This article examines the findings of the London Cluster research, ‘Critical Minds’, in which the Institute of Education, University of London (IoE) worked in collaboration with Whitechapel Chapel Art Gallery (the lead London gallery), Bow Arts, Chisenhale Gallery and Space ‐The Triangle, and four east London comprehensive schools. By collaborating with art departments and by focusing on learning within the gallery context, the research team questioned whether the perceived constraints of traditional art and design pedagogy can be overcome by changing the conditions in which learning takes place. The following analysis focuses on these conditions as outlined in the research report's recommendations.

In this article I discuss the relationship between theories of identity and making practices in secondary art and design. Of particular interest is the way students are invited to explore identities in relation to a sense of self and the extent to which this is informed by schools' concern to make diversity visible through multicultural celebration, thus framing and possibly limiting exploration. It is notable that non-heternormative sexual identities remain largely invisible in the official curriculum and I examine the disjunction between this absence and their hypervisibilty in the mass media and its culture of confession/exposure. I revisit Michel Foucault's discussion of the history of sexuality as a way to understand the development of confessional discourses in modern culture and to provide an alternative and ambivalent reading of the power relations implicit in work exploring identities by art and design students. Specifically, I look at the position of gay and lesbian students and teachers, and ask whether their sexuality can figure within the injunction 'explore your identity'. Given the heteronormative culture of schooling, I end by recommending that individuals should be wary of outing themselves in the name of self-expression but that art teachers could use strategies of distancing to engage students with issues of sexuality and join with others to counter homophobia by queering the curriculum. Abstract 10 JADE 26.1 (2007)

Abstract:Central to this paper is an analysis of the work produced by a year 10 student in response to the "Expressive Study" of the art and design GCSE (AQA 2001). I begin by examining expressivism within art education and turn to the student"s work partly to understand whether the semiconfessional mode she chose to deploy is encouraged within this tradition. The tenets of expressivism presuppose the possibility that through the practice of art young people might develop the expressive means to give "voice" to their feelings and come to some understanding of self. I therefore look at the way she took ownership of the "expressive" imperative of the title by choosing to explore her emerging lesbian identity and its position within the normative, binary discourses on sex and sexual identity that predominate in secondary schools. Within schooling there is an absence of formal discussion around sex, sexual identity and sexuality other than in the context of health and moral education and, to some extent, English. This is surprising given the emphasis on self-exploration that an art and design expressive study would seem to invite. In order to consider the student"s actions as a situated practice I examine the social and cultural contexts in which she was studying. With reference to visual semiotics and the theoretical work of Judith Butler, I interpret the way she uses visual resources not only to represent her emerging sexual identity but to counter dominant discourses around homosexuality in schools. I claim that through her art practice she enacts the "name of the law" to refute the binary oppositions that underpin sex education in schools. This act questions the assumptions about the purpose of expressive activities in art education with its psychologically inflected rhetoric of growth and selfhood and offers a mode of expressive practice that is more socially engaged and communicative. ExpressivismWhen people express something they are said to take from within themselves some phenomenon, a sensation, perception, thought or feeling and put it outside; they take what was once inside and, through a process of transformation, represent it as a material act or thing. Such a process makes it clear that the inner something and the expression are not one and the same. However, this way of explaining the process presupposes that the inner something is prior to its expression, a common sense attitude that pervades teaching in schools. And yet, as Hal Foster argues, quoting from Nietzsche"s The Will to Power III: "The whole notion of an "inner experience" enters our consciousness only after it has found a language that the individual understands -i.e., a translation of a situation into a familiar situation …". This "translation" precedes, indeed constitutes any formed expression so that between it and the self a rhetorical figure intervenes.

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