Significant personal experiences of Art in education

1. The purely Heuristic curriculum (identifying the need for didactic learning)

A lot of my drive to work in education as a teacher has come from a severe deficiency in teachers that cared enough to teach the subject. It seems a harsh and extreme sentiment, but sadly this was a trend of disappointment that followed me for seven years. I've had good teachers, even in subjects I didn't much care for, and at every conjunction in these years I fully believed that 'if only i take art GCSE...' or 'if only I take art A-Level' then the teaching would improve. Instead, every lesson was given in the form of a single recurrent sentence:

'The next task is in the back of your books, as always, get on with it until the bell goes.'

The role of the art teacher, in my personal experience was no different to a cover teacher. And it is precisely this lack of passion that inspires me to want to be an art teacher, to give lessons with as much care and passion that I saw other teachers deliver in other subjects.

This persistent disappointment over seven years may well be the most influential experience of art education.

This in fact led to me seeking didactic resources to fill the hole being diluted by state education.

Themes:

- didactic and heuristic - structure for an essay?

- can also be examined by applying Eisner's three levels of curriculum

- Which approach is more proficient in delivering the curriculum for art and design?

2. My first experience of responsive teaching

In 2016, I took a private 'portfolio booster' course with Oxford Brookes university. This was an intensive summer school program over a few days and was my first encounter with a teacher who took seriously the profession of teaching art. To discuss artists, create unique work and provide access to a wealth of facilities that I had never had the opportunity to work with before. The teacher was engaging and incredibly critical, which as I had never experienced before I appreciated greatly.

An example of the work I produced during this time which was especially important for my own development is the following work 'Wooden Elephant (2017)'. This was the product of my first lesson which used mimetic strategies and both heuristic and didactic strategies in the same lesson.

Themes:

- Responsive teaching practice

- Difference between state and private education - educational apartheid reading

3. A call to create meaningful art (reflecting on the shortfalls of my secondary education)

The next most significant experience within art education was my interview process for studying Fine Art at University. I had spent a lot of time putting together a portfolio of work that i thought best showed my talent. I had taken it to a painting academy in Florence, who said they it would suffice accepting an application and I had taken it to Reading university who had subsequently offered me an unconditional offer. It was only when I took it to AUB, where the head of the fine art course reviewed it and called all of the work 'meaningless' that I felt this immediate motivation to make art that was undeniably meaningful, starting projects as activism and protesting social difference.

Themes:

- Meaningful practice

- learning as meaningful experience, identifying through the artwork I had produced, that the education I had received did not create meaningful experience for me.

- limits of my education before university - no exposure to artists or to art history/ significant discussions

- Null curriculum - identified a deficiency in my education that I was unaware of because I had not experienced anything different

4. The didactic lecture's profitability to encourage the production of intellectually stimulating art

Another significant experience, came at university, when finally i received didactic lectures on movements in contemporary art. The most significant of these did not come from artists, but those delivered by professional art researchers. This change from complete openness and heuristicism to a purely didactic model identified the element of 'knowledge' that had been absent in my prior studies and in fact inspired greater and more meaningful growth. The shift was not external in regards to skill, but internal with regard to knowledge, critical analysis and decisiveness of action. Particularly these memorable essays investigated institutional critique, the panopticon, iconoclasm and the plasticocene.

Themes: - Importance of didactic teaching

- Developing thought rather than tactile practice

- Shapes understanding

- Leads to work created with meaning

- Shift from an implicit curriculum that champions talent, to a more accessible measure of value