Carnival in the Curriculum

Abstract

This article focuses on a carnival in the curriculum project designed to revitalise the arts in the experience of students in Higher Education preparing to become primary school teachers. It argues the relevance of a combined arts or trans‐disciplinary artform in the remit of a visual arts education journal and explores carnival as a complex, inclusive, multifaceted and multidimensional cultural practice with deep historical and social roots. It locates carnival within theory and the debate about the arts in schools in the UK from the early 1980s. Drawing on the analysis of interviews with students and teachers in carnival project schools, issues and themes such as student involvement, creativity, artists in schools, and cross‐curricular learning are explored, concluding that carnival in the curriculum provides an opportunity for agency within the regulated official curriculum.

Cross‐Curricular Gallery Learning: A Phenomenological Case Study

“…Little contemporary research has been carried out which attempts to examine the effect of cross-curricular work on students' understanding of a topic in secondary schools; cross-curricular projects are relatively common in the primary phase (e.g. Herne et al 2008). However, there are a few older studies pertaining to cross-curricular work involving art which can contextualise the focus of this article.…”

Editorial

“…The politics of learner identity, agency and subjectivity, brought to the fore by Goldsmith's investigations into contemporary art and pedagogies in the classroom, continues in their recent work in the journal (Atkinson 2008;Dash 2007;Herne et al 2008;Adams 2007). Ethnographic research methods have underpinned much of their work: Herne in his work on diverse communities of practice and young children's education (Herne & McLaren 2007), and Dash through his work on globalisation and diversity, particularly black and mixed race children's experiences of education (Dash 2005(Dash , 2006(Dash , 2007; similarly Page has used visual ethnographic methods to explore the work of children in remote educational settings, analysed by phenomenological theories of place and space (Page 2007).…”