One of the more memorable lunches I have eaten was in the late 1990’s, at the primary school in west London where I taught for ten years. Needless to say, it wasn’t the food that caused the occasion to lodge in my memory, but a very brief, almost unremarkable conversation. Not even a conversation, really, more of a comment - all I can remember are three words. Nonetheless, they were words that prompted me to pause, then to reflect and eventually to spend significant amounts of time thinking about children’s capacity for engaging with the visual world.
The morning had been overcast and, looking out of the window towards the Halal butcher’s across the street, I noticed an almost imperceptible change in the light, as the pale grey sky slightly darkened. It took a fraction of a second for my eyes to adjust, and a few more for my brain to register the implications. Looks like rain. Wet playtime. PE cancelled. Disappointed children. Disappointed children looking for someone to blame for the rain. At that point I heard a voice. ‘Looks like rain.’ Preoccupied by the prospect of an afternoon spent dealing with the frustration of 30 children and the subsequent and inevitable decline of my mental health, I wasn’t quite sure where the voice was coming from. I looked across the table. ‘Pardon?’ ‘Looks like rain,’ the voice repeated. I clearly remember thinking: How do you know? You’re only six.
Lee Gibbs, a pupil in my Year 2 class and the owner of the voice, was teaching me something. Here he was, chewing a potato, looking out of the same window as me and thinking the same thoughts. Until that lunchtime I had firmly believed that it was my art school education, my countless visits to museums and galleries and my years of experience of making art that enabled me to perceive such subtle changes in the visual world as the slight fading of light from a west London sky. Perhaps the truth was that my education and experience had essentially provided me with the means of expressing a response to the visual world, either in words or images. Perhaps most people, children included, were just like me, carrying around in their heads their own visions – visions of perfection, visions of beauty. Perhaps my role as a teacher should be to provide children with opportunities to express these visions. And perhaps teaching art wasn’t just about learning to draw and paint, perhaps it was about learning to see.
‘No PE then,’ Lee said, stabbing a sausage. I cleared my plate away. We could do PE in the hall.
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
E.M. Forster, sharks in tanks and unmade beds
A few years ago I published an article that explored children’s attitudes to making art, the research for which was prompted by a visit to a Royal College of art degree show; I’d taken a group of 7-11-year-olds from the primary school where I was teaching, and on the bus on the way back to school we got talking about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Since all the children had been selected for the trip because they had a particular talent for art – and since I had gone out of my way to organise this trip for them - I was confident that they would each tell me that they wanted to be an artist.
No such luck. Footballer, fireman, ‘something in the entertainment industry’ – anything, it seemed, but an artist. Slightly stung by these responses, I questioned them about their perceptions of art and artists eventually issued them each with a questionnaire. Why do adults make art? I asked. Why do children make art? Do you think you’ll make art when you grow up? And how is art important?
The responses to these questions were sufficiently reflective and varied in nature to persuade me to repeat the research on a larger scale. With the help of a group of student teachers place in schools, I gathered over 300 responses to these questions, and I also asked the same questions of student teachers themselves (apart from the one about growing up, obviously). I was intrigued to find that one response that was made occasionally by children – though never by adults - was that we make art because it is beautiful.
Initially I thought this response was ‘sweet’ – some children, it seemed, were less interested in the potential of art to challenge preconceptions, break boundaries and explore difficult themes and more interested in pretty pictures of flowers and cottages. The idea of making beautiful art seemed impossibly antiquated: it conjured up images of the Cadbury’s Flake adverts of the 1970’s, a girl in a wispy white dress painting watercolours in a cornfield. I thought of how my tutors at art school in the 1980’s would have scorned the idea of making beautiful art: when we were students, they used to tell us, we would stand at the doorway to the Pre-Raphaelite room at the Tate being sick.
But I also found myself thinking about how many of my current students – mainly non-specialist trainee primary teachers – were nervous of making art in the sessions I taught, particularly when they were asked to make some kind of representational work and especially when asked to draw from observation. In a largely misguided effort to encourage them, I would emphasise how central observational drawing had once been to the lives of young people. ‘When that place was built,’ I would say, pointing through the window to the Victorian grandeur of the main university building, ‘You lot would have been sending home from your holidays exquisite drawings of the beautiful views from your Florentine balconies, not texting your mates from a bar.’
Such reprimands – touching evocations, I liked to think, of scenes from E.M Forster novels – got me thinking about whether the Victorians – and their great-great-great-grandchildren, the schoolkids whose views on art I’d recently solicited – were perhaps right all along. The role once played by observational drawing – recording the beauty and mystery of the natural world, of brief visits to faraway places – was lost forever. Maybe there was more to art than unmade beds and sharks in tanks. Maybe beauty was important. And if it is important, shouldn’t we be getting children to think about it?
No such luck. Footballer, fireman, ‘something in the entertainment industry’ – anything, it seemed, but an artist. Slightly stung by these responses, I questioned them about their perceptions of art and artists eventually issued them each with a questionnaire. Why do adults make art? I asked. Why do children make art? Do you think you’ll make art when you grow up? And how is art important?
The responses to these questions were sufficiently reflective and varied in nature to persuade me to repeat the research on a larger scale. With the help of a group of student teachers place in schools, I gathered over 300 responses to these questions, and I also asked the same questions of student teachers themselves (apart from the one about growing up, obviously). I was intrigued to find that one response that was made occasionally by children – though never by adults - was that we make art because it is beautiful.
Initially I thought this response was ‘sweet’ – some children, it seemed, were less interested in the potential of art to challenge preconceptions, break boundaries and explore difficult themes and more interested in pretty pictures of flowers and cottages. The idea of making beautiful art seemed impossibly antiquated: it conjured up images of the Cadbury’s Flake adverts of the 1970’s, a girl in a wispy white dress painting watercolours in a cornfield. I thought of how my tutors at art school in the 1980’s would have scorned the idea of making beautiful art: when we were students, they used to tell us, we would stand at the doorway to the Pre-Raphaelite room at the Tate being sick.
But I also found myself thinking about how many of my current students – mainly non-specialist trainee primary teachers – were nervous of making art in the sessions I taught, particularly when they were asked to make some kind of representational work and especially when asked to draw from observation. In a largely misguided effort to encourage them, I would emphasise how central observational drawing had once been to the lives of young people. ‘When that place was built,’ I would say, pointing through the window to the Victorian grandeur of the main university building, ‘You lot would have been sending home from your holidays exquisite drawings of the beautiful views from your Florentine balconies, not texting your mates from a bar.’
Such reprimands – touching evocations, I liked to think, of scenes from E.M Forster novels – got me thinking about whether the Victorians – and their great-great-great-grandchildren, the schoolkids whose views on art I’d recently solicited – were perhaps right all along. The role once played by observational drawing – recording the beauty and mystery of the natural world, of brief visits to faraway places – was lost forever. Maybe there was more to art than unmade beds and sharks in tanks. Maybe beauty was important. And if it is important, shouldn’t we be getting children to think about it?
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
Beauty, truth, goodness – and infant school assemblies
It’s Friday morning in the school attended by both my kids: the little hall is packed with small children (singing), parents of small children (wiping the odd tear from the eye) and teachers (knackered). The song comes to an end and it’s time for the real action: the headteacher is about to hand out the treasured wristbands, little bits of sticky paper that will remain for weeks on the wrists of a select few pupils, surviving playground scrapes and bathtime scrubs before, we suspect, changing hands for a fortune on the black market.
How do you get a wristband? Let’s find out. Charlotte in Reception Class is awarded one for being good – her behaviour has once again been exemplary to the class; meanwhile in Year 1 Luke can always be relied upon to be honest, he’s learnt the difference between right and wrong and he deserves his wristband for always telling the truth; finally, Freddie is selected from Year 2 because he’s produced another of his beautiful paintings, and here it is, held up high above his head. Look everyone, says the headteacher, it’s beautiful.
Hovering somewhere above this pleasant scene is a figure clothed in robes and taking notes. It’s Plato, and he’s pleasantly surprised to find that, almost two and a half thousand years after he put the finishing touches to his Hippias Major (What is Beauty?), his influence lives on (at least, as far as infant school assemblies go). Plato was among the first philosophers to reflect on the nature of beauty and believed that beauty, truth and goodness, the Platonic forms, were the essential entities that existed beyond the world of the senses - everything on Earth was, in comparison, second rate.
We would expect young children to be familiar with concepts of truth and goodness. Children frequently encounter these words at home and in school and can assume a shared understanding of their meaning: we’re good when we do as we’re told, we try hard with our work and are kind to others, and the truth is what we should always tell.
But what does beauty mean? Should we agree on what is and what is not beautiful? Or is beauty, as the phrase goes, in the eye of the beholder? Parents tell their children that they are beautiful (it goes alongside loving them) and teachers tell us our work is beautiful (it encourages them to produce more work) so presumably children must have some notion of what the word means. But how would they define it if we asked them? And do they have a notion that it can mean different things to different people?
This is, essentially, what I want to find out through my research over the next couple of years, and this blog is a source of informal updates on recent progress. It’s not intended to be anything academic - just a record of thoughts, ideas and anecdotes about a range of related issues – to which responses would be welcome.
How do you get a wristband? Let’s find out. Charlotte in Reception Class is awarded one for being good – her behaviour has once again been exemplary to the class; meanwhile in Year 1 Luke can always be relied upon to be honest, he’s learnt the difference between right and wrong and he deserves his wristband for always telling the truth; finally, Freddie is selected from Year 2 because he’s produced another of his beautiful paintings, and here it is, held up high above his head. Look everyone, says the headteacher, it’s beautiful.
Hovering somewhere above this pleasant scene is a figure clothed in robes and taking notes. It’s Plato, and he’s pleasantly surprised to find that, almost two and a half thousand years after he put the finishing touches to his Hippias Major (What is Beauty?), his influence lives on (at least, as far as infant school assemblies go). Plato was among the first philosophers to reflect on the nature of beauty and believed that beauty, truth and goodness, the Platonic forms, were the essential entities that existed beyond the world of the senses - everything on Earth was, in comparison, second rate.
We would expect young children to be familiar with concepts of truth and goodness. Children frequently encounter these words at home and in school and can assume a shared understanding of their meaning: we’re good when we do as we’re told, we try hard with our work and are kind to others, and the truth is what we should always tell.
But what does beauty mean? Should we agree on what is and what is not beautiful? Or is beauty, as the phrase goes, in the eye of the beholder? Parents tell their children that they are beautiful (it goes alongside loving them) and teachers tell us our work is beautiful (it encourages them to produce more work) so presumably children must have some notion of what the word means. But how would they define it if we asked them? And do they have a notion that it can mean different things to different people?
This is, essentially, what I want to find out through my research over the next couple of years, and this blog is a source of informal updates on recent progress. It’s not intended to be anything academic - just a record of thoughts, ideas and anecdotes about a range of related issues – to which responses would be welcome.
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