Misrecognition of the Art Teacher ’ s Agency in the Artworks Made by Senior Art Students

This paper reports on emergent findings and qualitative research methods currently being applied in the author’s investigation of creativity as a kind of misrecognition in an art classroom. The study examines the transactions between the art teacher and Year 12 students who are making artworks for the HSC examination. The investigation is theoretically underpinned by Bourdieu’s theories of the habitus and symbolic capital. Emergent results are retrieved from observations and interviews using a form of semantic analysis, which takes into account the force of the linguistic utterances of respondents. The triangulated endorsement of claims made by the teacher and students are sought through the use of other qualitative methods including digital video recordings, unstructured and structured interviews, descriptions of artworks and factors contributing to their emergence, further observations and other contextual and documentary evidence. Preliminary findings reveal the significance of the teacher’s creative function in the student’s thinking, actions and resultant artworks. This is misrecognised in the alliances and elective relations of reciprocity between the teacher and students in the classroom. Background to the study The ambiguity surrounding the art teacher’s role in artmaking The domain of art education is notorious for the ambiguity of the teacher’s role in art making. Students’ creativity may be thought to be either dependent on the teacher, a position upheld by the Regio Emillia school or alternatively, corrupted by the teacher, a view strongly endorsed by Lowenfeld and his followers. The teacher may be regarded as one who fosters, collaborates with or appropriates the student’s creative activity. While ethical beliefs such as these retain the teacher as a fundamental contributor to the student’s creative performances in one way or another, the agency of the teacher is absent from the underlying causes of the student’s creative traits. Eisner, for instance, notes the ‘virtuoso [teacher] can exploit virtually any option to do something educationally significant with students’ yet how this might occur practically is not as clear (1990:24). What is generally missing from these underlying accounts, as Gardner intimates, is the way in which the semantic properties of the teacher are entertained as empirical traits of performers. The creative role of the teacher and the creative traits of the students, although coherently respectful of each other, lack integration. Divisions between the teacher and student beg an integrated genotypical explanation. In the relation between the creative performance and the performer we must go on to ask how is the agency of the teacher represented as an intentional trait of the student and in the artefacts they make? Quality of Teaching Rowe’s recent studies on the performance of boys in secondary education, the findings of which have implications for both boys and girls, lends further support to the investigation. Rowe’s studies bear out that it is the teacher and the quality of teaching that is the main determinant of student results beyond the curriculum, the inherent abilities of students or socio-economic variables (2002, 2000). This study takes the function of the teacher seriously and seeks to consider the implications of Rows findings in the unique setting of the art classroom studied. The identity of art education in the senior years of schooling in NSW The identity of art education is a reality that exists as a complex, inter-woven composition of culture, language, knowledge and values. Various institutional forces shape its character in the state of NSW. The NSW Stage 6 Visual Arts syllabus and HSC examination exert a powerful force on curriculum choices and school based decisions and create the very possibility of certain activities which are particularly pertinent for artmaking (Searle 1985:27). Students are assessed on their performance in artmaking in diverse expressive forms such as photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, and digital forms and in critical/historical components of the course. Assessment takes place as a set of school based tasks over the students final year of schooling and though the external HSC examination. ARTEXPRESS, the high stakes annual exhibition selected from HSC artworks scoring in the top 14% of the state exerts a force, perhaps even stronger than that of the examination. There is little doubt that the events of previous performances of students, teachers, schools and the distinctions in between artworks exhibited in the exhibition are consumed by teachers and students and invade the economy of the classroom effecting choices, language and the potential directions of emergent artworks (Baudrillard, 1996). The exhibition, related events and publications, also affect how art education is represented more broadly in the public arena. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales alone ARTEXPRESS attracts annual audiences of more than 100,000. The exhibition represents students as autonomously originating artists and their artworks as significant tokens of youth culture. On the other hand the exhibition offers considerable kudos for exhibiting students, their teachers and schools. Paradoxically, the orthodoxies of the exhibition also impose limitations on the kinds of artworks that teachers and students believe can be made for examination and exhibition and contributes to the social agreements that are made about the artworks senior students make. In many schools art activities and exhibitions in years 7-12 years rehearse the examination events of year 12 in a localised and particular way. Students’ artworks may, over the years, develop a characteristic style, intensity or complexion that is connected to what the teachers believe is expected within the HSC and from students in the school. In some cases, the style of the artworks produced by students can be attributed to the repertoire and stylistic interests of a certain teacher. These symptoms pose a threat to the teacher’s narratives of their creative originating students. Design of the study It is Pierre Bourdieu and his theories of the habitus — a feel for the game — and symbolic capital — the currency of exchange in a denied economy — that suggest the idea for the study (1992, 1997, 1998). Bourdieu’s theories offer a compelling way to revisit teacher-student relationships within the cultural context of the art classroom at moments of creative origination. The transactions between teacher and student may be conceived of as the site for the exchange of symbolic capital. The artroom and the broader institutional contexts in which the teacher and students function, to paraphrase Bourdieu, can be likened to the ‘archaic’ economy. In this economy everything takes place as if ‘the economic activity cannot explicitly recognise the economic ends in relation to which it is objectively orientated’ (1992:113). It is therefore not surprising that the instrumentality of the teacher’s pedagogical role is repressed in the interests of maintaining the subjectivist narrative of the autonomously originating student. But as Bourdieu recognises it is in the repression of this explicit economy that we forget to question all the non-creative presuppositions of the creative narrative (1992: 130). Accordingly, the design and methodology seeks to uncover the contradictory social practices of creativity at work in this classroom and the related contexts. It is not the object of the study to expose these tacit misrecognitions with the purpose of condemning them as hypocrisy. Rather, the intention is to understand them and the complex social reasoning that is exercised in support of the artworks that are made, art teachers, art students and the institutions of art education. Respondents The Visual Arts teacher, is known in this study as R2 and his Year 12 Visual Arts students, twenty of whom are referred to in the observations and transcripts, are identified as S1S20. Another of the Visual Arts teachers in the school, who teaches a parallel Year 12 class, is referred to as R3. R2 is regarded as an elite respondent and an expert performer (Ericsson and Charness, 1994). He has a specialised degree in art education, has taught Visual Arts for over ten years and has dynamic reputation amongst his peers, the school community and current and past students. He demonstrates a consistently high performance with his students in the HSC Visual Arts examination and, on a regular basis, has artworks selected for exhibition in the annual exhibition of ARTEXPRESS. 1 For a more detailed account of the theoretical components and design of this study see Thomas, K. (2002). Creativity as the Exchange of Symbolic Capital in the Transactions between an Art Teacher and his Senior Art Students, presentation and paper for the AARE Conference and electronic/CD-ROM publication, Brisbane, December These aspects of his practice are highly relevant to the transactions enacted with students in the classroom. His students, are in the vast majority highly motivated, academically able and competitive in their HSC studies Around one third of the class is from non-English speaking backgrounds. Many students claim their ‘passion for art’ and are dedicated to making their artworks utilising resources both in and outside the school to enhance their performance. Almost all students will pursue tertiary study, many in fields related to the visual arts and design. The teacher and students exhibit a certain ‘readiness’, which contributes to the intentionality of artmaking and orientation of the artworks that are assessed within the school and later examined by HSC markers independently of the school as part of the HSC examination. This readiness contributes to how the teacher and students structure experiences in the classroom and how perceptions, linguistic interpretations, the temporal sequences of events, actions, motivations and behaviours are enacted a