Towards a personal pedagogy: thoughts on the history, ethos and ecosystem, patterns, structures and beliefs that underlie teaching and learning in the Art department at Sidcot.
In 1983 I was employed as ‘the’ art teacher at Sidcot. Within a year I had established ceramics by taking on a ceramics specialist, initially to run an evening class, and rapidly thereafter to establish ceramics on timetable. The kinaesthetic and spatial skills involved in the creation of ceramic sculpture are essential ingredients to my conception of art education. Within four years I had also established a fine art specialist to compliment my own skill set (photography, print and conceptual art) to cover drawing, painting and art history.
Sidcot has doubled in size in these 25 years (We enrolled a record 50 post 16 students last year). This quarter century also neatly corresponds to the ‘digital revolution’ to date. From early on I recognised the computer’s propensity to engage, and added digital technology to the mélange.
The pattern of three teachers and three disciplines has thus been established in the art department for over 20 years. In our differing strengths we cover a spectrum of approaches from conceptual to craft based; a visual connection to the physical world, a physical connection to the physical world and an imaginative connection to both physical and non physical worlds. I read a suggestion recently that the accepted three dimensions of the physical world, height breadth and depth, might be replaced with the concept of three other dimensions; visual, temporal, and cognitive. This idea strongly favours my feeling that digital creativity, with it’s emphasis on both the temporal and the virtual, has an important and growing relevance that compliments traditional art media.
The structure of three art specialists is not a rigid demarkation. I believe strongly in team teaching, in cross fertilisation of ideas, in letting students work in the media that most suits them, in getting staff and students to work together, in offering a breadth of experience and understanding. By team teaching we create a lot of flexibility in how the art is taught, assessed, and timetabled, and we allow students the freedom to develop their own personal work. The essence of 20th century art has been on the new, on personal introspection, freely expressive; leaning more strongly to the conceptual rather than the craft. In this capitalist, consumerist society of mass consumption, mass media, and mass production, I am very keen to promote individual creativity, the handmade and craftsmanship. We have to find a balance between teaching skills that empower and enable students, while giving them time and space to develop their own expressive art, finding their own individual skills and tools. We need constantly to find the balance between teaching and learning, so that students find the impetus to find the skills, in a cycle of energy where activity, and the results of the activity inspire further activity. In this flexibility, the art does not fit neatly into the wider structure of school planning and timetable. A rigid approach can be comfortable as a blanket, but it can also stifle. Flexibility is challenging, and creative.
I strongly believe in the benefit of both order and creative chaos, and finding a healthy balance here too, across the department.
Art can be very difficult to measure, it does not fit well to regulated timetables or measurement systems. Sometimes the muse is there, and sometimes the artist just has to muse. To muse can be a worrying process for an onlooking teacher. A student may appear to be doing very little, and we may not know if they are in fact doing very little, or if, deep down, there is an artistic storm brewing, ready to unleash a force 10 gale of creative activity. There can be real inertia in the artistic persona, often in those with the most potential for originality. I have often found the perversity that the most talented of students has the most difficulty getting down to work, perhaps because they have such an understanding that they also have a very high expectation. I regularly have students who have exceptional conceptual understanding, great interest in art, but poor ‘artistic’ skills. It would be difficult to find a Van Gogh, or Alfred Wallis championed in a scientific domain. Equally I find myself responding strongly to the technically very ‘bad’ drawing created by occasional students who have both learning difficulties and a passion for drawing. Does an artist have to be aware of their art? Is a flower aware of it’s beauty? Students who have a low self esteem, may find expression difficult for fear of how others might rate their efforts. Art can be a very immediate medium, difficult to hide. It is not an activity that necessarily lends itself to an incremental, linear, defined curriculum, although there are no rules; there are artists who work best to a very rigid timetable and a very clear regime of practice. We need to be both highly structured and at the same time totally unstructured, we need to offer abundant praise and encouragement, but with total conviction. We do not feed art into students, we draw it out of them.
There is very little that we can actually teach in a concrete, cognitive sense. Leaning art is done with the whole body, all the senses, the conscious mind, memory, the subconscious mind; by ‘feel’. Watching will inspire, and you can be shown how to take things apart and put them back together, and experience is vital, going to galleries, looking and learning about art and artists, but the only way to learn art is to do. This highlights a difference between convergent and divergent thinking perhaps. Schools are well set up to measure convergent thinking, because of it’s conscious, linear nature; memory can be tested. It is much less possible to measure a growing aptitude for divergent thinking, which is less about what is thought, and more about how to think. The thinking that is associated strongly with the creation of art, can happen to a large extent in the subconscious; associations, connections, juxtapositions, patterns. This is the mechanism by which, when I become aware of something, a yellow car for example, I will suddenly start seeing yellow cars everywhere. Perhaps the same mechanism is responsible for the song I have playing in my head, the lyrics of which are so often pertinent to what is happening in my life, once they reach my awareness. It is the process that leads to the moment of inspiration, the moment when an idea pops into consciousness, and also perhaps the apparently serendipitous connections that so often arise during the creative process. How do you teach a subconscious process?
The creative process can have a long gestation, perhaps 70% where nothing appears to be progressing, while under the surface of the conscious mind the feet are paddling away, propelling the process to a final 30% that is conscious, visible, and measurable. But then, art is about feeling, rather than knowing. How do you measure a feeling? How do you learn a feeling? How do I pass on knowledge of the feeling I get, standing in a room of Rothko’s black/purple canvasses?
Some years ago I came up with an image of an infusing teabag, although I can’t decide exactly on the symbolic roles that teabag, mug, and hot water play. Guy Caxton, in his book Hare Brain Tortoise Mind uses the phrase ‘learning by osmosis’ which covers this concept. Often the ‘teabag’ is not the teacher, but other students. Perhaps, as teachers we provide the mug and try and keep the water as near boiling as we can. Another simile is that of homeopathy; that many believe to work, although it is scientifically unmeasurable. Somehow there is an energy, a memory, a vibration, in the homeopathic remedy to which the recipient responds.
I feel that much of the job that I do as a teacher of Art is in the creation and holding of a vibrant, energetic, exciting space, a safe space, a visually stimulating space, and a space in which students want to be. Some of the energy will come from me, as I perform in front of students, but much of it also has to come from students and groups of students. This synergy is also hard to quantify. In his book Creativity, Flow and the Physiology of Discovery and Invention Mihaly Csikszentmihaliy mentions times, such as Florence in the first 25 years of the 15th century, when there was a confluence of factors leading to an extraordinary period of creative innovation in the arts. Likewise in Paris in the early 20th Century, Russia, between revolution and Stalinism, New York in the latter half of the 20th century, and, perhaps China now. Similarly the extraordinary musical innovation centred around Liverpool in the 60’s; the synergy of Lennon and McCartney that seemed to produce a creative energy that was greater than either of them could be as individuals. Can we create this confluence in microcosm in the art room at Sidcot?
“There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.” – Warren G. Bennis
There are elements of this environment that would be anathema to most teachers; we have dressing up clothes and silly hats, (that always remind me of Rembrandt) a three piece suite, music players and music playing, chairs on wheels. We purposely want the department to be different, somewhere other, more like an Aladdin’s cave than a classroom, full of treasures and possibilities.
“The cave will certainly be less interesting when it has electric lights and ramps for tourists. Isn’t it best as it is - nearly inaccessible, unlit, dangerous, and utterly seductive?”
James Elkin Why Art Can’t be Taught, p191
Identity is critical to teenagers, exploration of identity, somewhere to feel safe, to explore, to fit in. Somewhere different, somewhere other. Art is a subject where students can explore and express their growing understanding of themselves, but it order to be so, there has to be space enough for this to happen. Art can not be taught, in the same way that riding a bike or sawing a bit of wood straight and square can not be taught. These are to be experienced and learned, not taught. The moment we start to ‘teach’ something, there is a universe of other stuff that we are not teaching, in danger of neglect. We do however need to expose students to possibilities and experiences, even if they are difficult. As a child from a Quaker family, I found the meditation of a silent meeting excruciatingly difficult, but I appreciate silence now, perhaps also adding comprehension to my understanding of a Richard Long walk, or a Rothko painting. If reality is infinite, we each have only a glimpse of understating of that reality, like the apocryphal group of blind people each describing a different bit of an elephant. My comprehension of reality shifts not only with the accumulation of experience, but also how I perceive that experience, how I remember it. My perception and understanding of the world is fluid, effected by circumstance and mood. Often I see what I think I see, or what I expect to see. It is difficult to know how the conglomeration of anyone’s experience works on their comprehension. In this age of consumption the role models are perhaps even less well defined that in previous ages.
“For future education to provide environments where schools are fun, interesting, relevant and safe, a personalised portfolio model of education is recommended, where educators act as facilitators for the successful management of the self as a project; provide alternative discourses to neo-liberalism by working as “community enablers‟; and act as protective stewards, shielding young people from some of the more aggressive aspects of technology, surveillance and commercialisation.”
Identity, community and selfhood: understanding the self in relation to contemporary youth cultures Sarah Riley University of Bath December 2008
We encourage students to engage in real issues through their art, issues of self identity, and wider, real issues, the issues that have always motivated art; sex, violence, beauty. Sometimes we walk a tightrope of acceptability. Sometimes the issues are so real to the students, they are painful. I am not interested in asking students to pretend, I want the art to be real, or if they we do pretend, while we may be playing games, the pretending is still real. I want students to be doing the art for themselves, and in the present time, not for me, or for some future goal.
The adult public transcript is to make children progress, the adult private transcript is to deny their sexual and aggressive impulses; the child public transcript is to be successful as family members and schoolchildren, and their pride talking transcript is their play like, in which they can express both their special identity and their resentment at being a captive population. (Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, 1997 P123 - chapter on child power and identity).
It is difficult to fit these pegs of all different shapes and sizes into the switchboard of a timetable and system of assessment, a system of bums on seats. School dresses the students in uniform, to make them uniform. In the art room I am seeing emos, goths, punks, hoodies, hiphop, hippy, geeks... It is a very difficult word to use, as it’s meaning has become very unclear, but I think that a main ingredient in teaching needs to be love.
What I want to teach students above all else, is how to find the passion that makes the creation of the art happen, and this can only come through the work itself, which adds a catch 22 paradox to the teaching of art. Students can only become passionate through their own work, and it is only their own work that provides the passion to work. Where is the start of this circle? Only by example perhaps, and the example is not necessarily how, the artwork is created, but in the manner of its creation. To provide an exciting space in which art is happening, in which students are fired up. A space full of individuals expressing their own artistic passions. I am passionate about art, and I am passionate about teaching. It is my passion that is the most important thing for me to share, rather than my skills. I would hope that my students, once fired up, will quickly transcend my skill level. The teaching of the skills is to touch the tinder, to kindle the fire. And once some of the students are passionate about their art, it is they who are doing the bulk of the teaching, through the process of osmosis. It is always a fascination and a joy to me, to see a student, who may have been taxiing on the runway for years, suddenly take off with a whoosh. The sheer speed with which their learning and understanding then develop can be awesome, sucking everything in.
” Education is not the filling a pail, but the lighting of a fire” - WB Yeats
However, this extraordinary combustion is rare. As the majority of our students remain on the runway, we also need to make the runway experience fulfilling and fun. To take a quotes from the aforementioned book by Mihaly Csikszentmihaliy:
“If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too many obstacles are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in creative behaviour is easily extinguished... if the next generation is to face the future with zest and self-confidence, we must educate them to be original as well as competent.” ibid p11/12
Csikszentmihaliy is best known for his work on the concept of ‘flow’; “the way people describe their state of mind when consciences is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” Flow p6 Csikszentmihaliy describes flow as the state in which there are clear goals, immediate feedback, a balance between challenge and skill, boredom and anxiety, action and awareness are merged distractions are excluded from consciousness, there is no worry of failure, self consciousness disappears, time becomes distorted, self consciousness disappears, and the activity becomes autotelic. The state of flow is obviously not restricted to the creation of art, but it is perhaps a very important ingredient in artistic expression. So many adults say ‘I can’t do art’. Not so with a child, children are easily engrossed in artistic activity, tongue slightly out; total involvement, total concentration. In this way all children are artists. Why, in puberty, do we lose this? Self image, the control of the brain, not letting go, self consciousness. Artists never loose this self consciousness; Alberto Giacometti, who’s ‘walking man’ has recently become the most expensive artwork, beating the sunflowers, was wracked by self doubt, as presumably, was Van Gogh when he held a gun to his head. But the ‘flow’ state can transcend these gatekeepers of our conscious selves. There are many routes to this flow experience, through music, team games, mathematical equations, scientific problem solving; anywhere that there is creativity and innovation, where people are pushing themselves. As an art teacher, perhaps my primary role is to help students rediscover and develop a capacity for entering this state. To overcome the inertia of entropy, the default state of our being.
As students are going through the chaotic and confusing processes of puberty, we rotate them through the three art areas, as an introduction to differing skills, challenges, working methods and teachers. This is a foundation for those that chose to continue with art further up the school, but also an end in itself as well as a beginning... The end being that students should, above all, enjoy their time in the studios; re-discover the possibilities of ‘flow’ the state. I want students to have fun. I want art to compliment studies where students are learning by rote. To me rote has little place in art teaching. Rote, by definition can not be original and creative.
“Tiny children want to learn to the extent that they are unable to distinguish learning from fun. They keep this attitude until we adults convince them that learning is not fun.”
Glenn Dolman
I want learning to be fun, to be playful. I wish to play too.
In the examination years we run a rotation of workshops, complimented by short set projects, but allow students to take on responsibility for the direction of their own work, working in their own choice of media. We compliment the timetabled sessions with sessions that students can opt into: after school activities, trips, weekend workshops, art history lectures, exhibitions, talks, etc. It is very important to me that there is an element of choice, that students should have to ‘opt in’ and indeed if they need to, opt out.
For this ‘free flow’ system to work, we need more teacher time rather than less. The industrial model of one teacher, one group, one room and set time facilitates a mechanised learning. The teacher can make sure that all students are learning... or else, and the room can be spotless at the end of the session, or no one leaves until it is. The alternative involves a great deal of trust, some disappointment (and extra work) as students inevitably fail to live up to the responsibility that comes with the freedom, and some surprise and joy as students unexpectedly exceed expectations. The mechanised model is the most efficient way to instil discipline. Self discipline is much harder to foster, like herding cats rather than cows, but as art teachers it is the cat is much more creative than the cow, or sheep.
This self directed working pattern is becoming more difficult, rather than less, in the current growing risk averse atmosphere, with our paranoia of litigation. Letting go involves risk.
Lesson planning is also currently high on the agenda, inspections, and pressure to improve standards (with the implication of a metric by which to measure success). Success in art is difficult to measure. If I plan lessons, then I know what is going to happen, which removes much of the creativity from the lesson for me. If I am to teach creativity, I best do it by example, by being excited about the art that is being created, because it’s creation in also new to me, and leading to other creative possibilities. And yet, if I don’t plan, lessons can come adrift, students float aimlessly away, or struggle, out of their depth.
It seems that the art of teaching art is a mass of contradiction and impossible compromise.
“Sense is something that has to be made. It does not exist naturally, and it is especially hard to find in art teaching.” James Elkin Why Art Can’t be Taught, p189