Agency and Social Construction: Practice of the Self in Art and Design

Abstract

Learning in the arts has the potential to be a co‐constructive means of inquiry for students, which enables experience of the self in relation to practice. This research explores a practice‐based investigation of agency as self‐definition, amid normative social constructions of the subject. The focus for data analysis is a project taught to BTEC Level 2 Art and Design students in a deprived area of North London (2010–12). A dialogue is presented between the implications for Sartre's theory of free‐will and a Foucauldian critique of social construction. Applications for this comparative theory are discussed here as a form of resistance to the compression of learning identities in art and design, and across the curriculum. This is an approach which encourages emancipated self‐representation, acknowledging cultural diversity, for a discursive environment viable at all levels of study. In exploring the data, a positioning of free‐will with social responsibility is identified as an inclusive forum for creative understanding, and the tolerance of difference.

Relational freedom and equality in learning: the affect of Sartre and Rancière

“…In this case Sartre prioritises free will in learning, and the student's spark of agency in working through an ethical dilemma (Matthews 2018b). Sartre as philosopher and educator signals a turning point, which corresponds with Rogoff's 'educational turn' (Rogoff 2008, Graham, Graziano andKelly 2016) so that we can visualise the removal of social constraints upon our life choices.…”

“…Existentialism encourages us to question passive learning patterns and invite active participation (Detmer 2005). When young people have the space to talk about choices they would like to make, they can also discuss issues in society that they feel are holding them back (Matthews 2018b). In these discussions we may begin with a question such as, 'What would you do if you could make your choices in complete freedom?'…”

“…I have recognised active freedom in students' self-generated and dialogical learning in schools, universities, galleries, museums and community settings. I find that the encouragement of this form of agency enables a breathing space from the expectations of formal learning, that can release capacity to take more confident decisions and be more vocal within learning experiences (Matthews 2018b). Learning pathways as 'roads of freedom' need to be able to travel in and out of education systems (Sartre 2009).…”

“…I found that it was possible to unpack Sartrean concepts -for example in discussions of free will, responsibility and creative action with sixth-form vocational art and design students aged 16-19. These interventions through practice included students with social and economic disadvantages, who had previously found it difficult to expand from experiences of limitation (Matthews 2018b).…”

Pattern and pedagogy in print: Art and Craft Education in the mid twentieth-century classroom

“…In observing the world, finding order and pattern within it, and creating their own symbols and abstracted units from their experience of the, children are approaching the roots of language and symbolic thought, and also centring themselves within their experience of the world, creating their own visual 'language' to make sense of it. He argues that the sense of empowerment that children experience in this way is a kind of energy, or 'contagion', which 'passes like fire from spirit to spirit' (Barry 1937: 26) and is experienced on a collective as well as an individual level (Matthews 2018).…”