Within an emerging philosophy of contemporary gallery education, new pedagogies are required to meet the demands of looking at art, with increasingly varied constituent groups. Strategies that aim to empower young learners come from an ideological framework in which knowledge is negotiated and local significances are produced conversationally by learners and facilitators. Tension exists between the ideological position and the role of the gallery as ‘expert’: this conflict creates ambivalence towards the learner. The discourse of the ‘expert’ and the discourse of ‘local negotiation’ employ different pedagogic strategies, creating tension in the ways in which knowledge is reproduced for the visitor and participant. This article explores interrogatory pilot work with young people at Tate Modern. I use a hermeneutical approach to explore the interpretive roles of facilitator and participant when language‐based strategies are used to look at art. This research aims to construct a pedagogy that enables young people to learn about art in ways that take account of their situation as learners.

Women, as a class, have provided thought for far too long with images or metaphors for whatever vice or virtue. (Gatens, 1996: 135) Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities, is at the core of mattering. (Barad, 2012: 16) These quotes identify two issues central to our argument. Firstly: that what is uncomfortable, unthought, indeterminate, is unconsciously feminized. Secondly: this process of feminizing the new, puts finite boundaries on what might be made to matter. We reflect on our experiences of some of the political and pedagogical problems encountered when the university curriculum is opened up to arts practice based learning. We consider ways that bodies involved in such generative processes of mattering can become controlled by fear and what is made to matter is thus policed. Drawing on the design and delivery of a university level practice based arts subject, we argue that embodied creative processes employed in pedagogical contexts can challenge and extend those who learn from reproducing stereotypical constructions of their identity, or being reproduced in line with dominant tropes of representation. For example, many of our students are Muslim women. These students made dance films in which their identities were constructed and performed in relation to landscape ('Urban Dreams') or power relationships ('Puppet Dance'). The presentations of British Islamic femininity these dance films offer are critical, aesthetic engagements with lived contexts and the power relationships embedded in everyday life. Both stand against the perception of the silenced or subservient woman, and were produced after initial anxiety about whether or not contemporary movement practice could be seen as congruent with a religious identity. Not only did the contemporary movement practice end up sitting with our students' articulations of femininity, it provided a means of critically reflecting on, and developing religious identity. Yet in order to arrive at this point, the students had to embrace the unknown and sit with the discomfort that the unknown can bring.We write with the conviction that creative practices can remake reductive, historically determined and governed images, figures or metaphors assigned to differently gendered, differently abled, diversely classed and raced bodies. Building on a feminist investment in the agency of materiality, we think through the problem of the body as a site of learning in the university. As Elspeth Probyn writes in her article "Teaching Bodies", We may often teach potentially 'messy' topics like embodiment or sexual identity. At the same time the zone of contact between student and teacher is heavily policed by ourselves and our institutions. So while we offer material that potentially sets off lines of flight, we then have to continually re-territorialize the very bodies that have been set in motion through our teaching. It's a situation that is bound to veer towards abstraction, and at times a lifeless rendition of hot subjects. (Probyn 2004: ...

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Creative activism is an approach to education that asks, 'What can happen when we take learning outside the classroom and think of it happening everywhere?'. Two charities-House of Imagination and Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination-have been asking this question in their creative place-making programmes working with socially engaged artists and communities linked to primary schools in Bath and Cambridge. Young children and adults co-create and speculate about the future of their communities and environments in these different geographical locations. This article draws together our shared understanding of creative pedagogies and the value to everyone of working in this way.

The data presented in this paper explores the effect on pedagogy when inclusion initiatives are bound up with learning objectives. It explores the generation of critical thinking skills in learning programmes at Tate Modern. Effective art education empowers young people to take a critical stance. In gallery education a decision has to be made: are programmes for young people about encouraging them to think about art or inviting them to think? I explore the position and status given to artworks and to young people's interpretations of those works through data gathered during a peer-led workshop. I illustrate the ways in which new critical voices are able to emerge and contrast them with potential pedagogic pitfalls in which such approaches become exclusive and ultimately work against their emancipatory aims. People who work in galleries and museums are 'cultivated individuals'. They can easily take for granted their judgements about art and consider them to be 'natural'. Because of this a disconnection can occur between people who are not acculturated and those who are. The purpose of this study is to shed light on cultural exclusion by exploring dialogue about art produced during a peer-led workshop.