The transformative potential of art education: Inviting subjectivities into the classroom

This thesis explores the transformative potential of art education. In particular, it argues that art education can be a productive site to explore the multiplicities of subjectivities and to adopt the transformative principles of feminist poststructuralism. To illustrate this notion, I researched a number of key spaces and texts related to art education. Firstly, I documented the art that was created by senior art students in three Queensland secondary schools. In addition to students' art, I documented their visual journals as a way of constructing meanings around their art. Secondly, I conducted interviews with three senior art teachers, which were aimed at exploring their personal philosophies to teaching and art education and their attitudes towards subjectivity in art. Finally, as a means of providing a context for these texts, I also undertook observations of the school and classroom spaces. From these data, I used the poststructuralist tool of discourse analysis to explore how schools, teachers and students take up, mobilise and occupy transformative spaces and discourses.

In adopting a feminist poststructuralist framework, this thesis opens by stressing the importance of writing from my body, subjectivity and lived experiences. I do so by exploring my own art and how I have used this space to explore my lived experiences and subjectivity. I also situate my methodology, research sites and participants. From this discussion, in Chapter Two, I discursively position my research within the literature. As such, in Chapter Two I focus on three key texts that allow my review to move between educational discourses, the gendering of art education and the transformative potential of art education. In Chapter Three, I explore in more detail poststructuralism's notion of subjectivity and the politics of transformation. As I argue, this perspective enables my research to adopt a productive way of seeing and understanding subjectivity and provides strategies of transformation. In Chapter Four, I outline how this lens has influenced the way I have constructed, designed and approached my research. After establishing the theoretical premise and design of my research, the next four chapters focus on the analysis of my research data. In Chapter Five, I analyse how students create art that resonates with the transformative principles of feminist poststructuralism. In doing so, I highlight how students use the potential of art education to explore their multiple subjectivities, embodiment and lived experiences. However, I believe this tells only part of the transgressive story, as the transformative potential of art education is a multi-layered and complex issue. Therefore, in the following three data analysis chapters, I explore some of the complexity surrounding art education and outline some of the possible factors or reasons that may contribute to students creating transformative art. In Chapter Six, I argue that the curriculum documents that relate to art education (such as the Visual Art Senior Syllabus and the teachers' work programs) provide spaces for students to explore their subjectivity and equip them with strategies of transformation. In Chapter Seven, I outline some of the differences that art education embodies and, by doing so, I suggest that these differences may contribute to the transformative possibilities of art education. In Chapter Eight, I discuss how art education can provide a space for students to explore and express emotions that have been traditionally edited out of the school environment. In the final chapter, I summarise my findings and suggest spaces for further research. Through this process this thesis advocates for art's importance in education. As such, it contributes to the ways in which teachers and schools recognise, accommodate and celebrate the role art has in the ongoing construction and negotiation of subjectivity.