title: Art stories: exploring the agency of art practice for undergraduate students in understanding their perspectives on self as artists and trainee teachers
Creators: name: Tutchell, Suzy
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2024

description: This thesis explores the agency of art practice on university students and their evolving identities 
as artists and trainee teachers. The purpose of the research is to better understand how their 
perceptions of self and identity can inform their future aspirations within the teaching of art at 
primary school. The study is particularly focussed on the students whose cohort, age and art 
practice are concurrent with socio-cultural behaviours and events relevant to their lived and living 
experiences. Theories around identity construction and art as research underpin the conceptual 
framework of this study. At a time when art, as a subject across educational phases, is under 
threat and undervalued, the thesis sheds light on the importance of it as a subject with agential 
potential to enquire about life in all its forms. 
An interpretative paradigm was followed, taking a qualitative participatory approach and using a 
wide range of visual data methods to capture lived experiences and perspectives. The visual data 
produced was generated by twenty-seven undergraduate students within the art studios at a
university in England, over the course of an academic year of their primary education degree. A 
reflexive thematic analysis approach was used to explore, deconstruct, and reflect on the data 
during and after the production period.
The key findings of the research indicate that past experiences of art education were restricted by 
rules, regulations and standardised outcomes thus significantly influencing how students viewed 
the subject of art as teachers entering the primary classroom. The situated experience of space, 
time and collaborative engagement within a designated art environment enabled them to disclose 
and share important perspectives in relation to their evolving identities and aspects of self. The
students’ navigation in this experiential process affected a greater understanding of the 
transformational potential of art, through which to explore personal and political issues. This 
window of opportunity within their university degree informed the students’ aspirations and 
intentions as future teachers in art and as co-collaborators in knowledge production.
Key contributions to knowledge were to make time and space to listen to and work with teacher 
trainee students in order to understand them better and so equip them to become listening teachers 
for their own class of children. To incorporate a ‘what if’ approach to teaching, through the 
agency of art enables a more contemporary and autonomous pedagogy for both teacher and 
learner. Finally, the research suggests that art, as a creative and exploratory agent, enables 
reflective decision-making to evolve. The study understands this as a powerful tool for learners 
across all phases of education but particularly for those who can then model this within their own 
primary classrooms to reposition and raise the profile of art.