Artist-Teacher

A recent evaluation highlights some disparity between normal art programs and those where practicing artists are in attendance. In the latter, improvements in student learning, creative skills, engagement, and student voice are often noted. How should the benefits that practicing artists often bring to the classroom be inculcated across all art classrooms? Given the fine art training common to most specialist secondary visual art teachers, one approach is to make the art teacher’s own artistic identity more visible; to be both a teacher and an artist. However, the question must be asked as to why this is not already widespread? Is it a fact that art teachers stop making art when they start teaching? Would early-career art making lead to better art teaching practice? Does having an active art practice improve the likelihood of retention of art educators? A longitudinal study is tracking art educators’ early-career experiences, providing information pertinent to these questions. These data help us understand the complex issues that arguably prevent many
teachers from embedding artistic practice into their pedagogy.

O presente trabalho versa sobre a atuação de Renina Katz na área da educação. Artista-professora, trabalhou em diversas instituições, do início da década de 1950 até meados da década de 1980. Ministrou aulas em cursos livres de museus, como no Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) e Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ), bem como no nível superior, em cursos de graduação na Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAU/USP) e Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI). Embora reconhecida por sua contribuição na formação de artistas, arquitetos, designers e professores, carece de um estudo referente a essa vertente paralela, ou seja, ao trabalho desenvolvido concomitantemente a prática artística. Nesse sentido, prezamos tanto em divulgar o seu trabalho, bem como dar visibilidade a um lado ainda pouco discutido.

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.

Käthe Kollwitz, one of the most prominent female artists in Germany, spend almost ten years working as a teacher in two renowned art schools. Even though she was insecure about her teaching assignments, her work as a teacher especially empowered her female students. Two documents from the Archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin that provide the evidence of Kollwitz’s teaching will function as a starting point to approach this topic of female empowerment through teaching.

Written from an Adult Community Learning (ACL) perspective, this research is part of a wider study that interrogates artist-teacher identity (trans)formation. This article explores artist-teacher identity with reference to identity models and character traits.

The Department for Education outline ACL as including “community based and outreach learning opportunities, primarily managed and delivered by local authorities and general further education colleges designed to bring together adults” (DfE, 2019). Learners are typically ages 19+ (House of Commons, 2020:5). ACL falls under FE.

The research employs a mixed methodology including a literature-based review, including key texts from Alan Thornton (2012, 2013), as well as participant research with the use of online surveys.

The research helps to produce new knowledge around the identity and understanding of the artist-teacher from the viewpoint of artist-teachers, managers of artist-teachers and learners of artist-teachers, within an ACL context.

The results of the research include the development of a new identity model and typologies of the artist, teacher and artist-teacher.

This thesis investigates the possibilities for applying Sartrean existential philosophy and Foucauldian post-structural theory to practice in art education. I have focused on Sartre’s concepts of free-will and agency, considering the subject who is capable of transforming life situations; as compared with Foucault’s theorisation of regulatory discourses, the social construction of subjectivity and his ventures into possibilities for negotiated autonomy.
I have been a teacher in sixth form art education throughout this research and have concentrated on this area of education, although I think that some of my findings could be applicable in other areas. Research into the potential for applying philosophy in further education, particularly in practice, is I think an area that has not yet been developed.
To explore my leading question I have analysed data from semi-structured interviews of three research groups: teachers and practitioners, policy makers and sixth form students. I gathered responses from participants in these pedagogical domains to enable a comparative approach between different angles upon issues of freedom and autonomy. I wanted to explore the interface between subjects with polarities of experience, including the precarious interface between educators and policy makers. My reflections on the extent to which policy regulates agency in art education have extended from the 2009 interviews to consider policy changes since the 2010 election.
I have viewed the data presented by my focal participants through the conceptual frameworks of Sartrean and Foucauldian philosophy. I have also conducted action research of my own teaching practice. I planned and taught projects for students which investigate the potential for using existential and post-structural theory as a contextual resource, and as a critical tool for encouraging discursive learning spaces and a more questioning and proactive engagement with learning.

This article examines the findings of the London Cluster research, ‘Critical Minds’, in which the Institute of Education, University of London (IoE) worked in collaboration with Whitechapel Chapel Art Gallery (the lead London gallery), Bow Arts, Chisenhale Gallery and Space -The Triangle, and four east London comprehensive schools. By collaborating with art departments and by focusing on learning within the gallery context, the research team questioned whether the perceived constraints of traditional art and design pedagogy can be overcome by changing the conditions in which learning takes place. The following analysis focuses on these conditions as outlined in the research report's recommendations.

This study aimed at using Project Based Learning (PBL) as a teaching method towards improving students' learning of multimedia crafts at YMCA Comprehensive Institute. This was guided by three research objectives: exploring PBL method as a strategy in multimedia crafts; implementing PBL method and evaluating its impact in teaching and learning of multimedia crafts. To realize these objectives, a Participatory Action Research (PAR) design using situation analysis and future workshop approaches was employed. This approach was qualitative in nature and it involved twenty-five (25) stakeholders who were purposively selected. Data was collected using Focus Group Discussions (FGD), future workshop, observation checklist as well as the interview guides. The interventions consisted of training art teachers on the use of PBL method, monitoring the teaching and learning, and providing a course outline to students in time to plan the material requirements needed for the discipline. Findings of the study revealed that students worked in groups which gave them a responsibility for their learning through self-directed learning and centred the teacher as a facilitator. Although PBL method requires a lot of time for preparation, art teachers adopted the method and managed their time well during teaching and learning. Based on these findings, vocational teachers are recommended to employ PBL method in other vocational disciplines.

In October 2013 we began the artistic and educational project Massot- Dalmases house. It was to work together, give the idea of inclusion in a common project, pupils of compulsory secondary school, disabled, university students and the teacher and artist who led the project.
The same had as its backbone a particular noble palace, built between the XVIII-XIX centuries, belonging to family Massot-Dalmases and located in the town of Cervera (Lleida).
We enter in this space through the House Dalmases Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes the culture, sustainable momentum of the territory, the social economy and employment opportunities and integration of people with special difficulties.
The proposal was carried out with twenty students of compulsory secondary education, La Segarra Institute in Cervera, users of Espígol Occupational Center, center also located in the same town, whose primary work integration of people with disabilities, students of University of Education in the city of Lleida – in service-learning condition- and artist teacher who led the project.
In the project we were interested especially the dichotomy ability / disability, and we wonder about the boundaries between them. The same evidence us what it proposes Michalko (2002), understanding of disability as a legitimate way of being. José María for example we pleasantly surprised us with one video to question the supposed idea of "normality". The dialogues with collective Espígol are an invitation to reflect on our ways of understanding life, while we proposed new alternatives to our old ideas and conceptions.
The project generates different spaces of reflection in inclusion, from the own physical spaces of the house, the Espígol collective, secondary students, university students or the artist teacher.
We believe the project is a good example of common and inclusive project with all the agencies involved, School, Occupational Center and University.

El 8 de marzo de 2014, en el contexto del Día Internacional de la Mujer, un numeroso grupo de personas se reunían a las afueras de El Puntal – Laboratorio de las Artes de Banyoles (Gerona) con un objetivo: construir un muro de resistencia. Pero no se trataba de un muro al uso, rígido y gris: sus ladrillos y argamasa eran cojines de colores.

In this paper I propose to present an exploration of processes of negotiated autonomy in education. The concept of negotiated autonomy is a term I have arrived at through applying a Foucauldian analysis to my observations of how subjects reflect upon their situations within institutions, and engage in theory and practice to regain agency from institutional control mechanisms.

At this point in time teachers and practitioners in education are working in an environment of market forces. These economic drives permeate the regulatory pressures of Ofsted and the performance management of teachers. It is a climate in which the subject is levered through processes that are intended to shape personal discourses of creative freedom, autonomy and productivity, channelling these drives towards institutional requirements.

I will refer to doctoral research data collected between 2009-2012 from teachers, gallery educators and students. I will also draw upon subsequent observations as a teacher in sixth-form education and a lecturer in Education Studies.