to the classroom, providing a way to move differently with and perceive anew its complex affective relations.

In bringing together the objects of artist-teacher practice with the classroom to ask what is revealed and given potential, this turn argues that it is necessary to see both as phenomena in movement, having a rhythm that one must be caught up in and carried along by in order to understand them. The turn has two moves. Move one describes the unique character of the classroom as formed by multiple movements of to and fro. Move two then considers how artist-teacher practice as a form of site-responsive inquiry may be a way to engage with and re-enliven the ‘restlessness’ inherent within the constant to and fro. Theoretical reflection is interspersed with descriptions of the four classrooms that I visited as part of this study.

Move 1: How movement creates the unique character of the classroom

Imagine a classroom.

From field notes at school with Julie and Catrin April 2017:

An art room to die for! One whole wall is floor to ceiling windows, with views across a tree lined street and the city centre beyond. From the car park below I could see three large MDF letters, A R T, leant against the windows for all to see - this is where the art room is! Everything looks new. White walls, white cupboards, white tables facing the front, at an angle, arranged in rows with a central aisle. Students (sitting on black metal stools with grey plastic seats) have a clear view of the white board centrally placed at the front of the room. There’s a desk at the front where Julie sits, completing the register on her laptop and using the visualiser (the projector is fixed to the ceiling) and a white plan chest in the corner behind for paper.

Three stainless steel sinks, all clean, sit within almost spotless white work surfaces, running along two sides of the room. A noticeboard at the back of the room displays homework (making colour wheels) and ‘knowledge organisers’. Above the teacher’s desk, is a kind of washing line, where more work is pegged. The walls are fairly bare though various notices outline classroom behaviour expectations. Behind Julie’s desk are pinned A4 laminated sheets indicating the desired level of noise (‘one at a time’ or ‘silent time’). There is no lesson now. Everywhere is quiet. When students arrive they line up silently outside the room - on the wall you can see the scuff marks that their bodies and belongings are starting to make, as they lean against it whilst waiting. I smell food from the canteen downstairs, a large white atrium, more like a minimalist contemporary art gallery cafe than a school cafeteria (until the students pour out of their classrooms, in their black blazers and white shirts). I hear a hand drier from the toilet across the corridor.

This art room is not a ‘typical’ one, but, arguably, there are no ‘typical’ classrooms, only particular ones. From a sociological perspective, Thomson and Hall caution that when asked to imagine ‘a school’, ‘the chances are we think generally’ (2017, p. 7), but when asked to imagine ‘my school’, the focus is more likely to be on the peculiarities. Thomson describes this particularity as ‘thisness’, ‘… the specificity of place and how it is that local action is framed and limited by the flows of people, information and things, and by connections beyond the school gates’ (2017, p. 21). She conjures a picture of the classroom in movement (students come and go, communities evolve), not simply a noun (a thing) but also a verb (a doing) – a happening in action, created by flows from both inside and outside its boundaries. Classrooms are not static, generic spaces, but unique, affective phenomena, with aesthetic qualities.

From field notes at school with Molly October 2018:

A really cold day, the school feels run down, decorated a while ago and needing refurbishment. The last OFSTED report was not favourable. This does not ‘look’ like a ‘good’ school. The only art room on the first floor, originally twice the size, was divided to make a languages classroom. Language staff use the art room as a cut through, several do so whilst I am there. Windows on opposite sides of the room are so drafty that papier maché sculptures hanging from the ceiling sway in the noticeable breeze. With my coat on I’m cold. Outside are fields and hills in the distance. At the back is a battered work-surface with cupboards underneath. To the side is a row of tables, facing the wall - when older students sit there they appear overgrown, too big for the furniture. A large table in the middle catches my eye as I enter. It’s an enticing ‘feature’- black but worn, its surface flecked with colour. There’s a lot of clutter. Shelving is piled high with used canvases waiting for reuse and old grey plastic drawers (the deep ones) are stacked lower down containing various ‘past their best’ materials. Everything looks worn, and well-used. There is just enough space for a whole class to sit down. Molly has an old wooden desk at the front; on it she keeps a barbie doll in a box dressed as her ‘ideal’ art teacher self, part of an activity from her teacher training. Through a door behind her desk is a separate work area, with facilities for screen printing, and a ‘class’ of fist-sized clay heads arranged on tables and window sills, the sun catches them and they glow a bright terracotta. Here there is a fridge, a kettle, a toaster, a bread bin, a box of biscuits, a jar of jam and an ‘honesty box’; a piece of paper stuck to the wall lists prices. Students come at break times, helping themselves to tea, coffee, toast and biscuits (choc-ices in the summer), staying in the room to work or chat. Judging by the number of students who try the door whilst we are talking this is a popular option. The teacher admits most do not pay.

Movement

Continuing with the notion that a classroom is ‘in movement’, one can ask what has moved and is moving in order to create the differences between this art room and the one previously described. Many ‘movements’ or flows are events that sanction change: funding decisions, admissions policies etc. Other ‘movements’ are modest, the opening of a door or window, putting something out or putting things away, others still occur at a molecular level that we cannot see (Youdell & Armstrong 2011; Frost 2016), materials drying out or decaying, teachers and student bodies modulating temperature, emotions, blood pressure, digestion, hormones etc. Each movement is part of a series of movements, all connected to each other.

These movements generate phenomena, or entangled material agencies’, in Barad’s terms (2003, 2007, 2012, 2014). No thing comes into being independently without entanglement with other things. A classroom might be considered a fixed, pre-formed ‘thing’, determined by the physical boundaries of floor, ceiling, walls, doors and windows, but if viewed in movement as a phenomenon, it becomes a complex milieu where a myriad of material and non-materialities intersect (Youdell and Armstrong 2011).

Thompson and Cook describe the classroom as ‘less a static location’ (2014, p. 286) than a moment of interaction formed as close-by and far-away flows and intensities intersect. Classrooms are alive with close-by sensation, noise, smell, temperature and light, but are also propelled by distant, spatial and temporal flows: exam regulations, inspection frameworks, accountability measures, funding decisions and political trends. Thompson and Cook present a paradox: perpetual movement ensures that the classroom is continually remade anew, with different combinations of teacher, students, curriculum, policy, life events etc. so that every day is different, and yet, there is a predictable repetition of the same as lessons return time and again to familiar patterns of movement, day after day, term after term, year after year. Adopting from Deleuze and Guattari the idea of metallurgic return, a repetition of the same movement, they present teaching as an ongoing oscillation between returning possibilities. Offering a number of oscillations that hold in tension the close-by and the far-away, they suggest that ‘the working to and fro between the oscillations of closeness and distance places teaching in constant flux’ (2014, p. 287).

This flux is seen in the following description: a coastal school tarnished by far-away, out-of-reach standards, political and economic realities that have moved to frame the school as ‘requiring improvement’. These contrast with Bella’s close-by interaction, the overwhelming superfluousness of resources she crams into every space, keeping all kinds of materials ‘just in case’ a particular student might develop work for which only that material might do.

From field notes at school with Bella November 2018:

An early academy, one of the first ‘Building Schools for the Future’ builds, a huge contemporary building looming over the white cottages of the seaside town. Artist Elena, teacher Bella and I enter through the lobby where 3D art displays are positioned on high up ledges (now out of reach for anyone to change - the school has no scaffold tower high enough for working safely at that height). It is Saturday, the building is eerily quiet. We use the lift. The building is painted grey and green. It’s sunny, but I wonder how the greyness feels on a really grey day. We walk along endless wide corridors before reaching the art room. First impressions: the room is large but (Bella did warn me) crammed with stuff. The architecture is industrial, walls of breeze blocks, exposed pipes and steel girders. Windows, set high up, run along one whole wall, overlooking a parallel corridor where the staff room and another classroom are - above that a slither of sky. There is no view unless you stand against the windows and look right. Under the windows is a work surface crammed with bags of materials and students’ work in progress. At the front is a whiteboard (projector on ceiling) ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Imagining new orientations for researching artist-teacher practice in neoliberal spaces through the inspiration of new materialisms and new pragmatisms
• Part 1 Classroom ways-of-being
• Part 2 Being less-than
• Part 3 Bourdieu and the arts Becoming more than…
• Conclusion: Sharing responsibility for a life lived aesthetically with art and design education
• Index