The Art and Craft of Pedagogy: Portraits of Effective Teachers 9781472553263, 9781847062901

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My wife Anastasia and my boy Alexi continue to make it all worthwhile.

Preface

Charles R. Garoian

Professor of Art Education, School of Visual Arts, Penn State University

Art as Pedagogy as Art Several years ago, when I first started teaching high school art, I met an art teacher at a party hosted by a local art gallery, who taught at another high school in town. After we introduced ourselves, and exchanged pleasantries, our conversation eventually drifted towards what we had in common, namely, our practice as artists and teachers. She asked about my teaching and how it was going; so, for the next several minutes while I carried on, she listened attentively but did not say much. I spoke enthusiastically about my new experiences teaching art; about interactions with my students, and the artworks that they were creating; about our compelling conversations during class time together; about art, about life and about art  life; mutual discussions that captivated and resonated with my studio practice before and after the school day had ended. I went on to describe the visual and conceptual associations that we were making between historical and contemporary works of art; critical connections with images in the media; correspondences with knowledge learned from other disciplines in school; and experiences from our personal lives. During those days, I recall my students and I invoking conceptual artist Walter de Maria’s (2009, [online]) contemplation, ‘I think both art and life are a matter of life and death’, thus suggesting the possibility that life is continuously affirmed through art; that experiencing art, its movements, affects and sensations, confirms our aliveness; that art enables an exploration and expression of who we are, where we come from and where we are going; and that where our private, personal memories and cultural histories intersect with those public memories and histories learned in school, there exists significant possibilities for

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creative and political agency through art. Looking back, perhaps I was being too naïve, too idealistic about teaching. In my zealousness to share my experiences with another art teacher, I may have overwhelmed my colleague whom I assumed was like-minded. Given that she was an artist and teacher, I thought that she felt the same way when I described my experience of the art classroom as a generative space within the school and the culture at large, where my students’ creative and intellectual emergence, and their becoming critical citizens, was possible through art research and practice. I assumed that she, too, had had similar experiences teaching students, and students teaching her, where the pedagogy of art and the art of pedagogy interconnected and opened multiple possibilities for seeing and understanding. My enthusiasm notwithstanding, as I continued to speak I became intensely aware that my colleague did not feel the same way that I did about teaching art. Indeed, she seemed dis­ connected from the excitement I was attempting to share and the dialogue that I had hoped to engage with her. Considering that she was an experienced art teacher, I unfairly assumed that we shared a common bond in believing that both teaching and art making are creatively constituted and thereby interconnected. As I quieted down and brought my chatter to a pause, I sensed tiredness and lethargy in my colleague’s body language. When I asked about her teaching experiences, her comments seemed restrained, indifferent and disenchanted. Having already taught for a number of years, she muttered about mounting frustrations given that teaching was taking time away from her studio practice as an artist. She described teaching as a ‘necessary evil to help subsidize her studio practice and to pay the bills’. She further explained that it was sucking her dry of inspiration; that after an entire day talking about art with students, she had nothing left for her own creative work. It was clearly evident that she had bifurcated and compartmentalized those two parts of her life to such a degree that the antipathy, which she felt towards teaching, was so powerful that it had invaded and faded her love and inspiration for making art. My surprise over my colleague’s tepid response on that day tempered my enthusiasm and marked my memory. The disappointments that she shared left a lasting impression on me. I can still recall the dichotomous trap that she described, her confinement between teaching and art making, and the claustrophobic hold from which she eventually escaped by quitting both practices. Her expressions of discontent continued to haunt me during the ensuing weeks and months after that party. Notwithstanding the pleasure



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that I found in how my teaching and art making experiences were interconnecting, I became concerned that I, too, might fall victim to such disillusionment. To resist such an inclination, I leaped into that lethal zone to preoccupy myself; that chaotic, indeterminate space between teaching and art making; to linger on their juxtapositions and to experience the relationship of one through the other; a lingering that philosopher John Dewey (1938) characterizes as ‘procuring the postponement of immediate action’ to resist the drive of desire towards impulsive judgements that can impede a multitude of creative associations and understandings (pp. 64, 69). If, for no other reason than my own survival, it was within that charged space of delay where I explored, experimented and improvized a more extensive and expansive set of possible associations between teaching and art making; an immanent, virtual space that philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) refer to as a ‘plane of consistency [that] cuts across... [multiple dimensions and], intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions’ (p. 251). That plane of consistency is where teaching, art making and other seemingly disparate and dissimilar experiences and understandings in life can possibly intersect and enable multiplicities of seeing and knowing that are yet unseen and unknown; that transformative space of susceptibility between art making and art teaching where our becoming other is interminably possible. If ‘art is the opening of the universe to becoming-other’ as Elizabeth Grosz (2008, p. 23) suggests, then teaching and art making, and teachers and learners, are part of that interconnected universe. In The Art and Craft of Pedagogy, artist and educator Richard Hickman has compiled compelling narratives of art teachers who understand susceptibility and openness as pedagogical imperatives from which the otherness of their students can materialize through art research and practice. Teaching, learning and art making are associative and relational processes in these teachers’ classrooms. Their curiosity, creativity and passion for art making and art teaching is contagious and coextensive with the curiosity, creativity and passion for learning that they inspire in their students. Indeed, while knowledge transmission and acquisition represent important educational objectives, the art teachers in this volume risk everything they know and understand about art and teaching by postponing, if not relinquishing their intellectual control over their students. In doing so, they and their students are learning as if for the first time, unencumbered by pre-existing knowledge. According to philosopher Jacques Ranciere (1991), such purposeful delay and relinquishment of academic assumptions positions teachers as ‘ignorant schoolmasters’.

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By leaving their ‘intelligence out of the picture’, they assume a position of not knowing in order to allow their students’ creative and intellectual agency to emerge through exploratory, experimental and improvisational learning processes (pp. 13–14). In doing so, the curri­culum begins with the personal knowledge and experiences that students bring to the classroom, which spirals organically, as Dewey has described (1938, p. 79), to interconnect with the personal experiences and academic knowledge of the teacher. The spiralling, relational process that occurs as teachers and students teach and learn from each other corresponds with the embodied ways in which artists engage and interact with materials, and with their audiences through their art works. Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) writes accordingly: ‘Art practice resides in the invention of relations between consciousness. Each particular artwork is a proposal to live a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum’ (p. 22). Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics resonates with the research and creative accomplishments of the art teachers featured in this volume; namely, that their art and craft of teaching represents ‘a proposal to live a shared world’ and that they and their students constitute ‘bundle[s] of relations with the world’ that give rise to a multitude of relations between and among them and others, again and again....

References Bourriaud, N. (2002), Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du réel. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. B. Massumi (Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. De Maria, W. (July 9, 2009), Minimal exposition [online]. Available:   http:// minimalexposition.blogspot.com/2009/09/walter-de-maria-life-and- death.html Dewey, J. (1938), Experience and Education. New York: Touchstone. Grosz, E. (2008), Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University. Ranciere, J. (1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. K. Ross (Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University.

Acknowledgements

The following people can be considered to be co-authors; this book could not have been produced without them: Tyler Denmead Nikki Goldup Mirko Junkovic Richard Keys Vasavi Koka Issam Kourbaj Patson Ncube Sian Quested Keith Winser I made a decision early on in this enterprise to include the life stories of the above in full. This meant that I eschewed a lot of material in order to accommodate their words within the contracted word length of the book. I hope that I included the important bits and that the discarded material was the result of a judicious pruning exercise. I would also like to thank Naila Din, Donna Clovis and Denis Smith, who each made extremely useful contributions. Professor Robin Alexander gave some insightful comments on an earlier draft, as did Dr John Steers; I am also grateful to Professor Maurice Galton, who assiduously reviewed the manuscript and gave invaluable advice. Dr Kristen Ali Eglinton gave an enormous amount of support with her insightful and informed comments and her meticulous analysis of the material. One observation she made was the ‘Englishness’ of much of the text; this is to be expected and I have tried to make my commentary understandable to an international audience. I have produced a small online publication (CHEAT: the Cambridge Handbook of Educational Abbreviations and Terms), which should help readers navigate through the more arcane educational acronyms and abbreviations; it can be accessed at: www.educ.cam. ac.uk/people/staff/hickman/CHEAT_R_Hickman_3rdEd_March2010.pdf

Introduction

Rationale This book examines the notion that successful teachers of art & design1 are among the best teachers of any subject and that they have much to offer outside their discipline in terms of pedagogy. Of course, this opening sentence itself needs to be examined carefully – what is meant, for example, by ‘successful’, ‘best’ and indeed ‘pedagogy’? Not surprisingly perhaps, I will avoid dealing fully with ‘what is art?’, but I will answer the other questions in terms of what I mean in the context of this book. The people who have contributed to this book can each be seen as ‘successful’, but in different ways; I am using the term ‘successful’ to indicate several things, but all are concerned with achieving external recognition within their field. My focus is on adolescent learning, but much of what I have considered is applicable to all ages and phases of education. I developed the notion that the practices of successful art teachers might serve as a model for others over a period of years through considering material from different sources; in the first instance, from my own observations in different contexts. Naturally, others in the field have also advocated that teachers adopt an ‘artistic’ approach – Parks (1992), for example, asserts: Artistic teaching emphasizes the individuality of the teacher, while deemphasising programmed formulas for instruction. It stresses quality and growth, rather than accepted notions about what works. It places emphasis on content and thinking, rather than technique and management. (Parks 1992, p. 57) I first had the opportunity to observe teaching in subjects other than art when employed as an education lecturer after some years as a specialist teacher. But it was when I was part of government inspection teams, charged with making clear and unambiguous judgements on teaching quality, that I realized that many art teachers were operating on a different level. My observations were validated to some extent by the publication of the UK

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Government’s Chief Inspector’s report of February 2005, which noted that art and design ranks as the best taught national curriculum subject overall in secondary schools: ‘The proportion of very good and excellent art teaching is higher than any other subject’, adding pointedly that ‘however, the innovation and experimentation that characterizes these lessons are often absent elsewhere’ (Bell 2005, p. 2). The inspection report highlights a number of things that contribute to the quality of teaching, including the use of display to exemplify high expectations, frequency of demonstration to reveal how media could be used and annotated drawings to explain how work could be improved; all of which are clearly recognizable as being characteristic of art lessons, but could just as easily be features of other subject areas. In addition to the deductions arising from my own experiences, I found that other commentators had observed that art teachers figured prominently in educational discourse, particularly with reference to innovative and individualized teaching. For example, Tom Barone, in his book Touching Eternity: The Enduring Outcomes of Teaching (2001), examined some basic issues concerning education by way of a qualitative study of a high school art teacher and the impact of his teaching on students. The ‘enduring outcomes of teaching’ resulted from providing students with the opportunity to gain self-esteem through their art making and by encouraging students to express themselves in their art work, in a learning environment characterized by mutual respect where individuals are valued. A more recent study by Catterall (2009) describes a 12-year project involving more than 12,000 American students who were tracked into early adulthood. The longitudinal nature of the study and the large number of subjects add weight to his findings, which suggest a strong connection between engagement in the arts (in schools) and their positive effect on academic performance and enhanced social values years later. However, Catterall, while considering at length the question of whether it is the actual subject that makes the difference, does not appear to look in any detail at the nature of the pedagogy employed by the art(s) teachers concerned. Alexander (2008), on the other hand, does examine the pedagogy of an influential teacher, in his semi-autobiographical chapter entitled ‘Words and Music’. He reflects on the enduring nature of his learning experiences from secondary school, and examines the pedagogical skills of an inspiring teacher, Douglas Brown, who, although principally a teacher of literature, displayed the ‘artistry of teaching’ and introduced the young Robin Alexander to a ‘vast’ range of music that had a profound and lasting effect on his life.



Introduction

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Jonathan Jones, in a newspaper article (Jones, 2008) that asked ‘Are the arts taught well in the classroom?’, reported on a visit back to his old school, and observed that ‘every stage of art education combines a practical and intellectual approach’. Of particular note are his comments on the quality of the actual teaching: ‘I’m struck by the high quality of the teaching I have seen [...] the way art is taught here seems liberating and inspiring’ (p. 24). These comments from someone outside education – in effect a layperson – are interesting in that Jones seems surprised that a traditionally margina­ lized subject area is, at least from his observations, taught so well. Elliot Eisner, lauded as one of the Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education (Palmer 2009) has eloquently and consistently put forward the view that the arts, and by implication, the practices of art teachers, can make a significant contribution to advances in pedagogical practice. In The Arts and the Creation of Mind (Eisner 2002), he argues that the arts are not just important within the context of the general curriculum, but that the curriculum as a whole can be enriched and can gain something from the way that art practice is taught and learnt. He builds on his argument and some of these assertions in his 2002 John Dewey address at Stanford University: ‘What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?’ (later published as Eisner 2004). In this paper, Eisner put forward six areas paraphrased as follows: 1. Involvement in the arts necessitates developing the ability to compose meaningful qualitative relationships between forms; there are few rules or formulae, thus people need to make judgements that are not governed by them. The arts teach us to pay attention to subtleties and detail; learning to pay attention through engaging in activities that refine perception. 2. Education can learn from the arts with regard to the formulation of aims. Artistic activities often result in phenomena that are not predetermined; solutions emerge from the process of engaging. Eisner refers to John Dewey’s notion of ‘flexible purposing’ (Dewey 1938); the kind of thinking that this requires arises most easily from an environment where uncertainty is cherished. 3. The arts can teach education that form and content are often inextricable. The arts are concerned with the creation and expression of satisfying relationships; how we teach is bound up with what we teach. 4. Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s well-known phrase, ‘we know more than we can tell’ (Polanyi 1967), Eisner points out that not everything knowable can be articulated in propositional form. The arts have a central

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part to play in education in dealing with the ineffable, and tacit knowledge has an important part to play in developing understanding of oneself and the world. 5. When engaging in arts activities, we are involved with the relationship between thinking and the material with which we work. Education as a whole can benefit from adopting this mode of working, where one thinks through the medium – the wider the variety of media, the greater the learning across domains. 6. In the arts, motivation often arises from the aesthetic satisfactions that the work itself makes possible. The kinds of activities pursued in the arts and the manner in which they are taught can serve as a model for education by ensuring that young people develop an appetite for learning and a lifelong desire to pursue such learning voluntarily and with enthusiasm. These six areas refer, in the main, to properties of the subject area – the domain of the arts. In summary, Eisner notes that students learn how to make valid judgements about qualitative relationships through art activities, thinking through and interacting creatively with a range of materials and media; creative thinking is facilitated through the realization that problems can have more than one solution. He highlights the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know; in this way, he is drawing attention to the importance of intuition, tacit knowledge and communicating the ineffable: learning how to say what cannot be said. The central point, however, is that what is common practice in the arts is not necessarily confined to the arts and such practice has much to offer in terms of strategies for teaching and learning across the curriculum and through our education. Eisner closes his argument with a rhetorical flourish, worth repeating in full: At the risk of propagating dualisms, but in the service of emphasis, I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached. (Eisner 2004, p. 10)



Introduction

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There is much of value that needs to be said and repeated here; I am, however, optimistic and feel that future commentators will view the schools of the early twenty-first century in much the same way as we see schools of the early twentieth century: rather grim, overly hierarchical and intellectually arid. In other words, I am hopeful that many of the principles and practices that we currently see in the arts in education are more widely adopted. Eisner has often emphasized the particularity of the visual arts – painting, drawing, printing, sculpting, video, etc. – but here he acknowledges the commonalities that bond different arts disciplines. There is a growing body of opinion and research that sees pedagogy associated with ‘the arts’ as being capable of offering something distinctive and of value to other areas. This is particularly so with regard to other ‘caring professions’, such as nursing and health sciences. Smith et al. (2004), for example, state that the need to attend to the full range of human experiences is afforded by teaching modalities commonly found in the arts, asserting that a ‘lens of caring requires nurses to use personal, empirical, ethical and aesthetic ways of knowing’ (p. 279) and that ‘Educators have a responsibility to teach in a way that honors the multiple ways of knowing that nurses bring to their caring practice’ (ibid.). Smith et al. (2004) refer also to the value of art in creating an empathetic environment; they cite Wikstroem (2001a, 2001b), who has used art to complement theoretical knowledge of nursing care through, in particular, using ‘art to create a safe environment for the discovery of personal knowing and empathy’.

Format, Structure and Style In considering the form that this book should take, I fondly imagined that I would do something innovative by including verbatim the personal narratives of my respondents in full; I wanted the unexpurgated data to form the bulk of the text and give readers the opportunity to respond to, analyse and critique the material. The notion of this as an innovation was, of course, quickly found to be an illusion, and my somewhat pretentious exhortation that I occasionally give to research students – to read Ecclesiastes – came back to disabuse me: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (Eccl. 1.9)

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The positive aspect of the growing awareness that my approach in this book is neither avant-garde nor ‘leading edge’ is that reporting personal narratives and letting respondents speak for themselves, in this spirit of participatory inquiry has been tried and tested by superior authors. I refer, in particular, to Carlos Alberto Torres’ 1998 book, Education, Power and Personal Biography: Dialogues with Critical Educators (Torres, 1998). In this work, Torres reports, apparently in full, dialogues with eleven influential educators, including, e.g. Maxine Greene, Henry Giroux and Paulo Freire. Torres allows his respondents to speak, giving them time and space to amplify and augment points made without intervention and with little critical comment. Another feature of Torres’ book is the implicit importance assigned to personal life histories, recognising that personal biography can play a significant part in shaping, forming and informing approaches to teaching and learning. Witherell and Noddings (1991) edited (and contributed chapters to) Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education, a book that explores the use of narrative – the telling and hearing of stories – in educational settings. What is relevant here is their belief that telling our own stories can be ‘cathartic and liberating’ (p. 280). I believe that the educators who gave themselves over to the present enterprise did so not only as a genuinely altruistic act to help explore approaches to teaching and learning, but also as a way of exploring, reflecting on and coming to terms with the relationship between life and work, between one’s experiences (as an artist for example) and one’s teaching.

Art and The Curriculum In the UK, Harland et al. (2000) conducted a wide-ranging research project, culminating in Arts Education in Secondary Schools: Effects and Effectiveness. They found that ‘all the lessons identified as demonstrating “effective practice” were taught by specialist [arts] teachers with high levels of personal involvement, passion and commitment to the artform’ (p. 568). This was especially the case when teachers used their own artistic expertise to model possible outcomes. It was also found that the display and celebration of work produced and the constructive criticism associated with it characterized many successful arts lessons. Harland et al. (2000) refer to the ‘highly supportive and affirming classroom environment in which pupils felt encouraged and safe to take creative risks’ (p. 570); these learning environments were generated by teachers who created ‘a climate for learning based on unconditional positive regard’ (ibid.). Arising from these findings, they



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make a fundamental point that ‘the traditional apprenticeship model of learning from an arts practitioner [...] was a significant and particular strength of arts teaching’ (ibid.). However, despite conducting such a wide ranging and comprehensive research project and generating significant amounts of data based on empirical evidence, the conclusions of Harland et al. (2000) with regard to broad policy implications for schools are dis­ appointingly narrow. For example, their first suggestion arising from their findings is as follows: for the full canon of effects from arts education to be available to pupils all of the artforms need to be provided in the school curriculum. (Harland et al. 2000, p. 571) They go on to list a number of policy implications that focus entirely on the provision of arts subjects rather than suggesting ways in which other subject areas can learn from successful art teaching. There is no reason why mathematics teachers, for example, could not adopt an ‘apprenticeship model’ or create ‘a climate for learning based on unconditional positive regard’ or any of the other positive attributes that were found to characterize effective art teaching. It should be noted that I am using ‘art’ rather than ‘arts’ here, not simply because it is the principal focus of this book, but because Harland et al. (2000) asserted from their findings that ‘overall, art was the strongest and most robust of the artforms’ (p. 567). While the UK project led by Harland focused on the work of arts teachers, in the USA, the work of Hetland et al. (2007) looked at ‘generalist’ teachers’ use of strategies derived from art teaching. Hetland et  al. (2007) documented how fifteen elementary and middle school generalist teachers in disadvantaged public schools (in Oakland, USA) learned to use what they termed the ‘Studio Thinking Framework’, in conjunction with the ‘Teaching for Understanding Framework’ and other teaching frameworks developed at Harvard Project Zero.2 Their research, however, appears to have been limited to teachers using these strategies, derived from the arts for arts teaching, rather than for teaching, learning and assessment across the curriculum. Their ‘Studio Thinking Framework’ identified ‘Eight Habits of Mind’ that art activities facilitated among learners.3 These ‘habits of mind’ need to be seen within the broader context of the studio environment; more importantly, however, one needs to understand how these ways of teaching and learning can be utilized across curriculum boundaries. Hetland et al. (2007) also identified what they termed three ‘studio structures’ that revolved around the nature of the tasks set, the nature of the formal teaching itself

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and the nature of the feedback given. Most teachers would recognize this structure to a lesson, with teacher demonstration, student activity and evaluation of work done, but the importance is in the subtleties of pace and focus. Hetland et al. draw attention to the effectiveness of small group and individualized teaching and the frequent use of visual exemplars. Of significance is the implicit value of economy of teacher talk: teachers talk ‘briefly’ to the whole class; information is ‘conveyed quickly and efficiently’ and is ‘immediately useful’ and there is a clear focus on critiquing students’ work (both in progress and completed). While demonstrations are flagged up as a central pedagogical tool, they are said to be most effective when they are paced to allow time for observation, reflection and discussion. Another key feature of studio-based teaching, according to Hetland et al. (2007), is the active use of ‘display’ – not simply semi-permanent (and therefore taken for granted) exhibitions of things of general interest, but temporary, informal and exciting displays that are relevant to the tasks in hand. So, there appears to be a body of knowledge and experience that indicates that pedagogical practice in the arts is in some ways special and has something important and useful to offer teaching, learning, curriculum development and the ethos of schools in general. There is often an overlap between the pedagogical characteristics of ‘art’ and ‘the arts’; I will focus on what is currently conceived of as visual fine art practice, which covers most of the activities traditionally associated with the arts in general. I have outlined some of the main arguments that have been put forward to support the notion that not only art as a subject or activity has something to offer education as a whole, but that art teachers, through their day-to-day practice, often appear to have something special to offer the pedagogical community (I use this rather cumbersome phrase to make clear that I am referring to all those involved with teaching and learning, not simply the teacher in the school classroom). The mission I set myself was to identify what it is that ‘successful’ art teachers do that is singular or special in some way. To find a way into answering this, I thought it necessary to focus on the lives of individual art teachers and find out what had shaped their practice as teachers.

About Pedagogy Robin Alexander’s succinct definition as ‘the act of teaching together with its attendant discourse’ (Alexander 2004, p. 11) is a useful one. The ‘attendant discourse’ consists of the ideas, values and the collective histories surrounding the act of teaching. This echoes an earlier description provided



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by Lusted (1986): ‘the transformation of the consciousness that takes place in the intersection of three agencies – the teacher, the learner, and the knowledge they produce out of the interactions’ (p. 3). Some commentators (e.g. Shulman 1986) appear to have a rather narrow conception of pedagogical knowledge, apparently conceptualizing pedagogy as knowing how to transmit disciplinary knowledge in a way that can be acquired by the learner. Alexander, however, challenges such a view of pedagogy as narrow, being concerned primarily with the actual act of teaching. In conflating the discourse surrounding pedagogy with procedural aspects, he places the latter within a broader sociocultural context. Basil Bernstein has made a huge contribution to theory surrounding curriculum and I touch on just one aspect here. Bernstein (1996) distinguishes modes of pedagogy on the basis of curriculum, transmission and evaluation. Curriculum refers to how knowledge is structured and what indeed counts as knowledge, while transmission refers to how learning takes place, e.g. how knowledge is transmitted from a teacher to a student. Evaluation can often be seen as an area where power relations are played out in their most poignant form: how the extent of learning that may have taken place is established, and by whom, by what/whose criteria and what counts as legitimate learning. Alexander (2004) argues that teachers engage with three areas, each with nested domains, the first consists of four domains (children, learning, teaching and curriculum); these four ‘enable’ teaching, while a second area, school and policy, ‘formalize and legitimate’ it. It is the last area, however, that Alexander identifies as consisting of culture, self and history, that is the central concern of this book, locating teaching, in time, place and the social world, and anchor it firmly to the questions of human identity and social purpose without which teaching makes little sense. They mark the transition from teaching to education. (Alexander 2004, pp. 11–12) Alexander (2004) elaborates briefly on these three domains in the following way: zzculture: the web of values, ideas, institutions and processes which inform,

shape and explain a society’s views of education, teaching and learning, and which throw up a complex burden of choices and dilemmas for those whose job it is to translate these into a practical pedagogy; zzself: what it is to be a person, an individual relating to others and to the wider society, and how through education and other early experiences selfhood is acquired;

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12 zzhistory:

the indispensable tool for making sense of both education’s present state and its future possibilities and potential. (Alexander 2004, p. 12)

Particularly pertinent for the central issue in this book is the domain of the self and its relation to a dynamic culture and to (personal and constructed) history. Therefore, I have focused on the biographies of a group of teachers, looking at the ways that their life histories might have informed their pedagogy. Attempting to define what is meant by a ‘good teacher’ or the ‘best teacher’ is fraught with philosophical problems and, in particular, social and political prejudices. For the purpose of this book, I define ‘teacher’ as anyone who is involved with facilitating the learning of others in terms of understanding, knowledge and skills in a specific domain of human achievement. A ‘good teacher’ is therefore someone who does this well; how we measure this is another issue, but it is not about examination pass rates, but rather the extent to which learners are enabled and empowered through the subject being taught. Of course, teaching cannot be considered separately from learning; a considerable amount of research has been undertaken to identify characteristics of effective teaching and learning and the factors that make them so. The now defunct General Teaching Council for England (GTC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) worked together on a significant project known as TLRP – the Teaching and Learning Research Programme – and identified ten principles that underpin effective teaching and learning (see Appendix). I would suggest that most, if not all, of these principles identified are commonly found among teachers of art; the more obvious ones include promoting ‘the active engagement of learners’, fostering ‘both individual and social processes and outcomes’ and recognizing ‘the significance of informal learning’. As a note of caution however, we need to ensure that ‘effectiveness’ is not conflated with ‘efficiency’; it is perhaps worth drawing attention to Eisner (2002), who commented on the use of the term ‘efficiency’ in this context: efficiency is largely a virtue for the tasks we don’t like to do; few of us like to eat a great meal efficiently, or to participate in a wonderful conversation efficiently, or indeed to make love efficiently. What we enjoy the most, we linger over. A school system designed with an overriding commitment to efficiency may produce outcomes that have little enduring quality. (Eisner 2002, p. xiii)



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This echoes Eisner’s (1985) earlier concerns about the ‘assembly line’ metaphor of schooling, when he comments that ‘such an image of education requires that schools be organized to prescribe, control, and predict the consequences of their actions, that those consequences be immediate and empirically manifest and that they be measurable’ (pp. 356–7).

Teachers’ Identities In each of my own professional art educational identities (classroom art teacher, art inspector, art education lecturer, art examiner, programme reviewer, etc.), I have been asked, on several occasions, variations on the question ‘do you do your own work?’. In response, trying to avoid saying ‘this is my work’, I usually reply yes, I try to exhibit regularly; the conversation then usually turns on how to find the time and the importance of getting up early, but the nub of the issue is concerned with one’s sense of self. Art teachers, in my experience, invariably refer to their work as what they do in terms of producing art, not what they do in the classroom. This might well be to do with what is perceived as higher status or more fashionable (I suspect that it is deemed more ‘cool’ to be an artist, with its enduring associations with rebellion and innovation than to be a school teacher with its enduring associations with conservatism and authority), but it might also be a genuine sense of identity that arises from a passion for an activity that has the potential to change lives and offer revelation. It could be the case that science teachers refer to their ‘work’ as the things they do in their personal laboratories in lofts and sheds rather than their teaching; I suspect that this is not the case to the same extent as it is with art teachers; there is, however, little in the way of empirical evidence to support either assertion. Milbrandt (2000) worked with 100 volunteer participants in researching the identity and practice of art educators. He found that over half (52 per cent) ascribed the highest value in terms of their identity as that associated with being an educator or art educator, as against 11 per cent rating educator/ artist as being the most desirable description, falling to 3 per cent seeing themselves primarily as ‘exhibiting visual artists’. Milbrandt suggested that in the light of his findings, the rankings suggest a ‘disconnection between the personal/professional values of art educators and their perceptions of the institution in which they work’ (p. 349). While most of Milbrandt’s respondents viewed themselves as teachers first (rather than artists), this might well be down to the nature of the cohort, in that they were volunteers in an educational research project and would therefore probably be

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positively predisposed towards education. Nevertheless, Milbrandt noted that ‘more research is needed regarding the professional daily life and identity of art educators’ (p. 355). Other commentators, such as Garoian (1999) have highlighted the importance of performance as a pedagogical tool. In advocating the use of performance art, Garoian asks ‘What would happen if school curricula, like the productions of performance art, consisted of playful, performative contradictions?’. Like others, he ‘was caught between making art and teaching it’. In refusing to believe that ‘knowledge and cultural production were limited to academic endeavors disconnected from personal memory and history’, he makes a case for treating teaching as an art form, asserting that art is a form of teaching. He resolved the tension between making and teaching by bringing his ‘art making inquiries to the classroom’ where he ‘could straddle between the art of pedagogy and the pedagogy of art’ (pp. 22–3). Garoian (1999) reports taking full advantage of the more liberal atmosphere of the art classroom: What I was after was a classroom experience where ideas and images, historical and contemporary, private and public could be openly problematized, interrogated, and expressed without the threat of absolute, universal, or reductive limitations. The art classroom seemed the most sensible place for such discourse since there was nothing to lose. (Garoian 1999, p. 202) Identity, of course, is a very complex issue and is dependent on many factors; although obvious, it is also important to note that people have many identities, each informing and interacting with the other personal identities. Factors such as place, gender and ethnicity play a major part, but so do personal histories, relationships and cultural phenomena. One might assume that one’s identity as a teacher is formed primarily by one’s training and education, but this would be simplistic. In looking at art teachers’ lives, I am looking at the whole range of influences that might have had some impact on their pedagogical style.

The Approach Taken – Method and Methodology The questions that led me to reporting the life histories contained in this book are as follows: What are the characteristics of successful art teaching? How do individual life experiences inform art teachers’ teaching? How, in turn, might others benefit from their pedagogical practices?



Introduction

15

These questions give rise to the need to consider the kinds of methods one might employ to gain information that could lead to answers. It seems natural to art educators to use qualitative enquiry, but it was not always so; anyone perusing, for example, the pages of Studies in Art Education over the decades will see an ever-increasing confidence in using qualitative methods, coupled with a reduction in the number of quantitative research reports included for publication. In education, we are dealing in the main with human relationships, which are complex, multifaceted, ephemeral and perhaps even ethereal – certainly not conducive to being analysed in any meaningful way through quantitative procedures. Many naturalistic researchers do what they do and know best, and those involved with the arts often employ methods, practices and standards associated with arts evaluation where, controversially perhaps, veracity and sincerity might replace rigour, singularity replaces generalizability and expression replaces analysis. For the purposes of this introduction, I will outline here the overall approach taken. I wanted to make use of new technologies as appropriate and felt that, until recently, electronic mail was a relatively under-used form of communication in educational research. From a practical point of view, it offers speed and ease of communication; I could contact many potential respondents regardless of distance and get (almost) immediate feedback. Nevertheless, I wanted to be able to talk to any potential respondents, and see them teach, so it was important to keep the geographical limitations quite narrow. This meant that, in the first instance, I contacted twelve art teachers working within about 100 miles of Cambridge, UK. I outlined my project and all were eager to contribute; this was not surprising as those whom I contacted were selected because of a combination of their professional success, approachability, dynamism and they were known to me personally. They did, however, have many things in common, and, as shall be seen, manifested many general characteristics of successful teachers. For similar reasons, the attrition rate was low: of the original twelve, only three dropped out. Those who dropped out did so for differing reasons; one preferred to defer her contribution until a later time (to allow more time for reflection), another experienced a combination of potentially stressful life events and a third contributed quite heavily but, as noted, withdrew because of the ‘rawness’ of her autobiographical narrative and the nature of the personal revelations that it contained. After the initial approach, I asked each to note down and send to me, via email, an account of their life, with reference to major influences in terms of art and education and their relationship with teaching. I gave, within the constraints of the medium, complete freedom in terms of style and content.

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Some approached it as an academic exercise, others as a kind of reflective journal and others as a straightforward piece of reportage. In most cases, the accounts were added to and modified over a period of about a year and I checked with each author that they were satisfied with the final contribution before analysing the biographies together in order to find commonalities. I made the initial decision, and informed the respondents at an early point in the project, to include each life history in full in the main text. This was in the spirit of allowing readers to make their own connections and indeed challenge the analyses and commentaries that I made. In addition to the nine life histories (which I can also call portraits), I include my own (which I term a self-portrait); this contribution is dealt with slightly differently as there are different dynamics at work. So, while in addition to the initial discussion with each of the contributors, I visited them in their place of work to observe them in action, as creative practitioners and as teachers, I triangulated my ‘self-portrait’ with reference to documents and discussions with people who have known me and my work over a long period of time. I discuss the nature of portraiture, autoethnography, autobiography and other related research methods in a later section. Thus far, I have talked mainly about method, but turn now to methodology, which, as the term itself implies, is concerned with the study of the method, in other words, the theoretical basis and assumptions that underpin the approaches used. It is clear that I am using naturalistic methodology, which is qualitative rather than quantitative; the assumptions that I make are therefore based on certain notions. Lincoln and Guba (1985) identified these notions as being associated with ontology, epistemology and axiology and contrasted the assumptions made between positivists and naturalists. In black and white terms, taking the extreme ends of what is essentially a continuum, the first of these (ontology) is concerned with the nature of reality: while a positivist approach would entail believing that there is a single reality, a naturalistic approach is based on a belief in socially constructed subjective realities. In terms of theory of knowledge (epistemology), in view of the positivists’ ontological perspective, the knower and the known are each independent of the other, while naturalists believe the two to be inseparable. Axiological concerns, i.e. the role of values, are another area of friction, with naturalists believing that all research is value-laden, while the positivists’ stance is that research can be value-free. The ‘generalizability’ of research is often an issue and in this area too, there is the positivist belief, not shared by naturalists, that generalizations can be made that are independent of context. A final area of profound disagreement is that of ‘causality’: naturalists believe that it is



Introduction

17

impossible to distinguish causes from effects, while positivists believe that there are real causes that precede effects (and can presumably be hypothesized about, examined and measured). Bearing all of these notions in mind, I offer a text that is highly subjective and yet allows for the reader to interpret – I have included details of my own influences and have included the life histories of my respondents unexpurgated and largely unedited. I have been open about my reasons for the choice of respondents and any bias or misinformation ought to be readily discernable. So, while acknowledging the highly personal and subjective nature of the material here, I present it for critical public consumption. Wall (2006) writes: (t)he questioning of the dominant scientific paradigm, the making of room for other ways of knowing, and the growing emphasis on the power of research to change the world create a space for the sharing of unique, subjective, and evocative stories of experience that contribute to our understanding of the social world and allow us to reflect on what could be different because of what we have learned. (Wall 2006, p. 148) It is my hope that this book creates such a space for sharing ‘stories of experience’. Reflections on Related Research Methods There are numerous methods associated with qualitative research and it is often difficult to see distinctions between one approach (and its epistemological foundations) and another; therefore, I defer to Denzin and Lincoln (2000) in these matters. The term ‘portraits’ is in the subtitle of this book and indicates the principal method adopted. Portraiture (and I include here self-portraiture) has much in common with other, perhaps more established, research methods in education. I will, however, outline some of the differences and areas of overlap between, in the first instance, self-narrative, autobiography and memoir, followed by a consideration of the nature of autoethnography and neonarratives. First, a few words about case studies, as this book revolves around what could be seen as ten different ‘cases’, although, as Robert Stake (2000) points out, ‘case study is not a methodological choice but a choice of what is to be studied’ (p. 443). A population of ten is often considered to be an upper limit for projects of this nature; Stake (2006), for example, in his authoritative book Multiple Case Study Analysis, recommends that the number of cases be limited to between four and ten (p. 22). The number of ‘cases’ in the study reported

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here is therefore at the ‘upper limit’ in order to derive enough information that is relevant to the research questions; the questions being concerned with pedagogy rather than, for example, where teachers take their holidays. In providing fairly full life history narratives however, the respondents provided material that at first glance might be irrelevant but could prove ultimately to be an important common factor. Self-narrative, autobiography and memoir are all related to self-portraiture, but in attempting to tease out differences between them, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated, as one would if attempting to push fog rather than thread through a needle. So, instead of ‘teasing out’, I will attempt to ‘shed light on’ – as far as I can – any distinctions between them. In the present case, we can discover that the subtle differences are due in the main to the origins of the words. ‘Narrative’ is derived from the Latin verb narrare, meaning ‘to recount’ and is also related to the notion of ‘knowing’ (‘self’ is derived from Old English). It would be fair to say, therefore, that the term ‘self-narrative’ refers simply to recounting what one knows about one’s life. Autobiography is etymologically Greek rather than Latin and means ‘to write about the self’. While an autobiography is said to focus, often chronologically, on the general events in the writer’s life, a memoir usually focuses on key public events and is therefore narrower in scope. Self-portraits are usually associated with paintings – to portray an image of the self – but the term can be used metaphorically to explore in writing the distinctive things that characterize the author. This is informed by how the author wants to be seen by others; the author might also use the convention of the self-portrait to express different personality facets and as a tool for reinvention. Autoethnography is slightly different from the other approaches in that it can be distinguished from, for example, autobiography, simply by reference to cultural context. An ethnographic account reports in detail on a cultural community; an autoethnographic account reports in detail on the self within a cultural community, highlighting the relationship between the self and the social world that the self inhabits. As is often the case among the messiness of human lives and concomitant social science research, things do not always fit into neatly defined boxes. The ‘life histories’ presented in this book are different in kind and reflect, both stylistically and in terms of content, not only the singular experiences of each author, but also, among other things, the relationship between the respondents and myself as one who requested the information. Self-portraiture, as with autoethnography and autobiography, should be engaging and scholarly. In attempting to produce an ‘academic’ selfportrait, I would suggest three areas that should be addressed: veracity,



Introduction

19

utility and ethicality. Veracity refers to the ‘truth’ of what is reported. Without wishing to engage in philosophical debates as to what constitutes truth, it is incumbent on researchers to ensure that the motivation for doing the research is transparent and the account is honest; this can, to some extent, be verifiable by reference to photographic evidence and others’ accounts, but triangulation in the usual social science sense is difficult. Duncan (2004) also refers to the importance of making explicit ‘the relationship between personal experience and broader theoretical concepts’ (p. 36). This leads to a consideration of the second desirable aspect of an account based on the self – that of utility. The researcher needs to take a pragmatic stance on this, and should consider the value of any enterprise of this nature, ensuring that it rises above being a confessional, with the ‘self-indulgence’ (see Mykhalovskiy 1996) associated with it. This entails the subject matter being appropriate to the research issue in hand, that it should inform others’ understanding of it, and can seen to be both topical and informative. Mykhalovskiy (1996) asserts that ‘to write individual experience, is at the same time, to write social experience’ (p. 141); the corollary of this assertion is that if one is writing about oneself, one is also writing about the social context in which the self is placed, and therein lies its utility.

Autoethnography Autobiography and self-portraiture have a long-established history among creative practitioners, but social scientists have drawn on such approaches relatively recently. However, qualitative inquiry of this nature, particularly autoethnography, has been around long enough for there to be a kind of internecine battle between qualitative researchers who value the approach and those who are antagonistic towards it. Sara Delmont typifies the latter group (e.g. Delamont 2007). In her polemical article and presentations on the same topic, Delamont (2007) puts forward six objections to autoethnography: 1. It cannot fight familiarity 2. It cannot be published ethically 3. It is experiential not analytic 4. It focuses on the wrong side of the power divide 5. It abrogates our duty to go out and collect data [...] Sociology is an empirical discipline and we are supposed to study the social [emphasis in original] 6. ‘We’ are not interesting enough to be the subject matter of sociology

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It can be seen that some of these objections are aimed at sociologists, particularly points 5 and 6, and are not really relevant here. Point 5 seems to privilege certain kinds of data above other kinds, while point 6 highlights the typical ethnographer’s position as being concerned primarily with ‘otherness’, which therefore, apparently, makes the focus of study intrinsically interesting. She asserts that autoethnography is antithetical to the progress of social science, because it violates the two basic tasks of the social sciences, which are: to study the social world – introspection is not an appropriate substitute for data collection; to move their discipline forward. (Delamont 2007, p. 2) This seems to me to be a rather blinkered view and I would hope that social scientists have a broader understanding of what constitutes the ‘social world’ and what can be deemed to be ‘data collection’. I would hope also that the discipline of social science is moving forward precisely by adopting a range of methods and methodologies for better understanding the social world. Nevertheless, I will briefly consider points 1 to 4. Point 1 refers to ‘fighting familiarity’; I would regard ‘familiarity’ as an asset, but hope to achieve that which is customarily attributed to the artist Paul Klee: to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar – not least in my own art practice. We can never really know the ‘other’ and familiarity with one’s own history, desires and motives, while impossible to view objectively, can shed light on issues that might be of value. The second point regarding ethical issues is certainly important, but I would dispute the notion that it is ‘almost impossible’ for autoethnographies to be published ethically. Such writing will inevitably be partial and there will often, if not always, be an element of self-censorship; the biggest problem seems to me to be concerned with putting oneself in a bad light, for which the author implicitly has ‘informed consent’. Regarding point 3 – that autoethnography is ‘all experience, and is noticeably lacking in analytic outcome’ (p. 2, emphasis in original), there may be two responses, first, there is no intrinsic characteristic defining autoethnography that precludes analysis; some are more ‘descriptive’ than others. Secondly, a strength of the autoethnographic method is its descriptive power that can engage with and draw in readers, who can then make connections and bring in their own experiences to reflect on, rather than relying solely on the author’s privileged position. This leads in to Delamont’s fourth point about the complex and difficult area of power relationships. Delamont’s assertion that the ‘sociological gaze’ should focus on the ‘powerless’ is simplistic; power is always relative and context bound. Contemporary ethnographic inquiries



Introduction

21

often stress the importance of participatory approaches (see, e.g. Eglinton 2008), which is to be applauded; autobiographical and autoethnographical work can be seen to be the ultimate in participation between the ethno­ grapher/author and the respondent/subject. In her edited book, Auto/Ethnography, Reed-Danahay (1997) maintains that the term has two senses, one refers to the ethnography of one’s own social group, the second to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest; she remarks that ‘either a self (auto)ethnography or an autobiographical (auto)ethnography can be signalled by “autoethnography”’ (ReedDanahay 1997, p. 2). Russell (1999) emphasizes the importance of relating autobiographical material to the larger social and cultural context: personal history [needs] to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes. Identity is no longer a transcendental or essential self that is revealed, but a “staging of subjectivity” – a representation of the self as a performance. In the politicisation of the personal, identities are frequently played out among several cultural discourses, be they ethnic, national, sexual, racial, and/or class based. (Russell 1999, para. 4) The importance attached to the alignment of identity with cultural discourse is central in distinguishing autoethnography from other forms of self-narrative. It might be argued that it is not possible to transcend one’s social and cultural context – just as it is not possible to ‘bracket’ entirely one’s subjective perception. Counsell (2009), in discussing this notion, notes that the concept of phenomenology ‘even where appositely applied, can never exhaust the fullness of a phenomenon’ (p. 271). This might well be true, but the declared autoethnographer self-consciously highlights the relationship between the personal and the political. Criteria that may be brought to bear on autoethnographic and autobiographical reports have been reported elsewhere; for example, Duncan (2004) found it necessary to articulate the following: I established the quality of my autoethnographic study by addressing six key issues regarding the legitimacy and representation of my account. These issues related to study boundaries, instrumental utility, construct validity, external validity, reliability, and scholarship. It was necessary for me to delineate these issues clearly because of the potential bias against the value of inner knowing within research culture. (Duncan 2004, p. 34) There appears to be a lack of confidence here in the nature of the approach taken – quantitative studies are not well known for having to justify their lack

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The Art and Craft of Pedagogy

of emotional impact or failing to account for the tacit or ineffable – but Duncan goes on to say that ‘there is a place in scholarship for shining the light of research where one stands for attempting to know one’s own experi­ ence and sharing that knowledge’ (Duncan 2004, p. 38). It is this sharing of knowledge that gives utility to any research enterprise and underpins its raison d’etre. Denzin (2009) displays no such lack of confidence in affirming that We must create a new narrative, a narrative of passion and commitment, a narrative that teaches others that ways of knowing are always already partial, moral and political. (Denzin 2009, p. 82) He goes on to point out that there exists an ‘ample supply’ of rules and guidelines for research of this type and, moreover, such guidelines are, thankfully, open to change and differing interpretations. Atkinson (2006), in referring to art objects, asserts that the viewer is not an ahistorical ‘disembodied spectator’ and that the relationship between the artist, the art object and the spectator is affected by, for example, class, race and gender (p. 108). In the same way, autobiographical vignettes, such as those presented here, will provoke a range of responses and interpretations from different readers; each might be valid. In addition to the myriad interpretations associated with ‘reader response’, there are at least three provided by the author: the unconscious informal, the conscious informal and the conscious formal. The unconscious informal is inherent in the selection, omission and tacit interpretation of the narrative. The conscious informal is revealed in the narrative itself, in the form of asides and comments that are part of the textual flow. The conscious formal interpretations are those that appear outside the narrative and form part of the reflexive element. Of the ‘key issues’ associated with autoethnography identified by Duncan (2004), scholarship and utility seem to me to be central, but to those I would add ethical considerations. Such considerations (which inevitably would have an impact on the veracity of the account) would include the need for complete anonymity where negative or pejorative observations are made. Moreover, the author needs to be careful not to misuse the authorial voice to denigrate or propagate a particular view. In autoethnography, I would suggest that there is also a need for a degree of self-protection; it is not uncommon for individuals to present themselves in a poor light and it is wise to heed the advice of Dr Johnson:



Introduction

23

A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused and laugh at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion. (Boswell 1830, p. 313) Narratives In writing about performance ethnography, Alexander (2005) asserts that personal narrative as an exemplar and contributing model of self-storying is a reflection of an individual’s critical excavation of lived experience and the categorising of cultural meaning. This is then shared in a public domain to provide the audience with a meaningful articulation of human experience. (Alexander 2005, p. 423) The nature of the public domain seems to me to be largely irrelevant; ‘performing’ an ethnographic study is simply an alternative mode of presentation, the ‘audience’ responds to and processes the material whichever way it may be presented (although the nature of the audience’s emotional response might differ according to the medium). The phrase ‘critical excavation of lived experience’ has a nice ring to it, but more importantly, it alludes to both the phenomenological aspect of personal narrative and the necessity of intensive personal exploration. Another key element in this quotation is the use of the word ‘meaningful’; this is particularly so in the case of what we might loosely term ‘artistic’ accounts. It is in the nature of ‘art’ or ‘the arts’ to be multidimensional, that is being capable of interpretation on different levels. While I am not claiming that the life histories presented here are art forms, they do have elements in common with art forms in that they are multidimensional and complex. Personal narratives do not arise independently of their historical, cultural and social context and always have a complex relationship with what is often termed the ‘master narrative’ or ‘metanarrative’. Another narrative form pursued in educational research is the ‘neonarrative’. Examples of neonarratives include Alexander (1992) and more recently, Stewart (2008). Alexander and Galbraith’s (1997) research is typical of this approach: self-reporting by student teachers was used to generate the data; these self-narratives were transformed by the researchers into neonarratives. The neonarratives then become the fused and firmed up versions of the narratives framed by the most relevant comments from the

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The Art and Craft of Pedagogy

student teachers. Thus, a neonarrative is said to become a story more representative than the one that it replaces; an obvious weakness from a positivist perspective is the apparent lack of rigour in determining criteria for salience. The neonarrative approach is said to add richness and clarity to respondents’ stories; meaning, albeit subjective, is distilled and re-presented. Alexander and Galbraith (1997) note the importance of the researcher’s role in the neonarrative enterprise: Acknowledging subjectivity and the reductionist nature of the method used are important antecedents to any qualitative work. More important is the close connection of the two issues in the research act itself. Perception, selection and construction are heavily influenced by the identity of the researcher, and this influence continues through to the condensation and consolidation of data to more manageable, more comprehensible accounts. (Alexander and Galbraith 1997, p. 26) In a neonarrative approach, therefore, the researcher is actively managing the data, synthesizing it and rendering it more ‘comprehensible’. It seems almost perverse to introduce yet another polysyllabic term related to (self) portraiture, but (auto)phenomenography needs mentioning here. The word phenomenography has Greek roots, being derived from the words phainonmenon (appearance) and graphein (description) – this can be compared with phenomenology, where ‘ology’ refers to ‘the study of’. Thus, phenomenography is a description of appearances, whereas phenomenology is primarily concerned with analysis. Phenomenography is an empirical research method designed to answer questions about thinking and learning, and so is particularly relevant in educational research; it is primarily concerned with describing the relationships that people have with the world around them. Locating Self-Portraiture In general, I am not referring here to actual self-portrait painting under the banner of ‘arts-based methodologies’, but use the word portrait to refer to the depiction of a person through words. In educational research, portraiture is a form of qualitative research that is related to ethnography but, characteristically, draws on the subjective interpretations of the narrator (the portraitist) to describe and analyse the object of enquiry (the sitter). Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, well known for her use of portraiture as a methodological tool, edited a special edition of Qualitative Inquiry, wherein she



Introduction

25

reflects on portraiture: ‘a dialogue between science and art, this pursuit of truths, insights, and knowledge projected by the imagination’ (p. 14). She describes, through an autobiographical piece (Lawrence-Lightfoot 2005), the ‘roots’ of her fascination with portraiture, as an artist’s ‘subject’ at ages eight and twenty-five. She recalls how the resulting portraits seemed to capture my “essence”; qualities of character and history, some of which I was unaware, some of which I resisted mightily, some of which felt deeply familiar. But the translation of image was anything but literal. It was probing, layered, and interpretive. (Lawrence-Lightfoot 2005, p. 5) In my own case, I have never been a sitter, but have attempted several (pictorial) portraits and self-portraits; I have taken as my inspiration the work of Vincent van Gogh, who said that portraits should be ‘sad but gentle but clear and intelligent’.4 I have never achieved such qualities, but I certainly aim to achieve some kind of informed lucidity and will always produce work that is recognizably ‘mine’ – it will have the hallmark of a subjective interpretation and will carry with it the baggage of my own life history. While attempting to depict the essential qualities of a sitter from a single viewpoint, traditional portraits will inevitably be partial. Moreover, as English (2000) notes: portraiture as a “scientific” research method possesses some of the same flaws as a painting in the world of art. [...] The artist sees only through the images of gender, culture, social mores, and relationships. The imposition of a singular meaning as in a painting or portrait displays a differentiated and hierarchical perspective that is neither neutral, natural, nor egalitarian. (English 2000, p. 26) I assume that by ‘singular’, English means ‘particular’ (although it is possible that he meant ‘single’); English goes on to say that Reducing the potential multiplicity and diversity of simultaneous truths to a singular story line, no matter how compelling or interesting, may be the most important disfigurement of the ensuing portrait placed on the verbal canvas. (Ibid.) Singularity, however, is to be expected and is a clear instance of the partiality that colours (some might say ‘infects’) all research. My own view is that the lack of neutrality can give a portrait strength and vivacity. Dixson et al. (2005), echoing Lawrence-Lightfoot (2005), maintain that social scientists

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acting as portraitists seek to portray participants ‘through the subjective, empathetic, and critical lens of the researcher’ (p. 17). In so doing, they acknowledge the ‘voice’ of the researcher and assert that the researcher’s very subjectivity and empathy add richness to the portrait (Dixson 2005). Dixson et al. (2005) draw attention to the need for scholars to explore ways to engage in “rigorous” research that goes beyond positivistic interventions and that embraces the powerful potential of organic and artistic representations of educational research. [...] Through portraiture, the researchers can demonstrate a commitment to the research participants and contextualise the depictions of individuals and events. (Dixson et al. 2005, p. 17) Schiffrin (1996), using a visual analogy, draws attention to the point that the act of putting a version of oneself into the public domain, either as an oil painting or in text, renders that version liable to analysis and judgement: we can say that telling a story provides a self-portrait: a linguistic lens through which to discover peoples’ own (somewhat idealised) views of themselves as situated in a social structure. The verbalisation and textual structure of a story (analogous to the creation of form and composition in a portrait) combines with its content, and with its local and global contexts of production, to provide a view of self that can be either challenged or validated by an audience. (Schiffrin 1996, p. 199) Further to this, she notes how form and content interact just as a self-portrait displays oneself (the artist) through both the contents and means of production of an image (e.g. the use of color, the composition), so too a story displays oneself (the teller) through both a tale and the telling of an experience. (Schiffrin 1996, p. 199) In the case of the ‘stories’ presented in this book, the principal medium was email correspondence and this has its own conventions, not least the immediacy of communication. Paradoxically, in view of this, one aspect of electronic communication is the possibility of drafting and redrafting, and this was employed by several correspondents over a period of some months, gradually refining in the light of new experiences and new realizations. Schriffin’s (1996) position is that identity is not fixed and static and is (obviously) affected by context and the medium employed:



Introduction

27

We are continually locating and relocating ourselves, defining and redefining ourselves and our worlds: telling a story about a personal experience is merely another example of a process that pervades our ways of speaking, acting, and being in the world. (Schiffrin 1996, p. 200) The ‘cases’ that form the framework for this book are, in fact, self-portraits rather than portraits. They are autobiographical rather than autoethnographical; they are not edited5 or synthesized and are therefore not neonarratives. In general, they focus on particular aspects of respondents’ lives that are pertinent to the overall theme of this book. This means that they are self-interpretations of life histories, or more accurately perhaps, life stories, guided and, to some extent, constrained by the need to be educationally valuable.

Characteristics of The Group The group of informants who form the backbone of this book is comprised of ten art teachers. I use this term loosely; it covers those who are primarily artists who happen to teach outside formal education settings (such as Issam) as well as those career teachers (such as Keith) who happen to make art occasionally. While the group members all have some connections with Cambridge (and can be seen to be an ‘opportunity sample’), they are in many ways very different from each other. Each is ‘successful’ in different ways. Sian, for example, entered into state education directly from her initial teacher education course as a head of department and within two years improved the school’s performance in external examinations in art by 100 per cent. Issam, on the other hand, has had international recognition for his art works and enjoys praise and admiration from his students for his art classes, while Patson was taken on by his teaching practice school as a fulltime permanent member of staff as it became clear that he had something special to offer in his honest interaction with the young people in his care and his passion for expressing meaning and social commentary through his paintings. They differ in terms of life experience, years of teaching, age, gender, religion and cultural background. They range from beginning teachers to the recently retired; they represent, I was surprised to find, at least eight different countries and at least four different religions. This diversity was not intended, but occurred serendipitously. I approached several more art teachers than those represented here and all were sympathetic to the project and wanted to contribute, but work pressures prevented

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them from participating fully. In at least two cases, I received autobiographies, but after some discussion it was decided not to include them because of the sensitive and personal nature of some of the material. This was especially the case with Nazreem (not her real name), who gave a full and frank account of her life and her relationship to art and to teaching. But her raw account contained ethically sensitive information and painful revelations that would not have been in anyone’s interest to publish. Her Muslim background, however, had provided her with a real sense of purpose and identity and she apparently became more devout as her career progressed. Previously, I had written several articles that focused on the attitude of Muslim students to art making (e.g. Hickman 1999a, 2004) and her contribution would have been valuable from that perspective; nevertheless, ethical considerations naturally overrule mere interest, however valuable. The group was not intended to be representative and is not a sample from which generalizations can be made. My task was to find commonalities, if they existed in such an eclectic group, in the individual life experiences of the respondents, how these inform their teaching, and how, in turn, others might benefit from their pedagogical practices. The next section of this book is the ‘filling in the sandwich’, comprising of ten life stories. They are presented in a different font to distinguish them clearly from my editorial comments. Each ends with some commentary that identifies themes, with some remarks to help contextualize the narrative. I refer elsewhere in the book to ‘informant’ or ‘narrator’; these are interchangeable, as are ‘account’, ‘life story’ and ‘narration’. Although I am reluctant to categorize myself as an ‘effective teacher’, I begin with my own self-portrait, together with some introductory remarks and concluding observations, to set the scene.

Notes I use here the preferred UK term ‘art & design’; hereafter I will use the term ‘art’, which is intended to cover all aspects of art, craft and design. 2 Project Zero was founded at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1967 by the philosopher Nelson Goodman to examine education in the arts. Nelson Goodman believed that arts learning should be studied as a serious cognitive activity, but that nothing seemed to be known about it, and so researchers were starting from ‘zero’. Several well-known outcomes have emanated from this centre, not least the concept of ‘multiple intelligences’, promulgated by Howard Gardner, a one-time director (see http://pzweb.harvard.edu/). 3 Hetland et al.’s (2007) ‘Eight Habits of Mind’can be summarized as follows: 1



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1. The development of craft skills, such as learning artistic conventions (e.g. perspective). 2. Engagement and persistence – learning to develop a focus conducive to persevering (at art tasks). 3. Envisioning – learning to exercise the visual imagination and picture outcomes. 4. Expression – learning to create works that express a feeling and/or have personal meaning. 5. The development of observational skills – learning to attend to visual contexts more closely than ordinary ‘looking’ requires, thereby seeing things that otherwise might not be seen. 6. Reflection question and explain – learning to think and talk with others about an aspect of one’s work or working process. Students also learn to judge one’s own work and working process and the work of others. 7. Stretch and explore – learning to reach beyond one’s capacities, to explore playfully without a preconceived plan and to embrace the opportunity to learn from mistakes and accidents. 8. Understand art world – learning about art history and current practice, including learning to interact (as an artist) with other artists and within the community. 4

This phrase is from a letter from Vincent van Gogh to Wilhelmina van Gogh, Auvers-sur-Oise, 13 June 1890 (translated from French): I‘ve done the portrait of Mr Gachet with an expression of melancholy which might often appear to be a grimace to those looking at the canvas. And yet that’s what should be painted, because then one can realise, compared to the calm ancient portraits, how much expression there is in our present-day heads, and passion and something like waiting and a shout. Sad but gentle but clear and intelligent, that’s how many portraits should be done, that would still have a certain effect on people at times. (Retrieved 5/3/10 from http:// vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let886/letter.html)

5

I corrected some obvious typographical errors, such as repeated words and checked back with the respondents if anything else (syntax rather than content) was changed, for the sake of clarity. I removed spelling errors, with permission, in order to save embarrassment!

Richard Hickman

Introductory Remarks Professional identity among art educators has been an issue in the literature for some time (see, e.g. Huddleston 1981) and is revisited periodically with exhortations such as ‘more research is needed regarding the professional daily life and identity of art educators’ (Milbrandt 2008, p. 355). I have, perhaps unknowingly, made it my life’s work to challenge assumptions, including my own; I find myself needing to review even more fully the ideas, notions and assumptions that I bring with me to inform both my role as an educator and my identity as an artist. Whereas in the past, with the certainty of well-informed ignorance, I could say ‘I am neither an artist nor an educator – I am an art educator’; this identity was, in part, due to my recognizing that art education has a mini-epistemological status, with its own scholarly journals, conferences and professional associations, but I was influenced by my then supervisor, the late Professor Allison, who made it his business to propagate that view, eloquently summarized by Victor Lanier decades earlier (Lanier 1959; Allison 1997). I feel now a kind of muddled tension between the two identities. This tension can be seen to be useful in the sense that it generates creative solutions to conflicting viewpoints, but there is a limit to this. In order to resolve this problem, which although personal to me, is likely to have parallels in other professionals’ lives, I adopt what can be seen to be an autoethnographic approach, which examines aspects of my personal history. In the present case, I attempt to unravel what Miller (2008) has termed the ‘double helix’ of professional and personal histories and identify incidents in my own history that might illustrate how one informs the other: The double helix is useful to characterize the way in which the personal and professional components of my life overlap, mutually influence, mutually inform and are inextricably tied. (Miller 2008, p. 348)

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However, Miller focused on issues associated with race; race in general was not something that I considered to be a particularly significant factor in my identity, but I have gained a developing awareness of the importance of class (and academic background) in the ‘helices’. As a so-called ‘gatekeeper to the profession’, I frequently interview prospective teacher-trainees who say ‘I always wanted to be a teacher’. I am not one of those. In fact, I have never wanted to be a teacher, nor even saw the profession as a last resort – I drifted into it as a way out of the tedium of having to save for things like soap and food. Like some addictive narcotic, I became drawn into it, and although my first few years were profoundly unpleasant, I ended up realizing that teaching is worthwhile, fulfilling and rewarding – clichéd descriptions typical of civil service propaganda – but nonetheless attributes of teaching that I have found to be accurate. With a goal in mind that I hope will help clarify how and why I came to this point, I searched my memory, old journals, photographs, school reports and talked to friends and relatives. I begin with my early years, and describe events that have been seminal (although many at the time were quite mundane).

Artist and Pedagogue – The Complexities of Identity: A Self-Portrait1 I was part of the post war ‘baby-boom’, born in a council house in Darlaston, in the Black Country region of England. I remember men going to work on bicycles, wearing flat caps and with waistcoats and large leather belts. I remember a brook polluted bright yellow at the end of the street; it must have been reasonably life sustaining as I saw rats there. Like most boys of that period, I watched films of Cowboys and Indians (on a neighbour’s black and white television). I sympathized with the ‘Indians’ and was very proud of a tomahawk that I fashioned out of a piece of wood and a roofing slate. I can’t remember actually taking any scalps, but I did not get the adult approval that I expected. A year later, in my first years at infants’ school, a far more serious (to adult’s eyes) incident took place. Having seen Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s Indian sidekick, taking some bad guys prisoner and holding a knife to their throats, I thought it would be a good idea to take my older brother’s bone-handled scout sheath knife to school and take a prisoner in the playground in a similar fashion. My prisoner did not appreciate my attempt at authentic re-creation and went squealing to the teachers. My mother was summoned to the head teacher’s office. The head teacher histrionically opened her desk drawer and, throwing the offending weapon on the desktop, said ‘he used this!’ with ‘this’, coinciding with a thud on the desk. After that, I felt that the teachers treated me



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differently, as though I needed to be kept firmly in place. I resented this greatly; it built on a lack of respect for authority that was engendered the year before when a policeman brought me home, at the age of four, for allegedly throwing stones at cars in the street. I was actually throwing small bits of vegetation at flies in the air. Independence I took it for granted then that I was going to be misunderstood; this resonated with the fact that I did not really understand what was going on most of the time, especially when other children seemed to know the rules of games and words of songs. It was all rather alien to me and I settled into what would be a lifetime of observing from the sidelines. By this time, my father’s scrap metal business was doing well and we moved to a detached house in a ‘better’ area, ten miles east of the Black Country (and currently the site of the nation’s biggest waste-disposal plant) – it was my uncle’s house; apparently, his business wasn’t doing well and they swapped it for our house in Darlaston. The family became part of that most unfashionable of groups – the moneyed working class with bourgeois aspirations. I attended a Church of England nursery school, while my brother attended the attached junior school. In conversation with him decades later, he recalled being beaten on the hands with a cane (drawing blood) for getting four out of ten in a geography test on his first day. As a result of my experiences at the Church of England nursery school and those of my older brother, I persuaded my parents to send me to the modern junior school nearby – a much more liberal establishment, which suited me better. I believe a bad report followed me, but I enjoyed my time there and was helped to identify two areas that I later excelled in – natural history and drawing. I did, however, play truant if things got boring; it was far more interesting playing about on the canal on a home-made raft, looking for newts (I caught a startlingly orangebellied great crested newt once). England in the 1950s was still recovering from the Second World War; boys took it for granted that there were such things as ‘bomb sites’ (usually overgrown with rose bay willow herbs) and air-raid shelters in back yards. The fact that I mention the flora of bomb sites is testament to my growing awareness of the natural world. My experiences outside the classroom – on school trips – were particularly valuable in fostering my fascination with nature. The first praise I can remember receiving, at the age of eight, was for my collection of unusual stones. I went on to become quite knowledgeable about fossils. Where I lived was unusually rich in Palaeosoic fossils: half a mile down my road, past Jones’s crisp factory lay the Ash Mounds – slag heaps and piles of rocks thrown up by now redundant and deserted nineteenth century mining and quarrying. The rocks were carboniferous, rich with numerous ferns, cycads and

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horsetails – two hundred and eighty million years old (or thereabouts)! I spent many hours there throughout my childhood; even in adolescence, I amused myself and friends by ‘surfing’ down the mounds on an old car bonnet. Nearby Linley wood was a fascinating and dangerous place for boys, full of caves and tunnels and rumours of secret military installations. It is a reflection of the laxity of the times that I was easily able to gain entry to an old warehouse and pore over bullets, grenades and parachute belts. But my main area of interest was the area’s Silurian deposits; I spent many hours in the railway cutting, finding trilobites, corals, crinoids, gastropods, brachiopods and sometimes lumps of aggregate composed almost entirely of fossilized life. I learned recently that this particular place has since been designated a site of special scientific interest (SSSI), but for me then it was a place of enchantment that I could take friends to and show them wonderful things. I read about the Silurian period and came across a quote (originally from Walter Scott) that refers to ‘one crowded hour of glorious life’, which I found highly evocative and in an odd way reflected my inner world of learning – I was like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up facts and ideas that got together and mated, creating new clusters of ideas and interests. I had a lifelong desire to acquire Murchison’s Siluria and some 40 years later, I did so. In those crowded hours of learning, I put glass microscope slides in the family refrigerator so that I could look at snow crystals under a microscope, but more wondrous was looking at pond specimens, that I remember as paramecium and euglena – single-celled organisms swimming in their own tiny world. I managed to buy a chemistry set and grew a crystal garden in isinglass (an egg preserver)... all of this was fascinating and unrelated to anything I did at my new secondary school, Tynings Lane. I can’t remember taking the ‘11-plus’ examination – the one that determines whether you go on the academic route via grammar school or attend the secondary modern school where instead of Latin you did woodwork. I failed it, of course, and went to the secondary modern. This school suited me just fine – I was with friends and didn’t have to try. The grammar school was deemed to be where ‘posh kids go’ and it was no surprise when two outcast middle-class pupils were put forward (perhaps through parental pressure) to take the ‘13 plus’ examination for two additional places ostensibly reserved for late developers. Although I was envious of my grammar school friends who studied French and Latin, I quite liked the undemanding curriculum on offer, with woodwork, metalwork and rural science figuring prominently. The set text in my first year English class was Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country – an anti-apartheid novel – and I was enthusiastic about our ‘social studies’ lessons, which focused on, among other things, the American civil rights movement. By the third year, I stopped going to maths and PE classes and did things that were far more interesting for a boy in early adolescence. Apart from getting up to no good, I spent some of my truancy time in the local library, but was put off reading when



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I attempted to read Gurdjieff’s All and Everything with the subtitle Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and later attempting to read Lacan – my introduction to post-structuralism was rather like being introduced to the cuisine of the Indian subcontinent via a Phall curry (that’s the one that requires an asbestos stomach). Unfortunately, I had a similar experience with painting when I travelled (by steam train!) to Birmingham museum and art gallery to have some fossils identified. I had to pass through the pre-Raphaelite gallery to get to the palaeontology section and I was struck with wonderment at Holman Hunt’s Finding of the Saviour in the Temple – such brilliance and vibrancy of the colours, such exquisite detail and verisimilitude... I could never achieve that level of skill and so decided to abandon ideas about becoming a traditional painter. Expectations were fairly low at Tynings Lane. In my second year there, aged 13, I had the obligatory career advice interview where I said that I wanted to be an artist or a palaeontologist, to which the reply was ‘have you considered leather tanning?’. This job was associated with one of the local industries and featured recently on television as one of the world’s worst jobs – something to do with the use of urine to condition the leather. Nevertheless, I continued to get a lot of encouragement for my art, always getting ten out of ten for my paintings and winning local arts competitions. My parents encouraged me, in their own way, not so much through praise, but through the purchase of art materials; in my case, oil paints and an easel. My first attempts with these more sophisticated materials resulted in a spectacularly unsuccessful painting of a bird – a trogon I believe – from the PG Tips tea free cards, ‘Tropical Birds’ series. Nevertheless, I was deemed to be ‘good at art’. By late adolescence, I had decided that I was, in fact, already an artist and, having assimilated most of the myths associated with that calling, could behave in as obnoxious a way as time and limited resources would permit. All manner of un- or anti-social activities could be put down to either artistic temperament or challenging the accepted status quo. Along with some friends, I established an ‘art club’ at the local community centre – we were later banned for causing a fire hazard. This meant that we went out onto the streets (circa 1967) doing things like accosting passers-by and asking them a few mundane questions, ending with ‘do you own a snorkel?’; whatever response was given, we put a large cross on the clip-boarded questionnaire and terminated the interview. This particular act of puerility was meant to be an ‘existential exercise in meaninglessness’, surpassed only by handing out blank pieces of paper during election time and saying ‘vote nasty snatch’ to each recipient. I delighted in the idea that ‘anything could be art’ and was especially taken by aspects of Dada, which I discovered through what I have since found to be the usual adolescent interest in surrealism. Liberated from the rigours of representational drawing, I experimented with collage, montage and ‘happenings’ – all good fun and suitably artistic to my mind at that time.

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As a child, I was not alone in being both horrified and fascinated by accounts of Nazi death camps, and the bombing of Hiroshima. In the 1960s, the latter fed into the real fear and threat of nuclear war. This fear was ever-present, taken-for-granted and had a real effect on my (and my peers’) attitudes and values. It culminated but did not stop with the ‘Cuban missile crisis’. The sense of doom, paradoxically coupled with an optimism that the state would provide and we were all to have unlimited leisure, with robots doing the nasty work, helped create (at least in one youth) a kind of anarchistic fatalism. My father and older brother both left school at 14 for work and I believe I was expected to do the same; I certainly felt parental disapproval of my intention to ‘stay on’ at school into the fifth year to take the new certificate of secondary education (CSE). I was not a studious student, however, and left having gained (very) weak passes in woodwork and technical drawing and very good grades in English, biology and art, for which I received school prizes – my parents did not come to the prize-giving ceremony and it did not occur to me until recently that they ought to have. I subsequently tore out the award labels that were inside the books I won because they referred to ‘Senior [English/Art/Biology] Prize, Tynings Lane Secondary Modern School’ – I was by then embarrassed to be associated with the academic failure trumpeted by the words ‘secondary modern’. I moved to Aldridge Grammar school, persuading the Headmaster [sic] to allow me to take advanced level courses, despite my lack of formal qualifications. He accepted me as a sixth-form student and I even represented the school in a regional general knowledge quiz. The Head continued to be indulgent, muttering ‘the gypsies are in town’ when I passed him in the school corridor – he in his academic gown and I out of school uniform. As it happens, in the manner of scrap-dealers’ offspring, I was in a grey three piece suit made to measure to my own design, but finished off with a fetching tattered red neckerchief in lieu of the school tie. I joined the Young Communist Party, much to the consternation of my parents and teachers, and also read whatever anarchist literature I could. Such larks were of little consequence compared to the several weeks I missed school, hitch-hiking around Europe. I had vague ideas about Paris being a place where artists should go and I hitch-hiked there as soon as I was old enough to get a passport. I wandered down to the Seine and found a suitably Bohemian group of people to engage with, but didn’t do any art. It was the famous year of 1968 and the Paris riots, but I didn’t see anything. The following year, I went hitch-hiking with my friend Anthony, a brilliant polyglot and somewhat eccentric son of a lorry driver. Anthony (who was also from an anti-school background) suggested on our return, when we were summoned to see the Head to explain our absences, that we admit only to ‘going as far as Zurich’. Ironically, I was suspended from school for ‘unauthorized absence’.



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The first time I experienced what I now believe to be ‘education’ was at the age of 17, during my English literature lessons. My teacher, Mr M. Webber MA (Cantab.), an erudite and perceptive teacher in the Leavis tradition, introduced me to TS Elliot, Thomas Hardy, Dickens and Shakespeare. He allowed his pupils to be emotionally moved and yet analytical and critical – a good model. By the early 1970s, my younger sister had been allowed (by our parents) to stay on at school, but she was too fearful of incurring our father’s displeasure by going to university and decided not to respond to an invitation for interview. Having exorcised my adolescent anarchist zeal and flirtation with Dada (including an unauthorized installation in the school hall), I went to do an art foundation course. In order to go to art school out of my county, I had to have a special portfolio interview at my county town of Stafford. The interviewer adopted an air of medical authority and dubious psychological insight: ‘well, you clearly have some talent but your work exhibits certain anti-social elements’. Nevertheless, I was allowed to go to the art school of my choice for a foundation course in art, on the condition that there was a satisfactory report on my behaviour each term. I was amused at this, especially as I thought that he based his decision on my school reports rather than – as he had implied – a sensitive analysis of my work. My ‘Foundation’ year was an eye-opener in that I was taught things about art, not just encouraged to be artistic, but actually taught how to do things: photography (my report at that time says ‘Richard seems to be confused by this subject’), etching, aluminium casting and other creative processes that I didn’t know about. I became more technically skilled in drawing, and also developed studio skills in other areas, such as printmaking and ceramics. But this was not enough; I felt a real need to explore my inner world and to understand my relationship with nature and my aesthetic response to it. I read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and was taken by his retelling of Ramakrishna’s aesthetic experience with a flock of cranes: I was walking along a narrow path separating the paddy fields, eating some puffed rice, which I was carrying in a basket. Looking up at the sky, I saw a beautiful, sombre thundercloud. As it spread rapidly over the whole sky, a flight of snow-white cranes flew overhead in front of it. It presented such a beautiful contrast that my mind wandered to far off regions. Lost to outward sense, I fell down, and the puffed rice was scattered in all directions. Some people found me […] and carried me home. (Wilson 1956, p. 252) The idea of being overcome by beauty and falling in a faint to the ground is rather amusing – but as an adolescent, the association of the aesthetic with the mystical appealed to me, and contributed to my developing ideas about intense involvement with both art and nature. I also read Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and

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was intrigued by his account of heightened perception through the use of mescaline, the hallucinogen derived from the peyote cactus: I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs […] but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms. (Huxley 1954, p. 20) He later describes the legs of a chair, referring to the miraculous tubularity and their supernatural polished smoothness. Huxley’s assessment of his experience centred on the idea of rising above the ego, identifying with the essence of objects by, in effect, becoming his own essence: This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For persons are selves, and, in one respect at least, I was a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving the being and Not-self of the things around me. (Huxley 1954, p. 31) From this distance, such sentiments appear pretentious, but these quotations encapsulate my own experiences with freshly gathered ‘magic mushrooms’. As an idealistic and rather earnest teenager, such things were influential in my understanding of not only my inner self, but also my perception of the natural world, which I saw as if for the first time and seemingly more real than anything I had experienced before, as if my eyes had been opened and my mind cleared of all preconceptions. I embarked on a course at Nottingham School of Art, leading to the Diploma in Art & Design (Dip AD) in Fine Art, which was a kind of neo-Dada free-for-all. One of my fellow fine art student’s art works involved officially changing his name to ‘no name’ in the Manx language, and then changing it back, framing both documents and presenting them as an art work... an odd parallel to this was changing my Dip AD to a BA (Hons) and then to a Cambridge MA (under Statute B, III, 6), in a sense parodying my English Literature teacher’s MA (Cantab.). Naturally, I felt that I’d outgrown such stuff and viewed my contemporaries’ work with bemusement – how can one take seriously the act of encasing small rodents in resin or copying the punctuation marks from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness? Interestingly, the latter’s subtitle, Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, introduced me to two words that have dogged me ever since: ‘ontology’ and ‘phenomenology’. One of two or three lectures that were given during my three years doing ‘fine art’ was on phenomenology. I have attended numerous sessions, workshops and the like over the years and still feel bewildered – how can anyone ‘bracket’ their subjective perception without having a lobotomy or ingesting large amounts of psychomimetic drugs? I retreated to



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a safe place, the familiarity of representational drawing. I went to draw animals at the local cattle market and was so appalled at the way that animals were treated – as if they were already dead – that I have not eaten meat since, that is for over 40 years. Retreating further, I opted for drawing insects and undertook some lengthy investigation into polymorphism in ladybirds, looking in particular at the relationship between melanism in Adalia bipunctata and atmospheric pollution. After four years at art school, I emerged as a fully fledged artist, allegedly. Turning against the apparently superficial nature of the work of some of my peers, I immersed myself in traditional representational drawing – of beetles, birds and flowers, albeit with a certain self-conscious self-irony, which included long-winded titles as a satire on academic jargon. Around me, novelty appeared to be the key to success and I associated conceptual art with my fairly shallow understandings as a school student of Duchamp and the manifestations of Dada. A key tutor at the time was Victor Burgin, who has gone on to achieve considerable acclaim as a conceptual artist. I was, however, unmoved by my peers’ preoccupation with visual puns. These included, for example, broken wooden school rules fixed on a board with the caption ‘Rules are Made to be Broken’; I even did my own pieces for fun: a large alarm bell that I found in a skip, attached to a board with the title ‘An Alarming Piece of Art’; there was also ‘Bulbs in Flower’ – light bulbs planted in plaster in a flowerpot. The antivocational ethos of my degree course compounded my antipathy towards meaningful work and I was able to survive for a while ‘being an artist’, while not actually making a living from it. At that point, I developed an urge to make art, not the kind of urge that I dimly remember from childhood, but an urge to make art because that is what I did, it was my identity. Three things from art school years had an enduring impact on me: the acquisition of certain studio skills, exposure to animal cruelty (or at best indifference to their welfare) and the availability of mind-expanding drugs. The latter led me to explore in the spiritual world in earnest. This took me to strange places, internally and externally over a period of 10 years or so. I read scriptural texts, went to churches, temples, synagogues and meetings of esoteric societies; I got initiated into the secrets of raja yoga, joined the theosophical society and meditated for hours on end. Aesthetic considerations were always present – evangelical Christianity, for example, was always going to be a non-starter as it suffered from an alarming lack of style, and not just the clothes and music. I realized eventually that I wanted too much too soon and that I should be more phlegmatic about achieving enlightenment. The feeling of being an artist is for me a more fundamental feeling than that of being an academic, teacher, husband, brother, father, consumer or ne’er-do-well; perhaps this is as a result of cultural conditioning in a time when individuality matters and when art remains cloaked in Romantic mythology. Nevertheless, there is something very strong about one’s identity as an artist. It is almost as strong as one’s

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ethnicity or religious affiliation, except that a group of artists gathered together in one place would not result in a harmonious coming together of like minds. Is showing one’s art work to others, particularly critical others, an essential part of art making? For me, it has been important, in terms of my identity as an artist, to place my artwork into the public domain. However, the really important thing is the desire to draw and paint in response to what I see and feel and imagine; exhibiting is a side issue, and so I can empathize with people who work on the periphery of the art world (such as art teachers) and consider themselves to be artists: it is a question of essential identity; art is not only a way of knowing, but also a way of being. In considering the relationship between my identity as an artist and the art works I produce, I ask: Would it matter if my art works were destroyed? I recall a commonly used phrase from art school days – ‘the statement has been made’, meaning something like ‘now that I have expressed my ideas through my work, no more needs to be said and the work is of no value beyond the ideas expressed’, with the implication that the idea behind the art work is far more important than the art work itself. I still subscribe to that notion to some extent, but feel that the artwork, as the vehicle for carrying ideas, is of value. Now in my fifth decade of producing artwork, I feel liberated from the constraints of pleasing teachers, parents and gallery owners. I do not have to make a living from selling my paintings and can simply do as I wish with regard to art. To me, my work has become richer and more complex than in earlier years (although others might see it as cruder and simpler); I have more concern for meaning than technique. One thing that continued to evolve throughout my development as an artist, was (and continues to be) my relationship with and regard for the natural world. Others did not share my enthusiasm however; one gallery owner said to me ‘people don’t want creepy-crawlies on their walls’. After touting my work around various galleries and doing illustrations for a natural history museum (such as Birds’ Beaks – the Right Tool for the Job) and a local archaeologist, I realized that if I wanted to do ‘meaningful art work’, I should get a job that enabled me to paint without the need to sell my paintings; I did not need to worry about other people’s opinions on the size, shape and content of my work as I was painting for me. Some years later (in 1980), after submitting some slides of my paintings to a prestigious art gallery for consideration, I received a reply in a letter from the director, which contained the phrase ‘paintings are passé’. I have often felt a slight unease with much of what has been written about art and art education in that I have not been able to relate it to my own personal experiences of art and art making. I had often seen my own practice, as a student of art and as a producer of art, as being parallel with, but separate from, my work as an art educator.



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Art Teaching Having made money from buying and selling things at antiques auctions, I had some vague idea that I could work with old things, things in museums. In a museum, I could pore over interesting things and not be besmirched by the world of capital – enlightened self-interest at its best, I thought. This goal necessitated further qualifications and so museum studies seemed the most appropriate. I applied, got accepted and found that I had to specialize in something like paper conservation (owing to my background qualification in fine art) rather than natural history, which was my passion. The prospect of this did not fill me with unbridled enthusiasm and I turned down the offer of a place. Having set my mind on a postgraduate qualification coupled with living in the East Midlands, I turned my eye towards another course on offer – the Art Teacher’s Diploma (ATD). I bought a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches as an exercise in self-irony and went for an interview in the nineteenth-century annexe building of what was then Leicester Polytechnic. The structure of the course was an eye-opener for me and I found the idea of behavioural objectives refreshingly concrete after the foggy abstraction of several years engaged in quasi-anarchistic art making. Teaching practice at a local grammar school confirmed for me the stereotype of teachers in gowns barking at compliant students – at least at first, when I observed rather than taught. Actual teaching proved to be rather different. My first lesson I remember well, or at least I remember particularly memorable aspects of it. I wanted to introduce adolescent boys to the wonders of nature and the joys of close observation. So what better than to bring in some hogweed and teasels and provide them with black Indian ink and fine pens? I envisaged that they would carefully label each ink drawing with the Latin names: Heracleum sphondylium and Dipsacus fullonum. My abiding memory of that first lesson was of me attempting to wash the black ink out of a boy’s hair by holding his head under a tap at the front of the class, while sensing some commotion at the back of the class. Leaving the boy at the sink to watch the ink run down the drain, I ventured to the area of the commotion to witness one boy with his trousers down being beaten on his bare buttocks with teasels by two other boys. It all seemed to be in good humour and I thought little of it at the time; fortunately for my future teaching career, neither did anyone else (the lesson was thankfully not formally observed). My teaching mentor at the time had a reputation for being fussy and anally retentive; I learned from him that a good way to stamp out joy and creativity in the art classroom was to begin every lesson with the command ‘eighth, quarter, eighth’. The boys were trained to respond to this by carefully ruling a line one eighth of an inch from the top of their A3 size paper, a line a quarter of an inch below that, and another one a further eighth of an inch below that. In the quarter inch space, each boy carefully wrote their name, the title of the artwork to be produced and the date. To do this, each boy was furnished with a pencil at the

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beginning of the year and was only allowed to change it if fell through the hole of a specially constructed box. Unbelievable. My teaching practice experience at this boys’ grammar school could not have prepared me less constructively for my first appointment – at a girls’ secondary modern school. It took me about two years to get the girls to do anything ‘worthwhile’ and it was an uphill struggle all the way. I realized that I needed to throw away all ideas about class teaching and use a range of grouping strategies while bearing in mind that each was an individual with individual needs. A particularly special outcome was just before one Christmas. There was a general request that the art lesson should be concerned with designing Christmas cards, so we brainstormed ideas about what we usually see on Christmas cards: robins, three wise men, holly, star of Bethlehem, Jesus in a manger, snow and so on. These were all written on the board and the class instructions included the rule NOT to include any of these things. When I then made individualized cards for each girl in my form, a girl who had not made any facial expression and had not talked since arriving at the school four years earlier, smiled and said ‘thank you’ – a small but genuine breakthrough. One activity that came naturally to me and proved to be fruitful in terms of generating a positive learning atmosphere, was painting alongside pupils; I discussed a topic with the class and we all responded to it ‘artistically’, usually through the medium of paint. I found this to be fulfilling as well as pedagogically useful, in that a suitable studio atmosphere was created and solutions to technical problems could be shared and explained with direct reference to my artwork. However, I had developed a certain ambivalence towards art production; my degree training after all was in the realm of conceptual art and I was inducted into the notion that there are too many art objects in the world already (a notion not dissimilar to that of married couples making an ethical decision not to have children because the world is overpopulated). I even went through a phase (some 10 years after finishing art school) of giving my sketches and ideas to someone else to paint – I had a whole exhibition of paintings that were basically spray-painted by my local garage. But, although I was working close to my intellectual ideal, that is, of the idea being more important than the product, I had a feeling that there might be a missing dimension to my artwork. The earlier flirtations with ‘politics’ were long gone and even the Falklands war and the excesses of Thatcherism did not stir me, nor did the search for spiritual enlightenment, which became more of a grudging trudge than an active hike. I was, however, fortunate enough to have a very supportive principal who encouraged me to pursue further study and approved my application to be ‘seconded’ to do a master’s degree in art education. Working on the master’s course consolidated my view of art education as a discipline independent of both art and education and, as mentioned at the outset, influenced by Professor Brian Allison, I eschewed the identity of ‘artist who happens to teach’ in favour of ‘the professional art educator’. Shortly after this



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period, I thought I was due for a change of career before I stopped enjoying teaching (as appeared to be the case with some of my more cynical colleagues). I responded to a call for teacher educators who had ‘substantial recent and relevant’ school experience, in line with government requirements, to bring in ‘new blood’, and so began my career in teacher education. I found that university teaching was quite different – far more demanding in so many ways than school teaching and it took me several years to get the hang of it. This included a stint in Singapore, which had an enormous effect on my art work; the equatorial sun and excursions into the jungle resulted in an exhibition of 36 paintings at the British Council. One experience from the primary jungle at night has stayed with me ever since, and has been the inspirational source of several paintings; this was the experience of primeval fear, such as our Palaeolithic ancestors might have felt. A more general experience that affected me was that of being an ‘other’ – an ethnic minority – and this has given me a greater ability to empathize with minority groups to a greater extent than before. I declined a further contract, despite the rather indulgent expatriate lifestyle (or perhaps because of it), primarily to complete my PhD. Mentally operating at the level required to complete a doctorate over a period of time had a deleterious effect on my emotional well-being, but I managed to hold things together as one of the walking wounded. I did consultancy work, examining and inspection work; this period was exceptionally useful professionally in that I was exposed to many different school environments and saw a range of lessons in different subjects. My professional identity felt less secure, however, and working for government agencies such as OfSTED, where dissent and the challenging of orthodoxies was an anathema, compounded my sense of displacement. It was only through producing substantial amounts of artwork that I felt in any way really human, in the sense of having a social, communicating identity. Further exhibitions, though potentially fraught with the emotional danger of putting one’s achievements in the public domain for critical review, helped me to anchor myself. This brings me, chronologically, to securing a position at Cambridge University. I was very aware that my class background and, particularly, my educational background were rather different from those around me. I muddled though the first decade as a teacher educator, specializing in art and design, with my artistic self running parallel, getting increasingly agitated that the two worlds – the world of art and the world of education – did not to my satisfaction inform or provide nutrients for each other. Then a realisation – a breakthrough... in the Spring of 2005, I planned for an exhibition of my paintings at Kings College, Cambridge, which was primarily to show my latest work – about 20 dark paintings from the previous 2 years. Feeling that 20 was a small number for an exhibition, I decided to exhibit work from previous years. As I collected it together, I realized that there were several distinct styles that had emerged over the previous decades – they were very distinct and very diverse – as if

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they had been done by different people, so I exhibited them as if they were done by different artists, each ‘genre’ with a different name: my dark and sinister ones are by Richard De’Ath; my hard edge ones are by R. D. Edge; R. Davis produces detailed illustrations, while Ricky Mavro goes for all-black paintings. The work produced by Dick Barker (the most prolific) is based on another alter ego, a kind of manic dog, which in itself has different doggy characters. The realization, as I was reflecting on this in the context of my identity as an art educator is obvious – I had multiple identities that sometimes merged together, occasionally disappeared (sometimes for good) and metamorphosed into new identities. I can now see that questions of identity are more important than I had realized. The paintings, drawings and prints that I have produced over the past 40 years certainly look as if they have been done by several different people, reflecting different self-images and a range of influences and concerns. However, real importance is to be found in the ways in which one interacts with others. As a teacher, a growing realization was that I was not teaching art but teaching people.

Some Observations It should be noted that I have truncated the more recent events to avoid ethical dilemmas; it would be unfair, unwise and unethical to make use of this forum to comment publicly on my present situation and any events directly associated with it. In writing this piece, I realized that I was gaining insights and new understandings – that I was ‘writing myself into understanding’ in the same way that pupils in class ‘talk themselves into understanding’ through discussion. I realized early in my endeavours that the elephant in the room that I was ignoring was the part played by social class and its fundamental role in (my) education. A further realization was the complex nature of identity; in particular, the way identities change, evolve, merge and divide. However, at this point, I should emphasize that my own contribution is not a full-blown autoethnographic account; I have, in general, eschewed references to social and cultural context and focused on personal episodes that I consider relevant to the issue under scrutiny – the development of artistic identity and how it might inform pedagogy and professional identity. Over 30  years ago, Fraser Smith (Smith 1980), in discussing art teachers’ values, categorized art teachers into the following: high priests (subdivided into magicians and mystics); technocrats (subdivided into engineers and designers); social workers; pedagogues; and lastly, anomics; these categories still appear to exist. Each type has a set of values associated with it, and these values form the basis for a certain approach to the teaching of art. For example, the



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high priest, according to Smith, is concerned largely with providing opportunities for individual personal expression, whereas the technocrat is more concerned with presenting art as a problem-solving activity, encouraging inventiveness and giving opportunities for exploration and understanding of materials. The social workers, on the other hand, will wish to encourage growth of imaginative ideas and provide opportunity for growth of social awareness. The pedagogue’s concern is more wide ranging, and is allied to the humanities rather than other practical subjects, with a focus on developing the aesthetic responses of students. Smith’s other identifiable group, the anomic, has an approach to art teaching that is a mishmash of all of the above, underpinned by a general hostility and fundamental conservatism. An emergent type, predicted by Smith, was the ‘semiologist’; it was this group of art teachers that was likely to carry forward the banner of ‘visual literacy’ and it seems that this group is becoming more dominant, with the widespread adoption of ‘visual culture’ as a focus for art educators. What has become clear is that identity is a multifaceted, fluid and organic phenomenon. More importantly perhaps, I have become more aware of the pedagogical implications of acknowledging the multifaceted identity of the teacher-practitioner: artistic thinking and knowing can inform teaching; this is not a new concept, but it is a notion that I feel needs to be personally realized. Hetland et  al. (2007) referred to an artistic way of thinking about teaching, calling it ‘studio thinking’. Teaching has also been seen as an aesthetic activity; Davis (2005) refers to ‘artful teaching’. ‘Artful’ teachers manoeuvre and operate within the classroom, manipulating different techniques and materials, in a way that parallels the artist’s manipulation of visual elements. This might involve, for example, adjusting the rationales and philosophical approach one adopts in teaching, in a way that is analogous to the organic reworking of an artwork by an artist. The diversity of artistic practice and ways of solving problems is suited to the complexity of teaching – from spontaneous and intuitive ways of teaching, to organized and considered pedagogical approaches. Subject areas themselves can be seen as organic; the blurring of subject boundaries echoes the blurring between the subject practitioner and subject teacher. Reflexivity and personal awareness, which are crucial aspects of self-portraiture, can inform professional reflective practice and ultimately can help one become a better teacher.

Note A version of this account was first published in the International Journal of Education and the Arts, 11, (2), 1–15. See http://www.ijea.org/v11p2/.

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Tyler Denmead

Self-portrait of a Creative Practitioner as a Young Man Are you an artist? ‘Well’, I often say in a canned response, ‘My only formal training is an apprenticeship I did to a chef’. This evasive, ambiguous response is often met with a curious look. If I am being asked whether I have the credentials of an artist, such as formal training, then I am inferring that I may be an artist using that criterion. However, if the interrogator is asking whether I went to art school, she/he can likely infer that I did not, by my use of ‘only’ in ‘only formal training’. Yet, if I am being asked whether I have apprenticed to a ‘master’ in the enduring Renaissance understanding of what it means to become an artist, then perhaps indeed I am one. ‘Yes, I have apprenticed to a master’, I am inferring. However, if I am being asked whether I have apprenticed to a painter, dancer or musician in the troubled hierarchy of arts disciplines, then I am suggesting otherwise. My response suggests that I have a loose interpretation of what an arts discipline may or may not be, which includes, for example, the culinary arts. If I am being asked whether I exhibit, perform or have made a living making art, then I have established some groundwork here. ‘Yes, I am an artist’, I might argue further. ‘I have prepared and sold culinary art for a fair dollar; I have also sold a few drawings too. But more recently, I have tended to give both away to friends and family’. If I am being asked whether I create beauty, then I am prepared to defer to some of the meals that I have eaten with friends, strangers and alone. I consider some of them to have been sublime, like the cheeseburger grilled over an open fire at the side of an Adirondack lake with two friends to kick-off a canoe trip. But my other artwork – my drawings and paintings produced with ‘self-taught’ skills – might fairly be described as ugly. Unless you think ugly is beautiful, which I sometimes do when ugliness burns in its own honesty. I avoid mentioning that I apprenticed to a chef in France. I do not want to give the impression that I am an artist because of participating in what might fairly be perceived as a culturally elitist art form. I do not want to claim any particular status as an artist, as a cultural elite. ‘Well, isn’t everybody an artist?’ I might rhetorically follow up along this thread of inclusivity.



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But what if I am being asked whether I am completely subsumed within a discipline, passionately devoted to a material or work, to the point that I barely function in ‘this world’, the mythological world beyond the boundaries of art making? I can talk about my apprenticeship in the kitchen, where like the stereotype of the artist beholden to his passion, I worked fifteen-hour days, six days a week, drinking too much whiskey along the way to numb the pain of hard work and amplify the trancelike state of being subsumed within art making. However, I may also argue that I have given up on the idea of complete devotion and endless production as good criteria for being an artist. I am more interested in how my practice might allow me to more deeply attend to my relationships in this world, rather than divorce me from it. I want to be in this world with others more deeply, not apart from them. For me, as I hope will become evident below, this is where my understanding of myself as an ‘artist’ and an ‘educator’ begin to intersect. For me, at this intersection, I often find myself stumbling into the ambiguous marker, ‘creative practitioner’, which at least more appropriately signifies how I am coming to describe and attend to my creative rather than artistic practice. By avoiding some of the rhetorical baggage associated with ‘artist’ and ‘educator’, evident above, its ambiguity provides some of the malleability and slippage that I find helpful in the ongoing process of describing and re-describing what my values and practices are. Of course, the downfall of its use is for the same reason. Plus, it’s a mouthful. ‘Are you an artist, yourself?’ It is a question that, unfortunately, many arts educators often confront. Lying underneath this question is sometimes the shaky assumption that there is a boundaried identity of ‘artist’ that is distinct from that of ‘educator’; and, perhaps more insidiously, the educator has chosen a path of not becoming an artist. Yet, our life stories in the arts – how we have engaged in teaching, learning and sharing art making – reveal, I think, far more complexity. I aim to illustrate this through my own story and point out how contending with this complexity can lead to timely and relevant arts pedagogies. To do so, I trace significant art making and pedagogic incidents in my life and how they relate to some of my emerging ideas about arts pedagogy. In particular, I intend to discuss the relationship of these formative incidents to my 10-year stint (1997–2007) as the founding director of New Urban Arts, a community-based arts studio in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. It is true that there may be some risk in producing an autobiographical account, as I may be altering incidents in order to reconstruct a past that fits into how I want to be understood. Yet, I hope that even with this risk of self-mythologising, I might highlight lessons that are generative for those making sense of their own stories and struggling with developing arts pedagogies.

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Uneducable Beginnings My mother may have been prone to stretching tales of my early years beyond tall into complete fantasies. But true or not, she often reminded me of when my paediatrician told her that her two-year-old son could not be parented. He felt that the only pragmatic step was for me to sort out right and wrong on my own. The doctor prescribed throwing me into a Montessori school before I turned three. At a Montessori school, where children’s inquisitiveness and self-directed learning are valued, I might stumble into some sense of how to less destructively participate in the world. Embracing experimental and experiential learning at Montessori on my first day, I proudly announced to my mother that I would go to school naked. Following doctor’s orders, she acquiesced. Entering a school for the first time with no clothes on, I met with awkward and frightening stares. After this lesson in humiliation, my mother claims I compromised by spending the next few weeks forcing her to dress me in the school parking lot. Indeed, I was learning right and wrong. The transition from Montessori to a rather traditional private day school at the age of six must have been a difficult one. My parents were beginning to chart out their professional lives, which involved sending their children to private school rather than contend with the rapidly changing neighbourhood state school. In the 1970s, American state or ‘public’ schools were being transformed by bussing policies aimed at providing more equitable educational access to different student populations. This meant that the socioeconomic and racial diversity of state schools was being transformed; and for my parents, this likely signified its decline. My mother, the daughter of an electrician from a small, struggling midwestern town, was a nurse. My father, an only son raised alone by his mother, a lifelong secretary for a defense contractor, was a lawyer. I suspect both of them prized education for its potential to further support their upward class mobility, but perhaps more importantly, signify their emerging professional status. The motto of my new school was astonishing both for its simplicity and for its arrogance. The meaning of ‘In Quest of the Best’ was revealed in school marketing materials, which provide illustrating examples of national merit scholars; university matriculation lists; championships in field hockey, golf and tennis; and, winners of statewide arts competitions. At age 8, I learned that I should quest the best anywhere but the art room. Mrs Amie, my art teacher, assigned one of her first units by instructing her class to make paper mobiles of brightly coloured fish. Unbeknown to me, her larger agenda was converting the art room into a tropical aquarium for the upcoming parent-teacher conference. To show off her class, she planned to clutter her ceiling with fish mobiles spinning from delicate strings of judgement. For the exercise, we were set the task of cutting out symmetric and predetermined fish shapes, on which we were supposed to decorate the pre-drawn scales, gills and eyes with bright purple, yellow



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and orange tempera paints. This was a distant cry from painting a la Montessori, where I was given a large paintbrush and one colour and the freedom to smear paint across a large piece of paper in collaboration with my classmates until feeling satisfied. For all that I knew, I approached Mrs Amie’s scripted tropical fish exercise in the Montessori way. I bypassed the blunt, backwards right-handed scissors and tore the paper instead. Then, unpainterly like, I used the paintbrush like a wooden spoon, scooping up and spreading gobs of different colours. In the end, my ‘fish’ appeared gasping for air, unearthed from prehistoric mud. Not surprisingly, Mrs Friend hung it in the corner of the room, furthest from the doorway and hidden by a school of mimicked reef fish. When my parents met Mrs Amie at the parent-teacher conference, she told them that it might be unpleasant for her to share with them what she had already told me. My effort at making a fish mobile was ‘not worthwhile’ and not much should be expected from me in the art room. These debilitating incidents are all too common in art classrooms, leaving a tragic trail of emotional scars that can preclude the making of art for lifetimes. These incidents often rest on the assumption that there are some, often the few, who are born with innate artistic talent. If not present, then the artist within cannot be cultivated, thus absolving educators from any responsibility for the work they are ashamed to display. In ignoring and hiding work by the uneducable students, they fail to consider and find potential significance that the work might reveal and attempt to extend their student in some generative direction. I think this the most treacherous kind of education: the one that closes rather than opens. From that point forward, I tended to avoid school art classrooms and art teachers. Though there were some exceptions, fairly or unfairly, I often considered both as sites and sources of pain, embarrassment and insignificance. I also developed some novel strategies for disengaging from the art classroom. For example, at age 14, I recall learning linoleum printing. After the first session introducing the tool and materials, I quickly went back to a workbench and abruptly carved a jagged line across the tile, mirroring the beeps of a heartbeat being registered on a hospital heart monitor. With one stroke of a v-shaped gouge and a couple of turns of the tile, I was finished and ready to print. The work perhaps signifies, in part, that I was beginning to recognize art making as a source for enquiry. At the time, my father was having his fourth angioplasty in as many years. I was confronting his and indeed my own mortality. But this lifeless lifeline also illustrates the extent to which I did not want to reveal or invest much in artwork, risking experimentation with a new tool or discipline for fear of art teacher retribution. By my last year in high school, one of the art teachers had converted a vacant kitchen into a ceramics studio. He trusted some of my friends with a key and they became unofficial proctors. With greater flexibility in our schedules, my friends and I were drawn to this room and the potter’s wheels in particular. I found so much delight

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in clay and the wheel as a site of contemplation and forgiveness. While lost in thought amidst a spinning wheel, mistakes with clay seemed to have few consequences other than starting over and/or changing plans. Accidents and failures led somewhere new, as tall and thin vases ‘failing’, easily transformed into ashtrays and possibilities to experiment with glaze. The ceramics studio became the first art classroom where I was able to work outside the gaze of the art teacher. I worked independently and alongside supportive and more experienced friends and peers, who illustrated ways in which I might approach clay and the wheel. Over time and with commitment, practice and my friends’ support, I began to develop a bit of a knack for the potter’s wheel. This suggested to me that art making has nothing to do with so-called innate talent. Instead, old-fashioned Sunday school virtues, such as hard work, practice and an interest in learning new things, began to appear to matter more. Into the Flame After high school, I left home for university, fulfilling my parents’ dreams by attending Brown University, an Ivy League school located in Providence, the capital of the smallest American state, Rhode Island. Named for a donor who earned his fortune in the slave trade, Brown is an academy on a hill overlooking a post-industrial city that, to its own dismay, is located, for those who are unfamiliar, between Boston and New York. Recently, Providence has designated itself ‘The Creative Capital’, attempting to revive its local economy using arts, culture and creativity as drivers for economic development and tourism. As a student at Brown, I registered for its pre-medicine programme with the goal of becoming an orthopaedic surgeon working primarily with athletes. This trajectory was a natural continuation of my parents’ values in becoming a professional and further acquiring wealth and status. Thankfully, the university advised its ‘pre-meds’ that only 10 per cent of them would continue on to medical school after graduating and suggested pursuing other academic interests. I took this advice to heart, and like a moth flying towards a flame, I chose to ‘concentrate’, as they say at Brown, in History of Art and Architecture. I found myself enjoying sitting safely in the back row of a dark lecture hall, admiring beautiful artefacts projected onto a wall. In the mid-1990s, the intellectual discourse at Brown was largely shaped by identity politics. Through this discourse, claims to knowledge are legitimized if accompanied by one’s self-identification to social interest groups, typically defined in terms of some mark of oppression and/or recognition as to how one might be an oppressor. Given our status as students at an Ivy League university, this produced some problematic tensions, particularly around questions of class and privilege. I sometimes found this discourse to be intellectually dishonest, when as undergraduates, we attempted to mask our privilege and seek some legitimacy by suggesting financial and/or other



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hardships. At the same time, there were aspects of this discourse that were also constructive. It challenged me to re-examine my values and practices; in particular, how they might have arisen through and also reinforced my privilege. This re-examination, I think, drew my attention to my concern for myself and others when one’s sense of possibility is denied for whatever reason. Reflecting back on moments where I felt denied, like in Mrs Amie’s classroom, I began to find nothing more cruel, when for whatever reason, a person does not feel a sense of possibility. With an emerging sense of my own mortality, I started to feel that being born into an uncertain world to face a certain death is suffering enough than to be denied a sense of possibility. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, I think I began to recognize that the uncertainty we inherit is also what allows for possibility. Somewhat ironically, this discourse led me to be less drawn to my pre-medicine programme and Brown itself. In its place, I found myself turning to an emerging interest in art making and education as sites for learning beyond the university. Through the Swearer Center for Public Service, an institute at Brown, which facilitates the public engagement of university students, I began bussing myself across town to a state school to ‘mentor’ young children. Through this experience, I was introduced to the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities within the education system. I became increasingly aware of my own limitations, recasting my own education attainment in light of my need to contend with my own insecurities, the possibilities afforded to me by my privilege – both mixed in with some hard work. Building on an emerging interest in food that, like clay, felt more accessible to me than music or visual art, I started to write letters to chefs, seeking opportunities for hands-on learning outside the university classroom. Through a series of auspicious events, again afforded to me by the social network present as a student at a prestigious university, I found a young French chef who owned a seafood restaurant, willing to teach me how to cook if I worked with him on his English. Soon, I found myself endlessly chopping parsley in a hellishly hot, closet-sized restaurant kitchen in Brittany, France. It was arrogant to think that as a young American with no cooking experience and little capacity to speak French that I might be prepared for the apprenticeship. For my first task in the kitchen, the chef handed me a carrot and a peeler. Since I could not speak French, he motioned what to do. When he looked over his shoulder a few minutes later, I had whittled the carrot to a nub in my fingers and a pile of shreds on the bench – I was Ivy League educated but did not know how to use a carrot peeler. Yet, what was immediately striking to me working with this chef was that he did not make me feel inferior for the procedural culinary knowledge that I lacked. Instead of teaching me knowledge I could find flicking through cookbooks, the chef invited me to participate in collaborative enquiry. He was interested in how I tasted food and ate, my willingness to experiment and reasons why I wanted to cook for others. Living

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abroad for the first time, my own cultural practices, particularly with food, became more visible through constant comparison with those found in my newfound home abroad. Through this enquiry and estrangement, I was pushed to consider how I wanted to cook, how I might direct dishes, particularly sauces, in new directions. I was challenged to bring my own experiences into his kitchen, while also adapting to how our evolving sauces tasted, looked and smelled. My ideas and how I tasted food mattered to him, and this acknowledgement provided some sense of security and belonging as I faced the uncertainty, risk and the possibility of failure that comes with authoring dishes. Putting these recipes in motion, putting a restaurant in motion, again altered my sensibility. I was becoming aware of the generative experience of contributing to a common life that aspired to something greater, which in that situation meant good food and conversation. When I returned to the United States and my final two years at Brown, perhaps with new confidence, I found myself participating in a dynamic circle of friends who choreographed dances, worked in student theatrical productions, created visual art and produced interventions and performances. Like a killdeer with a broken wing act, a young man led the group, doing startling performances such as chaining two eight-foot pieces of lumber to his ankles for the winter months. Dragging them around the campus, stopping for eager classmates who signed them as if they were casts on fractured limbs. He sat in lecture halls with his eight-foot tall wings, chained and autographed, sticking up in the air above nodding heads. Within this newfound social group, only the barest of revelations of fear or the shining of an interrogatory light on the darkest of secrets signified an honourable attempt to liberate ourselves from the false consciousness associated with our privilege. Any sniff of unacceptable Caulfieldian phoniness was snuffed out with smirks. Though ultimately unbearable and obnoxious, this ethos also had a bright side. For example, one evening, my friends hosted a Passover Seder, which I had never experienced. In retrospect, it seems almost cliché that I performed a liberatory dance given the Seder’s themes of slavery and freedom. When the tables were cleared and primal music played over the stereo, I found myself on my knees on the floor in the centre of the room. Beginning to gesture in small pulsating movements that one might expect to see in any dance club, they slowly transformed into more adventurous and expressive moves, with stretching arms and a rotating torso. Then, my hands were reaching the hands of others and we became lost in a series of duets, mirroring each other’s movements. I was authoring dance with those who once intimidated me. As the dance progressed, I became increasingly lost in time and space, the significance mounting until my lips began to tingle with excitement and then went numb. It was an impossible night to bring to a close. We were ready for the Seder to be over, but any gesture available to us – such as saying ‘good night’ and then walking in



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different directions home – seemed wholly inadequate for acknowledging what just happened. The Seder dance marked a moment when I began to learn why we embellish sound, movement and objects with each other. I began to appreciate how it makes our relations to one another and the world special. And rather than distinguishing who is more or less qualified to participate in this embellishment, the more essential question for me started to become how to work to expand who and how one might participate. There was, however, a dark side to our constant efforts to bare all to each other. Given the backdrop of identity politics at Brown, we related to each other by constructing and stacking victimhood on a scale and comparing the relative weight of our traumas. This, simply put, can be traumatizing. Soon after the dance, I started to make drawings in this spirit and thought I might exhibit them at a local public library. The exhibit, Notes on my Kindergarten Napkin, featured drawings in which I honed a microscopic lens on an emerging discovery of my family life as a series of literal and figurative assaults, affairs, frauds and bankruptcies. While working on the project, I ended up being carted away from a friend’s house in an ambulance with a massive anxiety attack that left me with mild paralysis for a day. Having flown fully into the flame, the event led to a wholesale re-evaluation of how I might reconstruct myself from the ashes. From the Ashes After this difficult incident, I found a wealth of important threads to draw on from my uneducable beginnings. Building on my emerging concern for tragedy, suffering and possibility, I began to develop an understanding of a creative practice as a way of describing how we enact possibility. I started to become more interested in this than an artistic practice, which for me describes the making of art. A creative practice, for me, describes taking artefacts – the residue of lives lived before us – and recombining, altering and stretching them in ways that allow us to describe and re-describe, make and remake, our relationship to each other and the world in a way that might feel significant. Stumbling into an understanding of myself as a creative practitioner, I began to think through the pedagogic implications of how I and others might develop a creative practice. Reflecting on the events described above, I began to think about how being able to recombine, alter and stretch artefacts depends on approaching them as malleable rather than fixed. This is aided when artefacts are allowed a certain degree of ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity, rather than being approached as requiring strict procedural or factual knowledge that must be adhered to. In other words, experiencing not knowing how to peel a carrot might engender possibilities for me, and perhaps even customary carrot peeling, rather than simply replicating the known way to peel a carrot.

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Related to the above, my deep suspicion of authority continued perhaps somewhat unfairly. Illustrated, for example, by my experience in Mrs Amie’s classroom, I became increasingly suspicious of authority’s approach to artefacts in ways that attempt to deny ambiguity, uncertainty and possibility for the sake of establishing and re-establishing its own status and position. Holding the keys to the ‘correct’ way for an eight-year-old to paint a fish mobile seems, in retrospect, more about her need to establish herself in the eyes of professional parents rather than someone genuinely interested in how I might approach a mobile. Similarly, I became more aware of my suspicion towards disciplines, such as the arts, which rely on authority to establish who might or might not be possible artists. As a result, I became increasingly interested in sites of learning that might be able to flatten hierarchies, minimize authorities and learn outside the confines of boundaried disciplines. I found potential for this type of learning in what is sometimes referred to, somewhat derogatorily, as informal learning, or learning that takes place outside formal educational institutions such as schools and universities. Drawing on my experiences in the clay studio and the restaurant kitchen, I also became interested in collaborative enquiry as a starting point for learning. Collaborative enquiry is a process whereby people investigate questions, and begin to make meaning from the investigation, rather than focusing on knowledge transference. I also became interested in estrangement, whereby we learn across difference in unfamiliar places, with unfamiliar people, using unfamiliar artefacts. Learning across town with a youngster half my age in a school like the one my parents tried to keep me away from, or in a restaurant in a foreign country, I started to appreciate how estrangement helps us gain perspective on our own uses of artefacts. This understanding, I felt, might again help them become more malleable, more adept to being recombined, stretched and altered. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, I became interested in making things special with others. From Mrs Amie’s classroom, I appreciated the vulnerable risks associated with enacting possibilities, and how criticism can threaten them. Through studying abroad, I was becoming aware of how confronting the unfamiliar in one another draws attention to our own limits and possibilities. From the Seder, I was beginning to appreciate the significance of risking unfamiliarity with the support of friends. With some sense of these pedagogic values beginning to emerge, I set out to launch a studio in Providence during my final year at the university, which was open to students from local public high schools and universities, who like me, might be interested in creating and learning in ways different from what they were encountering in their formal sites for learning. The place, initially coined Project: New Urban Arts, was founded in 1997 in a loft of a downtown church before being relocated, one year later, to a storefront in closer proximity to three public high schools. Discussed below, it is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that I clearly understood the values described above in 1997 and was simply setting out to develop pedagogies



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consistent with them. Attempting to develop and understand these pedagogies has been a complex process of trying out some that may be seen as consistent and inconsistent with these values, being immersed in and distanced from them, and allowing for multiple ways to attempt to describe and understand them. At the same time, I have also found myself consistently returning to the incidents described above as the sources of my interest in launching New Urban Arts. So, in offering this account, I feel that my perspective is aided by the particular vantage point that I have now; and yet, I feel like I have been repeating myself since its inception. New Urban Arts1 New Urban Arts has been described by its founding board chair as a place that ‘operates more like a professional studio – enabling learners and practitioners to follow an idea, impulse, or line of enquiry in a way that enables discovery and unanticipated learning’. It is a storefront studio that provides free arts-based mentoring programmes, professional development for practitioners, residencies, public programmes such as exhibitions and public dialogues, and a national alumni network of former artist mentors and students. Although the first decade of the organization was a struggle for recognition and funding, the organization has more recently earned local and national accolades. The studio attracts a diverse group of young people, mainly teenagers who attend nearby public schools and live in neighbourhoods marked by high rates of poverty. Students are often from Latino, West African and Asian communities, navigating multiple cultural identities as 1st, 1.5 and 2nd generation immigrants. Since 1997, over 1200 students have regularly participated in New Urban Arts’ programmes for at least one year, and often participate for many more years. Approximately 125–175 students were voluntarily participating each year, learning about New Urban Arts primarily through word-of-mouth from their peers. I first decided that New Urban Arts would work with high school students because we felt it was a particular group whose possibilities were being closed off to them through a pervasive social distrust of young people and youth culture, as well as their required attendance in schools where, we felt, reductive and managerial approaches to teaching and rote learning were increasing their stranglehold. The possibility for collaborative enquiry and flattened hierarchy was also facilitated by developing a near-peer mentoring model in which university students and high school students partnered with one another in the studio. The fact that university students are still making sense of high school, and high school students are attempting to make sense of life after high school, I think, makes for an interesting relationship. Although many of New Urban Arts’ ‘artist mentors’ are still university students, this group has expanded to include former high school students, and emerging and working artists, educators and/or creative practitioners. Among Providence’s

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strongest assets may be this segment of its workforce. Despite the economic challenges they face, I found that they are deeply committed to engaging their communities. One way they might do this is by becoming an artist mentor at New Urban Arts. Approximately 20 artist mentors participate each year, selected through an application and interview process administered by high school students who have participated in New Urban Arts for at least a year. The artist mentor position is a voluntary one rather than a paid position, as they are being recruited not so much to teach and offer expertise, but to join high school students, who are also volunteering, in developing their creative practice. Despite the voluntary nature of the position, New Urban Arts receives three artist mentor applications for each available slot. My interest in estrangement as a potentially rich source of learning is afforded by the rich diversity of those who participate in the studio, a mix I think that I have rarely experienced in what I have found to be a largely segregated American public life. People with a variety of backgrounds and interests are all welcome in the studio. As a result, I experienced richness and depth of sharing and conversation that I have rarely, if ever, experienced outside the studio, and one my parents sheltered me from as a young child. My distrust of hierarchy and authority perhaps best manifested itself in New Urban Arts’ fifth or sixth year, when the process of selecting artist mentors was handed over to a group of students. Though I was apprehensive about this move, I think few at New Urban Arts now have any regrets and have marvelled at the opportunities that this approach has presented. Beyond providing another opportunity for students to feel a sense of belonging within and ownership for the studio, it has proven surprisingly effective at weeding out applicants who probably are not interested or prepared to participate in the non-authoritative and collaborative enquiry taking place at New Urban Arts. This hiring process also positions students differently than they can often be positioned within institutions of learning. In other words, they are positioned as those with an active stake in its future, as opposed to passive recipients of its services. This also allows dynamics to emerge between students and artist mentors that can be quite different from those often found between students and teachers. Through this hiring process, students, for example, may be positioned as those who acculturate artist mentors on what it might mean to perform the arts mentoring role in the studio. Artist mentors are not provided with very much explicit training or introduction in terms of how to be an artist mentor. They are provided with a general history and overview of the organization, some ground rules and legal aspects of working with children, and some general housekeeping issues related to using the studio. As a result, students who have experience of what it means to be ‘artist mentored’ often use a variety of implicit and explicit strategies to direct new artist mentors. Students might suggest, for example, a project they might do together. Or, they might stop attending sessions or ignore artist mentors when they feel that they are being ‘taught’ rather than ‘arts mentored’. Rather than being framed like teachers as experts and judges



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of disciplinary knowledge and taste, this interviewing and enculturation process positions artist mentors as fellow practitioners and critical friends. The majority of New Urban Arts’ programmes take place in a studio, with a highly visible storefront, which is in close proximity to multiple public high schools, major bus lines and neighbourhoods with young people who may have limited financial recourses to access fee-based enrichment opportunities outside school. The space itself is an openly formatted and flexible space that is tweaked regularly and modified more significantly annually to reflect the emerging interests of those participating. To the extent possible, New Urban Arts attempts to refrain from providing artist mentors, students and disciplines distinct ‘classrooms’, and instead prefers to keep them working in the open. The assumption is that this allows for students and artist mentors to see the development of different creative practices and consider how they might support them or what they might mean for their own. At the same time, it is the case that particular disciplines such as silk-screening and photography have demanded somewhat demarcated spaces for technical reasons. New Urban Arts offers programmes essentially when schools do not, opening its doors after school and during holiday and summer vacations. Artist mentors make themselves available at particular times in the studio, often twice a week. Students choose their artist mentors and their schedule, and are not given any participatory requirements. If students cannot or choose not to participate, it is trusted that it is for a good reason, such as too much schoolwork or family obligations, such as babysitting, sports or a job. A central challenge to understanding and describing New Urban Arts is that the studio is a place in constant flux. Although the studio is designed to have ‘arts mentoring groups’ that consist of an artist mentor and four to six high school students who meet for two- to three-hour sessions, twice a week, over the course of an academic year, it rarely, if ever, unfolds that way. New Urban Arts allows students to participate if and when they want and change which or how many artist mentor(s) they work with whenever they want. They may choose to work independently or they may develop a type of participation not yet known. More recently, this has involved high school students starting their own arts mentoring groups, which sometimes involve ‘artist mentors’ participating in them as if they are ‘students’. As is evident, the norms for participation are somewhat ambiguous. This can be maddening for artist mentors, if they approach New Urban Arts as a teacher might approach a classroom. As long as they expect a somewhat dedicated and consistent group of students, they will likely be disappointed. Similarly, they will also probably be personally crushed if they approach New Urban Arts as a social contest, whereby the artist mentor with the most students near them is perceived to be the most effective. Over time, folks at New Urban Arts also developed an interest in an interdisciplinary, or perhaps even a trans-disciplinary approach, to contend with what many saw as the contentious relationship between knowledge and authority discussed earlier. As

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a result, the ‘disciplines’ practiced in the studio evolve each year, depending on the interests and experiences of those who participate in the studio. Artist mentors and students engage in a playful recombination of more and less traditional arts disciplines, such as drawing, photography, printmaking, radio documentaries, yoga, hip hop, bread making, knitting, bike repair, roller derby, marching band, mixed tape making, salsa dancing and ‘zine’ swapping, to name a few. This playful practice may blur the borders between disciplines, and possibly provoke the development of a critical perspective towards disciplinary knowledge and practices. It may also allow for increasing complexity and ambiguity in the studio that lowers the threshold for altering, stretching and recombining existing uses of artefacts. Through New Urban Arts, I learned that a creative practice in part is an exploration of possibilities, an encounter with difference. It is a process of becoming nestled in the unknown, ambiguous, and possible failure, in engaging in a relationship with the world whereby what is known must be suspended in order to embrace the unfamiliar. It is also a contention with how we might adapt knowledges, beliefs, uses of tools, practices and language to correspond with this constantly changing relationship to the world, which is provoked by a constant engagement with difference. At the same time, I have learned how important support and care is needed in order to engage with that difference. New Urban Arts, I think, can often be a profoundly non-judgemental place, where hugs, trips to the coffee shop among students, staff and artist mentors, endless conversation and students’ relaxed lounging near administrators’ wall-less offices are central. Sometimes it’s ‘only’ an unanticipated conversation with another person one afternoon in the studio that leads to an unforeseen and delightful place.

Some Observations Tyler’s writing touches on possibility, collaboration and critical moments, as well as how he himself defines art practice as ‘creative practice’; the studio ethos is considered central to this. His account gives a profound insight into the nature of informal learning, with connections to collaboration and experiences outside traditional schooling. ‘Epiphany’ figures prominently, alongside an openness to new ideas and the unfamiliar; he makes several positive references to ‘ambiguity’, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘complexity’, typical of one involved in an active and meaningful way with creative practice. Tyler’s account resonates with notions surrounding the removing of walls, both metaphorically and actually, with the consequent blurring of borders, and creating new spaces of collaboration. Tyler’s contribution here is of particular value as it highlights the importance of considering ‘art’ in a very broad way – what I have termed elsewhere



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as ‘creating aesthetic significance’ (Hickman 2010). The characteristics of such activities being a concern for formal unity (making things ‘just right’) and ascribing some personal significance to the act of creating. More fundamentally, the conditions for creating aesthetic significance are important and require a sensitivity to place and space; the paradigm example of a space that facilitates creative endeavour being, of course, the artist’s studio, but equally perhaps, kitchens and gardens can be seen as sites that enable people in this way. By engaging with the complexity and ambiguity of the identity of ‘creative practitioner’, he attempts to provide points of connection and departure for other artists, educators and creative practitioners. The content of Tyler’s commentary reveals his academic background – at the time of writing it, he was engaged in educational research, locating his understanding of both pedagogy and creative practice within sociocultural learning theory. Informed by this perspective, he uses pedagogy to describe the ways in which people come to learn and use artefacts. In this respect, he notes that pedagogy is not something that only teachers do in a school situation, but can be present in all aspects of our lives. Tyler’s doctoral research (Denmead 2010), an ethnographic study of the pedagogies of a group of artists, describes in his own words ‘how eight artists slow down time, construct generative spaces, engage empathetic bodies, and offer materials elementary in form and suggestion’. The notion of slowing down time is an intriguing one and identifies an important aspect of creative pedagogy that cannot be located easily within the conventions of schooling, but might well be an important contribution to pedagogical theory.

Note Since March 2009, New Urban Arts was designated a 2009 Coming Up Taller Award winner by First Lady Michelle Obama, America’s highest honour for youth arts and humanities programmes, one of only fifteen programmes honoured.

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Nikki Goldup

Formal and Informal Schooling – A Personal Account The pathway that led me to working in education did not feel straightforward, but in hindsight it was perfectly natural that I followed this vocation. It is now obvious that the learning experiences I gained along the way formed my pedagogical values, sense of self and understanding of my subject. I also believe that the events in your life, who you meet, who you don’t meet, your acts and how they affect others, all seem to have a way of forming what you are and your life course. It is with these thoughts that I begin the task of unravelling what it is to be a teacher through my own personal lens. My teaching career to date has been enhanced by my belief that perhaps events happen for a reason. Of course, this notion is debatable, but it does afford you some comfort when dealing with the ups and downs in life, making contingencies for possible disasters and making good out of a bad situation. I was never going to become a teacher. I just ended up as one. This account charts my career, pedagogical development and where this pathway has taken me to where I am today. My school art teachers were a fantastic team of eccentrics led by Mrs B, the most amazing and inspirational teacher-artist I have ever met. At school, I never understood the concept that an art teacher could also be a practising artist (as most students do, I thought that teachers taught and had no life out of school), but Mrs B personified what it was to be a ‘reflective practitioner’. She has since passed away and will be greatly missed. Her lessons were amazing; they had a beginning but you never really knew what the outcome would be until some point when there always seemed to be a collective ‘ahhhhh’ of understanding from the class. This was playful and witty teaching at its best, with a good dose of risk taking and danger. Mrs B. was a very philosophical and relaxed woman in most situations, but still assertive and assured so that we trusted her and believed in her professionalism. Her teaching style was one that embraced guided personal discovery; a mixture of formal drawing, painting and printmaking, in part, developed from her experiences at the Slade School of Art. We worked with focus and the times that I remember were the long periods that we were left to work at our own pace. There were deadlines, but this was the era of the old ‘A’ level system, where the course was two years long and you had time to produce a breadth of work in different media. Mrs B had an ability to balance pace and learning,



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so we would be given time to follow and make our own discoveries, while knowing there was help at hand if we needed it. The lessons at ‘A’ level were more indicative of an art school studio tradition and we appreciated this chance to work as ‘artists’. After finishing school in Cambridge, I left to pursue a career in textile restoration. This was following the obligatory gap year, which stretched out to two years of bliss, riding horses, completing several textiles courses and travelling to festivals. At the time, my sixth-form career advisors were not exactly geared up to knowing how to ‘direct’ students through visual arts-based career ambitions. In fact, they did very little to encourage the interest I had in making textiles. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to apply to an art foundation course or, more to the point, I lacked the confidence to apply. After trawling through various prospectuses, I came across a course in textile restoration, run within the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace. I remember thinking that this would give me some skills, a break from home and the possibility of a textiles-based career when I finished the training. With very little thought to the matter, I applied and was accepted on the course. After one term, I just knew the place wasn’t for me. I found the ‘sewing to instruction’ so different to what I was used to. At the time, I was going to parties, living in London and staying out all night. I was engulfed by the freedom of living away from home in the vibrancy of London. My friends were at St Martins, Camberwell and Chelsea, making art that represented them. I sat in a workroom making copies of historical textiles. The thought of a career in sewing to perfection bored me beyond tears. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the significance of the skills that I was learning or the quality of the pieces that I was able to work on. The iconography, the images of ‘women’s work’, the preciousness of the materials, all sunk in and stayed at the back of my mind to be retrieved later. I remember begrudgingly comparing the sewing studio to that of a convent as we stitched in silence, not daring to make a mistake. It was just too subservient for me, and within a term I had left with an aim to make my own mark on the textile world. My short stay there taught me what kind of environment and educational system I needed to thrive in. I wanted to go to art school and was determined to get there. My next move was to enrol at Opus School of Textile Arts. Run by Alex and the late Julia Caprara. If I could choose events that really have formed me as an artist-teacher then this would be one of the top three. During this time, I discovered that learning could happen by play and that, through sustained, playful, highly personalized and focused work, you could begin to understand your artistic self. The work that I produced at this time, with its naive and raw qualities, was some of the best that I have made and I still draw from the learning that happened during my ‘extended’ two-year foundation. On advice from Julia, I applied to study BA ‘Fine Craft Design’ at the University of Ulster in Belfast. My decision to move cities was one based on a small dream to live

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in Ireland and a need to experience the culture of another city as disparate from Cambridge as I could find. At the time, Belfast was still discovering its identity during the lengthy ‘peace talks’ of the early 1990s. Under the façade of violence was a clubbing and social scene that whetted my gregarious and hedonistic nature. The art college was based in North Belfast, an area predominantly occupied by The Irish Times and Belfast Telegraph offices, with a cathedral next door and the docks, with their impressive yellow cranes not far away. Declared as a ‘peace zone’, we were largely overlooked by the paramilitaries and as such, the college was a very relaxed and happy place. My first and second years allowed me to experiment with jewellery design, textiles and ceramics. I would not describe myself as a model student and was frequently ill with hangovers; such was the frequency of my party going! In hindsight, my social life had a large influence on my third-year work. As I became more involved and began to run and direct club lighting and visuals, I understood more about performance and what pleases people visually. The course focused predominantly on teaching and experimenting with skills so that we could specialize in a specific area during the third year. I chose textiles as it continued to be a medium that I appreciated for its complex cultural associations and beautiful textural qualities. Things seemed to ‘click’ during my third year. Happily left to play in my studio, I found that a looser and less structured approach suited my work. Despite the time we had to work at our own pace, the degree course was tightly run under very strict tutorage. This department had a serious work ethic, which developed competitiveness between students. It is questionable whether this was entirely healthy, but it did appeal to my personality and has since helped me professionally as it was an environment similar to the first school that I taught at. My final collection, gaining me the highest first-class mark in the year, evolved from a combination of decaying flowers and complex shibori (Japanese tie-dye) fabrics that I manipulated using metals and heat presses. The final collection, which reflected some of the earthiness of the geography in Northern Ireland, was shown in several fashion shows as a performance and received massive press editorial. On reflection, this experience and level of professional practice all lent itself to the future challenges of the classroom; at the time though, teaching was far from my mind. After graduating and moving back to Cambridge, I had the challenge of trying to work out just what sort of career I wanted to follow. Teaching was never an option – I remember thinking that those applying for a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) were insane. Why would anyone want to work in a school? At the time, it seemed a job where all your creativity would be squashed and you would have to follow too many rules. I was working as a freelance stylist, made and sold greetings cards and developed a collection of clothing that sold in various outlets across London. I honestly did not know where my career would take me, but I felt happy working away in my studio.



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A few months after graduating, I had a call from Julia and Alex Caprara from Opus School of Textile Arts. They were considering hiring a teacher that could help with their City and Guilds and adult education courses. Tentatively, I agreed to work with them, supporting the amazing women that attended their classes. Within this very happy and nurturing environment, I discovered how the social dynamic of a class could often work in a positive and, occasionally, in a negative way. At the time, I was surprised at how my teaching began to support my own art making and thinking. I enjoyed the performance of teaching, experimenting and testing out ideas and methodologies. I don’t think I would have followed a career route in education if it wasn’t for this experience. It provided a platform for pedagogical discovery and a safe space to try out and learn how to work with people. During this time, I decided it was prudent to gain a teaching qualification and so studied for two City and Guilds qualifications in adult education. Again, this helped to give a formality and a structure to my lessons and gave me some assurance that the way I naturally worked with students was totally acceptable and, in some cases, good teaching. After a few years working at Opus, I received a call from my former school textile teacher. The school had recently decided that it was important to place artists within the school as part of a visiting artist programme. I, having featured in the local press after winning several awards for my works, and being an ex-student, appeared to be ‘an entirely appropriate candidate for the role’. It was strange to be back at school. Although I had thrived in the art department, the rest of this very academic institution felt alien to me. I had always considered myself to be decidedly practical, and the thought of sitting in a staff room full of my former maths and language teachers filled me with horror. As a knee-jerk reaction to this, I decided to dress as ‘creatively’ as I could during my residency and push every boundary to the maximum. This reaction was really a reflection of my maturity at the time. I was still a recent graduate, and with no teaching career intended, I felt I had little to lose. Amazingly, my haphazard ways appeared to work and I soon felt very comfortable in the school environment. As my confidence grew, the rebel act was dropped and I worked hard to develop very holistic, longer-term plans for the students that I worked with. At the time, I remember attending a training day with some local art teachers. I remember noting how they seemed so lacklustre and ambivalent towards their jobs. What was the point in teaching if you had no passion for the subject? I remember asking myself. I made a promise to myself to leave teaching as soon as I fell out of love with art. During the residency, and very unfortunately, the textiles teacher that I was working with had to take long-term absence. At the time, the school was very pleased with my work and aptitude with the students. They asked if I would like work as a full-time cover teacher for the next three months, which was then extended to a year’s placement. This seemed like a good idea, as I was able to balance my own commissions and

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exhibition commitments with the job and it was a luxury to have a steady income. With no hesitation, I accepted the position. Sadly, the teacher who I was covering for decided to resign from her role and I was interviewed and accepted the position of full-time textiles teacher. This was a lucky break for me, although for a while I felt that my job was gained through a sad set of circumstances. It took about two years of work before I acknowledged I had been interviewed and selected on my merit as a teacher. The next stage of my career addressed my lack of formal teacher training. I had adult education certificates, but nothing like a PGCE. As the school was based in the independent sector, this wasn’t an immediate issue, but was one to be addressed. After some research and great support from a mentor that had been appointed to support me through the early years of my career, I discovered the graduate training programme. In essence, this was a self-structured course where trainees that had teaching placements could assess and direct their learning. I suppose you could call this ‘on the job’ training, less theory and more doing, with lots of teaching observations, reflection and feedback. At the time and with heavier work commitments this suited me, but I remember that I felt I lacked any understanding of teaching theory. Perhaps this was for the better, as I was able to teach, reflect and develop my classroom management skills quite naturally, without being bogged down with theories and academic understanding. Given my ‘accidental’ employment, and the fact that I never set out to become a teacher, I think my approach was always quite relaxed and informal. I worked hard but never taught hard – what was the point of pressurizing students and getting angry with them… a waste of everyone’s energy I thought. In hindsight, my approach was very constructivist, with the relationships with my students being at the heart of my teaching. I take the approach that not everyone is going to enjoy or feel that they can achieve a high level in art. I remember really lacking in confidence and hating the ‘show and tell’ sessions in art, where we had to discuss our work. My art was private and I did not want to talk about it or show it to other people. I think this led to my quite playful approach to lessons. I decided to make them relaxing, informal and fun, always with an emphasis on students producing work that reflected their personalities and ideas. I hate and don’t understand the purpose of ‘identikit’ art projects and have always steered clear of all forms of shoe and cut red pepper drawing or Picassoesque portraiture. As a textile teacher, working in a girls’ school I felt I also had to rebel against the predefined views of how textiles had been taught and how it was regarded within the school community. Although my early education viewed textiles as a domestic or leisure pastime, my further and higher education did not. I was lucky to be taught by some of the most prominent artists working in textile media and this heavily influenced the content and approach to my lessons. Slowly, the textiles (renamed as in its previous incarnation it was the needlework room) became a place to hang out and make ‘stuff’.



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I spent many happy hours with the radio on, making my own work at lunchtime, while students came in to attend clubs and work on their projects. Sometimes, I had upwards of 45 students in the room and it was carnage and loud, but it was always great to have a chat with the students and see their 10-minute fashion creations – held together with pins and tape and paraded around the netball courts at the end of the session. I did find it difficult to establish myself as a permanent member of staff in the sense that I was previously the visiting artist called Nikki, now I was ‘Miss Willis’. I was reprimanded a few times when the headmistress overheard parents calling me by my first name at a meeting. It seemed bizarre, as they were happy for their daughters to know me by my first name; they were just pleased that their kids were making great work and getting a break from their pressured days. It took a generation of students to remember that I was not ‘Nikki’ anymore, and I guess after an initial rebellion I accepted that I had to take a more formal role in school – in name if nothing else. After three years of working as a textile teacher and through a strange set of circumstances, I was offered a promotion. Over the summer, several staff members of the art department left suddenly because of personal disagreement and the department was left in a bit of a muddle. The head asked if I could manage the department and find two new staff members just two days before term started. I was thrown in at the deep end again and felt that it was important for the students that their teaching was minimally disrupted. Fortunately, after a few hours of cold calling hundreds of contacts, I was able to find two great teachers who could cover for the first term. I felt that it was important to make sure that I got the place as organized as possible. I worked 14-hour days and most weekends cleaning, organizing paperwork and sorting the place out. It was hard to make the transition between being a teacher and a manager, as I felt very responsible for the happiness and success of the department, the staff within it and inevitably, the grades that the students got in formal exams. I think my competitive nature won over any doubts that I had and I revelled in developing the department into something that was recognized within the school community and beyond. At the end of the academic year, the school decided to advertise the head of department role nationally (as they felt legally obliged to do this). I was keen to apply, and not too perturbed by the fact that I had to be interviewed for the role. I rose to the challenge and, as ever, had a big contingency plan if I didn’t get the job (I had a load of exhibitions and other projects to work on). The contingency wasn’t required after all and I was lucky to be formally employed as the new head of department. I spent a very busy seven years as head of department, in which time we employed some great staff and developed some really amazing projects. I can’t say that the time was totally relaxed; I did have to put in many hours of work in order to keep up with school expectations and my need to always be looking at ‘the bigger picture’. By this, I mean I always tried to think about how relevant our teaching was to the students, how useful it would be

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to them in the present and in their futures, and how art was established within the curriculum. Working in what could be called a very ‘academic’ school, I had many candid conversations with the head in order to get the necessary funding and timetable allocation to develop the subject. This was quite an uphill battle at times, but I quite enjoyed the act of persuasion! I also began to work with beginning teachers and found this experience very rewarding. The classroom observations were a useful time for me to reflect and look at my own practice through a new lens. During this time, I think my classroom teaching did suffer a little in the sense that I was rushing from one meeting to the next and arriving just in time to start a class. It was frustrating not to have the luxury of a lunch break or just five minutes of clear headspace to think before a lesson. I relied a lot on pre-planning lessons at the start of a course, combining this work with a very spontaneous approach in order to ensure that the students had a vibrant lesson, but I also stuck to some form of work plan. I remember thinking that it would have been nice to return to being a classroom teacher as it was this aspect of the job that I really treasured. It was a time to engage with the students and reflect on my own practice. I have always loved teaching as it provided my inquisitive mind with the opportunity to learn about the wider world, try out new ideas and engage with people in a collective way. I think it is these things that I took from my time as a schoolteacher. I also felt that I wanted to learn more about teaching and the arts in education. For a while, I had yearned to take a masters course but had found my timetable too full. With much persuasion, I managed to get an afternoon off a week in order to study for a MEd in Arts and Culture in Education at Cambridge University. Again, studying this course was a pivotal point in my career as it provided me with access to literature, discourse and thinking in areas that were very new to me, but made so much sense. I think if I had studied this course earlier in my career it would have been lost on me. However, with 10  years of teaching experience behind me, I found the study highly reflective and useful in the sense that it gave me fresh ideas to implement and experiment with in my classroom teaching. It was hard to balance work with study and to learn how to write in such an academic style, but these negatives were far outweighed by the opportunities I received. In early 2007, I fell pregnant with my first child and decided that I would take a year out of school in order to finish my MEd and raise my child. At the time, it did feel that if I left school I would never return, and when I departed for maternity leave I secretly knew that I wouldn’t be coming back to school. I just didn’t want to return to the 7 a.m.–7 p.m. job I had, particularly not with a young family to support. It was odd being out of school, and it took a while to unwind and retreat from a life led by timetables, planning and bells. Most of all, I missed the students that I worked with and kept in touch with the leavers that went on to art college. We now have quite a network and I am pleased to say I have kept contacts and worked with some of my former students. It was hard to leave the department that I had built up, but with



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motherhood and the academic challenges of the MEd to contend with, I was distracted from this sense of loss. In my second year of the MEd (when my little boy was a month old), I had to choose a subject to research in detail for a 20,000 word project. Originally, I had wanted to research textile making in schools, but I felt this was researching something that I already knew a lot about – where was the discovery and wonder? I remember one night at about 3 a.m., I was feeding my baby and thinking about other mothers who were doing the same thing across the country. It seemed a perfect opportunity to research mothers within a textiles educational context. I was lucky enough to have a highly supportive supervisor for the project. Her frankness and professionalism was amazing and I owe so much to her for the support she gave me during this time. I worked for six months with young mothers, using film, textile making, photography and sketchbook making to explore their notions of identity and to understand what it was like to be a young mum. During this time, I led a series of workshops and held interviews. The end of the project was celebrated with a series of exhibitions, with all the mums receiving a formal qualification in textile making. The project was quite ambitious and I don’t think I would have managed to complete it if I hadn’t had experience teaching in school. It was hard to be so engaged with a group, teach and collect useful data; sometimes, I felt like I was juggling several things at once. It was also hard to leave my small baby, but I felt quite supported being around people who were experiencing the same things as me. As part of the research, I focused on beginning to understand the balance between informal/formal pedagogies and constructivist theory. The group I worked with were from very different educational backgrounds to the students at my previous school, but I found that my teaching style remained the same. This was quite a revelation as I had always tried to be quite truthful to myself and not put on ‘a teacher act’. The project was a great success and since then I have been employed by the centre, working with the mums on a part-time basis. I’ve also extended the work that I do, and work with a range of different community groups of all ages. The projects are always very participant centred and often bring quite diverse communities together. This type of work suits me as it fits around my childcare and allows me to be quite experimental, challenging and playful with my approach. There aren’t as many boundaries, and it is great not to be tied to a formal curriculum and grade getting. I think it also plays to my strengths in the sense that I have to think about the delivery and content of the projects in more detail and accommodate the wider needs of the group. It’s also nice to work with a huge range of people of all ages as this freedom keeps me feeling alive and energized. At this stage, I don’t think I will return to the more formal classroom situation. I love the enquiry and variety that working freelance provides me. It is refreshing and I hope it will allow me to complete further research when my children are older. I don’t think I would have been at this stage if I hadn’t first worked in a sustained way

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within a school. The regularity of lessons and challenges provides you with confidence. It has enabled me to ‘think on my feet’, deal with issues in a calm way and, above all, engage with people in a holistic and empathetic way. When I entered the profession, I knew that classroom teaching wasn’t going to be a lifetime career for me, but it has provided me with the skills I need to pursue bigger dreams and create a meaningful pedagogy to work within.

Some Observations Nikki writes mainly about formal and informal learning; this can been seen not only in her own career trajectory, her schooling and her thoughts about constructivist learning theory (and applying this kind of knowledge later), but also in her own negotiations with the school (moving from the artist to the formal teacher), and in her teaching. In her classroom practice, she cultivates an atmosphere based on relaxation, interaction and the strengths of the students. This ties to her informal style and is something she values in other educators, in the spirit of a studio or art class as a student, as well as something she strives for in her own practice. Play is a major concept threaded through her work. This idea is manifest in her work with women in textiles – blurring boundaries – both in the classroom/studio and in her own mind as she is able to work freelance. Informal learning, particularly the idea of play, and her own studio/ teaching environment are prominent. This connects to her artist identity; there is a clear interaction between her thoughts on art making and studio engagement, personal feelings and ways of working professionally, and in her classroom practice. Play is seen as a means of breaking borders and of making innovation; the space of the studio environment is seen as one of exploration. There is an indication of some ambivalence towards teaching; there is a tacit sympathy for ‘critical pedagogy’,1 while acknowledging the influences of inspirational teachers.

Note I use the term ‘critical pedagogy’ here in what has come to be the accepted sense, as advocated by, e.g. Freire (1970) and latterly Giroux (2005, 2nd edn).

1

Mirko Junkovic

The Learner as Apprentice – Autobiographical Notes My parents immigrated to England in the 1950s from the former Yugoslavia. Although art, as pictures on walls, did not feature in any way in my childhood, my mother was constantly knitting, crocheting or making embroidery – skills that she grew up with in her native Serbia and Croatia. Thus, the products of her creative activity surrounded me. Whether I was snugly sleeping under one of her expansive, exquisitely crocheted bedspreads or eating at the table covered, in full display, with a white embroidered tablecloth, decorated with a multitude of pattern and floral motifs, in what would now be described as a ‘folk art’ style, her intuitive talents were never too far from my consciousness. At an early age, I became aware of her decisions over which colours of thread or wool to use, choosing patterns or textures in her knitting, as she mulled over these thoughts aloud, half sharing them with me as if asking for my approval. This natural, innate quality would occasionally emerge in a different form when, at a loss for what to do with a bored preschool child, she encouraged me to make watercolour paintings. I recall her demonstrating her technique of painting a tree by tenderly and directly painting the trunk and then patiently, brushstroke by brushstroke, painting in individual leaves. Although she never actually produced any paintings and certainly would not have seen herself as an artist in anyway, I recall the intensity of these moments as she sensitively built up the image of her stylized tree in her attempt to entertain or pacify her restless son. My own art development throughout primary and secondary education was relatively uneventful, although I did seem to be confident in subjects that involved manual dexterity. It was during my teenage years that my then brother-in-law became interested in stone carving and encouraged me to help him make illicit Sunday morning tours of various Cotswold quarries to scavenge for pieces of easily portable stone. We would take out the passenger seat of his battered Ford Anglia and somehow lever heavy boulders of digestive biscuit coloured Hornton stone into the car and drive home with the vehicle at an absurdly acute and dangerous angle. As he was discovering his own creative identity, he started to look at various stone carvers, becoming particularly interested in the work of Henry Moore. He went on to make a fine copy of a Moore reclining figure, with the original also made from Hornton stone.

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Untrained and self taught, I was impressed by him, the physicality of the process and his determination to master the technique of direct carving. My role in these endeavours was very much one of subservient apprentice-helper, occasionally being allowed to do some carving if I was lucky. I remember, for example, being shown how important the angle of the chisel or gouge is in relation to how much material was to be removed or how to make a stone surface really smooth by using varying grades of abrasive papers. This apprentice model of teaching and learning remains extremely effective, particularly in the acquisition of a specific set of skills, and one that I now realize has influenced me in my own teaching. Although I didn’t particularly excel in the subject, I maintained a sufficient interest in art to choose it as one of my ‘A’ level subjects. I recall that the course was very loose and unstructured with much predictable painting and drawing from natural forms. This was, however, a period when I discovered clay modelling and throwing. Becoming quite proficient in the process, I began making large functional vessels and then, starting to tire of their monotony, I went on to cut up the cylindrical forms and reassemble them to make semi-abstract figures. I made a series of seated figures, influenced by Moore’s family groupings. Having considered a career in architecture, but being put off by the long training period and more significantly by my failure to get a science-based ‘A’ level, I applied to study for a BEd Joint Honours in Art and Education at Newton Park College of Education, now the University of Bath Spa. This was certainly an important time in my artistic and creative development because it was during these four years that I really developed a lifelong passion for both making art and for the creative thinking skills required for teaching the subject. I was surrounded by teachers who cared about art and, more specifically, its pedagogy. We were introduced to the work of Malcolm Ross and Robert Witkin’s influential ‘Intelligence of Feeling’; also to the work of D. W. Winnicott and his emphasis on the importance of play as a critical element to successful and meaningful creative activity. As part of the course, we were encouraged to keep a journal/sketchbook based on the journals of the British painter, Keith Vaughan. This was something that has stayed with me, almost consistently, ever since – the need to have a sketchbook or notebook on the go as a container for current thoughts. I spent most of my main subject time in the painting studio within the glorious grounds of Newton Park, on the outskirts of Bath. Daniel Burden, a figure who was to become an extremely influential role model, ran the painting studio. He had been taught by John Minton at the Royal College of Art in the 1950s and revered the work of painterly painters like Chaim Soutine, David Bomberg and Frank Auerbach. He was a practising painter then and this remained a constant priority in his life alongside his teaching. Through writing this piece, I noticed on Google search that he is now in his eightieth year, and painting in Northern France. Danny was passionate about painting and it wasn’t long before his energy and enthusiasm rubbed off on all



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of us who came in contact with him. He encouraged us to draw from the figure and the landscape and to interpret our drawings into paintings. He valued highly the process of ‘seeing’ and would often stop a conversation in mid flow, having noticed some momentary play of light on a surface through the window, and urgently point it out to you before you missed this transitory moment of magic. He had a collection of art books in his office that he would constantly refer to and bring into the studio to inspire us further. At one point, I became interested in impasto and started using palette knives to apply the rich buttery oil pigment. Danny, in turn, would excitedly call me into his cosily cluttered office filled with books and exhibition catalogues, to show me an image of a piece of work by the painter Nicholas de Staël, and animatedly point out the richness of his surfaces and how the palette knife had been used to superimpose layers of subtle colours, one on top of another, occasionally allowing previous colours to show through. The facility to have art books on hand to show and inspire students as ideas emerge in conversation, is another aspect of Danny’s teaching that continues to influence my own teaching, particularly at sixth-form level. Shortly after completing my degree, and as a result of Danny’s introduction to the work of Frank Auerbach, I went to his first really big retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in the early 1980s. This exhibition was to have a significant effect on me. Not only did I find the work profoundly moving, but it also inspired me to keep painting and to try to remain a creative teacher practitioner. It was at about this time that I became interested in the writing of John Berger and Peter Fuller. I remember listening to the late Peter Fuller giving a lecture at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 1978, and being impressed by his knowledge of art. He was clearly very well read and supported his views on good and bad art with evidence and extensive research. Sitting on the stage, surrounded by other members of the panel, he had, what seemed like a scrunched-up, thin and apologetic demeanour that invited vilification from various members of the local art community audience. Nevertheless, I became interested in his writing and, of course, he went on to write several books on art and art criticism. I was influenced by his clarity of thought and erudition. He wrote about art and its transcendent, spiritual qualities. At that time, he seemed to champion various artists that I had become familiar with and had already been influenced by. He wrote of his friendship with John Berger and how Berger influenced his own position. I began to read Berger and realized how beautiful, profound and insightful his writing was on all aspects of visual art and on life in general. Unfortunately, as Fuller became increasingly reactionary in his thinking, it became difficult to continue admiring his work and his dismissive attitude towards a lot of contemporary work. During my first teaching post at a large comprehensive school in Essex, I was involved in a piece of research that has continued to influence me in how I relate and talk to my students. A colleague had decided to continue his studies by doing the MA in Art Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, at that time the

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only MA in its field in the country. Newton Park had close links with the then head of the department who happened to be the external examiner on our degree course. Many of us were encouraged to consider the MA, but at that point I was keen to become involved in teaching and start earning a salary. My colleague became interested in epistemology and language, and his research led him to look at how teachers actually use language to communicate concepts to pupils throughout any given lesson. How do teachers explain to the whole class and how this changes when discussion takes place on a one-to-one basis? The recording of this process was carefully considered. I was ‘miked up’ so that everything I said could be recorded and also pick up pupils questioning and responses. The transcript from the resultant recording would then be used as raw data for a piece of research. I found this under the magnifying glass scrutiny very enriching and the process set a standard for the future. I believe that each individual encounter with each pupil to be equally important and the language used to be clear, accessible and unambiguous. I then moved to southeast London for what turned out to be a 20-year period. I gained some excellent experience by working in a variety of schools. I began to emerge as a confident generalist. I was very determined that my pupils experienced as broad an art curriculum as possible, especially during the compulsory years 7–9. I developed teaching skills in relief printing, painting and sculpture, always trying out new approaches and rarely repeating projects too many times. I was then, and am now, constantly interested in new techniques and in extending my knowledge. I was enthusiastic and enjoyed my work. I developed skills in classroom management and the ability to deal with challenging situations and behavioural problems. I was keen to get out of the school environment and use local sites for visual stimulus, e.g. Woolwich market, Woolwich barracks, Greenwich Park, National Maritime Museum and the Avery Hill hothouse. I enjoyed demonstrating techniques at the start of a lesson with all the students watching and asking or answering questions, often grouping close to the demonstration to be able to really see how some subtle process was carried out, and then as pupils dispersed to work independently, mindful of every student, I checked on their practice. I was always encouraging and positive, never cynical or disparaging. Drawing underpinned everything. Most of my projects began with some form of observational study from a primary source and then further developed with visual research before evolving into a painting, print or sculpture. Primary source drawing gave the work vibrancy, vitality and the capacity for the unexpected. This act of drawing was fundamental – life affirming. Throughout this time, wherever I lived, it became essential to have a place to carry out some form of creative activity, usually painting, and I assiduously kept a sketchbook in which I drew anything and everything. I made work and had exhibitions at Greenwich Theatre and the Woodlands Gallery and had drawings accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.



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Throughout my period in London, I twice flirted with ideas of changing career paths. Although neither lasted very long, they both enriched my creative knowledge and skills base, particularly towards three-dimensional thinking. I spent a year studying cabinet making at the London College of Furniture and then worked as a furniture maker for a short period of time with a small company in Greenwich. I also completed a degree in architecture at the then University of North London. These experiences really developed my interest in design and in finding relationships between furniture, architecture and sculpture. I enjoyed enormously getting involved in a design proposal, exploring possible solutions by playing around with materials, making small models and maquettes, often totally absorbed, into the early hours of the morning. Architectural models intrigued me with their potential to suggest new and exciting spaces. Developing ideas through actually handling materials, feeling the nature and character of the material, continues to influence my teaching to this day. I became really interested in the loose working design processes of emerging international architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Liebeskind. Although neither of these interests led to new careers, on my return to teaching, they gave me an added impetus to champion the teaching of sculpture within the secondary art curriculum. Working at Crown Woods School, in southeast London, I continued to devise new schemes of work to push sculpture as far as I could within the limitations of where I taught. I became interested in the method of applying plaster to an armature, and found ways of teaching the process to year 9 pupils, having acquired an old disused garage within the grounds of the school. I recall running a Frink-inspired project on flight, being particularly successful. I also used an old horticulture hut, long after the school’s vegetable garden had been abandoned, and set up the sixth form to make much larger pieces of ‘A’ level work. I didn’t always know exactly what I was doing, but I soon gained confidence through experimenting and trying out ideas. Funding became available for vocational courses, and I learnt to oxyacetylene weld on a one-week course in the heart of what was still then, industrial Birmingham. On my return, equipped with my new skills and the money made available for new courses, I purchased equipment and began to teach metal sculpture and armature making. The contrast of the rigidity of cold steel and fluidity in its hot molten state has an alchemical fascination that sets up many creative possibilities. Probably as a result of my architecture studies, I became interested in light, complex structures made from willow or cane, often with thin tissue membranes applied to give a translucency to the final piece without losing the ‘drawing’ of the structure. Much of this work was based on the notion of giving young people new absorbing experiences, encouraging three-dimensional thinking within a more creative environment, free from the constraints of a design technology brief. Something that, within my experience, I saw as being marginalized.

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It was at this time that I became involved with postgraduate education, managing to get additional part-time work alongside my post at Crown Woods. I felt this to be a perfect situation as it meant that my work with students was underpinned by examples of my own practice. I set up a strong partnership with the PGCE mentoring programme with Goldsmiths College, London, in which I mentored many students and delivered slide presentations to the year group. I remember one particular occasion when I was showing examples of pupils’ drawings. Several students publicly expressed their lack of confidence in teaching drawing, as they themselves had not been taught to draw on their degree courses. It became a catalyst for a heartfelt discussion on drawing and its significance to contemporary practice. At the University of Greenwich, I taught design studies to Design Technology PGCE students, enabling me to incorporate my interest in the relationship between architecture, furniture and sculpture. Within the Art PGCE programme, I was also invited to devise my own course on sculpture within the 11–16 curriculum. This was a marvellous opportunity to explore new ideas in my own teaching alongside sharing my teaching, on a practical and immediate level with postgraduate students, fresh from fine art degrees, who appreciated the opportunity to learn through creative workshops yet closely linked with classroom management. In retrospect, these sessions were teacher led and might be described, to an extent, as a teacher/apprentice model. My short period at the Roehampton Institute involved working with primary specialists and making use of my own children’s collection of drawings, which I had carefully amassed to document the emergence and development of their schematic mark making through its various, intuitive, unhindered stages, towards later inevitable selfconsciousness. It was with these postgraduate experiences in mind that I applied to study for the MA Art in Education at the Institute of Education, with a personal crusade to research further, sculpture in secondary art education. I was sufficiently determined that I was prepared to fund myself on a part-time, two-year programme. Frustratingly and expensively, this proved not to be as successful as I had hoped. The biggest disappointment for me was that, having had some experience of the Institute, I was expecting to find an environment in which pedagogic issues would be central. After all, the degree was, ‘Art in Education’. Unfortunately, I recall becoming increasingly frustrated by the emphasis on theoretical postmodern interpretations of text and image, particularly through semiotic analysis, which although relevant and vital, were considered in a vacuum, without case studies or references to pedagogic approaches. Reading lists that contained only theoretical texts, with no reference to teaching methodology, disillusioned me, and I felt removed from the kind of debate that was being encouraged. As an artist, my work was continuing to develop as I set up a studio/workshop in our garage on Shooters Hill, southeast London. I had discovered the work of new painters



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that finally drew me away from the Auerbach influences and I began to move towards more intuitive, fresher painting that used purer colour with gestural line and mark, freely and expressively. I became more interested in painters like DeKooning, Hodgkin, Twombly and Diebenkorn. I thinned my paint down, in contrast to my earlier turgid ‘London School’ accretions. I started to use oil bars and draw intuitively on the canvas rather than feeling over-constrained by external factors. I worked hard in the evenings and weekends towards an exhibition in the converted old library in Deptford. The other and more defining factor for not completing my MA was in getting my current post at Long Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge. This was to open up a new and exciting chapter in my teaching career, in a department with an already well established and very successful visual arts department and an organisation that valued and recognized its work. I was primarily successful in getting the post because of my experience and ability to work in a range of media. Although I was based in a traditional ceramics studio, previously run by an excellent ceramicist, my aim was to expand this to include a range of sculptural practices. This I continue to do to this day, with my natural inclination to explore new media and techniques that may offer the potential for new sculptural form. The basis of my teaching has now further evolved to strike a balance between what may be described as traditional group-based, skill-based, teacher-led practice and student-centred, one-to-one, ideas-based teaching. My teaching style, although fluid and adaptable to the requirements at any given stage or time within two-year courses, is fundamentally based on fairness, inclusivity, negotiation, praise, humour and working with students’ personal strength and interest. I hope that my students will be sufficiently interested in their work that commitment and self-motivation is self-evident. I hope to encourage individuality through students’ personal responses that acknowledge art making in relation to culture, society and other visual art practitioners. Similarly, I want my students to be able to talk and write about their work, describing their own chosen references and inspirations. I also continue to value drawing in its widest and most experimental sense, but that responds to the ‘real’ world, encouraging the act of seeing. And, finally, I hope that students will develop a lifelong interest and sensitivity to all aspects of the visual arts, whatever their chosen career paths may be.

Some Observations Mirko’s early experiences are typified by his being surrounded by art making, involving keeping a sketchbook, visual observation, connecting to the world, building his own skills and then moving forward. He discusses teacher influences and the impact of good and bad educational experiences. He stresses the importance of making teaching relevant to learners’ needs.

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Informal learning is prominent, using everyday experiences as a basis for developing skills through play and engagement with other media. In terms of connections to pedagogical practice, Mirko clearly articulates the desirability of the apprenticeship model of teaching and learning. He stresses the importance of learning from others, especially in the visual arts; Mirko cites over fifteen creative artists in addition to people such as Malcolm Ross, Robert Witkin, D. W. Winnicott, Peter Fuller and John Berger, who have influenced his work as a creative practitioner and teacher. Mirko’s intense involvement in art making and the joy it brings is evident: ‘I was then, and am now, constantly interested in new techniques and in extending my knowledge. I was enthusiastic and enjoyed what I did, as I do to this day’. In writing his autobiographical piece, Mirko said that it was ‘an interesting reminder of why I am and who I am as an artist and practitioner and who I am and why I am as a teacher’. The process of writing clarified his ideas about being both an artist and a teacher and he hoped that what he had put down would be valuable to others.

Richard Keys

On Progressivism in Formal Schooling – Autobiographical Notes My name is Richard Keys and I have been an art teacher at a variety of establishments for 35 years. When I was very young, I remember drawing and painting on the back of bits of wallpaper left over from my mother’s early experiments in home decoration. These early paintings were, by and large, fairly wild adventures into abstract expressionism and I was very happy, splashing paint and food around on the kitchen table. Some time afterwards, at infant school, we were asked to make a picture of ‘bonfire night’ and my response was a particularly explosive piece, drenched with colour, drips, splats and stars. Proudly, I took it into school. ‘Richard, that’s a complete nightmare’ announced my teacher, Mrs Baggaley, and tore it up in front of the whole class. Luckily my mother helped me through this early setback in my artistic career – she was an artist too – and using the same sound philosophy that builds confidence following a car smash (get back in a car and start driving again ASAP), I was soon creating more epic pieces on the back of Peter Rabbit wallpaper. (That Peter Rabbit wallpaper was destined for my bedroom where it stayed for years. Early girlfriends found it particularly amusing.) I guess the subject matter of my early work was fairly stereotypical for a boy in the 1950s; trains tore across the picture (mostly from right to left), rockets screeched into the sky and battleships pounded through mountainous waves. An early experience of a road accident in Nottingham produced a huge picture of a collision between a bus and a tar spreader. Reading a book on the collapse of the Tay Bridge stimulated my best disaster painting. Below a murderous sky lit with lightning bolts, the train, with all its windows painted in a bilious yellow and fire and smoke pouring from the steam engine, falls from the twisted bridge into the black water of the river Tay below. I still have that painting, somewhere. Putting these pictures together didn’t present a problem. I really can’t remember being taught to draw, at least not in these early years. I drew all the time. There were masses of detail and incident. Things that were important were large and things in the background were small, much like those pre-Renaissance adventures into perspective. I’m sure that early influences were illustrators of children’s books and Frank

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Hampson’s Dan Dare in the Eagle comic: also the photographs in the Ian Allan locospotters’ handbook. Even now, I can knock up a pretty good Stanier Class 5 mixed traffic locomotive. But the earliest adult influence, apart from family, was Mary Martin. Mary Martin had red hair: she was fun, she liked paint and she was my junior school teacher. She was endlessly encouraging. This is the single most important duty you have as an art teacher, even if the material you are dealing with looks distinctly unpromising. There’s always something there that you can celebrate, some potential to be had. The jargon is ‘continuous formative verbal assessment’ and it comes miles before fiddling around with technique or the colour wheel. Sit down with your young artist and make them feel special. At secondary school, art was regarded as a fairly unimportant activity in the curriculum. This was a school with a cadet force and thrusting scholars eager for Oxford or Cambridge. Art ‘A’ level, for example, had to be achieved in one year. This was my first experience of the marginalization of art in the curriculum and not the last. Throughout my career, it has been my aim to make art education central rather than peripheral. Part of the problem is that most curriculum models have had art, rather like a lonely planet in the solar system, orbiting around the very edge, only to be viewed occasionally, as on school open days. On many art-training days, I’ve heard the (rather smug) advice that you should ‘fight your corner’. What a depressing remark. We shouldn’t be in ‘a corner’ in the first place. However, the resilience of art teachers is not to be underestimated and the status of art is more secure because of it. My art teacher, J. A. Foister, was a remarkable man against all the odds. His art room was a haven for us peripherals and we were encouraged to make it ours. That’s a sound philosophy and it still maintains. He taught me drawing – all the formal elements – and I could line, shade and texture better than anyone. He taught me this because I wanted to learn. I won the school art prize for years until Martin Wiltshire won it, because he could draw people. So, I had to learn how to draw people. I’m still learning how to draw people. A considerable chunk of our ‘A’ level art course involved a written theory paper on art history. Our given text for this was Thames and Hudson’s From Giotto to Cezanne. There were hundreds of pictures and we knew that four would appear on the exam paper, to be identified and analysed in three hours flat. And yet, never did we go anywhere near an art gallery. Not once, in all those years at school. To learn how to teach, I went to Bretton Hall College of Education in Yorkshire, a college devoted to progressive ideas in arts education. Many have heard of this remarkable place; set in beautiful grounds, with an ethos of creativity and challenge, this was our teacher training for three years. For many of us, stultified by mediocre education, this was a liberation and a huge progression. Philosophy, psychology and sociology were endemic



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and taught well. We learned how to make creative outcomes and relationships; collaboration, innovation and some wild experimentation. We painted till late into the night and we acted in each other’s plays. Miss Phyllis Tate, our textiles tutor, introduced me to screen printing and was therefore directly responsible for the major content of my artistic and teaching career ever since. She was a redoubtable character with little time for hippy idleness; she taught us screen printing from scratch: how to make a screen, stretch it, stencils, inks, the lot. Theo Olive, the head of art, took this further with early experiments in photo screen printing. I was greedy for knowledge because I wanted to print the psychedelic posters for the college gigs. John Hodgson was pioneering theatre in education and Giles Elliot was ceaselessly active in his promotion of art education. Ken Robinson (now Sir Ken) was a drama student and was part of a young drama group called ‘Squirt’. I shared a room with Peter Kyle, now chief executive of the Globe Theatre, and our truly visionary principal was Dr Alyn Davies. During that time, a group of us went to Summerhill School, in Leiston, Suffolk, run by A. S. Neill. This was/is probably one of the most progressive/liberal/bonkers (however you view it) schools and it had a profound influence on us. We loved it. The idea of coming to learn when you’re ready was revolutionary. Fired by these ideals, we all went off for our final one-term teaching placements. I have to admit that it was an ideological struggle in Featherstone Junior, but I was on an educational crusade. In those days, I had an old ambulance and faced with the tricky prospect of having to teach unfamiliar subject areas like maths and history, I decided to base all my schemes of work around this machine. It was measured, drawn and quartered: swathes of fairly ghastly creative writing were written and we painted patterns on the spare gearbox. Miss Grimes (I’m not joking) was the form teacher and, I suppose, my mentor. She was rigorous about display (equal borders, pupils’ names underlined) and also the ‘standard of dress’ expected by a teacher in her classroom. After a time, the headmaster asked to see me at the end of each day in his office to discuss my educational achievements. A ‘clash of cultures’ is not an understatement. In hindsight, these people had endless patience and tolerance. One of my most stimulating and satisfying activities while teaching has been as art mentor to the trainee teachers from the faculty of education here in Cambridge. I am still in contact with many of them, and sometimes I wonder how Miss Grimes is getting on. An underlying constant is the significance of the environment in which you make art, at whatever age. The kitchen table, a teenage bedroom, a school art room or an art studio – anywhere secure and stimulating enough for creative expression. Something like ‘bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards’ (from Ways of Seeing by John Berger). My school art room is

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covered with this sort of stuff. It’s our wallpaper (well it’s not Peter Rabbit) and when we get bored with it, we paste new images over it. Make each student feel special – the recent ‘Every Child Matters’ policy isn’t a new idea. Children like making art and they like to feel unique. The knack is to combine the two and take it further. After a time, they need to learn a trick or two – and you need to teach techniques. One of my most successful projects was a Fauvism landscape with Year 10. It’s at the start of the academic year and the weather’s generally pretty good so we go to Christ’s Pieces (one of our local green spaces) for some landscape sketching. Before we set off, I demonstrate how to select and sketch a good composition: also how to add some of the formal elements of line, tone and texture. The students are also shown examples of expected outcome by previous students and by me. It is emphasized that what is expected is a sketch to work further from rather than a fully finished drawing, and we look at the difference between the two. Once they’ve selected their position, I tour the area, sit down with them and give individual technical help – trying to make sense of the complexity of a whole landscape can be fairly daunting and the students really appreciate support at this point. Now, all of this may seem obvious practice, but I’ve observed classes where, once the business of getting the pupils to the site is accomplished, the lesson plan has been too and while the teacher sits in the sun, the frustrated artists are soon exploring the aerodynamic rather than the mark-making properties of an HB pencil. Back in the art room these sketches are used as the basis for a major painting project based on the use of colour as exemplified by the Fauves. The students undertake some investigation and analysis of this art movement and apply some of these ideas to their own practice. They are taught how to grid up their sketches to A2 and how to use acrylic paints. They need to know the difference between using acrylics and, say, watercolours: that you can use light colour over dark colour, that they dry very quickly, that you can mix pure secondaries and beautiful tints. Show them. Show them how to hold a brush to create different effects. They love it. It’ll also give them the confidence to experiment and succeed, and reinforce this with individual engagement. Again, I’ve seen lessons where the art teacher has, at the point of painting, stopped teaching. Job done. This is definitely one of my most successful projects. It’s a combination of work from analysis, observation and imagination; it teaches skills and celebrates colour. The students like it because they are given licence to experiment and the results are spectacular: we hang them in the lounge bar of our local pub with a proper private view evening with the artists and their parents. My earliest recollections of teaching are, to be honest, of hard work. It was a relentless slog: I’d been out of education – out of any real work – for a while and the task was really demanding. We had no ‘schemes of work’ and no lesson plans. They had to be constructed from scratch and tried out on sceptical students. Then, two years



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later, came my epiphany: I’d just finished afternoon bus duty outside Hinchingbrooke Lower School, Huntingdon; it was a sunny day and, in a flash, I realized that not only could I do the job, but I was actually enjoying it. However, it was clear that something had to be done in terms of ordering the content and delivery of the projects. Over the years, I’ve built up a comprehensive selection of teaching packs to cover schemes of work for each year group. These A1 folders contain everything necessary for project delivery: project outline in bullet points, reproductions of work by famous artists, visual aids made by me, examples of previous outcome from other pupils and printed handouts to help with technique. You just grab the pack and off you go! My five years at Hinchingbrooke was my apprenticeship, you could say. I learned how to teach drawing, painting, printmaking and photography and, with the memory of my old secondary school very clear, I started to run trips to art galleries. John Taylor (now retired) was my head of art: we had our differences but in his department I learned the trade. Rob Howard (now General Adviser, Art and Design, Cambridgeshire) taught 3D and we were thick as thieves. The school, and the grounds, were beautiful; I lived in a cottage with roses around the front door and played darts in St Ives for the Nelson’s Head B team. It became time to move on. Even the delights of away matches at the Mad Cat in Pidley were beginning to pall and I needed my own department. In 1978, I became head of art at Parkside Community College (now the Parkside Federation, Parkside Campus); Tom Eatough was the principal, and my mentor. Tom was a great supporter of innovation and, with me at least, had a ‘give a man enough rope’ policy. I painted murals all over the art room and stairwell, ran art trips to Amsterdam, introduced photography (the darkroom accommodated two people) and photo screen printing. We made hot air balloons, which we launched from the front playground, and produced ‘action paintings’ using bicycles and buckets of poster paint. Tom had a huge influence and I’m very grateful. I also remember the great support I had from Roy Bell and Nelson Rands, art advisers. One day, I needed to source some lino for a printing project with the third years. I got in touch with Nelson. He turned up the very same day with a huge roll of it – heaven knows where he got it from. My present principal, who I get on with very well, is a visionary and another great supporter of innovation. He also appreciates art, which is a great help (we’ve all known heads who haven’t) and we now have a darkroom with twelve enlargers, we teach photography from Year 7 and we run art trips to Barcelona. Recently, he asked me to be the college’s artist in residence for a term, which is a wonderful thing to be asked. So I checked my diary, made sure there weren’t any clashes… well of course you say yes! My teaching style is fairly extrovert. I’m an enthusiast, a risk taker; I enjoy the ‘actor’ element and, let’s face it, I like showing off. It does take time to build up confidence to

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conduct demonstrations, e.g. figure drawing with 30 pairs of eyes scrutinizing every mark you make, but it’s well worth the effort. Your credibility goes through the roof and with it, naturally, respect. This blatant demonstration of your obvious talent is one of the most potent teaching aids you have as an art teacher. I don’t think it works, somehow, with algebra. Having said that, I have little idea of the teaching style of most colleagues outside the art department, as there are few opportunities to witness them in full flow, which is a shame. As well as these dynamic demonstrations of technique, show the children examples of your own original work as well as all the other visual aids, artist’s reproductions, videos, etc. that you use to support projects. I find this helps hugely in putting the activity in context – making it more relevant – and it’ll make your students feel more confident of success, because they can clearly see that you’ll know how to help them if they’re struggling; after all, you’re an ace practitioner and your pictures are wicked. Earlier on, I mentioned that I drew all the time as a youngster, and it has to be part of what you teach. As I say to my students, it’s an activity in which you were happily engaged before you could speak or walk (at this point, I generally grab a large felt tip and scrawl huge swirls and marks all over the whiteboard, in the manner of a very young child. They like this bit). So, drawing is a completely natural activity and everybody does it, whether it’s directions to a party or a doodle on a shopping list. A few years ago, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, coordinated by the British artists Allen Jones and David Hockney, had drawing as its central theme. It was described by the Independent newspaper thus: The result is an eclectic display featuring the work of scientists, sportsmen, architects, mathematicians and filmmakers. Amongst the most striking is a video installation of the Papworth Hospital transplant surgeon Francis Wells demonstrating his techniques to students by sketching with a patient’s blood and a pair of surgical forceps. Another drawing by the (then) England Rugby coach Sir Clive Woodward shows his team tactics for the Six Nations game against Italy. Of the two artists who organized the show, Jones says ‘Drawing skills are the foundation of good art’, and Hockney says ‘I’ve always drawn – what else is there to do?’ So it’s important. At some point, your students will want to learn how to improve their drawings and you don’t want to let them down. I tell my students that anyone can be taught to draw; maybe not quite as well as Hockney or Rembrandt, but with some confidence. (They quite like this bit too.) Throughout my teaching career, the one underlying principle is this: treat each child as an individual, unique and valued. Get to know them and their idiosyncrasies. They only get one shot at this: you may be teaching for years, but their time is



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precious, and the vast majority will want to learn. Construct programmes of work that are stimulating, achievable and relevant and be a huge enthusiast – nothing is guaranteed to be more effective than this. If your learners can see your passion for the subject, they’ll want to climb on board too. That’s good teaching, that’s effective teaching, and it should be fun, too. If they see you’re enjoying yourself, then – well, you know what comes next. Not so long ago, I asked a Year 8 class to make a short written response to the question ‘why do we do art?’. Invariably they valued the opportunity for creative expression, although one took it further: to further our concentration and skills of imagination and make us look more closely into things it also teaches us to put ideas or things around us into a new physical form we also do art to further our creative ideas and understanding of the world Absolutely – to which I’d add, in conclusion, ‘Because it’s natural, and essential, that you should’. Look at what happens in regimes where the freedom of creative expression is repressed. Does it stop? Of course not. It just goes underground for a while, because the energy is too great to be destroyed. For my final term at Parkside Community College, I was invited to be the artist in residence, with a pretty open job description except to leave the college something (artistic) to remember me by. My colleagues, however, weren’t short of suggestions. In fact, they seemed rather too keen to ensure that I had plenty to do. A plan emerged. Apart from coming to work, picking up a paintbrush and making large statements in acrylics, I knew I wanted to involve our students in a major project unhindered by the normal structure and routine of the school working day. As I touched on earlier, we have a mutually beneficial relationship with the local pub; our students get to hang their work in the lounge bar and the pub gets a series of ever-changing pictures. As it happened, the landlord wanted to promote his enthusiasm for sport and I was approached to produce, with our students, three large murals on board to be displayed on the pub exterior: cricket, football and rugby. ‘A competition, with cash prizes’, he enthused. Designs were invited from Year 10. They asked several questions, a few concerning the nature of the art materials to be employed, some concerning colour, size, composition, etc., and many focusing on details of finance (to be explicit, the prize money). The days went by and the entries rolled in. It soon became clear that perhaps I should have devoted a little more of our curriculum time to figure drawing, but among the strangely disjointed footballers and dodgy cricketers there emerged some real potential.

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A selection panel was appointed, the designs were laid out along the pub bar and the three winners were chosen. At this point, I need to mention something about my artist in residence studio. The college finance officer occupies a large, airy room with tall windows, which was ideal, so I moved in. Visitors with invoices were confronted with the tidy desk and computer of the finance department in one corner and the easel and mess of the art department in the other. It was an arrangement that worked brilliantly and before too long we had a radio and a fridge too. It was here that the competition winners came to paint their designs onto large panels and they evidently appreciated making art outside the art room and art with a real purpose. To be fair, I lent a hand with the painting because the task was enormous. The local fire brigade assisted with fastening the finished panels to the first floor exterior and a grand opening ceremony took place with all involved. Nearly a year later, the pictures are still there, the colours haven’t faded (Dulux emulsion with water-based varnish) and I hope the students, when they see them, have a real sense of achievement – and fun. In all respects, this was a challenging, enjoyable and meaningful project, which has given much delight, not least to the punters who sit outside sipping beer on a summer’s evening. The point here is that the project could not have happened within the constraints of the school day or without the aid and input of a specialist in the area of mural making, in this case me. Many years ago, during an ‘activities week’ when the school disbanded the regular curriculum, we employed a 3D specialist who taught us how to make sculptures from wire and plaster. She worked with us throughout the week and, as a result, the students were enabled to make some substantial pieces of art, which would not have been possible otherwise. In fact, this was the genesis of some serious thought concerning the significance of sculpture for students learning about art, which had hitherto been neglected. On a more limited scale, we’ve had a watercolour expert, a comic book designer, a printmaker and a jeweller in to share their expertise. Their input has been invaluable and it’s a point worth making: no art educator can be – is expected to be – a brilliant practitioner in all art disciplines. So, you need some extra help. My post as artist in residence happened at the end of my career in teaching. On reflection, while I was teaching I could have drawn more on the huge resources of talent from local artists to add value, variety and depth to our curriculum. A school placement for an artist in residence takes some organising, but there’s no shortage of help and advice: the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy all have outreach programmes and it’s worth investigating the local art college/art gallery. Back to the studio. A box of canvases was ordered and the large acrylic statements started. I’d decided to celebrate the more overlooked parts of the college campus and



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pretty soon the overgrown science pond, a crumbling playground wall and some discarded goalposts behind the gym received the full ‘personal response’, to paraphrase the exam board’s terminology. I came to work, made cups of tea, picked up my brushes and, largely influenced by David Hockney, started to transform these rather unprepossessing areas into iconic images exploding with life and colour, or so I hoped. Now and again, a colleague might call in with, say, a requisition for thirty rugby balls and after an exchange with the finance department would invariably come over to ask ‘How’s it going, Richard?’. It was going very well and all too quickly. At the end of term, I mounted an exhibition of my paintings in the college so that the staff and students could see what their artist in residence had actually done. I left most of them with the college, packed up my brushes and left. The college gave me the easel to take with me.

Some Observations Richard Keys’ account is characterized by early formal training and the progressive spirit of the institutions he attended – this resonates with his teaching style and excitement for art and art making. He places emphasis on individual students, excitement, enjoyment, drawing (and more formal art learning) and the artist/student collaboration. There is a sense of his spreading a kind of aesthetic indulgence, an enjoyment of form and colour, around the school. Active and focused engagement in his subject area is central to his pedagogical concerns; there is a passion for art and genuine delight in interactions with individual students. His reference to Summerhill ties his teaching to progressive education, and to a perspective on schooling that owes much to the philosophy of Dewey. His progressive roots with links to individual students as well as experimentation and collaboration come through in his descriptions of his teaching; there is, however, an emphasis on more formal aspects of learning. What comes over clearly is a respect for young people and a determination to treat them as individuals.

Vasavi Koka

Autobiography: Making Art and Teaching Art – A Reciprocal Relationship From as early as I can remember, I knew that I wanted to be an art teacher. This was largely due to the impact that art had on my life both in and outside school. I was encouraged by my parents to record ideas and events in a visual form and I was exposed to various and diverse cultural influences from an early age. I used to enjoy analysing the world around me in terms of its visual elements and it made it a richer and more stimulating environment for me when I viewed it in this way. During my secondary school education, I discovered that through the study of art I was able to focus on my personal awareness and on my own emotions. I was able to acquire an understanding of and an insight into the world around me. I was not bound or restricted by absolute rules. This for me was the reason I chose art and the essence of why it played such an important role in my education. In addition, it also enabled me to transfer an imaginative approach to other, more academic subjects. This was largely because I found academic subjects particularly challenging when younger. I began to discover how art could help me to understand some of the key concepts in other subjects, e.g. maths and science, and I found it much easier to grasp complex concepts when they were described to me visually, in the form of pictures and drawings. Art, therefore, became a subject that helped me to understand other concepts in other subjects. As a secondary school pupil, I observed the way in which different teachers taught their subjects. In particular, my art teacher employed a variety of teaching strategies that catered for different learning styles. She had a real classroom presence and an inspiring classroom manner, which thoroughly enriched my learning experiences throughout this period of my education. During my GCSEs, my art teacher had taken over from another member of staff who had left to teach at another school. I remember clearly that she was particularly unorthodox, both in attire and in her eloquence. She was, indeed, notably different and possessed her own unique style of teaching. She had a quirkiness that worked in her favour and she was able to inspire many pupils who had lost interest in the subject, and give them a renewed enthusiasm for art. I can see now the way in which she would lay out her classroom with the most stimulating still life displays that dominated the room, an array of colour and unusual objects.



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She would also invent her own words to describe different visual features, such as pattern and texture. This had a profound impact on me because her lessons were so different from other, more prescriptive lessons given by other teachers. I found her much more stimulating, relished learning and reacted positively to her tremendous enthusiasm for the subject. She placed a lot of emphasis on an individual’s progress, and gave me a sense of self worth; her influence on me was immense. I have travelled extensively and have met and interacted with different people from diverse cultures. This was inspiring and of particular benefit to me because it allowed me to relate all that I had learnt in the classroom to the outside world. I was taught and encouraged by my school art teacher to embrace the visual world around me, to engage with its different elements, line, colour, shape, pattern, texture and so on. Art for me was about discovery. It is through the different visual experiences I have encountered that I am able to gain so many of the ideas for the practising of my art. My experiences of travelling have had a great impact on my teaching style and the way in which I write my schemes of work. I believe, then, that my family and my secondary school education have contributed to my passion for the subject of art. People say that you are a combination of the people you meet throughout life and I must agree that this is definitely the case for me. In terms of my professional abilities, I believe that I am totally committed to the vocation of teaching and constantly experiment with new styles. This, I believe, comes from engaging with the subject at a personal level, allowing me to think of new and more exciting methods of practising my subject. I find that my teaching ideas do not stagnate because I am forever seeking new ideas and a fresh perspective associated with my own art practice, an area on which I shall later expand. One of the main things that I have acquired over the past few years is the knowledge that contrasting teaching methods work with different pupils. No class is ever the same. And it is for this reason that I aim to write class-based schemes of work based on the common interests of particular groups. Whenever possible, I try to integrate varied teaching styles to cater for the different ways in which pupils learn, and by so doing, endeavour to create an exciting and inspiring art room environment for pupils. Much of my teaching is certainly experimental. I do enjoy taking risks as I believe this adds a fresh dimension to each lesson. My teaching styles also vary according to individuals and I place a far greater emphasis on the role of the individual than on the general results, which I believe make a statement about the school rather than its pupils. As art and design played such an important role in my early and formative years, I am keen to build into my own teaching practice a similar stimulating approach. Relating pupils’ works to different artists, including contemporary artists and those from other cultures, is, I believe, a good way for pupils to learn about how their work relates to other styles and movements. It also provides them with a more analytical and considered way of looking at art. In addition to this, I sometimes use

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my own work and the work of other pupils as a source of inspiration. I find that varying the artists that one examines adds more varied perspectives and stretches pupils’ imaginations far more. Considering the relationship between what I teach and how I teach it, I try where possible to engage my students in what I am doing by using peer-to-peer learning or student-led demonstrations. It is for this reason that I constantly change the structure of my lessons. Working with pupils in small groups, undertaking individual coaching and organizing groups according to ability, are all aspects of my teaching methodology. Breaking the lesson up into manageable component parts, I find, makes for a more interesting and more interactive session. Towards the end of my lessons, I often have what I like to call ‘The Gallery’. My lower year school groups really enjoy this part of the lesson as it allows them the opportunity to be part of the plenary. During this session, I nominate three or four pupils to be what I call ‘Gallery Judges’ and they are encouraged to use at least two or three key terms to describe their favourite pieces. This, I believe, gives the pupils a chance to articulate their ideas and their thoughts. They are encouraged to voice their own opinions in class discussion, during which, after careful scrutiny of the work of different artists, they could identify different visual aspects and demonstrate their understanding of different visual elements. My intention with this notion of a ‘gallery’ is to provide a defined conceptual base on which to build. I also find that having this time to reflect on their work gives pupils a sense of worth. In relation to my most successful lessons, I believe that I have been extremely lucky to have taught some excellent and very able groups; I found that I was able to draw on my own travels and life experience with them and they have been very intuitive and imaginative with their ideas and extremely receptive to my lessons. During one term, I devised an exciting scheme of work that allowed me to draw on my own travel experiences in Cuba. I decided to explore different styles and techniques, including sugar and coffee painting and creating metaphorical sculptures inspired by Cuban subject matter. My students responded to this in a dynamic way and produced some very unusual and ambitious pieces. This, for me, is the crux of why teaching art can be so rewarding. Imparting one’s own ideas and seeing how students have assimilated these ideas and created their own response is extremely rewarding. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that being inspired and enthusiastic as an artist oneself enables one to be a truly effective teacher – but it is a two-way process: teaching art has always inspired my own practice and my work is richer as a result. As a committed artist, I believe that one of the biggest influences on my teaching is that of my own practice. During my time in teaching, I have found that my students have provided me with sustained inspiration, and through their ideas and enthusiasm I have been inspired to create my own works. I have also discovered that my pupils respond more keenly to my lessons when they understand that I am a practising artist, and they are always eager to see my portfolio documenting my travels and the



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resultant artwork. To build on this, I decided to study in London part time (at the weekends) doing an experimental printmaking course at St Martin’s College of Art and Design and at the London College of Printmaking. Both courses have helped me acquire a repertoire of skills that I have been able to utilize in the classroom. Sometimes, instead of analysing pupils’ work, I often begin or end my lesson with a review of my own work. I will ask students questions about my presentation and listen carefully to their opinions and feedback. I find that my ideas are a lot fresher and I have more enthusiasm in the delivery of my subject than if I were simply just a teacher. I find that this classroom interaction gives me endless energy and constantly informs my teaching. The two are inextricably linked. I am definitely influenced by colleagues in other subject areas and I try to integrate different teaching styles with my own. For example, with the recent changes made in the curriculum, a lot more emphasis is placed on cross-curricular learning. I have taken this into account and have observed colleagues from different disciplines and noted their delivery styles. There are a number of links between art and other subject areas. One simple example is that of ‘investigative’ art, the approach to which may be compared with that of ‘investigative’ science, as both facilitate discovery and experiment. And, of course, concepts in mathematics associated with scale and mass in three-dimensional art projects, the knowledge of physics required in printmaking, the science of colour in design work, the properties and techniques involved in clay modelling and so on. Some pupils respond more enthusiastically to learning tasks when visual and tactile materials are used as opposed to words and numbers. On completion of my degree, I decided to pursue a career in the travel industry. The experiences I acquired in this post have enabled me to impart a number of useful skills to my students. I believe that having worked in industry can be of great benefit to a teacher and enhance pedagogical skills. After my time in the travel industry, I decided to take a sabbatical, and travelled round the world. This broadened my horizons and improved my understanding of different cultures and peoples. I have always tried to incorporate this knowledge in my projects and schemes of work. My intention is to make my students more globally and culturally aware and I feel I am able to do this effectively because of my experiences. Following my travels, I decided to do a master’s degree in Art, Design and Visual Culture. My master’s programme was very intensive and exposed me to a wide variety of aesthetic techniques and experiences. I studied design in great detail, which contrasted with my first degree, which had focused mainly on fine art. The programme embraced design theory and criticism and the knowledge gained has been of particular worth when teaching sixth-form students. On the programme, I was given an opportunity to learn different craft techniques: enamelling, various ceramic techniques and the use of digital technology in the production of textiles. The acquisition of proficiency in these crafts has been of real value in my teaching career. I would not consider myself a

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specialist in any one area, simply that I enjoy working in different media because I realize that it helps me to vary the techniques I can make available to my students. Studying at postgraduate level just prior to embarking on my PGCE course was of great importance. I was able to draw on my experiences and skills in the travel industry and from the expertise that I had newly acquired on my master’s course. In terms of the philosophy of education, teaching methodologies, design and implementation of curricula and the extension of my straightforward academic skills, the PGCE has been my most rewarding educational and aesthetic experience so far. My ambition to be a teacher was fulfilled the day I successfully gained a place on the PGCE course in art at Homerton College in the University of Cambridge. Many of the sessions and classes were art workshop based, so we were able to build on our knowledge of already developed artistic skills and apply that to our teaching practices. For the first time in my life, I had found a role that I considered vocational and exciting, and where I could put my imagination and creativity into practice. Learning how to teach and apply the knowledge and enthusiasm I already have for my subject was and is a great experience. I was fortunate enough to have very supportive mentors and I was able to put some of my ideas into practice in the classroom. For me in particular, because I have such a strong passion for my subject and its place in the curriculum, I consider myself privileged to be an art teacher. For me, art education allows a child an escape from the methodologies and teaching styles associated with the more prescriptive syllabi of many other subjects and yet inculcates a sense of purpose through the acquisition of those practical skills that enable pupils to experiment with creative visual ideas and to develop their sensibilities. My experience of the world has provided me with multifaceted stimuli that encourage an appreciation of the importance of applied art and design in the everyday world, whether it examines the aesthetics of drawing, fashion (something that I regularly draw inspiration from in the classroom), photography or simply the colours in an urban landscape or in nature. It has taught me to observe carefully and to communicate through diverse media, a perception of the world and feelings about that world in an uninhibited fashion. My personal vision and philosophy of teaching art is that as a subject it provides a tool that responds to a student’s wish to communicate, and it can do this in a truly distinctive and personal way. I have always been very passionate about travelling. The very different cultures that I have encountered inspire me to provide constant source material both for my own artwork and for my teaching. I believe it is essential for students to think in a global context and to be exposed to different cultures and ways of seeing. Whenever I visit a different country, I keep a sketchbook that I fill with visual materials, records of interviews with people I encounter, and small collages using the found object and discarded materials. I find that this provides a springboard for ideas for schemes of work and continually provides my students with some very different and unusual



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source material. My travels have also supported the work that I have done as my school’s international coordinator and recently the full International Award (a professional qualification accredited by the British Council) was bestowed on the school. We have successfully built links with schools in Malawi, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Holland and we are currently working on a range of different projects. I am particularly keen to develop the links between these schools and my school’s art department. The international project undertaken by the art department included a number of component art projects that I had devised and delivered. I was delighted to be told that the portfolio that I had compiled has been kept to one side as the British Council felt it was of outstanding quality, and would like to use it as exemplar material in their training workshops for schools. I find that my work as an art teacher and as an artist dominates my life: I feel I have a true vocation. In addition to my travels, I am also very passionate about the arts in general, particularly the theatre. I am currently working on schemes of work that involve mask making and puppetry. These projects stem from my genuine passion for the stimulating visual world around me in which I perceive endless opportunities for exciting lessons and unusual schemes of work. I am also very passionate about the process of learning and this has led me to undertake a course in puppetry to further develop and enhance my own acquired skills.

Some Observations I visited Vas in her school and we discussed her own regard for art and arts pedagogy, and herself as an artist. The importance of bringing her own artwork into the classroom was stressed and how both she and the young people she works with grow from her own experiences as an artist. She talked animatedly about culture, artefacts and her own experiences of travel. It was clear that there was a reciprocal relationship between herself as artist and her students’ personal growth. Vas’s art room was colourful, vibrant and celebratory. She flits from desk to desk in a vivacious manner, but seems calm and appears justifiably proud of her pupils’ work and she directed me to various pupils – proud of their achievements and encouraged them to talk about their work: Steve: ‘you run your own lessons in art – they’re controlled, but there’s individual freedom. In science, [for example] the teacher stands at the front and tells you what to do’. Jill: ‘Yeah – you don’t all have to do the same thing’. Jason: ‘I like it [with Ms Koka] because the lessons are more interactive than in other subjects, you get more individual attention’.

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Sergei, recently arrived from Russia, was somewhat disaffected generally, but was taken by the ‘identity’ theme of his art lesson and was particularly interested in investigating visual forms associated with Russia. Vas had bought in some of her wonderful travelling sketch/notebooks from her travels through Russia, Siberia, Mongolia and China. I observed a Year 7 (11–12 year olds) lesson about kinetic sculptures based on Miro’s imagery, ‘Oh cool!’ said one of the boys when they found out what they were doing. Vas later went around the room and gave a lot of positive and encouraging evaluations of what the pupils were producing – ‘Oh! wow! Look at this, it’s fantastic! What a wonderful design’.

Issam Kourbaj

Magic and Poetry – ‘Eye’ and Other Magic Moments I grew up in the southern volcanic mountains of Syria, in the Druze mountains. My childhood was shaped by the poverty of the place, the people’s highly developed art of survival and the lack of everything. My first teachers were very special; they had never been educated at art school, in fact at any school. Some I never, or barely, met. My uncle Suleiman, my mother’s brother, who I never met, formed, with his resourcefulness, my early vision; he discovered, at the time of hardship, an unusual source of income, unexploded bombs! At the time of the French Mandate of Syria, many of these bombs were left unexploded, and my uncle found a way to make spoons and coffee pots out of them. Until one day, sadly, he met his death, when he found his last unexploded bomb, but his legacy lives on. This is the way he was brought up; he had to follow my Lebanese grandmother’s school of thought. She, in turn, couldn’t do anything else but pass it on; she had her way of surviving the mountains’ cold nights, making a rather thick quilt out of the remains of the family’s worn-out clothes. Though I barely met her, as she had died before I learnt to hold a pencil, her legacy of ‘the quilt’ formed my early nightscape, and my first encounter with abstract form. As a child, I was a keen learner! I started to go to school when I was five, but had so many difficulties learning to write the alphabet of my tongue, particularly the first letter of my name ‘I’ (the sound of the initial of my first name, both in Arabic and in English, had mystical echoes; I is pronounced /aI/ and it means ‘eye’ in English. In Arabic, is pronounced /aIn/ and that means an eye too!). My mother, then well into her forties, with hardly any form of schooling, set out to help me form the first letter of my name. She asked me to show her my ‘ ’, and I did. She held my hand in her hand and together we ‘drew’ the letter ‘ ’. She asked me to do it again. My mother was very generous, she made me understand that this letter was not just a letter, part of a word, a fragment of a whole language, but a picture. It took me many attempts, with and without her hands, and then I did it, not very well, but I did it, and since I started to learn how to form my ‘eye’. Many moons later, my mother was living alone, my father had died; we all left home and went away, I thought I must teach her how to read and write. I started to

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teach her. Of course, she had many difficulties learning to write the 28 letters of our alphabet. When we arrived at forming the eighteenth letter, the letter ‘ ’, I held her hand and I reminded her of the way, when I was little, that she had held my hand and together we ‘drew’ it. She couldn’t remember; she was so keen to carry on learning the remaining ten. The smell of the orange skin burning on the top of the stove marked the transition from one year to the next; this was our New Year’s Eve ritual. In front of the stove, my father used to roll his cigarettes very beautifully. His smoking ceremony carved a yellow-tinted hole between his index and middle fingers, and blocked his heart with smoke. In the evenings, occasionally, friends of the family and relatives came to visit, and we all sat around the stove, the kerosene lamp burned and a story-telling event would start to unfold. My father had many stories to tell; he spent his life away, fighting against the French. He was absent, and my mother had her mountain to climb; she was married to my father, who was, in turn, older than her father. So, for us all to survive, my mother had to rely on her hands; she was the daughter of my Lebanese grandmother. Among many things, she used to bake and sell bread, she sewed, wove and prayed. She used to make a sweet out of semolina for me to sell in the street. In my turn, I served it on newspaper cuts, with a flattened spoon, and to Zena, my regular first customer, I used to give extra pieces. Zena and I used to look at the mirror images of the newspaper’s printed words, imprinted on the bottom of the semolina sweet. Shadows were long in the early mornings of my summer holidays; the silence of the street was broken by the sound of donkeys’ hooves and the morning greetings to both of us from passing people, heading eastward to the mountain. I am the youngest of five children, two girls and three boys. My older brother, Shaher, was a calligrapher. He used to write signs on buses, cars and shopfronts; he even wrote eloquently, with his fine brushes and black paint, on the front wall of our house, ‘The Calligrapher Shaher’. I was impressed by it; I found a stick and black shoe polish and underneath I wrote ‘and Issam’. My brother did not notice it, or pretended not to. A few days later, I went to get a haircut. Adel, the barber knew of my brother, but had no money to pay for his services, so he asked me to write a sign on his shopfront. Though it was only two words, it took me many hours. Secretly, I used my brother’s brushes and paint, and by the end of the day I was paid with a free haircut. My brother was indignant to see that his tools had been used, but a few years later he made a much bigger sign on the front wall of our house: ‘For all your adverts, Calligraphers Shaher and Issam’. I was much further away then than the moon! My brother acknowledged I was one, therefore I was. I never knew then that Arabic calligraphy and script would be my means of survival and the beginning of my journey with making marks.



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The walls of our house were made from black basalt. The roof was made from a single metal beam and rows of bamboo poles covered with layers of soil. If somebody walked on top of it, our roof showered us with earth. I loved our old scruffy house. It only had two rooms, the east room and the west room. In spring, we had a constant supply of camomile growing out of the roof. In winter, we had to press the soil with a very heavy, curved basalt roller to prevent the rain from leaking through the roof. Throughout the years, water and snow made the ceiling damp and stained it. When the sun closed its eye, and the kerosene lamp burned, a big light circle was cast on the bamboo poles, showing up the damp patches. This circle of light was my first and only storybook. Every winter I read a new chapter. However, I think we had enough of the water leaks and earth showers, so backwards we turned the clock of our house – it was demolished! Since then, as an artist, I have strived to re-create my first storybook. Rusty sardine tins, olive and dates’ stones, marbles, wire cars and kites were our few toys. Books and electricity belonged only for the people who had, and television was no exception. I first saw a real one by climbing the steps over the neighbour’s wall. I dreamt of having one. I asked for a television at Fadhlalah’s tiny shop, and magically, from underneath his shop desk, he presented me with one. It was plastic and small, very small, and to see its images I had to look through its eyepiece and hold it against the light. My first dark-box contained the universe, and seeded my fascination, much later, with light. In my city, gypsies had their form of survival too; they would go around the city carrying their whitening tools and music and offering their services to all (they specialized in cleaning, they call it whitening, aluminium and copper saucepans and spoons), we use them as a metaphor for carrying our luggage of the past. Paper, too, was a rare commodity and my journals were the only place I could doodle. My fourth-class teacher was keen to find any opportunity for me to draw; he asked me to enlarge a drawing of an insect so he could use it for our biology lessons. But, in fifth class, I had a rather strict teacher, who was not keen on my doodles. He told me off whenever he saw any in my journals. At my secondary school, an art teacher noticed my drawings, and said I should find out about the art classes at the art centre on the other side of the city. Eagerly, in the afternoon, I went to the centre. All the students were packing their canvasses and tools, to travel to a nearby village to paint. They suggested that I join them, and I did. I knew nobody, I was unequipped, paintless and brushless. The students offered to share their few oil paints and I found an old piece of cardboard, but I knew I couldn’t ask to borrow a brush, as each student possessed only one. A terrifying experience was touching, for the first time, the oil paint, but delicious and sensual was the smell of paint on my naked fingers. That day, when the sun became absent, marked not only my first ever landscape painting, but also my beginning to discover the eyes of my fingers. The centre provided me with a window to the worlds of

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painting, sculpture and printmaking. I spent two years there before I was expelled; I ruined the centre’s reputation because I dared to be interested in one girl. While at my high school, I regularly visited a stationary shop to buy papers for my drawings and watercolour. The owner was an old man, a man of knowledge; he spoke French fluently and was a calligrapher and a bookbinder. When I told him that I was interested in art and calligraphy, he always responded very well to my curiosities. One day he mentioned that I should meet his son; he was my age and a fantastic pianoaccordion player. I was magicked by the sound his fingers made; Naseeh plays himself rather than his instrument. He became a very special friend and for months he tried very hard to teach me how to play. But soon he realized that making music, for me, is not as simple as making colours, so he gave up teaching me. But still, he used to play for me for hours, both in my city and in Damascus. In Damascus I lived in the Old City, in what was called a half-room; it used to be a rather tall room, but necessity forced it to be halved. It had a rather low ceiling, four windows and hardly any walls. The door of my magic box was secured by a small lock, usually used for small bags. My half-room was almost a light box, but a rather cold one. The neighbours were strict about using electricity for heating. For warmth, I had to rely on cheap wine and many generous girlfriends. I was studying at the Institute of Fine Art during the day. In the evenings, I would go around seeking calligraphy work at Damascus sign writers. But there was little demand for my services, so I found a job at a publisher’s warehouse, sorting out books, boxing books and loading them for shipping. I was surrounded by a forest of books, but hardly managed to read them. A friend had to go to serve in the army and he offered me his job as an exhibition organizer at the Soviet Culture Centre in Damascus. I had an office, a telephone and a picture store! I was delighted with my new evening job. I had enough to pay the rent of my half-room, give my parents half my salary, live and buy art books with the rest. I enjoyed our projects at the Institute of Fine Art. One day, we had to paint a scene from the Old City and I chose to paint from the mill over the river Barada, one of the seven gates of Old Damascus. My presence outdoors was celebrated, with many people offering me tea and cold water. Two weeks later, I was putting the last touches to my perfect painting, when a gust of wind picked it up and flung it into the river, and Barada carried it away on its waters. I never saw my painting again, but always wondered if anyone found it – wet, weathered and whitened – and hung it on their wall. Diary of my studio was the title of my final project at the institute. I did get a first in my year. I had many teachers, some plain, some vivid, but Fateh Moudarres (Moudarres means teacher in Arabic) was the silent one. I hardly heard him, until one day when I had to exhibit my ‘Diary of my studio’ I knocked on the door of his basement studio to ask if he could write the introduction to my first exhibition. He opened the



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door (putting his index finger to his mouth) and ushered me inside. I followed him into his very long, dark studio. The walls were covered with his paintings, writings, drawings, pictures, quotes and newspapers cuttings. He poured me a coffee with honey and asked me to sit on the chair next to the cassette recorder and press the RECORD button. He sat, giving me his back, behind his piano and started to play. I was in ecstasy; the place was filled with the unfamiliar sound of his piano keys and the smell of paint, dust, honey and coffee. He finished, took the tape out and signed it ‘composition 27, F. Moudarres 1984’. It all made great sense; I didn’t know that my silent teacher was a composer, a poet and a great painter. I went out to the street, closing my eyes, breathing slowly, trying to capture the remains of the after image inside my eyes. I printed his words on the invitation to my first exhibition, and many people from the Soviet Embassy visited the centre and my paintings. I was on duty at the reception one day; the centre was not open to the public, when an elegant man entered the centre to meet somebody. While waiting, he looked carefully at my paintings and asked me, in Arabic but with a Russian accent, about the hand behind the paintings, I said it was my hand. He nodded and went on to his meeting. Soon, I forgot this incident. I invited my teacher to exhibit at the Soviet Culture Centre too, and many times visited his studio to transport his work. The months after I graduated were a great insight to the inside world of a great teacher. Many years later, I had an exhibition with him in Cambridge called Sketch, when Moudarres gave me his short stories, ‘The sprig of mint’, and asked me to translate it into English, but insisted that this should be translated by me only, to keep the spirit of his visual thoughts. I attempted this, but sadly my teacher died and I never managed to untangle his complex simplicities. Back, and jobless, I went to live in my city. There was a great void in my life after Damascus, no teachers, no projects, lack of everything again. I was fully fledged to do the compulsory army service, but guns are not my toys. I converted our old shop to a studio space. Unlike my half-room, my new studio had no window, and the huge metallic door made it rather cold in winter and very hot in summer. A friend came with Christophe, a young French teacher, teaching French in my city. Christophe was rather impressed with my studio, and asked if I would be interested in teaching him to draw in exchange for French. So, we used to go around looking at the Roman ruins and amphitheatres to draw. Christophe was very responsive to learning how to draw; unlike me, as my French, like my music making, was rather close to none. He suggested I should go to France to learn French, even better, he asked ‘what about studying at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris?’ I said with a shiver down my spine, ‘Mmm’. ‘No problem, I’ll apply on your behalf, you only need to prepare your papers and your dossier and I’ll take it with me to Paris next week’, he replied. Christophe did not imagine the heavenly seed he planted in my head, and I was so

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sure that I’d get an offer from Paris. Anyway, I knew it would take a year to get a passport, so I applied for a passport, a six-month ‘tourist’ one (as I wouldn’t be allowed a full passport until I finished serving in the army). I went to Damascus University, the Department of Architecture, to seek a teaching job. ‘Can I meet the Head?’ I asked his secretary. ‘Who is asking to meet him?’ she enquired. Professor Issam Kourbaj, I replied. She weighed me up from my head to my toes; she read I was far too young to even be a teacher, so the title of a professor certainly was beyond me. Anyway, the head was rather polite and considerate. I showed him images of my work, a copy of my first three years at the Fine Art Institute (I was not allowed the results of my final year until I finished serving the army), and asked him if I could teach at his department. He looked carefully at both the work and the results, and said ‘I really don’t know what to say to you, but I should tell you that you are not a typical teacher; to come to show me your work, your results and to ask for a job, without being referred by others or having any greetings from them, this has never happened to me before. I want to offer you a job here; you seem sincere in wanting to do something, so what about teaching drawing to our first year students?’ The day after, at nearly 21 years old, I was a teacher at Damascus University. I was an unconfident teacher, until I took my students on a trip to Maalula (a Syrian village, its houses grow upwards in the mountain, known for its surviving Aramaic). This was a turning point in my teaching approach that year. I told the students the story of my first trip outside my city and about my first ever finger painting, also the story of my lost perfect painting in Barada. I suggested that they draw not just by using their eyes, but also to think about touching the fabric of the village. The architecture students enjoyed my stories and touching the dwelling tapestry embracing the mountain. The head came to the students’ exhibition and he was very impressed by the quality and the diversity of their marks, some made by fingers. The postman knocked at our door and gave me a letter, I thought it was another call to the army, but the letter was in French. I went running to the house of my uncle Fawaz, my father’s brother, nearby; he could comprehend French, and I asked him to make sense of this long letter and numbers. He managed to understand that it was the OFFER from the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, the letter said more about the tuition fee and the living costs in Paris. My uncle put his glasses down and said ‘a month in Paris is in the price of all the lands we own here!’ I was so lost, never imagined, and Christophe didn’t say that Parisian life costs the earth. I smelt the ink of each of its pages. It was so new, so crisp. I counted the number of its light-green and purple pages a few times. I slowly touched its embossed lettering and its leathery shoulders. It was my first ever passport, and I had only just received it. It was the recognition of my place in the universe. My passport was my icon of other worlds. It was dark blue, and it was valid for only a precious six months. In the first



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light of the next morning, I moved my fingers under my pillow to touch it; to be sure that it was still there, where I had left it the night before. In the evening, again I started to look at it, trying to read the invisible maps in its blank visas. My thoughts were swimming to the beyond. Suddenly, I noticed a spelling mistake. They had printed an E instead of an I to write my first name. The officer in charge had translated the first letter of my Arabic name into E. After some very long consideration, the officer took out his shaving blade (which he kept in his desk for such occasions) and scratched the E out. Then he drew an I with a black pen. It looked massive, and to make things look official, he stamped it with red ink. After an agonising wait, five of the six months later, an unexpected call from an elegant man who spoke Arabic with a Russian accent came, offering me a scholarship to study art in St Petersburg. I was in Moscow for three days, Baku, Azerbaijan, to learn Russian for a year, and then I arrived at the Academy of Art and Architecture in St Petersburg to study architecture. It was so cold in St Petersburg, and I found the Russians were very passionate, resourceful and hard working. I felt at home with my fellow artists, though my Russian was broken. My academy teachers were very strict and demanding. I was the oldest among my classmates, and the only foreign student at the Department of Architecture since the academy was built 250 years earlier. Once I asked the group of teachers, while they were having a go at us for not working very hard, why this demand on us to work hard; hardly anyone encourages us to have fun, read poetry or even to go to the theatre, as another form of learning? My teachers were rather impressed with my command of Russian, but not with my thought. The daily life of the academy was rather daunting – five hours lectures, three hours drawing from the same model, same position, and four hours design studio work every day. My favourite class ever at the academy was the two hours life drawing classes on Fridays led by models, usually young ex-ballet dancers, and free of teachers. We needed to be alert to draw their movement at their pace; they moved eloquently. The first few years were a disaster; I hardly managed to get more than 3 out of 5 in any of my projects, some of which I thought I must get 6 out 5 but got 2! My much younger classmates easily got 4, 5– and 5 out of 5. Soon I was worn out and skipped all the morning lectures. I used to spend my nights throwing cheap paint on newspapers prints, so I could survive the strict rigorous academic training. One day, we were given a one-day project: designing an architectural abstract surface. I felt so happy using my night self-training; I started to see meanings in playing with cheap paint on newspaper prints. I got 5 that day, it was great. I was passportless, and life started to be more complex at the time when Gorbachev was in power. Though he allowed the constructivists’ works and the ‘20s and 30s

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Russian Art’ to be seen at the Hermitage, sugar, toothpaste, toilet paper, vegetables and vegetable oil were impossible to find anywhere in the entire city. The academy was the best institution to rebel against, and I spent most of my nights making abstract compositions. I even carried them, with difficulty, out of Russia and exhibited them in Cambridge! My teachers thought highly of my achievement, and were very delighted to see me back with my travel sketches. I was rewarded with books on Russian masters, signed by all my teachers for the best sketches of the year. Once I met Misha, a mute mime artist and student at the academy. He looked like a nineteenth-century character, but his thoughts and private work belonged to the avant garde. I started practising with him and we managed to stage a few performances at the academy, some of which were by me, solo. I started to see again, that silent teachers speak with resonance. And Yura, a painter and sculptor, was expelled from the academy; he was not able to fit in. But he managed to have a studio in the old quarter in St Petersburg; he made a huge impression on me with his abstract canvasses and sculptures. I was drawn to work in his studio; it was a place of passion. Yura couldn’t fit in Russia either, so he emigrated to Paris. Many years later, I went to visit him while he was living as a squatter with another 17 Russian artists in a disused factory near Colonel Fabien Metro. They had literally nothing but their art, some old used rags and carpets to paint on, others collaged the nuts and bolts of the ghost factory in their compositions. Yura found some old oak in the derelict factory, soaked with engine oil, and made his Parisian sculptures. The old factory was filled with the smell of struggle, creativity, and togetherness (my nose made my eye remember! I thought of my silent teacher’s studio in Damascus); it was a genuine art factory. Though, while in Paris, I went for a short visit to the École des Beaux Arts, I felt that a week in the old factory with all the artists was not only my best school, but also a multisensory landmark in my life. Soon after I learnt, sadly, that Yura had died and all the squatters evicted. I exhibited eight abstract pieces of my work in a group exhibition in Cambridge with, among others, Eduardo Paolozzi, Elisabeth Frink and John Piper. I managed to sell five of them to a young couple. The gallery directors were planning to open a new gallery, and asked me to prepare works for a solo show for the gallery opening. The same couple came to my show and collected more of my pieces; they were very interested in art, and owners of an independent school of art. They asked me, for the couple of weeks while I was in Cambridge, if I would be interested in teaching drawing to their students. I agreed, though my English was made of a handful of words. I made sense to the students, who enjoyed me being speak-less. I wondered if I could be their silent teacher! In the streets of Cambridge, in order to pay the rent of my room, each summer I used to draw portraits. I visited England four times before I came to live in Cambridge. The Russian train journeys between St Petersburg and Cambridge were a feast for the eye;



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seeing from the train window the many colours of the lands between. But rather long, and travelling with my Syrian passport, though renewed, crossing borders and walls made the journey for everybody much longer. The German border police did not like ‘my’ interferences with my passport, and arrested me on suspicion of passport forgery. The German police were not good at English, nor was I. I was desperate to explain that it was not a forgery, but a spelling mistake. Though I pointed out the red stamp was there to prove it, they were not sold on my story. It took them a long time to release me. On the borderline between West Berlin and East Berlin, I thought about my place in the universe and my fragile I, not E. Drawing has always been the way I respond to whatever comes before my senses. In my early years in Cambridge, drawing had to become (due to my lack of English idiom) an extra arm in the process of communication. For an artist, a Syrian and not an English speaker, Cambridge was not paved with gold. Many times, I packed my few belongings and many paintings and thought of leaving, but I had nowhere to go. I started learning English from my students, native speakers and foreigners alike. I felt at home with students who couldn’t speak English. I have to find my way to be inspired and inspire others. I once took my three foundation students to St Ives, Cornwall, for their final project of the year. We spent three days there; the project brief was simple, to find a language to articulate their experiences; to reflect on the town and to react to its dynamics as material for the project. The final product could be in any format using paint, sound, drawings, collage or any other media. During the day, we each went on our expeditions, and at sunset we reflected on our findings. One student collected pebbles, shells and washed up wood from the beach, and she recorded the sounds of the town, the seagulls and the waves. She brought it all back to Cambridge and her installation was multitextured, multilayered and multisensory. Another was interested in line drawing and focused on boats, their weathered and bright colours, their names and theatrical presence on the Atlantic. Her final piece consisted of spacious line drawings, sketches and prints on many different backgrounds. The third student was fascinated by the town maze, its topography and weathered roofs. Her piece was made of different approaches to collage, using human hair, sand and sawdust. I, too, managed to make sketches using ink, bleach and coffee powder, and I came back with three sketchbooks; truly it was the most memorable trip, an experimental and experiential project. I was privileged to have a studio behind the Round Church and ADC theatre (in Cambridge). My studio was an old snooker room, with no heating system, so I had to install a stove. At that time, I was studying theatre design in London and I took the Olivier Theatre as a site for my project on the Epic of Gilgamesh – Gilga the hero, he who saw everything. While Gilgamesh used to look for immortality, I was looking

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through the ADC theatre skip; it contained many discarded theatre sets and props; I am sure that my uncle Suleiman would have regarded it as his unexploded bomb. The skip was not only providing wood for my old-fashioned stove, but also a source of inspiration for me and my experimental Group See (who I worked with on Sundays for 7 years); a group of people coming from different backgrounds (from a carpenter, to a farmer to a music therapist), ages (from 14 to 78 years old) and cultures (from Europe to Africa to the Far East). In winter, I used to burn orange skin on the top of the stove as a ritual for both my life drawing and experimental workshops. I was there to enable them to see the dusty gift, their imagination they have been blessed with, and to feel comfortable to visit or to revisit the most basic instinct, their playing instinct. Each week in the morning, one member of the group would present some personal thoughts and experiences for 10–15 minutes on the theme we were working with: My True Map of Cambridge. Then, everybody would find a place in the studio or on the grounds outside to articulate their own response to the presentation, using findings from the skip, or from their ‘magic box’; I asked everybody to have a bag and fill it with recycled objects; photos and other materials of personal meaning that they wanted to share with others. For the life drawing workshops, I invite one, two or three models, pregnant models, couples, dancers and ex-dancers to model; trying to re-create the performance quality of my favourite life drawing classes at St Petersburg. I conduct the session with very short poses to start with and much longer ones towards the end. I leave the models to make their presence with their eloquent movements, and the drawers to make their marks. Sometimes, I ask them to draw with their untrained hand, other times I suggest making a blind drawing (when the paper is stuck underneath the board and the drawing action is unseen). I offer some props to the models to react to, such as a chair without a seat, so they could wear the chair, or I give them a large elastic tube, a ‘sock’, to wear, so we could draw the pre-sculptural quality made by the ‘absence’ of the body, and many times I put the models behind a translucent screen and projected light from behind the screen, so we could play with seeing through shadows. At the end of each workshop, we exhibit the work and reflect back on the journey of thinking and making. There were many magical moments in this completely uncompetitive environment. The workshops were very popular; I was invited to run them at the Department of Architecture, and a few years later at the Department of Engineering and many other places. In 1997, the British Museum acquired a sketchbook of mine. It contained a collection of drawings from St Ives, and from my Milan to Florence train journey; I used to look out of the window and draw the framed landscape from memory. In 2007, the British Museum acquired another piece called Sound palimpsest – a collection of hundreds of drawings, marks, collage and Arabic script on old paper – produced at



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the time of the Iraq war in 2003 and relates to its sounds. These acquisitions, acknowledgment, reminded me very much of my brother when he made the sign: For all your adverts, Calligraphers Shaher and Issam. I went to Mexico to learn about colour from the Mayans, and after Cuba, unexpectedly, I started making sculptures out of old chairs. I was told many stories about Cubans, who used to make boats out of their furniture to sail to Miami, and unfortunately, most of them could not survive the waves. At the time when I was in the middle of an installation called ‘Immigration’, which was made of fragments of old chairs and based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, I was forced to leave my Round Church Studio, and had to find another at the Old Labs at Newnham College. My ‘Immigration’ contained references to agricultural tools, old musical instruments, primitive alphabets and the Cuban improvised sails. A year later, I moved to another studio at Albert Street (the building was an ex-billiard room, in the back of a house belonging to Girton College). Its last use was a bookbinder shop. There, I found an old sewing machine called Singer. I dismantled it and made a sculpture out of it; another ‘Singer’. I found an old piano; though it had many broken keys, this didn’t deter me from making sad sounds out of the rest, in memory of my dearest friend Naseeh, who played himself rather than his instrument. I learnt of his leukaemia and death soon after. I collaborated with the University of Cambridge Collection of Aerial Photographs on a project called Juxtaposition and I used their images on the floor and at the bay window of my studio. I was fascinated with the aerial view and the juxtaposition of fields, cities and landmarks. My work explored meeting or departing points: a sculpture, a wooden travelling case called ‘Farewell’ in which the lid contained black piano keys and the box contained white ones, once open they separated. Another piece called ‘Don’t look back, Don’t look, Don’t, Do’, was made in the form of a tall stool out of old wooden hospital stretchers. Inside the stool was a video piece showing the meeting of human sperm and egg, and the journey of the foetus to birth. I used an aerial image of Cambridge to make a puzzle, underneath which was an old map of the city. It was called, and I really meant it, ‘Cambridge is a Puzzle’. I wrote beside: feel free to play. A very thoughtful visitor, Professor Marilyn Strathern, came and spent a long time looking at my ‘Juxtaposition’. When she came to the puzzle, I said ‘feel free to play’, but she didn’t. She stated when leaving, ‘I enjoyed playing with this’, indicating the exhibition, ‘but not this’, meaning the puzzle. She explained that the puzzle offered only one form of connection. ‘Without action there is no reason’ was the title of the piece that Professor Strathern commissioned in  1999. It was based on her hands and inspired by her research as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea. Professor Strathern presented me with a kina shell as material for thought. The kina shell was made of wood, bamboo, mud, gold-lip pearl shell and was dyed with natural red or ochre colours. She told

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me about the kina ceremonial exchange events, which resonate with giving and taking. I thought of my culture and the way we look at our two hands; the right for giving and the left for taking. In my piece, I used zinc plates and acid etching. I made a hollow relief of the left hand and a proud relief of the right one, and juxtaposed all to form a ceremonial line suggesting the shape that the kina exchange event takes. In November 2000, I shared an exhibition with my then three-year-old son Mourad, which we called ‘is/am’. We both worked on old book covers. This is the introduction to the show: He is, therefore I am. The son partakes of the father. But father can also partake of son. Issam Kourbaj (37) has drawn on the painting of his son Mourad (3) to explore images of his own childhood. The son paints the father who paints the son and, in turn, his own father, re-tracing the child’s first faltering steps in paint back to his own origins in the black mountains of southern Syria. As big Kourbaj responds to small Kourbaj’s pictures, he has flashbacks to buried memories of family, relatives, shopkeepers, trees, toys, brushes, machinery, cats, calligraphy, boats, and chewing gum. My son was the artist, and I was following his footsteps. He had no ladders, unlike me. I had many ladders and rather heavy to carry under my skin. The collaboration with my son was an invitation for me to drop them. This was the import of my contribution to Radio 3’s short talks series ‘Work In Progress’. In July 2001, I introduced a retrospective exhibition of my work called ‘Nothing is Constant except Change’ from 1990 to 2000 with this chronology: 1990 I sketched in a bedroom. 91, I began searching for a studio and found Candelaria. 92, I went to Mexico and discovered colour. 93, I went to the theatre. 94, I learned to cook rice. 95, I returned from Cuba to make clouds and chairs. 96, I moved into the Old Laboratory at Newnham College. 97, I exhibited at Kettle’s Yard, went back to Syria, found a piano in a skip, and my son Mourad was born. 98, I glued my coat to a painting and sold my sketchbook to the British Museum. 99, my teacher died, I watched workmen painting yellow lines, and made kwads. 2000 I took up aerial photography, painted on old book covers with Mourad, and my second son Sami was born. On the morning of Monday 24 February 2003, my then 5-year-old son Mourad woke up with an inquisitive mind, and asked me: How the day comes?



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It was a rather universal question, I didn’t dare to answer. I asked him back, what do you think? He replied: Is it the same as snow? God throws snowflakes, and God throws light flakes. Then God throws clouds, and at night, he throws stars. But when it rains, God throws rain flakes. And when it is windy, God throws paper. When it is frosty, God throws something, I do not know, but it is frost! Since then, I couldn’t help it; I took his thought on board and still reflect on it some years later. My current preoccupation with light began by accident, and in small way. In 2003, at the time of the Iraq war, I worked on a project called Palimpsest, etching on hospital and veterinary X-ray plates. This project led me to search for further possibilities that light might offer. In the dark attic of my studio at Christ’s College, a knothole in the boarded-up window projected a live image of the street and its people and vehicles onto the ceiling. This had been happening for years, unnoticed. Its discovery invited me to start research on a device, at that time entirely unknown to me, the pinhole camera, and its natural extension, the Camera Obscura. I conceived a project called Last light first light, relying solely on light sources, lenses and mirrors, and this formed the basis of my Open Studio in 2004. For the last three years, I have been working on a proposal to recreate the spire, originally planned 400 years ago, for Great St Mary’s Church, but now as the home of a Camera Obscura to provide visitors with a dramatic circular sweep of Cambridge’s streets, greens and skyline. By means of an arrangement of mirrors and lenses placed high within the new spire, the Camera Obscura would present its continuously moving image above the heads of visitors in a darkened chamber. This project, called the EyeCone, touched and linked many disciplines: optics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, religion and architecture. The focus of this project is on exploring the performance of light – its transition from source to image. Though I never realized it, I wish that Fadhlalah could see the magic light that the small plastic television, my first dark-box, had brought to my life.

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One plus eleven  two started on 25 January 2007 and was completed in June 2007. The idea of this piece is to mark daily, the sequence of my thoughts, by making marks and drawings on each page of an old 12 volume Encyclopaedia Britannica. The daily process consists of drawing from life, from images or from reflecting on memories of sounds, smells of things I have touched and been touched by: exploring a diversity of approaches to mark-making territories, such as Arabic script, pattern, collage, geometrical forms, mono-print, cutting through the page, sanding and tearing the surface of the paper, drawing with my ‘wrong’ hand or upside down, and deliberately using a variety of inks, oils, pencils, wax and turpentine. Looking at each volume separately, each page presented a space to react against and play with, a palimpsest of bleed-marks from my work on the adjacent page, texts, illustrations and newly applied marks, creating a fusion of heartbeat and ‘mindbeat’. One idea might live for a short time through one, two or three drawings, but revive a few weeks later; another could run for much longer, generating many drawings, and then vanish, never to return. It is a story told by two energies. One is formed by tracing images parallel to the alphabetized knowledge. The other is the ‘actual’ sequence of thought conveyed horizontally across the volumes. Thus, one plus eleven  two refers to the unexpected vertical distance between successive images – one plus eleven  two! To draw on books, particularly in Cambridge, could be seen as a sacrilegious act; many people enjoyed my marks and the process of going through the pages. Others saw it as mutilation. I know that my strict fifth-class teacher wouldn’t approve of it too. Whenever I am invited to run a workshop, I start with the context of place, its offerings and the people I am to work with. I could generalize that I am interested in inviting all participants to use their hands as their thinking instrument; in my family workshop ‘Drawing on the Universe’ at the University Institute of Astronomy, I offered balloons as a background to draw on, and make objects from. I gave a few potatoes to each artist at an art community in Cambridge when they asked me to run an experimental workshop at their studios. My brief was to tell a story using potatoes. Some made a book out of it, others made a city and for others the potatoes’ skin became a storyboard. At the University Botanic Garden, I offered refugees the garden as a canvas and as a tool to build a nest. I covered the entire floor of the Anthropology and Archaeology Museum with multilingual newspapers, and asked the participants to draw the museum objects of the past on the object of the present. At Kettle’s Yard, I asked all participants to look though the windows of Kettle’s Yard House, as an extension of its stories inside (the house was built on the acoustics of light, objects and space), and to make their marks on acetate. To review the journey, all their pieces were exhibited behind a long piece of muslin, and we shone light from behind. At the Institute for Manufacturing, I used my children’s toys to work with



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visiting researchers. I asked them to choose a toy and draw it (drawing the present), then to draw the traces of their memory of their first toy (drawing the past) and finally to draw and sculpt a toy for their children (drawing the future). Now, both my children (age 10 and 7) are going through the compulsory British education system; only time will prove the quality of their education. I wonder if they are to go through the same process as I did; doing, undoing and redoing all the learning I went through at all the institutions and systems, when I realized that playing is not a sin. I never knew the future of my past. Not unlike the gypsies in my city who go about carrying their whitening tools and music with them, I do carry my mountains and I know that my uncle Suleiman, my Lebanese grandmother, my mother and her hands, stories of my father, ‘the Calligrapher Shaher’, the roof of our old house, the lack of everything, my toy television, my first finger painting, Adel the barber, Naseeh the piano-accordion player, my silent teachers, my half-room, my fragile I not E, my bad teachers, Yura and the squatters artists in the old Parisian factory, my lack of English idiom, my Group See, the ADC theatre skip, Gilgamesh, the British Museum, my students, the Mayans, the Cubans, ‘Cambridge is a Puzzle’, Professor Strathern’s kina shell, my wife Candelaria and boys Mourad and Sami, the knothole in the dark attic of my studio and the old 12 volume Encyclopaedia Britannica, are all part of my DNA as an artist and a teacher.

Some Observations Issam is an artist of great vision and passion. Among other things, he teaches life drawing to architecture students, one of whom commented to me that attending his art classes was akin to meditation. Issam is well known for his ‘palimpsest’ work1 and has exhibited in prestigious places around the world, including the British Museum. He is, at the time of writing, artist in residence and Bye-Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Issam’s quotation ‘the future of my past’ reveals the ways in which his past experiences (at least from the point of view of the narrator) constitute his identity as artist/teacher. Additionally, his work looks at the importance placed on ‘process’, ‘doing’, ‘coming to know’ with respect to identity and pedagogy. There is an element of rebellion and opposition to grading. Other themes in this narrative are survival, resourcefulness, the senses, aesthetics (non-traditional), artist/teacher, inventiveness and place – particularly with regard to early influences. There is an indication in his narrative style of a kind of resonance with his experimentation in art and teaching.

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Issam talks of engagement through play; he has a concern for the process of making, doing and undoing. Informal learning figures prominently – from life experiences, language, culture, ritual and artefacts from the past. Resourcefulness is a quality that is evident in Issam’s life; aesthetic skills of both self and family have been the means to survival in difficult times. This account provides several connections to pedagogical practice: experimentation, play, possibility thinking in doing and making. Memories and self-reflection and the use of artefacts is prominent and facilitates seeing the aesthetic in the ordinary. A rich and varied cultural life, together with an openness to new ideas and a resourcefulness, give Issam a natural tendency to see possibilities and the wisdom to deal with challenges in a considered way. Something that comes across clearly is his empathetic nature and ‘tolerance of ambiguity’ – an essential prerequisite for creative practice. His account is perhaps the most poetic of the contributions and is entirely in keeping with his day-to-day life as an artist who teaches.

Note In addition to his artwork based on the notion of images being scraped off and the surface reused, Issam has produced a publication entitled A Cambridge Palimpsest, published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press. It is a layered puzzle that tells the story of how Cambridge and its surroundings were shaped, and shows what has been lost and forgotten.

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‘Patson’s Song’ – Self-Reflection Through Production I was born from my mother, a beautiful and charming KwaNdebele woman named Sibongile, who came from a small village called Mtshabezi in the Gwanda region, south of Zimbabwe. I decided to leave my mother’s womb on 24 April 1976 and explore her village and the country, which at that moment was at war. Her family came from the Zulu heartlands, fleeing from the terror of Shaka, the most powerful and feared king of the Zulus. In the late 1970s, we moved from the south to the west of Zimbabwe and relocated to my grandfather’s homestead, Tinde, in the Hwange region close to the Zambezi. My grandfather of the Nambya tribe, one of the first headmasters in this region, was brutally murdered in front of his children. This image has always stuck in my memory and my father never wants to speak about. However, my family fled again after this incident to another village called Songwa close to Dete and this became our new home. My father, Joseph Bakani, in his youth wanted to be a priest and I make a joke to my friends that he met my mum in church during his training. He decided otherwise and became a miner at Kamative Tin mine. We moved again to Shangani mine for a couple of years and I have fond memories of the apple trees and the green lawn around our house. My father was then offered a job at Dunlop Limited as a fitter and turner in Bulawayo. It is here, living in Luveve, a township on the outskirts of this city, where my life developed and evolved. I had a playful upbringing with four brothers, Evans, Kizito, Busani and Ishe and cousin Fortune. We went to the bush nearby with our catapults, shooting birds, lizards and looking for wild fruits and berries. Home was always full of people as we lived with several relatives, grandmothers, fathers, uncles, cousins and all sorts of people I was told were my relatives. I went to Fusi primary school for my first year at school and before I had settled, I was transferred to Sacred Heart Home at Esigondini, a Catholic boarding school. My artistic journey begins here in this school. I was a shy kid and spent lots of time in the library reading all sorts of books. I liked images and one day I found a book about the life of Elvis Presley, the king of rock. In the centre spread of this book, I found a black and white photograph of his portrait. I traced it and decided to produce a duplicate of the same image, paying attention to the different tones based on the lighting. I was 8 years old and produced countless images of this image for a year. There came a point

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when I did not trace it, it was so ingrained in my mind that I could produce this image from memory. Then one day, one of the teachers, a nun, saw these images and asked me if I would like to partake in an art competition and represent the school. This was exciting and I signed up. I did a landscape drawing of huts and people herding cattle in the countryside. My painting came back from the competition and was exhibited in the school hall with a star sticker. I was over the moon. I had found something I loved and was addicted to. During my school afternoons, I went to the workshop at school and made sculptures, such as the famous historic Great Enclosure of the Great Zimbabwe ruins. During my school holidays, I made wire cars and tried making all sorts of inventions out of junk I found around the township. By this time, I wanted to be a scientist, machines were my hook. I would steal my dad’s car manuals and browse through technical drawings of car engines. I would draw abstract designs of car parts joined together and try to explain to my friends how these ‘things’ would move or fly. They just thought I was crazy or weird, but I did not care. Creating new abstract stuff was the future to me and school was boring. I hated school because they taught the same repetitive stuff, which was not exciting, thus I underperformed. I was labelled the dumb, stupid kid with my oversized specs. I failed most of my tests and I had a hard time in the class. I preferred going out in the bush with my friends, hunting, looking for wild fruits and daydreaming about what lay beyond St Joseph’s hill. After primary school, I moved to the Christian Brothers College, a predominately white school. My technical drawing teacher, Mr Cook, used to get irritated by my lack of doing what had to be done. I would do my own abstract technical drawings as I loved straight lines and circles. I was in this school for a year when I got expelled after a bizarre episode of racism. Mr Fincham, the new head, was cutting down on the number of black students in the school and, unfortunately, I was one of the victims. I moved to another Christian Brothers school in Plumtree, called Embakwe Mission School. This boarding school was so different from any school I had gone to. I was shocked by the school facilities, which were very poor; I had porridge and a slice of bread for breakfast for the next four years. Lunch and supper were beans or sour milk or overcooked cabbage. It was horrible and the toilets were full of maggots crawling out of the chamber. We used the bush, which got so littered with our shit, hiding behind trees and using leaves to wipe our ass. Every day, the senior boys came after evening studies to raid any food we had in our trunks. If you resisted, you were beaten up, kicked, punched and spat at like dogs. We never knew what a hot bath felt like as we bathed in sinks, running endlessly with cold water plugged with any paper or plastic we found. It was like boot camp and detention was served digging holes for trees the same as your height. It became my mission that one day I would be a senior boy and stop all this nonsense. One day, I did become the head boy of the school. Yes, it did happen and, proudly, I changed many things. Regardless of the hard times, I also had the best moments in this school. As a



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boys-only school, we saw girls on a few occasions. With my artistic abilities, I swapped food rations for letter writing. I created a booklet with a wide range of calligraphic styles. My friends came with their letters to their girlfriend and asked me to rewrite them in a chosen style from my booklet. One of my clients was a rich kid from Botswana named Tinaye Lopang from whom I got lots of tinned fish for my artistic services. I was popular and at the same time knew all their secrets. The kids from Botswana brought new fashion trends, including one I became addicted to, Reebok pump-up trainers. I wanted my own pair, but my parents could not afford them. I fell in love with one of my friend’s trainers and asked him if I could have them for a couple of hours because I wanted to draw them. I copied the pair from all angles and decided to design my own. I designed my logo after my school nickname, ‘PERU’ and started a long journey on trainer designs. Unfortunately, I never kept my designs and gave them away to friends who thought they were cool. In my third year, I had a new English teacher, Mr Mawoko, who introduced us to Animal Farm by George Orwell. I got addicted to English literature and politics. I read lots of African literature: the likes of Ngugi and Sonyika. I enjoyed stanzoic patterns and the playfulness of words, especially by Dambuzo. I was determined to write my own book after I discovered that Ben Okri wrote his first book at the age of 16 or 17. Eventually, I did write my own collection of poetry called Thunder! Mambo!, which was published in Canada in 2000 when I arrived in England. After secondary school, I went to Northlea high school again as a boarder; here I studied mathematics, English literature and geography. I was involved in sport and started a successful volleyball team coached by the national Zimbabwean coach. 1997 was my peak, I was the sportsman of the year and got full colours. I met my first girlfriend who fell in love with me after my heroic 200 m sprint race. I broke the school’s records in track and field. I had been training in karate and started coaching the young kids in my school. I wanted to represent my country in athletics but suffered from hamstring problems. During my last year at high school, something bad happened two weeks before my final exams. My father lost his job, which completely changed my life and my family. We were so poor that I remember eating bread and tea for breakfast, lunch and at times supper. Our only hope was the little shop in the country that my dad had opened during his working days in Dunlop. He opened this tiny shop to help his people and save them from walking miles to buy the basics. The shop never made a profit and slowly its empty shelves reflected how bad things were. I finished high school on a low and got a job as a temporary teacher at a secondary rural school in Nejambezi near Victoria Falls. I had a pair of trouser and two shirts and a tie from my dad, which my mum gave me. I had a two-month contract and left the school when I decided I wanted to be professional hunter as I was living within a tourism region. I went back to study for a year; then, by a stroke of luck, I met an old friend from Nejambezi who had worked as a volunteer for an NGO called Students

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Partnership World Wide. They were looking for volunteers and thus I signed up. I worked as a volunteer in a rural area in the Gwanda district, doing AIDs and environmental awareness. Here, I organized an arts workshop and ran an art club in the school. I visited Tengenenge and had two weeks of working and learning from some of the great Shona stone sculpture artists. As the economy of Zimbabwe was looking so bad, one day I decided with my best school friend to go to Mozambique for work. We packed our bags and left. I had been to Mozambique before and fell in love with the Indian Ocean. I worked as a beach lodge manager in a small town called Vilanculos. Here, I made extra cash by painting with watercolours, trying to capture the beauty of the ocean and the Bazaruto islands. It is here that I was fortunate to meet Theo, a Canadian artist who later helped me to publish my book after she saw some of my poems. Mozambique was full of fun and adventure. I had decided to live here forever. Life was too good and I was in love too. My girlfriend, Lily, was back in the UK – we had met while I was a volunteer back in Zimbabwe – and she was coming to visit me in Mozambique. I left Mozambique to pick her up in Zimbabwe. While in Zimbabwe and about to return to Mozambique, something tragic happened. While watching the news in our hotel, we got the biggest shock. A tsunami struck Mozambique and the place where I worked was destroyed. However, everyone was safe, but we could not go back as the roads were destroyed. Thus, we embarked on another random trip to Malawi. We headed for Nkatha Bay to see a friend whom I had met while in Zimbabwe and decided to set up a lodge there. Charlie the weed-smoking English Rasta had a beautiful lodge on Lake Malawi. I managed his place when he went to England for a holiday. I still continued painting in watercolour and oil paints. One incident I remember was a painting I did for this racist South African lodge owner. I masturbated on the painting and mixed up my semen with oil paint to create some abstract painting, which she proudly hung up in her bar. This was my big ‘F you’ statement on how I felt about her and everything that she represented, not forgetting her racist friends sitting in her bar staring at my ‘come’ painting. From Malawi, my girlfriend and I moved to Tanzania for another adventure. Our goal was to travel up to Ethiopia. We had lots of time to kill, why not? Two days of chilling on the beach at Bangamoyo, we got a phone call from London. It was my girlfriend’s mum, excited with the news that I had an interview at South Bank University to study nursing. I was confused for I had no clue about this interview and who had made the application for me, and now I had to make a tough decision about England or going back to Mozambique at some point, because I still wanted to return there; I wanted to set up my own lodge at some point in my life. I had one night to think about going to England because the interview was within four days. I flew out of Tanzania to Harare, Zimbabwe, within two days. I did not have the chance to say goodbye to my family; I had shocked them when I called with the news



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that I was off to London. On the third day, I flew into Heathrow airport and was grilled by the immigration officer about my visit to the UK. For a while, I thought they would send me back to Africa as they went through my bag and asked all sorts of questions. All this made me feel unwelcome to this country. Then I remember going on the tube. It looked like any train, but this one went underground and I remember how quiet people were on the train. No one talked or smiled. It was cold and I sat thinking to myself what was wrong with these people. We got to Chelsea at midnight and my girlfriend’s father came to pick us up. We got to the house but we had to go round and round looking for parking. We are a poor family, but our house in a township has enough space to park two or three cars. Anyway, the following day, I got to South Bank University via Elephant and Castle. I got another massive shock at the state of the buildings because I could not believe that people in London lived on really poor housing estates that looked so neglected and so out of date. It looked and still looks like some parts of Africa. However, after a week, I got accepted to study nursing. During the summer before university started, I was introduced to an art teacher working in South Kensington, who kindly offered me some oil paints and lots of old brushes. I tried painting some nudes, having been inspired by Shona sculptures. While at South University, I continued drawing and making all sorts of abstract paintings. I liked watching home design programmes and started doing interior designs in my tiny hall of residence. My room was a gallery and I invited all sorts of people I had met for parties. At one moment, I had over sixty people crammed into my room, dancing, drawing on the walls... trying photos and leaving their work in my room. During my clinical placement as a psychiatric trainee nurse, I worked with some interesting ‘patients’ – at times I wondered who the real patients were – the helpless black teenage guy who, having a conversation with his mum, his white neighbours called the police reporting that they were concerned about the loudness of their neighbours. The police arrested him on the grounds that he had been ‘aggressive’. You see, when black people talk, we tend to speak very loud and with animated gestures, beautiful gestures of expression that have, at times, been misinterpreted by many. He was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and, unfortunately, during his arrest, he reacted to defend himself and punched a policeman. He was restrained, sedated with drugs and sent to prison. He reacted badly to this, his mental health suffered and he began to have delusions. These delusions and the horrible nightmares of the brutality of the police destroyed his everyday life. His family came to visit their son, who had become a drug addict through this small misunderstanding. This was the moment when I started to question myself and what was happening around me. Until racism is fought against or the way we think about each other as ‘individuals’, not races or cultures but as people, we stand to fail as human beings. We will not progress to our fullest if we deny the growth of another human soul. Did this helpless black young man deserve to be treated like this? His dream of becoming a professional

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footballer was crushed. He was a talented young man, full of life and a desire to be someone, but unfortunately it never turned out that way and it never will. He now has speech impairments and concentration problems. He restlessly paced up and down the hospital wanting to go home and be with his mum. He would break down in tears, scream, shout and cry, pleading to be set free to go home. Later, he would be let home after some ‘psychiatric treatment’ as he was deemed a threat to society through the police report. I felt helpless as I could not do anything. I spoke to a mentor who also felt he could do nothing in fear of his job as he was trying to make it up the NHS ladder as a black man. This issue also prompted me to start the Student Nursing Council with its objectives to help and assist trainee nurses. There was a strange pattern happening within my university where I realized with some of my colleagues that black trainee nurses were placed in the most remote and horrible hospitals. That our colleagues were sent to the more advanced and nearby hospitals frustrated me and I challenged the Dean. What happened next was that I got expelled from the University. I was deliberately failed an exam, which I appealed against and the university refused to prove my claim and, in my confusion and anger, I left and never set foot in there again. At this time, things were upside down. I had met my new girlfriend, Aravinda, whom I got married to and decided to go to India for a break. In India, I got to know about this interesting place called Auroville. I was inspired by the architecture and wanted to be involved in the construction of the African Pavilion. However, I didn’t stay long and returned to London. In London, I found myself working as a chef next the Oxford road police station and other jobs such as a stall holder at Borough Market, Spitalfields. I also worked as a bouncer in several nightclubs and bars and as a care assistant, before I enrolled in Westminster University to study business studies. I was bored within two weeks and decided to pursue my ambition to be an artist. I was accepted after I showed the art lecturers my small portfolio and it was here that I dived into the world of art. On my second week, I went to see a Steve McQueen video piece, Western Deep, which got me buzzing. I wanted to do video art installation; I met Vinne, a secondyear animation student, who was looking for artists to be involved in an art collective. We started Visualdept, an art collective doing video and various shows. We were part of the new Vjing (video jocking) culture in London. We spent our evenings in Brick Lane decorating the streets with graffiti and doing shows. It was so exciting as I met other people looking for the same rush as me; however, the art collective ceased as some of the members seemed less committed. Our last show was with Black Twang, an urban black rapper at the Cargo. It was a success for us and we decided to go our different ways. During my studies, I painted and one day while on a bus passing Liverpool station, something happened. With my sketchbook, I discovered Finger World, the symbol of the finger become the mark of my work. It was an abstract idea



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that I have used in my work, trying to explore my political views of the black male’s representation in modern society. The issue of racism was burning and raging in me. So, one day I made the most controversial painting entitled, God is a Nigga. I wanted to have this painting hanging at the entrance of the university with a voice recording playing in the background of ‘the secret relationship between the Blacks and Jews’ by Khalid of the Nation of Islam. My painting survived for two hours after complaints from the Dean. I then realized that Britain was still not ready to openly debate on the issue of racism. In my last year, my girlfriend got pregnant and my life took another turn. During my last year, I had to go to Zimbabwe after I got an emergency call from a friend of mine. My mother was seriously ill and I caught a flight to Zimbabwe two weeks before handing in my dissertation. I met my mum in a hospital bed and it looked really bad; I knew she did not have long and she passed away the following day. This happened in 2003 and I did not recover from this shock for another three years. My relationship with my then girlfriend who I had subsequently married, crashed. I moved to Sanford Housing Coop, a hippy commune and things went downhill from there. I was stuck in this country and I desperately wanted to leave, but I was somehow stuck. I could not go home as there was nothing to go home for. My family had left for South Africa. These were the most trying moments in my life – without family, no money, just my tiny room and crazy people. Then, one day I decided to get out of this trap and applied to do teaching. I am enjoying being a teacher and I have always seen myself as one. When Cambridge sent me an invite for an interview, something deep down told me, this was the place I wanted to study. When I got to the Faculty of Education, I remember walking in and getting this feeling of belonging. In my mind I told myself, this was it. I had an amazing and trying time at this place and met some amazing artists wanting to teach and share their knowledge. What moved me the most was their passion for the arts. We discussed ideas, experimented and indulged for one hard year and it paid off. Now I am a happy art teacher at a village college. Here, I get the opportunity to share with people my life experiences and show them what I can do. I am continuing to learn from people who are still helping me in my journey as an art teacher.

Some Observations Patson’s writing is characterized by ideas around politics, race, activism, engagement and resourcefulness. All of these themes are tied together not only through his travel, but also through his art making, which seems to be something continuous throughout, as a means of survival – an inner need. Activism, through art making, and thoughts about ‘radical democracy’ are

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evident in Patson’s life story: he makes art to survive and to fight; his story typifies a kind of self-reflection through production. He is the youngest of the contributors and his account resonates with connections to social justice, education and radical democracy. When I walked into Patson’s classroom, he was painting – based on an image of Africa – and the walls had examples of his work and his influences. One of Patson’s colleagues observed that Patson is ‘naturally inquisitive’ and that he facilitates inquisitiveness and curiosity in his students. At the time of writing, Patson was under investigation by the UK immigration authorities, with the threat of deportation hanging over him.

Sian Quested

Reflections on Teacher Types The Sun and The North Wind The sun shone brightly on a warm, British June day in the late 1980s. I was inside amid the hustle and bustle of a crowd of my fellow DM-booted 15-year-old classmates during a noisy lesson change. A sea of uniforms moving autonomously upstairs, hoping that this lesson was going to be a positive experience. Through the dirty hall window above, a ray of hope broke through in the form of a shaft of sunlight. The beam lit the tattered, gleaming blue corridor floor like a torchlight in the dark. On seeing this beam, I broke from the shoal and took an unorthodox turn against the tide. I was headed towards Strangeways – so named decades ago after the Manchester prison by students (inappropriately so in terms of its ability to free teenagers from the confines of school). The ladder to Strangeways sat in darkness at the back of the school stage. Creeping silently up the ladder in summer took you undisturbed to fresh air and sunlight on the roof of the school hall, where you could escape the monotony of school and sunbathe at your leisure watching school-life go by. I was happy here in the knowledge that I had escaped the almost unbearable boredom of that lesson and had finally freed my own thoughts from the confines of school. The Sun The North Wind and the Sun disputed as to which was the most powerful and agreed that he should be declared the victor who could first strip a wayfaring man of his clothes. The North Wind first tried his power and blew with all his might, but the keener his blasts, the closer the Traveller wrapped his cloak around him, until at last, resigning all hope of victory, the Wind called upon the Sun to see what he could do. The Sun suddenly shone out with all his warmth. The Traveller no sooner felt his genial rays than he took off one garment after another and at last, fairly overcome with heat, undressed and bathed in a stream that lay in his path.

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Persuasion is better than force. (Aesop’s Fable) This was one of my favourite Aesop’s fables as a child. It means you shouldn’t attempt to work against the nature of people and persuading people along with their nature works better than forcing them. The North wind in the fable could be anything or anyone; ruling government, headteachers, your boss or anyone bullying or bureaucratic; as can the sun. I believe that schools could be the most amazing, rewarding and inspiring places. However, those involved with them tend to become bogged down with timetables, punctuality, rules and grades. This leads to tired, pressured teachers, an uninspiring environment and curriculum, and mundane, seemingly futile work. It’s not being at school that children don’t like; it’s lessons and more specifically their teachers. Unfortunately, I had to pass through school like waiting to get out of jail on a Monopoly board before I was free to live life to the full. At certain points, school was more than I could bear and I would make a bid for freedom, whether this was deliberately missing a lesson or whole days. I find it deeply sad that this was my experience of school as now, being an art teacher myself, I realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. Government monetary constraints and a system where those in charge haven’t a clue what works to make school a rewarding and valuable experience for students have made its tiresome existence. School mainly fails to provide students with a lifelong love of learning and independent learning skills. Those who the system fails simply have to find their own way back to where they started in early childhood – as creative, innovative beings – through life experience after school. I have had what I consider to be some of the most rewarding and valuable experiences of my life outside school. I have a low boredom threshold and high expectations for learning, which seemed to exclude me from the school education system. I appreciate what the government, parents, community and teachers are trying to do, but school doesn’t work in its past or present format. School is particularly ineffectual for young people who are intelligent, questioning, imaginative, creative, think outside the box, take risks and dislike trivial boundaries and rules imposed on their person. The past and present school system is not able to fulfil the needs of these individuals. Therefore, children who are extremely creative, innovative and brimming with ideas are often excluded from the school system or it stamps out their individuality entirely. This is done with much more subtlety and less of their own choice than if these children were to join the army. The effects though are the same – toe the line or become a ‘black sheep’. I am not a big fan of school – or anything where you don’t have a choice whether you go or not, have to toe the line, wear a uniform, do exactly what you’re told and act the same as everyone else (such as sport or prison) where you’re toe-curlingly bored. Likewise, I don’t enjoy been confined to an aesthetically challenged environment. I like being free to experience things for myself, to take risks sometimes and to think for myself. I am a naturally questioning person, by which I mean that I don’t just accept



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what I’m told – whoever is attempting to do so – nor do I arrogantly dismiss other people’s opinions. I like to listen, think, sometimes research, then make up my own mind. I would rather be reading a book on a beach somewhere hot while furthering my literary mind. I would rather be studying science by visiting rock pools, snorkelling or pond dipping. I’d like to look at some real life art while being taught about it and be taught by someone who can actually do it or wants to teach it as opposed to the long succession of unwillings, uninspirings or unables that I experienced during my education. This happened to me during my school education and it was real-life experience, adventure and love of knowledge that eventually helped me find my potential and bring me back to try to achieve it. After what seemed like endless grey school years, trapped in rigid routine, authoritarianism and intense frustration, which made me want to jump off the world as I knew it, I finally escaped. I embraced the ‘edges of life’ visiting ‘other worlds’. I travelled to other countries and experienced their cultures; face painted using clay with Aboriginal Australians, learning about their myths and legends; rode on horseback up a mountain, learning about wildlife on the way. I’ve had wolf cubs chew on my hair and I’ve galloped bareback on a horse on the beach, learning about the sparkling constellations in the black night sky. I’ve become familiar with flocks of green, red and white parrots and parakeets on my balcony while feeding them each day. In France, I’ve sped past red fields of poppies and obedient golden sun-searching sunflowers looking for their fiery master. I’ve experienced things directly – the warm sun on my skin, soft sand between my toes, cold rain on my hair and icy snow on my tongue. I’ve stayed in some of the world’s top hotels and drunk champagne at the Ritz, Paris. I’ve got my hands dirty fishing for newts in a lake, picked beached mussels at first light on the Irish coast and learnt about rock pools and their inhabitants on beaches in the pouring rain. None of these experiences were in primary or secondary school. The North Wind I come from a long line of female school avoiders and dark despisers of school. My mother, a school shunner, attended a Roman Catholic school in Scotland, taught by nuns. She could often be found kneeling in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary (she still has damaged knees from the cold, stone floor) as punishment for submitting to temptation, such as dipping the girl in front’s long pigtails into her desk ink well, out of boredom. She was masterful at truancy and more particularly skiving PE lessons. In a bid to avoid standing in a freezing cold field in Peebles (near Edinburgh) in knicker-like shorts in the depths of winter, she (a short woman and even shorter child) would often hang from a coat hook in the PE changing room under a pile of coats.

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My father cannot recall his school years without withdrawing into himself with a sinister, ominous curtain of deep brooding shadowing his face. His stories normally start with the headteacher at his school who told him that because his father had died that week and was therefore not around to administer beatings, he would take his place and thrash him instead. Part of my father’s dark hatred of school and my mother’s aptitude for truancy passed on to their three children – Jamie, myself and Briony. We listened to this culture of fascinating anti-establishment school tales. Both my parents are highly intelligent and now successful business newspaper publishers. So, how does school fail such people and does it matter if they have become successful (I’m defining this as rich, happy, together and challenged) anyway. They, as did I and the rest of my direct family, completely lost interest in school. I became increasingly frustrated by how tedious it was to trudge from one uninspiring lesson to the next even duller one. I would then have found it almost unbelievable that I would ever become a teacher. By the time my parents moved to the south of England – Cambridge, and the secondary school where I took my GCSE examinations – I spent much of my schooling in the lofty position of ‘Strangeways’, soaking up the sun’s rays while watching the classes that I was timetabled to be in take place. I barely picked up a pen or a book for almost three years and certainly did no GCSE revision or work. Instead, I relied on the work I had done in the first and second year of the private school I attended in the north of England. Also, it hadn’t been explained to me the importance of GCSEs and what we were working towards. In my opinion, there is still a problem with this in contemporary education and in not taking an overall picture of individual’s educational progress. Unless a student is causing a substantial problem in a school, they slip under the radar. I continued to slip beyond the reach of the radar. During my ‘A’ levels, I was the student who hardly ever attended, had no organizational skills (despite the fact that I am now a super-organized person), never brought anything to write on or with, truanted PE and didn’t pick up a pen or book. For my English ‘A’ level exam, I had never read the books on the syllabus, including Shakespeare plays and Wuthering Heights. While others cram-revised outside the exam, I simply read the book’s introduction, which explored its themes, and then answered the questions accordingly from the exam paper. Like my parents, I was actually quite able in many areas but after many school moves (due to business moves by my parents) and said school’s lack of knowledge of my ability, prior learning and general academic progress, I stopped trying and started truanting. On a more positive note, my sister, brother and I, however, did attend a variety of schools greatly differing in terms of social class. This ensured we were able to communicate effectively with most people. Some were of the top private schools in the country and others were local state schools. Within these schools and social pressures to fit in, the three of us can now converse widely and easily with a huge variety of



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social classes. I find this helpful with my secondary school teaching – particularly in the cosmopolitan state school at which I am currently head of art. Within this, I have an understanding of what will sustain interest at different social levels. For example, if you teach a lesson that enables students to be creative within what currently interests them, they are very likely to work well and enjoy lessons. This works in art as we tailor the curriculum and individual lessons to suit student interest and needs. The development of empathy in me was stretched to capacity by my Irish Catholic mother – a keen journalist. She had (and is still adept at) the ability to induce severe guilt in a person. She was insistent that everyone in the family deeply feel every newsworthy injustice. I was the kind of studious sensitive person in early childhood who would cry if a teacher told me I wasn’t standing in line properly, so I felt all of these world woes acutely. I do feel that this gave me a deep sense of empathy for the world and justice for all. Like many other teachers in the arts, I have quite an imagination. I dream in vivid detail, almost in video. Last night, I visited a market with bright beautiful textiles and Aran jumpers made of itchy wool. I dream lucidly every night with imagined ‘sights, sounds, taste’ and ‘touch’ and have done so since I was a small child, with amazing extended detail about creatures and scenarios. My wide-open imagination is frequently useful in my job with lesson or project ideas. Qualities I consider a good or ‘sun’ teacher should possess are: risk taking, pushing boundaries, imagination, experimenting and questioning the status quo. These qualities were inherent in me in early childhood. As a baby I would, according to my mother, determinately hurl myself after the cat, who would move slightly away from me every time I got close. I wrecked a cot within months of being in it, a cot that my older brother had happily inhabited for two years and left pristine. I was also walking extremely early and would climb out of my cot and appear at the kitchen door while my mother was cooking. In short, I was hard to contain and didn’t like boundaries then either – particularly when they were physical ones imposed on me. I was also determined in the face of strong opposition. My mother once painstakingly grew from seed and nurtured a rainbow of pansies, which she planted in the back garden. I was fascinated by these aged two and loved to pull the pretty heads off them. I was mes­ merized by their jet-black centres and eyes like yellow flames. My mother tried to tell me kindly not to continue to do this. She says I blanked her pleas and continued in my trance-like obsession. This escalated to a telling off and then a hard smack (which she says was quite a forceful hit on a two year old). She said I simply turned, looked at her, then turned back to the pansies and continued pulling off their heads. If I was her, I would probably have been quite scared at this point. Later on, she tried supporting what she considered to be my blinkered determination to do something, which didn’t work either – hence the tattooed black paw prints that circulate my ankle.

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Teaching Art My early career saw me working as a journalist and, subsequently, senior business editor. In this job, I gained full-time sponsorship to live in Australia and jetted up and down the coast of Australia on business meetings, designing, writing and commissioning articles for a wide variety of business publications. These spanned the history of Australian states, health and environmental publications and also involved teaching Australian companies about issues such as global environmental issues. It was interesting and enjoyable at times, particularly in learning about a wide variety of issues in depth. However, in my stylish office on Australia’s sunny Gold Coast, while looking out at a surfer walking to the beach, I had a feeling of hollowness. I was, as usual, contemplating the coldness of the air-conditioning system in my office and more unusually writing an advert to attract people to buy a product for a marketing magazine. I looked out at the gleaming sun, the pale blue sky and the tanned surfers wandering to the beach. At this moment, I was trying to think of a ‘catchline’ to manipulate readers into buying a product advertised in the magazine. Then, I made an unwavering decision that this empty, uninspiring feeling of doing a job based on getting money out of people (and not even for myself) meant I should do something more morally rewarding. A week later (I can be quite impulsive), I handed in my notice to pursue what I considered would be a more rewarding career for myself and others. I returned to the UK to retrain as an art teacher at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education. My first year as a newly qualified teacher was spent in a head of art position at an 11–16 school based in central Cambridge; its intake is socially and culturally diverse. The school had recently gained a ‘good with outstanding features’ in its latest Ofsted inspection, so this wasn’t the most difficult of tasks, but it was challenging enough for me to require a large glass of red wine by 6 p.m. each Friday. After four years of running the art department, I now understand why I didn’t really enjoy my own schooling. It wasn’t just having moved schools regularly as a child. I found the lack of tangible rewards, uninspiring lessons and the boredom of visiting the same environment day after day utterly miserable. I would fluctuate between being one of the highest achieving, well-behaved students for ‘good’ teachers, to being one of the most challenging (or missing school entirely to sunbathe on top of buildings). My students are free to learn independently and be creative in their thinking; some work on individual projects designed to enable them to explore what they are interested in and come up with their own individual responses. Within this, they are also taught very specific, enjoyable sessions on how to paint, draw, spray-paint, sculpt and printmake, to name a few. Many art teachers are primarily ‘sun’ teachers. We enjoy our subjects, working with young people, creating and inspiring students. I regard myself



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as a ‘sun’ teacher as my students are interested in art and enjoy creative lessons, where they get to make and/or create imaginative art objects. The opposite of this would be ‘wind’ teachers. These teachers (or sometimes schools) try to force students to sit in an environment not conducive to learning and they focus on bureaucracy. ‘Wind’ teachers might see the traditionally timetabled school week as the format for teaching. ‘Wind’ teachers expect all students to behave the same way, like a pack of robots, and become irritated when they don’t behave accordingly. ‘Wind’ teachers don’t teach interesting, creative lessons; rather, they just expect students to do what they are told unquestioningly. By their nature and by this I refer to personality, interests and inherent learning styles, students will respond well to ‘sun’ teachers and do their best for them. ‘Sun’ teachers value the individual. The art curriculum, particularly at GCSE level, offers individualized learning. ‘Sun’ art teachers don’t drone on in a monotone voice for the whole lesson. This is partly because we get as bored with our own voices as the students do. There is instruction (usually about ten minutes or so), then the students work and the teacher supports, summarizing learning throughout and at the end of the lesson. Also inherent in ‘sun’ art teaching is love of learning. Students enjoy art, are good at it or become adept through good teaching. The curriculum is varied and well judged, so students are never bored and want to be there. They listen to their own choice of music and can freely move around the room. It’s a pleasant, warm atmosphere; like the sun shining on a cold grey day in the dreary school environment.

Some Observations Sian talks about her own experiences in school, particularly with respect to being outside the norm, and not liking to be bound; her schooling career was one of difficulty and boredom, and of resistance. She mentions the lack of ‘real life’ experiences in the classroom, and teachers that do not connect with individual students’ needs or learning styles. Essentially, she has developed her site of art/making/learning – the department of which she is head – as a space where youth are treated as individuals and where their own natural learning styles, interests and identities are examined, fed and lessons produced accordingly. This goes with her discussion of the ‘sun and wind’ story and how we must work with, rather than against, people. There are references to informal learning, especially with regard to how she forged an education for herself outside traditional schooling. Her teaching is characterized by attention to individual students’ needs and with realworld experiences, working with people’s natural ways of learning.

Keith Winser

I am Not an Artist Who Teaches, I am a Teacher Who Sometimes Makes Art Art is a Serious Business I was always pretty good at art – I could draw trees. If you wanted a tree drawing, I was your man. Deeply sculptured textural trunks narrowing to spindly intertwining branches were my forte. Looking back it seems that this rather limited ability has formed the basis for my entire professional life. This, coupled with an inability to take things too seriously and an overactive imagination. My tree drawings, while based on empirical observation, would often be adorned with wide-mouthed baby birds sitting three up in a cartoon nest, gulping down tearful worms brought to them by their spotty-pinafore-wearing mother... this predisposition to embellish otherwise serious imagery contributed to my downfall in secondary education. My otherwise geographically accurate renditions of Norwegian fjords were improved, I felt, by the addition of a rubber-suited frogman spearing a weird species of deep sea fish complete with a light dangling on an antenna sticking out of the top of its head. My biological studies of flowers, with carefully labelled petals, sepals and stamens just had to have several bite marks out of them and a replenished maggot licking its lips, disappearing down the stem; and if I say so myself, my Bayeaux Tapestry was a tour-de-force in everything except its capacity to endear me to my history teacher. Thus started my love-hate relationship with the secondary school system. Negatives Lead to Positives – I am an Optimist A serious accident, damaging my eyesight when I was 13, left me unable to risk physical contact sports and the like. For months, as a punishment for having the accident, my PE and games lessons were spent clearing the newly laid out football pitches of dangerous flints and miscellaneous building rubble. This has had a longlasting effect on my relationship with PE teachers in general and football in particular. The married couple who taught art were my saviours. They recognized a prestigious



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talent for tree depiction and encouraged me to broaden my skills to include other subject matter. They encouraged me to incorporate my irreverence into my artwork by selecting topics and tasks that suited the approach. They engineered for me to be in the art rooms instead of PE and games, where I could produce illustrations for the school magazine and design and screen-print posters for the school musical, summer fetes and any manner of events – where practical skills, imagination and a sense of fun could legitimately be combined into a successful design. I single-handedly created a puppet show (a cardboard box theatre – with opening curtains, papier mâché puppets, set, props and story line) for the junior school taster day (it wasn’t called taster day then). I was able to convert this circumstance into an opportunity. I found and refurbished a small Adana hand-operated printing press and trays of lead type. I was soon printing tickets for school events. The unruly gangs of youths that gathered around the shopping precincts of Stevenage New Town were the only ones able to identify themselves with personalized business cards. I was, however, at age 14, commissioned to produce deckle-edged invitations for my art teacher’s own one-man exhibition. Into the Real World I later wrote to every business that might take me on as a graphic designer – as well as studios, agencies and companies, I wrote to large organizations that, I surmised, might have their own in-house designers. I received one reply from a large packaging business inviting me to come to see them because it just so happened that one of their designers – an ex-student who had completed the course I dropped out from – was moving on. Even as I started my life as an employee, I retained an unquestioning youthful idealism; after all, I had achieved my goal. At the age of just 17, I was employed full time as a studio designer in what was not much more than a cardboard box factory. The studio in which I worked employed four artists and a team of corrugated cardboard engineers. They were the designers; we were the artists that ‘decorated’ the sides of the boxes. I got boxes – boxes for 24  8oz tins of baked beans. Welcome to the real world of the jobbing graphic designer. At first, I resisted the tendency for my idealism to wane. Ever optimistic, I could see that more exciting work would come my way one day and, after all, I was in my dream job and this was the most important thing. At least it was until my first pay packet was handed to me – and it contained significantly less than I had expected. Suitably enraged, I went straight to the wages office and rapped on the door. While waiting for an answer I realized that, in that instant, I had grown up – and I learned a lesson that shaped me forever.

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I Need Challenges If pressed I will admit to one personality defect – I do have a short boredom threshold; I can lurch from extreme enthusiasm for a particular enterprise to having nothing to do with it in a very short space of time. Not in everything I do, but quite regularly throughout my life. All too quickly I became bored with life as a cardboard box embellisher. I did enjoy team meetings when the jobs were discussed and divided out for completion. When sales reps brought in the job briefs, the team got together to suggest how a particular job might be done – I was in my element. I discovered that I could offer ten ideas and suggestions to the rest of the team’s one or two. My imagination was valued and I found a role that suited me – every job was new and exciting. Trouble was, I was bored by what came next – the necessary painstaking detail needed to complete the job to photographic accuracy – something I learned to do but hated with a passion. I had to fill my days drawing caricatures of my workmates. Doing this, I realized that the management of the design process and the hands-on drawing aspect of design were completed by different age profiles. To forge a career in graphics ultimately means moving into managing younger people who would actually do the artwork. I didn’t like that idea – I felt that I wanted to keep my hand in. I began to feel unsettled – graphic design didn’t suit me as much as I had expected and had the prospect of suiting me even less as time passed. What do I do now? Teacher training college was good for me. I was totally unaware that it had an excellent reputation for both subject and education studies. As part of the junior/secondary requirement, students had to choose subsidiary subjects to complement the main subject studied. For art students, it was expected to be something more mainstream such as history, geography or mathematics, as this made you more employable – I chose drama. In short, this was not allowed, but I argued that an arts package was likely to be as valid and relevant – certainly as employable – as any other. With a mix of reluctance and foresight, it was allowed, and by the time I was in my fourth year of study I was involved in piloting the arts and education degree at Sussex University where students were expected to have studied a mixed arts package! Self-discipline At work, I learned to deal with clients’ demands that they ‘didn’t want it good, so much as they want it Thursday’. This discipline helped me to make the most of my college career. As soon as I was given a task, I did it, often leaving me with considerable time on my hands. I’m not a time waster; I used it to good effect – to further my education. For example, I extended my musical knowledge and experience – playing in bands and forming a jazz club. I wrote, performed in, constructed and promoted drama productions – including the college Christmas revue for three years. I was joint editor of the weekly Union Newspaper, completed a BBC radio journalist training course, organized excursions to London galleries for other art students, worked as a



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technical assistant to resident artists at the Gardner Art Centre and critiqued travelling exhibitions that were staged in the college, to name but a few. One of the most influential experiences at college was my third teaching practice at Varndean Boys’ Grammar School. The head of department (HoD) was a formidable teacher who had two main boasts to his fame – he more than doubled his salary every year by selling paintings of animals completed while on extended excursions to far off parts of the world, but he had a secondary role in the school – as a former sergeant major, he was head of discipline. When I arrived on my first visit, he greeted me with the words ‘I’m glad you’re here I can now go and get on with my other job’ and with that he gave me the keys to the art room and I only saw him twice before I finished teaching practice – once for tea with the HoD and his wife at home and secondly when he thanked me for returning his keys. The grammar school boys were not impressed with my inability to generate huge wealth by painting animals, and they did everything they could to take advantage of the fact that the discipline meister had withdrawn from the art department. My response was to borrow a stock of materials and equipment from college and convert a small stock cupboard into a fully functioning darkroom for my 12-week placement, and teach photography as a process, a technique and an art form. I liked the independence and the autonomy – this training continues to serve me well. It was like being a HoD from the outset. First Post Kate and I married while in my last year at college. Brighton was a great place to learn and to live, but an expensive place to be permanent. We decided that I would put off getting a teaching job, but go for the rich pickings of building work – so we could save. Towards the end of the summer term, my college tutor got a message from the head teacher of Tideway in Newhaven – one of the largest comprehensive schools in the area and one where I had asked for a teaching practice placement but hadn’t got it – they needed an art teacher for September. My tutor arranged for me to visit the school during parents’ open day. I went out of politeness and gratitude, but he didn’t know about our plans. As I was wandering around the school, I was approached by the head who ushered me into a quiet classroom in order to, in his words, ‘Get away from all the parents who just like to ask me awkward questions’. We perched on two desks and without any formalities he asked me if I wanted the job or not. Notwithstanding our private plans and the fact that I hadn’t actually secured a job on a building site, I said yes and started two months later. There were five art teachers in the school, but it was difficult to conceive of it as a department. The HoD was a well-known local artist and a successful teacher – he took all the sixth form in a well-equipped purpose built art room. There was one other recently built art room and a dishevelled old pottery room. The other two art rooms were just rooms with sinks. Mine was up three flights of steps in a separate block away

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from any contact with art colleagues. I was given a budget allowance as well as the basic stock left by the previous teacher and I was expected to order some materials for myself. To supplement the meagre stock, I would scour the school at 5 p.m. after everyone else had gone home and gather pencils, rubbers and any other useful bits of kit that other teachers had left lying around. The previous occupant of my room had been a textiles specialist and had spent her allowances on hanks of yarn, bobbin winders, a couple of tabletop hand looms and one massive workshop loom that took up half of the back end of the art room. I guessed that it was her interest rather than an overt desire to introduce the youngsters of Newhaven to the noble craft of weaving. After some nifty DIY, I converted the workshop loom into an animation table complete with four spotlights, an overhead mounted camera bracket and using the warp roller we could make animated films with a rolling backdrop to simulate figures and objects travelling across a scene. Normal for Norfolk After two years, we were no nearer our goal of being able to afford to buy somewhere to set up a permanent home in the south, we could just scrape together enough for a poor deposit on an even poorer quality building. In the summer of 1977, a chance encounter with an East Anglian newspaper advertising houses for sale in Norfolk made us realize that our meagre savings would be considered relative riches in different parts of the country. It was decided that we would start looking for jobs where we could afford to live. The first job I saw advertised in Norfolk was for the head of art at King Edward VII School for Boys, King’s Lynn (known as ‘KES’). This didn’t look like a forward-thinking institution to me. Having a selective intake of some 550 boys, it was about as far removed from the 1500 strong comprehensive I was so thoroughly enjoying working in, as you could get; and it was a HoD on scale 2. I’d only been teaching for two years. So I applied, and got the job. In my second term at KES, I met Norman, the (county) art advisor. I had mounted a display of the mock ‘O’ level paintings along the art room wall – marked and in rank order, when he visited. I got to know and understand his brusque Yorkshire ways over time, but his first words on perusing the display, ‘They’re rubbish aren’t they?’ came as a bit of a shock. Eventually, it became apparent that this was his comment about the way art was perceived in the school and of the quality of art education that the pupils had thus far experienced. It was his way of supporting me by indicating the hard work I had in front of me to change this perception and improve the quality of the art education for the pupils in the school. I think I have what is known as the common touch – I am from an ordinary, and I would say, working-class background. Solidly working class by any definition of household income – and I would argue that in the context of my parent’s generation,



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working class in value also. I am not so sure that the same values are more likely to be attributed to the middle class today – but I think I am fairly humble, unpretentious and down-to-earth. Many of the parents, staff and even the students at KES were selfassured and patronizing to the point of arrogance. This, I found hard to cope with. Of course, not all were like that, but I found it much easier to build strong, purposeful and positive relationships with those whose disposition was similar to mine. Some of these relationships endure to this day. Of the sixth formers I taught in my first three years at KES (1979–1982), I was best man for Steve and still exchange Christmas cards and stay with him and Anne where they now live in Kent. I visited another in Norwich for a weekend earlier this year (2010) – it was a matter of much discussion between us, Trevor his stepfamily and his second wife, how he could be friends with one of his ex-teachers. It was a concept that none of the others could comprehend. The bond between Trevor and I began when he was in the lower sixth (1981) and his strong-willed father, a well-known local policeman, wanted Trevor to follow a career in something useful like being a telephone engineer – but Trevor wanted to be a graphic designer. I think I must have become just about the only person in Trevor’s family’s life who was prepared to disagree with his father. Trevor is now senior designer at County Hall in Norwich. I was responsible for two main innovations at this time, one in school and one outside. The school-based development was with computer-aided art and design; as early as 1980 we had four different computer systems in the art rooms, including animation, textile design and digital imaging. I started the West Norfolk Art Teachers’ association in 1982 and began a series of after-school INSET sessions for printmaking, sculpture, photography, computer graphics and examination assessment. Eleven years at KES and I was beginning to get unsettled. Day-to-day teaching was hugely enjoyable. I had a strong teaching team around me and my HoD responsibilities were easy to manage, the students were, in the main, a joy to teach. I had time to think and space to experiment. However, I had fallen out with the school’s senior management who were mostly the ‘old school’ – I even had a run in with the head. We were both headstrong and found ourselves on opposing sides on an issue of attending after-school activities. When first appointed, I set the precedent of being fully involved in all aspects of the life of the school – after-school clubs in art, photography and printing, drama and plays, set design, PTA, the school fete, revues and so on. Ten Years Later... My first advisory role was with the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) and a six-year contract. When I was given the brief for the post – describing an education that is geared towards the real world and the world of work, the creative use of technology and a redefinition of the traditional structure of secondary education, it

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screamed ‘the future’ to me and, at the same time, described pretty much what I had already established at KES. The job description for the original post had, in fact, been changed in the run up to setting up the team and I believe this may have been partly due to some backroom manipulation by Norman. The post was titled ‘Advisory Teacher for Visual Communication’ and its specification had been rewritten to describe the skills and attributes of an art and design teacher, not the design and technology area in the original wording. In exactly 10 years, all this had been created from virtually nothing – then it went back to nothing. Art in The Park – I was told and I forgot, I saw and I remembered, I did and I understood In the same week that I received my formal notification of redundancy, a job was advertised in the TES. It was for the head of art in the school closest to where I live. I knew it well, as much from simple local knowledge as from having been involved with the present HoD auditing the department’s provision and forging an action plan to develop it. An action plan that appeared so demanding as to put the present incumbent off and make a move sideways in the school, thus creating the need for a new HoD. If I had been looking for redundancy and a move back to school, I couldn’t have planned it better. Pity – I wasn’t and didn’t. I had considered going the ‘independent art education consultant’ route. But such insecurity is not for me. As a teenager, I had been given the chance of giving up a secure design job and going to Germany with a band in order to seek fame and fortune. I lacked the courage to take the risk. I was interviewed at The Park. Surely the governors must have thought that I was overqualified for the job. Had I been interviewing me, I might have thought that this person would only be using this job as their stepping stone from redundancy to their next advisory post – how long are they likely to stay? The others interviewed were much younger and characteristically on their way up in the profession. I was 46 and had left as a HoD ten years previously. When I met him on my advisory visits, I had warmed to the head teacher and he was keen to get me on board – but despite this, I had to work hard to convince the interview panel that I was their man for the job. The Word is Challenge The Park is a challenging school (officially) and taking on the art and design department was a challenge within a challenging school. For a couple of years before I joined the school, art had developed a name and a reputation. The art area was nicknamed ‘the zoo’ apparently because of the way the pupils behaved when they were there.



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Believing, as I do, that the environment has a strong influence on attitude and behaviour, I could see from the start some of the problems to overcome. Having been out of the classroom for 10 years, I am happy to admit that the return to day-to-day teaching was not a walk in the park. The zoo had three full-time keepers and two part-timers teaching in a semi-open plan area fed by a narrow corridor leading from the main school. Before every lesson, upwards of sixty youngsters (at least three classes worth) queued up – if that is an appropriately descriptive term – waiting for their lessons. Of course, their arrival generally coincided with the departure of the previous three classes, resulting in an overwhelmingly unruly mob pushing, shoving, screaming and shouting, which I have always thought was not the ideal way in which to start art lessons. I started this job in January and therefore had no influence over the timetable, rooming and or composition of the classes. This situation was not helped by the fact that my teaching area was a corridor – literally. I had a set of tables and a desk positioned between two other teaching areas, and as I settled my classes down, latecomers, stragglers and pupils who had gone to the wrong teacher would be wandering back and forth between my pupils and me. At times, the start of my lessons resembled Wimbledon as twenty pairs of eyes – twenty two including mine – followed a seemingly endless flow of people passing between us as I tried to impart the finer points of printing half drop pattern repeats. I felt somewhat disempowered by this, but even more so when I was confronted by a Year 7 class that included a girl who simply refused to follow any of my instructions whatsoever. So this was what they meant by challenge. I delved into my magic top hat of experience and brought out trick after trick, but nothing worked. She would not even leave. Total defiance. I apologized to the rest of the class saying that until X (that is not her real name) was prepared to comply, we would be doing nothing in the lesson – trying the peer pressure approach. This didn’t work either, so I resigned myself to a long and exasperating waiting game. Looking around at the faces of the other pupils, I was struck by their expressions that clearly showed the massive range of ability, attitude, behaviour and needs present in this school; as I scanned the class I made eye contact with another girl who I had already discovered loved art and really wanted to get on. This just wasn’t fair – and it was this experience that formed my view that at this time, and in this school, there must be a way of organising the teaching to better serve the needs of the pupils. Previously in my advisor role, I had discovered a research project about art assessment in primary education. The research used definitions of three levels of cognitive ability in relation to the creation of art outcomes – I reworked this into categories of differentiation identified by a different colour, chosen at random but chosen to avoid a numerical or letter hierarchical labelling. Orange represented the higher attaining pupils – those who understood what was required of them and had the knowledge and the skills to demonstrate it with confidence.

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Pink represented talented pupils or those with a flair for art – those who did not necessarily fully understand what was being asked of them, yet seemed to possess skills if not the secure knowledge necessary to demonstrate their aesthetic understanding. Yellow represented average ability or, what we called, struggling pupils – those who had some understanding of what was required of them and, possibly some emerging knowledge of art and artists, but lacked the skills necessary to demonstrate it effectively. Blue represented the less able, who found it difficult to grasp what was required of them and, as a consequence, lacked knowledge or the basic skills of art practice. These useful definitions coupled with my request to block timetable three or four art classes together enabled us to set our art groups according to cognitive criteria. The following September, we began teaching all key stage three groups as mixed ability, giving them a six-week diagnostic induction course. At half term, we resorted to placing the classes into different colour groups according to their performance against the above criteria. We were than able to plan differentiated teaching that suited the capabilities of each group. X was placed in a blue group, while the other girl ended up in an orange group and each was taught in a manner and with demands that better matched their abilities and aspirations. Innovation in the art curriculum did not stop there because I was determined to make sure that pupils could move groups easily as and when necessary – we reviewed each pupil’s placement at the end of every term. I also wanted to make sure that the curriculum was ‘rounded’, art has always been art, craft and design to me, and this view had only been confirmed and consolidated by all the work I had done with the national curriculum. So, as well as setting the groups, we rotated them around three specialist teachers, for a term each group experienced a diet consisting of: a ‘traditional’ fine art approach concentrating on painting and drawing using wellestablished subject matter; three-dimensional artwork using clay, wood, metal plastic and the like and graphics, illustration and computer-generated artwork. This classroom action research lasted for eight years and, I believe, enabled the department to consistently deliver pretty much the best results of any single subject area throughout that time. Perhaps one small, but nonetheless significant indicator is that both girls previously described ended up in my examination group in Year 10 – of course these groups reverted back to mixed ability by then due to the option system; by the end of Year 11 both had gained a GCSE grade appropriate to their age and ability – one was awarded an A grade and the other, a grade F. A successful outcome for both, and an indictment of the somewhat unconventional setting experiment. A significant part of my work at The Park has been building a strong and enduring professional relationship with the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education. There was never a problem between the faculty and the school art department, but the relationship was fraught with problems in other areas. Working with new teaching



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talent has had a significant effect on my own classroom practice. Working with newcomers to the profession has helped me maintain the attitude and drive I had for teaching when I began. My first sessions with trainees at Cambridge were also about assessment – drawing on my knowledge and experience as an examiner for GCSE and principal moderator for ‘A’ level, I set up workshops where trainees could build up their knowledge, experience and understanding of assessment objectives – these sessions would invariably be characterized by lively, engaging discussions, a thirst for knowledge, intense scrutiny of students’ sketchbooks, heartfelt and sometimes moving descriptions of trainees’ own experiences of teacher assessment, and all this having to be brought reluctantly to a close well beyond the stated end time. This is why I like working with trainee teachers. So, again, and for the third phase of my working life, I have reached another threshold. Ten years as HoD at The Park, I ask myself ‘Am I becoming bored?’ or is the need to seek out new challenges the reason why I take on the directorship of the sixth form? Patterns and Reoccurrences Writing this has helped me to accept that I probably have a 10-year boredom threshold – but another factor has become apparent. In almost all of the positions/roles/jobs I have taken on, I have been given the task of either building something from scratch, or at least rebuilding something new from the remains of the old. In hindsight, I have been a sort of education troubleshooter – I have never taken over a pre-existing successful enterprise that simply needed a firm hand on the metaphorical tiller in order to keep it on its already successful course. To continue the metaphor, I have either had to build the boat from plans I draw up myself, launch it, sail it single-handedly, or bail out and repair what would be if left, nothing but a dilapidated and sinking wreck. I do not come from a teaching background or one other than that of parental support and encouragement – my mother was a somewhat embittered secondary modern girl; she always thought she was better. My father was formally registered as blind for most of his adult life. He was a mild-mannered, intelligent and quiet type. You could discuss something with him, in considerable depth and with great conviction on your part. He would listen and, now and again, offer a quiet comment and a point or two. Then, without much warning, he would come back with a sharp and incisive question that would make you stop in your tracks. His way of creatively thinking around a problem was an inspiration to me. He was a much better listener than I have ever been, and I do think that being a good listener is a more valuable attribute than being a good speaker. My mother did have a huge talent for art (and crafts) – a talent recognized and acknowledged by all who saw the results of her labours – she was immensely skilful and

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had had botanical illustrations published at an early age – she was able to turn her hand (literally) to all manner of craft work and achieve results that commanded universal acclaim. For me, however, there was something about what she did that was never quite ‘right’ – doubtless it is as much to do with the generally antagonistic relationship we had as mother and son. But, I have always had a problem with the concept of ‘talent’. I always saw my mother as the perfect example of someone who could do art – but didn’t know why or how. There was no apparent artistic understanding or real aim behind what she did; she did what she liked doing and it looked effective, which, of course, was fair enough, but it all seemed totally superficial to me. We argued about it a lot in our household and doubtless this contributed significantly to form, in me, a view of art that must have meaning, purpose, direction and intent – what the art looks like is secondary to what the art means. By the early 1970s, I was fully embracing conceptual art in all its forms and have continued to champion it ever since. As I write this, I can now recognize links between my emerging attitudes about art as a youngster and some other significant influences on my later professional development. As well as Norman, two other important professional influences lived in Norfolk and this coincidental proximity helped to shape my career and development as a teacher. John, one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI), lived in Fakenham. His inspectorial responsibility for overseeing art & design was the entire East of England from North East Yorkshire down to Kent – I think he was the only HMI who went from school to school on a motorbike. He came to us at KES and we discussed art and art education – he was an inspiration. Not only because he dispelled the mythical preconceptions that we teachers had of HMIs, by being down to earth and realistic about day-to-day classroom practice. He was also a listener and a thinker, able to make complex concepts like ‘creativity’ accessible and understandable. Bill Read – at the time teaching in the Faculty of Education at Birmingham – lived in Hunstanton with his wife Shirley. He worked in Birmingham during the week and spent the weekends in Norfolk (where, if I remember correctly, he had been evacuated to during the Second World War). He was a product of teacher training in Leicester and had embraced the philosophy of education through art and design. He had led a design faculty in a large London school before his move to teacher education. Bill was the architect of the art and design examination syllabus. He came to KES and we agreed to pilot a new exam called 16  . At KES, I had created ripples by splitting the exam art group into two and entering half for Ordinary level and half for CSE. No one knew what CSE was; students had never been entered for it before. The idea of a single exam embracing all abilities seemed right to me. Bill visited us regularly for the two years of the pilot – he would leave Birmingham late Friday morning, get to us for afternoon school and travel on to Hunstanton for the weekend. Although we were not the only pilot school – I don’t think there were many –we were a key element in the ongoing action research that was to be the full-blown London Examinations GCSE.



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This particular GCSE had a character and a philosophy that was unique and this has been a significant influence on me as an art and design teacher. If you can have an exam that is about the examined and not the examiners, then this was it. Bill helped me shape a view that education is more about what students do than teachers. I am not an artist who teaches, I am a teacher who sometimes makes art.

Some Observations Keith’s writing is marked by ambition, resourcefulness and a continuous discussion about his movement as an educator. This begins with his early discussion of his schooling, and leaving school to work as a designer. His academic work is mixed in with real-life experiences. Resourcefulness and tenacity are evident, often connected to the need to get a job. Involvement in creative activity is characterized to some extent as a means of survival. Real-life and hands-on experiences both as an educator and through his work as a graphic designer appears to be central to his professional identity; he is, however, clearly committed to education as a profession. He appears to have empathy with the needs of young people and adheres to a model of teaching that works to youth strengths, based on new technologies. When I visited Keith’s school, I spoke with some of his students, these are a couple of things that they had to say: He tries to combine our interests within our art work with positive attitude. (Dovile, a student from Lithuania) every other subject, there is a right or wrong way to do things – and you have to stick to that way. In art it’s the way you want to do it, and art teachers support that – by never saying yes or no to how you want to do something. (Emma, a sixth-form student) What struck me most forcefully was the difference in character between the openness and busily relaxed atmosphere of the art classrooms and the rather oppressive ethos elsewhere in the school.

Emerging Themes and Pedagogical Implications

Emerging Themes All ten of the life stories were considered together and, using in the first instance qualitative data analysis software (Atlas.ti), a number of themes and sub-themes were identified and coded by looking across the narratives ‘horizontally’. While the coding exercise was extremely useful in identifying themes and for coding instances where the narrators articulated similar ideas and topics, it was less useful in recognizing commonalities that were hinted at, alluded to or that were tacitly present, such as the overall personality of each narrator. The life stories were then examined individually to get an overall ‘flavour’ of the narrative. The principal themes that emerged from these accounts when considered as a whole are described below.

Education Education is broadly defined as any sites of learning and refers to both formal and non-formal education. Not surprisingly, given the background of the people concerned, there were many references to schools, schooling, discourses of school, teachers and educational institutions of various kinds. Experiences and expectations in those institutions were also referred to, as were school connections to socioeconomic class. Most narrators positioned themselves as educators and referred to interaction with students, e.g. in making students feel special through care for individuals. Vas, for example, in referring to her teaching style, said that it varies ‘according to individuals and I place a far greater emphasis on the role of the indivi­dual than on the general results which I believe make a statement about the school rather than its pupils’, while Sian, in describing the attributes of what she termed ‘sun’ teachers, mentioned that they ‘value the individual’.

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All the narrators had what appeared to be a rich and varied life experience, much of it related to moving to a new place, immigrating, migrating and general travel. Past educators and sites of teaching and learning, including the environment and other experiences where learning happens, figured prominently; Mirko mentions that he ‘was keen to get out of the school environment and use local sites for visual stimulus’. There were many references to people who have taught the narrator something or that they admired as role models, both as artists and educators. Nikki tells us that her ‘school art teachers were a fantastic team of eccentrics led by Mrs B, the most amazing and inspirational teacher-artist I have ever met’. Some referred to teaching for moral reasons, wanting to change lives or do something, as Sian puts it, ‘morally rewarding’. There were explicit references to personal achievements as well as to ‘being determined’, and working hard against the odds. These were frequently associated with resourcefulness and fighting for a cause. Informal learning, finding one’s own sources of inspiration and moving outside traditional schooling featured in several of the accounts. This can be associated with a regard for the importance of the individual and negative attitudes to authority. When traditional schooling was not felt to be working, some of the narrators found their own sources of inspiration. Those who taught in formal school settings appeared to be committed professionally to the demands of the institution, seeking career advancement and acknowledging recognition for successes, including the performance of their students in external examinations. It should be noted that in several of the accounts it was stressed that the learners were more important than that which is to be learnt. Practical Engagement The informant with the most years of service in formal education (Richard Keys) ended his teaching career by working as an artist alongside the students in the classroom. Early career teachers, such as Vas, refer to the centrality of their subject in their professional life and the importance of actively engaging in practical activity; doing and making across the curriculum was also highlighted. Art was seen throughout the narratives as a means of communication, expression, mode of understanding and personal growth. A passion for creative activity and its association with skill, excellence and expression figured strongly throughout the life stories. The need to create was evident in all the accounts, some tacitly, others overtly; Mirko, for example, declared:



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This act of drawing was fundamental – life affirming. Throughout this time, wherever I lived, it became essential to have a place to carry out some form of creative activity and that ‘the need to have a sketchbook on the go’ was consistent throughout his adult life. While some wandered in and out of working in formal education, practical engagement in some form of creative activity was constant. Sites of art making, such as studios, were strongly featured in the narratives; this was a key feature of the working environment for most if not all of the narrators. Collaboration with other artists, teachers, students or as a general pedagogical approach was mentioned and there were some references to arts other than visual (in traditional sense), such as performance. There were several references to the self as artist and teacher and some discussion of teaching in the context of a career as an artist. Play and experimentation were considered important in the accounts, with references to playfulness, sense of play, importance of play, invention and play with materials. Inventiveness is associated with this, particularly with regard to originality, in both novel ways of teaching and in using materials in new ways. In Tyler’s account, for example, there is reference to playful practice blurring borders between disciplines, and allowing ‘increasing complexity and ambiguity in the studio that lowers the threshold for altering, stretching, and recombining existing uses of artefacts’. Seeing the aesthetic in the ordinary and using one’s senses emerged as a theme. Early aesthetic experiences were also mentioned as a catalyst for interest in creative activity. Aesthetic sensitivity was associated in many accounts with noticing, particularly the natural world; while nature was seen by some as a source of inspiration and learning, the importance of the studio environment as a site for learning was clearly articulated. Identity Identity was an overarching theme that emerged from the narratives; in particular, the dynamic interplay between being an artist and being a teacher. Identity is a complex and multifarious phenomenon, with each of its constituent aspects linked to another. The individual person is associated with a group or groups and a variety of roles. In arguing for a merging of what is known as social identity theory (associated with self-categorization within a group having similar attitudes) with what we might term straightforward

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identity theory (associated with having a particular role and its attendant values), Stets and Burke (2000) put forward the idea that analysing the relationship between the person, the group and the role will help inform our understanding of what motivates us to adopt certain identities. For example, Stets and Burke (2000) suggest that people tend to feel good about themselves when they are associated with particular groups (such as art educators), while confidence is associated with specific roles (e.g. the classroom teacher); authenticity, however – when individuals feel ‘real’ or true to themselves (perhaps as an artist) – is when ‘person identities are verified’ (p. 234). Taken as a whole, the life stories speak of a sense of identity, growing out of a commitment to and a passion for a subject; inspirational and charismatic teaching was seen to grow naturally out of enthusiasm. Motivation is an important concept here – whether it is a teacher’s motivation to teach, an artist’s motivation to make art or a student’s motivation to learn – and is strongly associated with both self-esteem and self-efficacy. Selfesteem is regarded within social identity theory as a person’s overall evaluation of themselves in comparison with the group. Self-efficacy is regarded in identity theory as a person’s belief in his or her ability to succeed in a particular situation: the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce a given attainment (Bandura 1997). With regard to students’ (and for that matter teachers’) motivation and subsequent performance however, Bandura’s claim that self-efficacy is a powerful indicator has been criticized. Criticism appearing in the literature includes the following: self-efficacy is a cause of behaviour, not merely a predictor (Hawkins 1995); interest theory indicates that it is interest in a subject that predicts achievement (Dweck 1999), while attribution theory predicts that those who believe that success or failure depends on effort will work harder than those who believe that success or failure depends on ability (Mayer 2003). One’s identity (as an artist, a teacher or whatever), therefore, can be seen to be dependent on a number of interrelated factors; I am in agreement with Stets and Burke (2002) who see group identity, role identity and personal identity as overlapping. Ellemers et al. (2002) make the additional point that social identity involves not only a commitment to the group, but is also a ‘crucial determinant of central identity concerns’ (p. 161). Exploration and Curiosity The willingness to travel, and to move house, even to another country, together with openness to new ideas is evident in all of the accounts. This ties in with the narrators’ natural curiosity and enthusiasm for exploration.



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I have already noted that Patson was known among his colleagues as one who excited curiosity in his students; his life story reveals his propensity for finding solutions to problems through exploring different avenues. Such exploration is intrinsically associated with art making; Tyler, for example, in the account of his work with ‘New Urban Arts’, asserts that ‘a creative practice in part is an exploration of possibilities, an encounter with difference’. Nikki, in her account, talks of ‘guided personal discovery’, referring to her time as a school student, when she was fortunate to have had an inspirational teacher who has since served as a pedagogic model. She reports that ‘we would be given time to follow and make our own discoveries’ and as a teacher, she has adopted this approach, coupled with a recognition that ‘play’ adds an important dimension to learning. Another respondent who highlighted the importance of heuristic learning (that is, learning by discovery) is Vas, stating ‘art for me was about discovery’. She talks about how this helps her link with other subjects, such as ‘investigative science’, stressing that both art and science ‘facilitate discovery and experiment’. Going Against the Grain A common theme among the life stories was that of fighting back, rebelliousness and resistance; this was also seen in terms of distrust of authority. This attitude comes over in the narrators’ (initial) antipathy towards the idea of school teaching, such as Nikki’s declaration: ‘Why would anyone want to work in a school? At the time it seemed a job where all your creativity would be squashed and you would have to follow too many rules’. Some referred to using art or arts pedagogy as a means of political or personal change. Self-understanding and reflection, moving into rebellion, resistance and anti-authority came out as an issue of importance alongside practical engagement with art-related activities. It is in the nature of a concern for individuality that there is an associated, often negative, reaction to authority, together with a feeling of being different. Paradoxically, there is also a need to belong – individual group identity and role identity can become fused. The thing that can give a dynamic character to the respondents’ identities is the interplay between subject specialist and teacher; this is enhanced by the practical and creative nature of the subject. This tension is also seen in the stated desire of several informants to give students a voice while also working in an institution that, by its very nature, does not facilitate this; the power relations between teacher and student in formal schooling militate against the preferred more democratic relationship between

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teacher and student. This was resolved, in some instances reported in the narratives, through creating a studio environment within the institution. An important area of commonality lies in the underlying humanity evident in the individual life histories – a willingness to empathize and recognize an individual’s worth together with an acknowledgement, often tacit or even unrecognized, that learners bring their own tools and understandings to any educational enterprise. Seeing from the learner’s point of view and caring for others figure prominently, as does the association between learning, joy, fun and fulfilment. As Mr Keys says: If your learners can see your passion for the subject they’ll want to climb on board too. That’s good teaching, that’s effective teaching, and it should be fun, too. If they see you’re enjoying yourself, then – well, you know what comes next.

Pedagogical Implications1 I allude to the subject orientation in this book’s title, but the concepts of art and craft are used here in the general sense. Put simply, art can be seen to refer to the philosophical, or more significantly, the axiological dimension underpinning teaching, while craft may refer to day-to-day practice. The art of pedagogy then is concerned with values and a concern for not only what is taught, but also why it is taught. This can be seen as distinct from the craft of pedagogy with its focus on how a subject is taught, particularly with regard to classroom practice/studio organisation, and concerning things such as grouping strategies and behaviour management. There were two distinct but not mutually exclusive approaches to teaching evident in the life stories: the apprenticeship model and one based on informal or progressive education. Richard Keys talks about his first five years of teaching, saying that it ‘was my apprenticeship, you could say. I learned how to teach drawing, painting, printmaking and photography’, adding that he and his then head of department ‘had our differences but in his department I learned the trade’. Interestingly, judging by his reflections on an early visit to Summerhill school, he was clearly impressed and influenced by the tenets of progressivism: probably one of the most progressive/liberal/bonkers (however you view it) schools and had a profound influence on us. We loved it. The idea of coming to learning when you’re ready was revolutionary. Fired by these



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ideals, we all went off for our final one term teaching placements. I have to admit it was an ideological struggle in Featherstone Junior, but I was on an educational crusade. Although such youthful zeal did not translate into full-blooded revolutionary pedagogy, his later position as a head of art in a state comprehensive school gave him the opportunity to practice his own version of ‘critical pedagogy’. Several of the accounts stressed the importance of inspirational teachers and experts in their field. The apprenticeship approach does not question the relationship between expert and novice in terms of power; in fact, it can exacerbate the hierarchical nature of the model. Mirko, in writing about his experiences of learning how to carve stone, says that his ‘role in these endeavours was very much one of subservient apprentice-helper, occasionally being allowed to do some carving if I was lucky’. This reveals a grudging acceptance of the hierarchy, but he does go on to say that this model is ‘extremely effective, particularly in the acquisition of a specific set of skills and one, that I now realize, has influenced me in my own teaching’. Nikki also uses the word ‘subservient’ with reference to her time when she was learning to sew, ‘begrudgingly comparing the sewing studio to that of a convent as we stitched in silence not daring to make a mistake’. Not all studios are the same. Responding to individual learners’ needs is an important factor in establishing a genuinely creative atmosphere, one where learning and teaching can be enjoyed as a two-way dialogue between expert and novice. Informal and progressive education approaches are often associated with student voice and to some extent with critical pedagogy. Teaching and learning is seen here to be more focused on reciprocation and empowerment. Paulo Freire’s notion of conscientisation (self-reflection though production) is apposite with regard to some of the accounts, particularly Patson’s, who uses his art production as a political tool. He recounts how he used his art to express his feelings about racism ‘burning and raging in me. So one day I made the most controversial painting entitled God is a Nigga’. He goes on to say that the painting ‘survived for two hours after complaints from the Dean’ – it lasted a few weeks in the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education’s art studio until it prompted complaints from the head of finance. Freire (1970) asserts that social myths are acquired that have a dominant tendency; learning, therefore, has to be a critical process that depends on uncovering real problems and actual needs, through problem posing rather than problem solving – the latter often being based on students finding a

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solution known in advance by the teacher. Freire’s pedagogy involves a democratic dialogue between students and teachers and involves critically examining the social world. The kinds of values that are revealed in some of the accounts have resonances with aspects of the kind of critical pedagogy advocated by Paolo Freire and other critical pedagogues. However, a more accurate portrayal would be the kind of pedagogical practice associated with the atelier approach, where power relations are not critically examined, and perhaps more significantly, with Bandura’s (1997) social learning theory, which sees learning in terms of a reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioural and environmental influences. While the traditional apprentice model has its advantages, there needs to be opportunities for reciprocity – what we might call a dialogic apprenticeship. I say ‘opportunities’ for dialogue because I do not believe that dialogue on its own is the whole story. It would seem from the narratives that the importance of the individual needs to be more clearly recognized – learning can occur independently of a community and, I would suggest, is not entirely dependent on others, nor is it entirely socially constructed. While the idea of tacit knowledge is well known (see, e.g. Polanyi 1967), tacit learning is not a feature of much educational commentary, which tends to emphasize dialogue and socially constructed learning. Tacit learning occurs through creative practical engagement and I would argue that it is central to a genuinely student-centred studio approach to education. In writing on the literature on ‘talk’ in art education, Mary Zander writes: In my research, I found that it is not direct instruction that encourages creativity, but rather tacit understandings that come from other kinds of interactions. I believe that teachers build spaces for creativity in their beliefs about students, in how they negotiate rules of social interaction, and in their ability to guide students to discover and explore a variety of ideas. The ‘other kinds of interactions’ must also include teachers’ engagement in practical activities, such as demonstrating techniques in the novice/ apprentice model. Moreover, the teacher creates opportunities for ‘multiple forms of discourse’ (Zander 2003, p. 117). Teachers working in formal education with whom I have consulted, often refer to the importance of lesson ‘pace’ when talking about the craft of teaching. ‘Lesson pace’, however, is only really relevant when learners are seen as a single unit rather than a collection of individuals who each need to have the opportunity to learn in their own time at their own pace. Where



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dialogue might occur is an important consideration; it can be fruitful within what Lave and Wenger (1991) have termed a ‘community of practice’. Wenger (2006) gives a concise definition of what is meant by this term: Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. (Wenger 2006, para 1) Schooling can be included here (although not part of Lave and Wengers’ original research), both as an entire institution and as a collection of communities. In an ideal situation, I envisage experts (who might be teachers and/or practitioners) interacting with a community of learners in a fluid and dynamic learning environment, engaging in a dialogic apprenticeship. Learning would be characterized by reciprocation between novices and experts and also between novices and others with varying levels of competence in the group. Lave and Wenger (1991) developed the idea that effective learning occurs when learners’ participation moves from the periphery of the group to a more central position, becoming increasingly engaged in more complex learning; they refer to this as ‘situated learning’. However, I would stress the need to be inclusive, open and flexible within any community of practice, which by its nature has the potential to be exclusive. The structure of such a community needs to be organized to allow participants to move in and out of it, in addition to moving within it, and, importantly, it should be organized to allow time and space for tacit learning. Tacit learning occurs during periods of sustained individual activity, particularly activity of a practical creative nature, and is consolidated through reflection. A model I have advocated elsewhere (Hickman 1999b) is apposite here; this involves the four steps of reacting, researching, responding and reflecting, and can be briefly summarized in the following way. Reacting (to an artefact or a piece of information, for example) is the initial, principally affective, response that learners navigate around, in relation to their existing conceptual framework. Researching into the phenomenon in a practical, heuristic way then helps develop the understanding and this can be tested through dialogue in the respond phase before consolidating the learning through reflection. It can be seen that in this model, social learning is intrinsic but is only part of the story.

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There are some commonalities and some distinct differences between the informants’ accounts. Three areas that have taken on a political dimension in education over the past decades have been grading, grouping by ability and extrinsic rewards for learning. Some differences in experience and viewpoint in the life stories with regard to each of these are evident. My personal view has always been that grading and examinations are antithetical to learning for (many) reasons, such as the fact that they are partial, and in only examining the examinable have a tendency in times of ‘accountability’ to lead curricula rather than reflect the outcomes of real learning. So, despite the clear antipathy towards the instrumentalism of formal schooling shown to a greater or lesser degree in all of the life stories, there is also a degree of compliance to the status quo. Keith’s account reveals his long experience of formal schooling and also his considerable experience of working in what have been designated ‘challenging’ schools. His narrative refers to the decision to set students according to ability, that is, performance against specified criteria in art, maintaining that he was ‘then able to plan differentiated teaching that suited the capabilities of each group’ and teach ‘in a manner and with demands that better matched their abilities and aspirations’. However, this goes against much current educational practice and theory, as asserted by Hart et  al. (2004) in Learning without Limits. Here, they reject totally the notion of ability labelling and talk of teachers’ responses to their learners’ pattern of achievements in what they call a ‘spirit of transformability’: seeking to discover what it is possible to do to enhance young people’s capacity to learn, and intervening to create conditions in which their learning can more fully and effectively flourish. (Hart et al. 2004, p. 246) Keith tellingly uses the word ‘resorted’ in describing the decision to use grouping according to perceived ability, but clearly found the approach worthwhile. What works, works, some might say, but its worthwhileness depends on underlying values; in each case, it is concern for the individual students’ well-being that is at the heart of the enterprise. One particular success story told to me by Keith but not included in his account relates to an ‘underachieving’ boy who left his school with only one pass in the national GCSE subject exams: a grade ‘f’ in art. He was so proud of this that he returned with his brother some time after leaving the school to collect his artwork to show it proudly at home. There have been many attempts in different places and different times to incorporate what we might loosely call ‘artistic’ ways of knowing and doing



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into educational establishments. Some, such as the Bauhaus in pre-war Germany and Black Mountain College in 1950s America have been highly successful. Black Mountain College is perhaps rather less well known than the Bauhaus, but in its short dazzling existence (1933–1956), it showed what can be achieved by adopting a curriculum that puts the arts at the centre of living. Such a curriculum challenges the very basis of our day-to-day political reality by rejecting what can be called ‘academic bookkeeping’, like giving grades, and concentrating on improvisation and risk taking. However, Black Mountain College was an unpredictable environment; its intellectual and creative energy could not be sustained or even come into being in the controlled and compartmentalized regimes typifying many schools. The freedom to fail is a fundamental characteristic of any creative environment; Buckminster Fuller, who spent much of his most productive period at Black Mountain College, noted that one succeeds when one stops failing, acknowledging that failure and success are inextricably linked. The centrality of the artistic process within the structures and systems of Black Mountain College led to innovation in a wide variety of areas, fusing intuition with intellect in a cross-curricular framework. The practice of art, in its broadest modern sense, allows for new insights; Josef Albers, another prominent individual from Black Mountain College, asserted that ‘art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation’ (Albers 1935). The success of early years schooling in the Reggio Emilia area of Northern Italy has been noted internationally. Of particular interest here is the staffing structure employed, with each school having an ‘atelierista’ (a specially trained art teacher) who works alongside the classroom teachers. This atelier approach has a long history and was central to the Bauhaus, which remains one of the most successful educational establishments of the twentieth century. What is odd is that the model has been shown to be successful at both ends of the educational spectrum – in early years teaching and in the training of professionals – but not in the years of compulsory schooling. There is no shortage of books and guides that purport to help teachers be more ‘successful’. Many follow the ‘tips for teachers’ format so despised by educators, but others offer genuine research-based evidence to support the strategies advocated. Glasgow and Hicks (2003), for example, in their book entitled What Successful Teachers Do: 91 Research-Based Classroom Strategies for New and Veteran Teachers, detail a description of each strategy together with a discussion of research supporting use of the strategy.2 They outline twelve areas where it has been found that ‘success’ has been achieved; whether such success is necessarily worthwhile is another matter.

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The Studio Environment A model of teaching based on the practices of artists in studios is not uncommon, and there is a historical basis for advocating such an approach; more recently, commentators have described teaching itself as an aesthetic process (see, e.g. Garoian and Gaudelius 2008; Daichendt 2009, 2010) and have made convincing arguments for an ‘artistic’ approach to pedagogy, principally within arts subjects; however, studio-based pedagogy as a more comprehensive model for education as a whole has not been strongly advocated. The willingness to challenge orthodoxies (and authority) can result in exciting and valuable lessons and an inspiring environment. It is not uncommon, for example, for music to be played in school art lessons; students are often free to move around and discuss things. The well-resourced and informal studio is characterized by its flexibility and diverse use of space, including space for private contemplative work and space for communal teamwork. In my own research, I have found that students and pupils often refer to the art classroom, or studio, as a ‘haven’ or ‘oasis’ (Hickman 2010) and this is a theme identified elsewhere (e.g. Sikes 1987; Tallack 2004; Graham and Zwirn 2010). These ‘oases of learning’ are not simply architectural structures, they are made that way by the teachers who are in charge of them; altering the learning environment is part of their pedagogy and is an essential part of their day-to-day teaching approach. Graham and Zwirn (2010) interviewed and observed teachers to explore how their artistic activities beyond school contributed to their teaching; they found that the physical space that they created was crucial for facilitating ‘divergent outcomes’: The studio classroom resists the limitations school imposes on time by making it open after class, for lunch, or after school. The studio can be a refuge, a place to have conversations, and a place to work on things students and teachers care about. For some students, the art room provided a welcome haven [...] a place to experiment, nurture ideas, and gather objects and images for inspiration. (Graham and Zwirn 2010, 227–8) They assert that education should emphasize care, hospitality and conversation as important pedagogical practices and that these qualities are found in the studio rather than orthodox classroom. Citing Palmer (1993), they draw attention to ‘hospitality’ within the classroom as a valuable resource: Evidence of this hospitality was abundant in our conversations and observations of these teachers. However, the care, empathy, and hospitality engendered by teachers was only part of the story. Because of their



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artistic practice, they had rich personal artistic experiences they could draw upon in their conversations with students. (ibid. p. 228) Of course, no two studios are the same and teachers use them in different ways. Some years ago, I did some research into the nature of ‘art rooms’ (Hickman 2001) and found that there were at least four different types that were representative of different kinds of approach. The principal types were the clean, tidy and efficient; the anarchic art studio; the cosy home from home; and the anthropological museum. What they had in common was an array of visually interesting objects, a surrealist extravagansa, which from memory included sheep skulls, car engines, driftwood, stuffed animals, rubber lobsters, antique bottles, coral, typewriters, redundant computers and various electrical items that appeared to have come from an autopsy. Sometimes these items were used, but mostly they were just ‘there’; this has its value and I recall as an 11-year-old, how intrigued I was by the biology room at my school because of its collection of specimens. However, the important pedagogic principal lies in the way the learning environment is arranged; arranged to arouse curiosity, facilitate discovery and aid interaction between other learners and resources. However, I have drawn attention to the notion that successful art teachers are often exceptionally effective: inspirational, humane, sensitive and having enduring positive outcomes among their charges. The subject area can also attract and be responsible for exceptionally ‘bad’ teachers: not only uninspiring and ineffective, but also positively damaging to learners’ self-esteem, as can be seen in at least two of the accounts given in this book – from Richard Keys: ‘“Richard, that’s a complete nightmare” announced my teacher, Mrs Baggaley, and tore it up in front of the whole class’; from Tyler Denmead: ‘My effort at making a fish mobile was “not worthwhile” and not much should be expected from me in the art room’. Tyler goes on to say, ‘I tended to avoid school arts classrooms and art teachers. Though there were some exceptions, fairly or unfairly, I often considered both as sites and sources of pain, embarrassment and insignificance’. In some cases, art teachers are responsible for perpetuating crude stereotypes and miseducation through their attempts at ‘multicultural’ themes, such as ‘African Masks’ or ‘Indian totem poles’. Thankfully, these are a small minority, but their existence reveals the fact that it is not the subject itself nor the use of a room designated a ‘studio’ that facilitates meaningful learning, but the way in which these resources are utilized pedagogically. There appears to be a link between the kind of groupings and general organisation that occur naturally in the studio environment and creative

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activity. Kristensen (2004), in researching into the physical context of creativity, argued that creative processes can be promoted and nurtured in the informal environment of the studio. Creative processes are, however, highly complex and abstract; in order to make the concept intelligible, Kristensen (2004) made use of the rather dated but useful ‘phase model’, introduced by Wallas (1926),3 in particular the phases of preparation, elaboration and incubation: The preparation and elaboration stages typically require a combination of communal and private space. The incubation and insights stages probably require more private space. (Kristensen 2004, p. 96) He argues that what seems to facilitate creativity is ‘personal and idiosyncratic’. Flexibility, a willingness to bend rules and create an informal atmosphere is important here. In addition to ensuring that appropriate physical space is available for contemplation and reflection, it is also important to allow temporal space, as Sternberg (2003, p. 119) notes, teachers need to allow children the time to think creatively, especially with regard to the ‘incubation’ period. In a sense, we make a decision to develop our innate creative instincts; Sternberg (2001) refers to this as the ‘investment theory’. It can be seen from much of the material presented in this book that some people make a definite decision to invest in their creative identity and seek ways through which this can become fulfilled; one aspect of this appears to be through a studio environment.

Artists as Teachers As outlined above, I have found that the cultivation of a studio ethos promotes a certain kind of learning, but it needs to be borne in mind that some learners will not feel comfortable with this kind of approach and, in keeping with notions fundamental to student-centred learning, more formal structures will also need to be in place. The Arts Council of England has supported visual artists working in a range of places and situations since 1996 through its ‘Artists in Sites for Learning Scheme’ (AiSfL). The role that artists play in this scheme is complex and multifaceted. Emily Pringle (2002), in commenting on the nature of the pedagogy associated with the artists, sees four different but interrelated roles in addition to the artist as educator: the artist as collaborator; the artist as role model; the artist as social activist; and the artist as researcher/enquirer. As educators, the artists



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engage with participants primarily through discussion and the exchanging of ideas and experiences. Pringle notes: There is evidence of “co-constructive” learning taking place, whereby shared knowledge is generated and the artist functions as co-learner, rather than knowledge being transmitted from the artist (positioned as infallible expert) to the participants. The artists also promote experiential learning, with an emphasis on giving participants the opportunity to experiment within a supportive environment. The artists see the restrictions of the curriculum and timetable as prohibiting teachers from working in this way within schools. (Pringle 2002, p. 8) As role models, Pringle (2002) found that artists tend to engage with participants in three interrelated ways: ‘first, by exemplifying a profound level of engagement with their own practice; second, by demonstrating their own particular working methods and critical and creative approaches; and third, by embodying the concept of “the successful artist”’. She notes that the ‘pedagogic model of apprenticeship is relevant here’ (p. 109). In a later paper (Pringle, 2009), Pringle addresses the question of how artists engage with learners, and found from the research she undertook at Tate Modern that artists, in terms of direct pedagogic engagement, ‘drew on their own experience as creative practitioners to instigate a learning process that resembled their art practice’ (p. 2). However, as we have seen, teaching, learning and creative practice are complex phenomena, as are the identities and roles of the players. While artists in residence clearly have something to offer pedagogically across the curriculum, what is more pertinent here is identifying and developing the existing skills of teachers. The Artist Teacher Scheme is a successful professional development initiative, managed by the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD, the oldest society of its kind in the UK) and supported by Arts Council England and the Scottish Arts Council. The scheme differs from the AiSfL scheme in that it is underpinned by the belief that teachers of art, design and craft who maintain their own creative practice are ‘significantly more effective in the classroom or studio and more likely to be satisfied with their work in education’. Its central ambition, according to its own literature, is to ‘dismantle the perception of a contradiction between the complementary, symbiotic roles of artist and teacher’ [...] working alongside students in joint creative enquiry’ (NSEAD 2010). The next step would be to encourage skilled teachers of art to share their practices with teachers of other subjects.

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Artists in residence are a relatively common phenomenon; scientists in residence and mathematicians in residence are rare or unheard of, but this need not be the case. While I am not convinced of the efficacy of learning by ‘osmosis’, there is something to be said for the presence of subject experts in addition to subject specialists at all levels of formal education, and there appears to be some evidence to suggest that the presence of an expert practitioner in addition to the teacher would be of benefit within a community of learning. In formal schooling situations, there would inevitably be tensions between professional attitudes and risk taking, but flexibility and freedom to experiment are key themes that have emerged from the life stories included in this book. I would add that freedom to experiment in terms of curriculum structures as well as content and approaches to teaching and learning would be desirable, as would greater opportunities for learners to be given a voice, especially with regard to negotiating the curriculum. In his report on ‘creative practitioners in schools and classrooms’, Galton (2008) found that ‘one third of teachers’ comments were negative in tone and had to do with classroom control’. School students were admonished to ‘stop talking’, ‘sit up straight’ and to ‘pay attention’ (p. x). Such observations are familiar, with the admonishments verging on clichés, but what would not be so familiar is the presence of creative practitioners, which was reported to have a beneficial effect on the classroom climate. Galton observed that, when compared to the resident teachers in a formal schooling situation, creative practitioners ‘extended questioning sequences so that classroom discourse was dialogic rather than consisting of the more usual “cued elicitations”’ and gave pupils more time to reflect on their learning and encouraged independence. It is interesting to note that the students in Galton’s study did not think creative practitioners were the same as teachers, mainly because “they didn’t shout at you” and because they forced you to “make big choices for yourself”. Pupils said that although having to make their own decisions was “scary at first” when it went well it boosted self-confidence and made them “feel good inside” themselves. (Galton 2008, pp. x–xi) It is not surprising perhaps that the artists involved in the ‘Artists in Sites for Learning Scheme’ invariably saw their identity as artists rather than educators and felt that the nature of schools and schooling in some way militated against creative practice: the artists do not see themselves as “teachers” and, without exception, do not wish to become one. This is mainly due to the restrictions of the



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curriculum and the limitations that they perceive this brings to creativity. (Pringle 2002, p. 99) While there were several references to the importance of nature and the natural world in the context of aesthetic perception, there were, disappointingly, fewer references in the accounts of cross-discipline activity than one might expect, either in the general life context or in the context of educational institutions. Collaboration with others was mentioned in some of the life stories, but did not figure prominently. The narrators were clearly wedded to their own discipline, the curriculum of the future might, however, be characterized by interdisciplinarity. The social sciences have much to learn from other areas of enquiry, not least the arts, but additionally from neuroscience and genetics. Issam’s account gave some insight into how creative enquiry can and often does cross discipline boundaries, in his case ‘optics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, religion, and architecture’. Teaching and Wisdom A number of rhetorical questions arise when I think about wisdom: From where does wisdom come? Is wisdom associated with life experience? Can children be wise? Can we teach wisdom? The Socratic aphorism ‘Know Thyself’ comes to mind and it is perhaps noteworthy that when engaged in arts activities, many people choose to focus on their own being – the theme of identity and ‘mythologising the self’ has become so commonplace among contemporary fine art practitioners that it has become an orthodoxy. Nevertheless, I would venture to say that self-awareness is a starting point for gaining wisdom and when this is merged with a desire to move away from self-indulgence to serving the community, the fusion of self-knowledge with empathy seems to me to be a good starting point for a journey towards the acquisition of wisdom. Throughout the narratives, there is a hint, clearer in some than in others, of an emerging wisdom and a desire to help children and young people acquire their own self-knowledge. I include below some other correspondence that is apposite. Denis is an ex-student of mine from 1998; he came to visit me in 2010 and talked about his career and his present position as an EAL (English as an additional language) co-ordinator. In some ways, Denis encapsulates much of what I have written. Denis enjoys a reputation of having a hedonistic streak; he is fond of relating the kind of stories that make people wonder why he is still alive. Coupled with his zest for self-abuse is a genuine empathy for others and a sensitive, caring side to his nature. He is a talented artist

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and illustrator and was trained as a specialist art teacher in 1998; he has, however, never been employed as an art specialist despite being in more or less constant employment as a teacher since his period of initial teacher education. However, he has employed many of the techniques that I have found characteristics of specialist art teachers. In conversation, he mentioned that as an artist he tries to understand the world in various ways; he said that it was art that led him to teaching – he thought that this was an attempt to understand himself as he ‘tried to understand others why they were the way they were’. He later wrote to me, saying: I am an art teacher that doesn’t teach art, but EAL – in an artistic way! The link between formation of identity and the understanding of such is explored through creativity, that much is perfectly clear. Experiment, explore, draw parallels, just draw! After a confusing adolescence riddled with esteem issues and identity crisis it was my art teacher who introduced me to the idea of difference being “ok” and so weirdness became originality. The great thing about art is that no one is The Best; there is no right answer, and that itself is a huge relief. I teach children who have just arrived from other countries with little or no knowledge of English or England, our culture, our ways. Using the medium of image making through art my students not only communicate with great clarity but also enable themselves to connect with the reality they find themselves in. It was Gerhard Richter who said he used to art “...to comprehend this incomprehensible reality” and the same man who said “Art is the highest form of hope”. It was the study of art and artists that really inspired me to experiment and to research and now it does the same for my own students. Some of the life stories featured in this book told of moments of enlightenment or epiphanies – critical turning points that were often connected to ‘inspiration’ and significant moments that led to or were associated with working creatively with others. Another successful art teacher with whom I came into contact during research for this book was Donna Clovis. Donna was involved in some educational research at Columbia University, New York, and attended a lecture of mine; she followed up her research in England and we discussed her background as a teacher and the road she travelled to her present position and the epiphanies (or as she put it ‘A-Ha Moments’) on that road. She later wrote to me the following: One thinks with graduation from college, one knows almost everything. As a teacher at the age of 19 years, that’s what you are supposed to know.



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Almost everything. Your high school students watch carefully as you walk into the room with your books and brief case. Your eyes glance at the sixty eyes glaring back at you. You are the teacher now, you must know. I left teaching. I went back to the university to study photojournalism. After graduation, I worked as an artist/producer. A-Ha, I was the artist/producer now. Now I gained the experience I needed and worked there for ten years. I came back to teaching. Now I was ready. The eye glared at me in front of the classroom. I smiled back. I spoke and they listened. My voice did not quiver. I spoke and stood with confidence. I had something to tell my students this time. It was about life experience. I knew much more than I did before. Maybe the knowing was something called wisdom. Wisdom has traditionally been associated with teaching, so it is not surprising that reflective practitioners consider this to be an important and desirable trait. The ‘good’ teacher is one who is effective in both teaching and facilitating; one who can bring about and develop meaningful learning about worthwhile things and who can create an environment conducive to that learning. I have presented portraits of ‘successful’ art teachers as potential models for all teachers and in doing so have drawn attention to the pedagogical strategies characteristic of successful art teaching that are worth sharing: not just the combination of ‘knowing that’ with ‘knowing how’, but also with ‘knowing why’. The ‘good teacher’ therefore deals with declarative, procedural and sophological knowledge, or put simply, the sharing of knowledge, understanding and wisdom. The subject area of art has traditionally focused on potentially profound issues: sex, birth, death, love, war; the good teacher explores these things in a way that is meaningful to the learners. Sternberg (2003), in his conveniently titled book Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesised, makes a convincing case for the teaching of ‘wisdom’ and how wisdom relates directly to creativity. The view I am putting forward here, however, is not about teaching wisdom in a discrete way, but that it is a natural outcome of ‘good’ teaching. This is despite Sternberg’s assertion that the essence of wisdom is ‘tacit knowledge of the kind learned in the school of life’ (p. 157) (rather than in the life of a school, presumably). While conventional wisdom might assert that it is easy to acquire wisdom (‘just think of something stupid and then don’t say it’), such pronouncements clearly have their limitations. Sternberg’s idea is that wisdom is concerned with analytical thinking about ‘real world dilemmas’ (Ibid.); it is primarily about being practically involved in the social world;

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creativity is involved to the extent that creative ‘insight’ is needed to successfully negotiate this social world. Nevertheless, Sternberg acknowledges that teachers and schools have a role to play in this, while also somewhat pessimistic about how to bring about structures that facilitate ‘teaching for wisdom’. I am more optimistic about this. We have seen the unprecedented growth of the use of new technologies in schools, enabling instant worldwide communication and access to almost limitless knowledge. At the same time, educationalists and those who make decisions about such things are increasingly seeing the value of informal learning, and education that is sanctioned by educational institutions but takes place outside those institutions, and is therefore free from the strictures and structures that often inhibit the development of meaningful knowledge, understanding and wisdom. I am making an assumption that good teaching should not be primarily concerned with imparting measurable amounts of knowledge; good teaching fosters the imagination, facilitates creative responses, draws attention to meaningful knowledge and helps develop wisdom. One facility that can connect these things is empathy; this is certainly a view that Claxton takes, when he suggests, in the context of teaching skills, that the ability to adopt a kind, wise, and disinterested perspective itself grows out of the development of empathy. As one masters the ability to look at the world through the eyes of an increasing range of other people, it becomes possible to partial out the particulars of individuals’ motivational perspectives and approximate more closely to the view from “nowhere”. (Claxton 2008, p. 47) Disinterestedness seems at first glance to be an odd if not inappropriate quality to expect from a teacher, but I am referring here to the development of impartiality and the ability to see from others’ viewpoints with no bias or self-interest.4 Concluding Thoughts – Reflections on Possibilities Talk of any characteristic being ‘innate’ continues to be viewed with deep suspicion among many academics, especially social scientists, and advocates tend to be viewed (at best) as heretics. I would resist any argument about someone being ‘a born teacher’, but this particular heresy might also need to be researched. Interestingly, there were no instances of ‘always wanting to be a teacher’ in the life stories and, if anything, the opposite was true, with most of the narrators expressing an antipathy to schools and schooling. Most of



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the life stories gave accounts or indications of a natural rebelliousness, typical of youth generally, but apparently more pronounced in the narrators’ lives. One might expect this to be linked to a reaction to formal institutions. In later life, as one would expect, the tendency to challenge was diminished, but not absent in the life stories. It would be useful to investigate further the effect of personality types on teaching styles and their relation to subjects, as there seems to be a certain ‘type’ of person associated with different subject areas. It is worth noting that Alexander (2008) suggests that teaching is a complex amalgam of the person and the professional, and it may well be impossible to be a teacher of the kind that stretches minds and fires imaginations unless one is also a rather special person. (Alexander 2008, p. 156) This gives rise to the question – do some subject areas attract more ‘special persons’ than others? In the literature on artists working in schools (e.g. Eisner 1974; Pringle 2009), there is a suggestion that individual personality counts for more than other factors in terms of inspirational, creative teaching. Pringle (2009) questions the assumption that high levels of artistic ability determine the efficacy of artists to teach, stating that ‘instead, the more important issues of the personality of the individual and their ability to establish a rapport with the students should be recognized as contributing to effective arts teaching’ (p. 21). Feist (1999) reviewed 118 empirical studies concerned with personality traits and creativity and found that the common personality traits of creative people include openness to experience, imagination, ambition, non-conformity, attraction to complexity, flexibility and risk taking. These all appear to be characteristic of the artist teachers featured in this book. Individual personality appears to be a key factor in ‘good’ teaching. Inspirational teachers – those who challenge orthodoxies and facilitate creative and meaningful ‘play’, those who value individuals as co-learners and those who emanate ‘practical sagacity’ might well happen to be those who gravitate towards, and develop mastery of, creative skills. The group of narrators whose life stories appear in this book represents, to some extent, a continuum from professional artist to professional educator, with, for example, Issam (‘my DNA as an artist and a teacher’) at one end and Keith (‘I am not an artist who teaches, I am a teacher who sometimes makes art’) at the other. In terms of personal identity however, there are some tensions throughout the narratives. In my capacity as teacher educator, part of my job has been, for many years, to take art graduates (whose self-identity was overwhelmingly that of

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‘artist’) and ‘professionalize’ them. This means inducting them into the strictures and requirements of schooling, with its rules, regulations and constraints, especially with regard to time. Denmead (2010) has found that artists working in the community often seem to ‘slow down time’ and have an altogether different approach to the use of time when compared with non-artists working in a learning environment. Fortunately, their creativity is not entirely extinguished through this process and many manage to hold the dual identity of artist and teacher. I mention ‘creativity’ here as it seems that there is a connection between the kind of pedagogical behaviour that I have described and the creative personality. Wolfradt and Pretz (2001) investigated the relationship between creativity and personality among college students from a variety of major fields of study. Their research provides some support for the notion that there is a close relation between personality and different kinds of creativity. In particular, they found that openness to experience was clearly associated with creative behaviour. This echoes Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his 1996 book on the lives of 91 ‘eminent people’, where he asserts that creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt. Csikszentmihalyi (1996) also stresses that it is the complexity of the personalities that is most significant; in particular, the tendency towards contradictory extremes. He goes on to describe ‘antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension’, including being both rebellious and conservative; humble and proud; extroverted and introverted; alternating between imagination and fantasy, and with a rooted sense of reality. He adds that creative people are also characterized by the way they combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. I believe that humans are innately endowed with both the urge and the capacity to engage in creative activity that has special, personal meaning. Teachers and the learning environments they create can nurture this through a creative application of the wisdom gained from informed reflection on life experience.5 Age alone, or even extensive world experience, is not enough; it is a considered and reflective practical application of experience that produces empathy and an intuitive understanding of others’ needs. ‘Good teachers’ demonstrate practical sagacity – drawing on wisdom in a demonstrably creative way to scaffold learning – and draw out in a practical way the inherent wisdom of their students. If we take – as I do – one outcome of creative behaviour to be something that is of quality and is worthwhile, then the outcome of creative teaching ought to be, among other things, the promotion of wisdom. Practical sagacity refers then to wise teachers, through their practice and through their practical engagement



Emerging Themes and Pedagogical Implications

163

with various materials and media, using their own wisdom to facilitate wisdom among their learners. Practical imaginative activity is not confined to art of course, but all subject areas could be enhanced through adopting some of the practices that are commonly associated with that subject area. In particular, the importance given to imagination, to facilitating imaginative activity; as Maxine Green puts it in her usual wise and succinct way: Imagination is required to disclose a different state of things, to open the windows of consciousness to what might be, what ought to be. Imagination allows for empathy, for a tuning in to another’s feelings, for new beginnings in transactions with the world. (Green 2008, p. 18) In an earlier text, Greene (1973) captures what I believe to be the essence of ‘good’ teaching: [the teacher is] engaged in transmuting and illuminating material to the end of making others see afresh. If he is able to think what he is doing while he is vitally present as a person, he may arouse others to act on their own freedom. Learning to learn, some of those persons may move to sheltered places until they stand by their own choice in the high winds of thought. (Green 1973, p. 298) Teaching is, therefore, fundamentally and foremost concerned with human interaction; this means more than engaging in dialogue, it means explicitly acknowledging the implicit – and allowing time and space for reflection and tacit learning on the part of both teacher and learner. My vision for state education, therefore, would be for learning situations at all phases to have more in common with artists’ studios than traditional classrooms; places where students can learn at their own pace with access to an expert in their subject. I would expect dialogue between experts and novices to be encouraged and tacit learning and imagination to be facilitated through practical heuristic activity. If compulsory education were to be freed from the constraints of age, and state schools were genuinely part of the community, there would be wonderful opportunities for experts from all fields of study to participate actively in studio-based learning environments, with learners of all ages being ‘apprentices’, working across the curriculum as well as in depth with particular subject areas. There would be time set aside for reflection and contemplation; there would be a concern for ways of knowing that focused on declarative, procedural and sophological knowledge and a recognition that while dialogue is central to learning, the ineffable by its very nature is beyond words.

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Notes For an illuminating discussion on whether teaching is an art or a craft or indeed a science, see Robin Alexander’s (2000) Culture and Pedagogy (pp. 272–6). 2 The 91 strategies are divided into 12 areas: 1

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

‘Interacting and Collaborating with Students’ ‘Managing Classroom Organisation and Discipline’ ‘Managing Classroom Time’ ‘Organizing Curricular Goals, Lesson Plans and Instructional Delivery’ ‘Using Student Assessment and Feedback to Maximize Instructional Effectiveness’ 6. ‘Working with Special Needs Students’ 7. ‘Celebrating Diversity in the Classroom: Emphasizing the Positive in Cultural, Linguistic, Ethnic, and Gender Identity’ 8. ‘Integrating Technology in the Classroom’ 9. ‘Enhancing Teacher Self-Assessment and Reflection’ 10. ‘Developing a Professional Identity’ 11. ‘Enhancing Professional Relationships with Colleagues’ 12. ‘Fostering a Positive Relationship with Parents’ Kristenson (2004) uses Wallas’s ideas in a slightly modified form; the original phases of Wallas (1926) are: preparation (preparatory work that focuses on a problem); incubation (where the problem is internalized); intimation (an intuitive notion that a solution is forthcoming); illumination (where the creative solution is reified); and verification (where the idea is elaborated on and verified as a practical answer to the initial problem). 4 It may well be coincidence, but it is interesting to note that both ‘empathy’ and ‘disinterestedness’ are considered by many art theorists to be central concepts in engaging with art objects. These concepts are, of course, central to qualitative research in education and, especially in the case of disinterestedness, difficult to put into practice. 5 Building on this biological theme, there could be a link between the natural ageing process (in addition to life experience) and wisdom. For example, one could argue that increased testosterone (associated with risk taking) in women and its reduction in men after middle age leads in both to a more holistic ‘intelligence’ as a result of different parts of the brain being utilized more generally, with greater synaptic connectivity – resulting perhaps in a greater facility for intuition. 3

Appendix

TLRP’s Ten Principles of Effective Teaching and Learning 1. Equips learners for life in its broadest sense 2. Engages with valued forms of knowledge 3. Recognizes the importance of prior experience and learning 4. Requires the teacher to scaffold learning 5. Needs assessment to be congruent with learning 6. Promotes the active engagement of the learner 7. Fosters both individual and social processes and outcomes 8. Recognizes the significance of informal learning 9. Depends on teacher learning 10. Demands consistent frameworks with support for teaching and learning as their primary focus Adapted from Pollard, A. (Ed.). (2010). Professionalism and Pedagogy: A Contemporary opportunity. A commentary by TLRP and GTCE. London: TLRP.

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Subject Index activism  118, 154 aesthetics  41, 61, 92, 109, 143 and motivation  6 and nature  39, 157 and teaching  47, 152 and technique/skills  91, 110 and understandin  134 ambition  92, 116, 137, 161 apprenticeship  9, 48–9, 72, 76, 78, 83, 146–7, 150, 155, 163 dialogic apprenticeship  148, 149. art institutions  39, 57–9, 63–4, 72, 75, 81, 91, 97, 98, 100–2, 151 artist/teacher  63, 109, 155, 161 atelier  148, 151 Bauhaus  151 Black Mountain College  151 classroom environment  8, 64–5, 70, 74, 89, 104, 125, 133, 142, 155 community of practice  149 creating  5, 60, 151 aesthetic significance  61 creative practice  55, 58–61, 110, 145, 155–6 creativity  43, 52, 92, 145, 148, 154, 157–8 and personality  161–2 and wisdom  159–60 Dada  37, 39, 40, 41 dialogue  8, 147–9, 163 discovery  6, 57, 62–3, 65, 88–9, 91, 145, 148, 153 early aesthetic experiences  37, 39, 50–1, 62, 71–2, 79, 88, 95, 97, 111–12, 123, 126 education formal vs non-formal  10, 12, 27, 48, 56, 60, 66, 69–70, 78, 110, 125, 142, 146–7, 150, 154, 160–1

examinations  27, 36, 67, 80, 116, 122, 136–7, 142, 150 grades  38, 67, 109, 120, 134, 151 heuristic learning  145, 149, 163 identity  13, 14, 21, 26, 46–7, 69, 94, 143–5, 157–8, 161 artistic  33–4, 41, 42, 46, 49, 70, 109, 154, 156, 162 professional  13–14, 33, 44–6, 61, 109, 137, 161–2 social  11, 52, 145, 149 imagination  25, 29, 85, 123, 160–3 individual learning  12, 82, 122, 124–5, 141, 148–9, 165 inspiration  25, 45, 62, 77, 90, 92, 104, 135–6, 142–4, 147, 152–3, 158, 161 intuition  6, 151, 164 inventiveness  47, 109, 143 motivation  6, 77, 144, 160 National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD)  155 nature  35, 39, 43, 143 negotiated curriculum  68, 80, 123, 134, 142, 151, 156–7 passion  8, 13, 22, 27, 29, 43, 49, 65, 72–3, 85, 87, 89, 92–3, 102, 109, 117, 142, 144 place  14, 36, 59, 61, 108–9 play  29, 60, 63–4, 66, 69, 70, 72, 75, 78, 101, 104–5, 109, 110, 143, 145, 161–2 practical sagacity  161–2 process of art-making  29, 39, 72, 74–5, 108, 110, 151, 154 rebellion  13, 65–7, 102, 109, 145, 161–2 Reggio Emilia  151

172

Subject Index

resourcefulness  95, 101, 109–10, 117, 137, 142 role models  72, 142, 154–5 schooling  6, 13, 60–1, 70, 87, 95, 122, 124–5, 137, 141–2, 145, 149–51, 156, 160, 162 sites of art-making  82, 103, 125, 142–3, 154, 156 situated learning  149 socio-economics  21, 34–6, 45–6, 50, 122–3, 130–1, 141 studio environment  9–10, 52, 57–9, 61, 70, 143, 146–7, 152–4, 163

survival/struggle  95, 97, 109–10, 118, 137 tacit knowledge  6, 148, 159 tacit learning  148–9, 163 teaching the ‘good teacher’ 12, 123–5, 159–63 teaching styles  14, 62, 69, 70, 77, 83–4, 87–9, 90–2, 141, 161 traditional art movements  37, 39–41, 79, 82, 90 wisdom  110, 157, 159, 160, 162–3

Name Index Albers, J.  151 Alexander, D.  161 Alexander, R. J.  4, 10–12, 23, 24 Allison, B.  33, 44 Atkinson, D.  22 Bandura, A.  144, 148 Barone, T.  4 Bell, D.  4 Bernstein, B.  11 Boswell, J.  23 Burke, P.  144 Catterall, J. S.  4 Claxton. G.  160 Counsell, C.  21 Csikszentmihalyi, M.  162 Daichendt, G. J.  152 Davis, J. H.  47 Delamont, S.  19, 20 Denzin, N. K.  17, 22 Dewey, J.  5, 87 Dixson, A.  25, 26 Duncan, M.  19, 21, 22 Dweck, C.  144 Eglinton, K. A.  21 Eisner, E.  5–7, 12, 13, 161 Ellemers, N.  134 English, F.  25 Feist, G.  161 Freire, P.  8, 70, 147, 148 Galton, M.  156 Garoian, C.  14, 152 Gaudelius, Y. M.  152 Giroux, H.  8, 70 Glasgow, N.  151 Graham, M. A.  152 Greene, M.  8, 163

Guba, E. G.  16 Gurdjieff, G.  37 Harland, J.  8, 9 Hart, S.  150 Hawkins, R.  144 Hetland, L.  9, 10, 28, 47 Hickman, R.  28, 61, 149, 152, 153 Hicks, C.  151 Huddleston, C.  33 Huxley, A.  39, 40 Jones, A.  84 Jones, J.  5 Kristensen, T.  154 Lanier, V.  33 Lawrence-Lightfoot, S.  24, 25 Lincoln, Y. S.  16, 17 Lusted, D.  11 Mayer, Richard E.  144 Milbrandt, M.  13, 14, 33 Miller, D. M.  33, 34 Mykhalovskiy, E.  19 Noddings, N.  8 Palmer, J.  5 Palmer, P. J.  152 Polanyi, M.  5, 148 Pollard, A.  165 Pretz, J.  162 Pringle, E.  154–7, 161 Reed-Danahay, D. E.  21 Richter, G.  158 Russell, C.  21 Schiffrin, D.  26, 27 Shulman, L.  11

174

Name Index

Sikes, Patricia J.  152 Smith, F.  46, 47 Smith, R.   7 Stake, R. E.  17 Sternberg, R.  159, 160 Stets, J.  144 Stewart, R.  23

Van Gogh, V.  25, 29

Tallack, M.  152 Torres, C. A.  8

Zander, M.  148 Zwirn, S. G.  152

Wallas, G.  154, 164 Wilson. C.  39 Witherell, C.  8 Wolfradt, U.  162