School Art Education: Mourning the Past and Opening a Future

Abstract

This article begins with a brief summary of the findings of a recent research project that surveyed the content of the art curriculum in a selection of English secondary schools. The research findings suggest a particular construction of pedagogised subjects and objects rooted in ideas of technical ability and skill underpinned by a transmission model of teaching and learning. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and social theory reasons for passionate attachments to such curriculum identities are proposed, when in the wider world of art practice such identities were abandoned long ago. Working with the notion of the subordination of teaching to learning and the difficulties of initiating curriculum practices within increasingly complex social contexts, the article argues for learning through art to be viewed as a productive practice of meaning‐making within the life‐worlds of students. The term, ‘encounters of learning’ is employed to sketch a pedagogical quest in which an ethics of learning remains faithful to the truth of the learning event for the student.

Invention and repair: disability and education after the UK Coalition Government

“…An inability to mourn the past leaves us with policy repair of processes for managing the education of disabled children resulting in an inability to invent new ways of defining pedagogic relationships (Atkinson 2006). The Coalition policy for SEN reflects an inability to conceptualise education in the United Kingdom as anything other than two parallel tracks where difference is accepted as deficit and support, provision and care are accepted as synonyms for education.…”

Liberal Ideals, Postmodern Practice: A Working Paradox for the Future of Secondary School Art Education in England?

“…If modernism is inherently motivated by progressive change – why have teachers working within this paradigm continued to do so without self‐criticality? Atkinson, writing thirteen years ago, explains that art teachers ‘have become embedded within a modus operandi of careful structured planning which has encouraged a rather mechanical and formulaic approach’ (Atkinson , 19). It seems that still, art teachers are ‘tempted to continue taking Prozac’ (Greenhalgh , 253) rather than recognise contemporary criticisms of stylistic continuum and genre hierarchy.…”

“…Atkinson suggests a further reasoning for this stasis, beyond external constraints: he posits that art teachers are not unwilling captives of technocratic systems, but that they are themselves passionately attached to the transmission model of typical modernist teaching: ‘The psychic process identified with the difficulty of relinquishing the past, a failure to mourn lost objects or ideals and therefore to preserve them as “passionate attachments” is called melancholia by Freud’ (Atkinson , 20).…”

“…If the noble modernist rationale for art education has been uprooted within wider visual culture, it is understandable that elitist educators may cling to this function for stability or status, as well as in habit. This does not provide a sustainable basis moving into uncertain futures, promoting ‘dubiously out of date curriculum models that are held in place … by the power of caricatures of past practices’ (Atkinson , 21), a policy that degrades the perceived value of art education.…”

A journey into silence: students, stakeholders and the impact of a strategic governmental policy document in the UK

“…Whilst to be modern means moving on, this document peers at the future as it resurrects the past; acknowledging the student only as some 19 th century construct requiring training and skills for a mechanical universe that Dickens' Gradgrind would recognise. This failure to let go is not a healthy mourning of the past (Atkinson 2006) but a blindness that damns us to endlessly repeat it again and again.…”