From Art Appreciation to Pedagogies of Dissent: Gallery Education Rethinks the Inclusion Agenda

This chapter explores the problematic effect on pedagogy when inclusion initiatives are bound up with learning objectives. It explores the generation of critical thinking skills in gallery learning programmes where young people are empowered to take a critical stance. I use hermeneutic theory to explore the position and status given to artworks and to young people’s interpretations of those works. The art discourse that is explored was produced during peer-led workshops which, by design, were aimed at disrupting the dominant discourse of the gallery. With reference to critical pedagogic theory and the emancipatory ideologies of Paolo Freire, I illustrate the ways in which the potential for new critical voices can emerge in this context. I go on to contrast those ideas with potential pedagogic pitfalls in which such approaches become exclusive and ultimately work against their emancipatory aims. The research was conducted over a ten year period at Tate Modern in London. It uses data gathered from a youth programme for 15-23 year olds

City Mill Skate: Skateboarding Architecture and Community

City Mill Skate is a proposal for a set of incidental obstacles, or ‘skate dots’, to sit within the fabric of UCL East, a new campus development in East London due to open in 2022. It will form a series of interlinked architectural punctuations, akin to a sculpture trail. This article describes our thinking about the project in which we contrast the totalised and singular environment typically associated with contemporary skatepark design with archoitecctural interventions that are incidental, we use the term ‘skate dots’. Skate dot is a recently coined term that plays on the established label of skate spot and describes an incidental piece of architecture that lends itself to the act of skateboarding. This article describes our methodology: a hands on, participatory design process. We discuss how this approach is essential as this is a local project in which skaters’ active participation is sought alongside professional fabricators of skateable structures

Enabling the 'Other' community through creative pedagogies for urban renewal

This article draws on an art in education project in the UK to explore the value of creative pedagogy in the process of urban renewal. In this article community engagement is not simply about learning as an instrument to produce a person who is ready for active citizenship within a democracy, but rather to enable newly configured communities where an individual’s uniqueness is savoured. Biesta refers to this as the ‘other community’ (2006), which contrasts with the idea of a social group in which existing structures are rationalised according to pre-existing rules or values, it does not attempt to replicate same-ness. I focus on ArtScapers, an art in education project that uses practice research to explore the implications of creative pedagogy on community formation. The exploration of this art project, with three UK Primary Schools, employs cultural theory to investigate strategies for arts engagement with a particular interest on inclusion. Community consultation is commonplace in urban centres undergoing regeneration and the potency of public voice can be variable, this article explores ArtScapers as a consultation model in which there has been a process of genuine engagement. Using cultural theory to analyse pedagogy I assert that creative practices can purposefully draw communities together into mini democracies

The Artist Teacher

Artists who teach or teachers who make art? To explore the identity of Artist Teacher in contemporary educational contexts the ethical differences between the two fields of art and learning need to be considered. Equity is sought between the needs of the learner and the demands of an artist’s practice, a tension exists here because the nurture of the learner and the challenge of art can be in conflict. The dual role of artist and of teacher have to be continually navigated in order to maintain the composite and ever changing identity of Artist-Teacher. The answer to the question: how to teach art? Comes through investigating attitudes to knowledge in terms of the hermeneutical discourses of ‘reproduction’ and ‘production’ as a means to understand developments in pedagogy for art education since the Renaissance. An understanding of the specific epistemological discourses that must be navigated by Artist Teachers when they develop strategies for learning serves to explicate the role of art practices in considering the question: what to teach? The answer to which lies in debates around technical skills and the capacity for critical thought

Investigating the Impact of Contrasting Paradigms of Knowledge on the Emancipatory Aims of Gallery Programmes for Young People

Within an emerging philosophy of contemporary gallery education, new pedagogies are required to meet the demands of looking at art, with increasingly varied constituent groups. Strategies that aim to empower young learners come from an ideological framework in which knowledge is negotiated and local significances are produced conversationally by learners and facilitators. Tension exists between the ideological position and the role of the gallery as ‘expert’: this conflict creates ambivalence towards the learner. The discourse of the ‘expert’ and the discourse of ‘local negotiation’ employ different pedagogic strategies, creating tension in the ways in which knowledge is reproduced for the visitor and participant. This article explores interrogatory pilot work with young people at Tate Modern. I use a hermeneutical approach to explore the interpretive roles of facilitator and participant when language-based strategies are used to look at art. This research aims to construct a pedagogy that enables young people to learn about art in ways that take account of their situation as learners

Making ‘Culture Vultures’: an investigation into the socio-­‐cultural factors that determine what and how young people learn in the art gallery

This thesis focuses on the Raw Canvas youth programme at Tate Modern (1999-2011). Data is drawn from peer-led workshops and interviews with gallery education professionals. The material has been sifted to extract understanding of the ways in which pedagogies imagine and construct learners in voluntary and unaccredited educational environments. The particular educational context of the art gallery, in comparison to learning in formal educational environments, is central to the research. The title refers to Peterson’s (1992) conception of the ‘cultural omnivore’ as an individual whose tastes span popular and high cultures. This term describes the work of youth programmes at Tate Modern whilst simultaneously revealing the underlying problem: that such cultural infidelity is primarily a middle class characteristic. Was the aim of this youth programme to make all young people middle-class? The thesis begins by exploring the historical context for gallery education before a detailed study of theoretical frameworks for the interpretation of art: hermeneutics. Specific interrogation of critical, constructivist and emancipatory pedagogies create a backdrop to the analysis. Audience development and inclusion initiatives are key themes that run throughout the study and are explored in relation to the political landscape, personal ideologies and the academic imperatives of learning in this context. The outcomes point to the fact that inclusion initiatives fail to be inclusive when they employ pedagogies that are not suited to individual learners and rely too heavily on the specific ideology of the learning institution itself. Ideologies define what we do and as such they must be made visible to young people and be open for discussion so that we avoid merely teaching acceptance of the dominant ideology of the time. I conclude that art educators must consider what we are doing for learning and the arts and whom we are doing it for

Creative Activism – learning everywhere with children and young people

Creative activism is an approach to education that asks, ‘What can happen when we take learning outside the classroom and think of it happening everywhere?’. Two charities - House of Imagination and Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination - have been asking this question in their creative place-making programmes working with socially engaged artists and communities linked to primary schools in Bath and Cambridge. Young children and adults co-create and speculate about the future of their communities and environments in these different geographical locations. This article draws together our shared understanding of creative pedagogies and the value to everyone of working in this way

Climate Impact Storylines for Assessing Socio-Economic Responses to Remote Events

Complex interactions involving climatic features, socio-economic vulnerability or responses, and long impact transmissions are associated with substantial uncertainty. Physical climate storylines are proposed as approach to explore complex impact transmission pathways and possible alternative unfolding of event cascades under future climate conditions. These storylines are particularly useful for climate risk assessment for complex domains, including event cascades crossing multiple disciplinary or geographical borders. For an effective role in climate risks assessments, practical guidelines are needed to consistently develop and interpret the storyline event analyses.This paper elaborates on the suitability of physical climate storyline approaches involving climate event induced shocks propagating into societal impacts. It proposes a set of common elements to construct the event storylines. In addition, criteria for their application for climate risk assessment are given, referring to the need for storylines to be physically plausible, relevant for the specific context, and risk-informative.Six examples of varying scope and complexity are presented, all involving the potential climate change impact on European socio-economic sectors induced by remote climate change features occurring far outside the geographical domain of the European mainland. The storyline examples illustrate the application of the proposed storyline components and evaluates the suitability criteria defined in this paper. It thereby contributes to the standardization of the design and application of event-based climate storyline approaches

Diffractive Pedagogies- dancing across new materialist imaginaries

This paper outlines the affirmative potential of diffractive pedagogies, presenting learning through dance as its central empirical focus. Drawing on data from the university classroom and new materialist scholarship, we consider the problem of learning through the body for university students. We argue that embodied creative processes within pedagogical contexts can liberate those who learn from reproducing, or being reproduced, as the finite set of reductive yet historically determined and governed images, figures or metaphors assigned to them. Building on a feminist investment in the agency of materiality we think through the problem of the body as a site of learning in the university. Learning in higher education is popularly thought as pertaining to the transfer of abstract knowledge, and this process typically occurs in ways that largely ignore the physicality of learning. A pedagogical system which presents repeated structures and patterns of discourse as more valued vehicles for learning than experimentation and creation recognises only preconceived, representational models of thought and expression. This philosophical imaginary therefore requires reconfiguring, to allow for embodied and creative learning processes that are open-ended, nomadic and affirmative