Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores why and how the personal creative practice of arts teachers in school matters. It responds to ethnographic research that considers specific works-of-art created by teachers within the context of their classrooms.
Through a classroom-based ethnographic investigation, the book proposes that the potential impact of artist-teacher practice in the classroom can only be understood in relation to the flows of power and policy that concurrently shape the classroom. It shows how artist-teacher practice functions as a creative practice of freedom tending to the present and future aesthetic life of the classroom, countering the effects of neoliberal schooling and austerity politics. The book questions what the artist-teacher can produce within that context.
Through the unique focus on artist-teacher practice, the book explores the changing nature of the classroom and the social and political dimensions of the school. It will be key reading for res
Trade Review
I am delighted to see the publication of Artist-Teacher-Practice and the Expectation of an Aesthetic Life. This book, with its excellent combination of sophisticated theory and frontline ethnographic research, makes a vitally important contribution to research into the concept and practices of the artist-teacher movement. The author has a strong personal grounding in the classroom as an artist teacher herself that has enabled her to make this powerful analysis of the movement in context.
Jeff Adams, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Chester; Fellow of the National Society for Education in Art and Design.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Imagining new orientations for researching artist-teacher practice in neoliberal spaces through the inspiration of new materialisms and new pragmatisms. Part 1: Classroom ways-of-being. Introduction to Part 1. Turn 1: Artist-teacher practice, site-responsiveness and the classroom as aesthetic movement. Turn 2: Artist-teacher practice and creative, transformative, therapeutic objects in the classroom. Turn 3: Artist-teacher practice, becoming the ideal teacher and the disorientation of classroom subjects. Part 2: Being less-than. Introduction to Part 2. Turn 4: Reading about knowledge with Bourdieu and Bernstein: Artist-teacher practice, School Art and powerful knowing. Turn 5: Reading about creativity with Deleuze and Foucault: Artist-teacher practice, neoliberalism and the impossible ideal. Part 3: Becoming more than... Introduction to Part 3. Turn 6: Reading Rancière and Dewey with Jane Bennet: Reconfiguring the politics of the classroom through artist-teacher practice as a third-thing. Turn 7: The gendering of artist-teacher practice: Nurturing the expectation of an aesthetic life through third-site encounters. Conclusion: Sharing responsibility for a life lived aesthetically with art and design education.
