Art in Education : Identity and Practice

MEMORY SEED My introduction to teaching art began in September 1971 when I took up a post as art teacher in a secondary school in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Apart from my desire to survive and establish myself amongst students and staff I remember holding firm ideas about what I should be teaching. In relation to drawing and painting I had clear expectations concerning practice and representation. Students’ art work which did not correspond to these I rather naively) considered as weak and in need of correction. I assumed wrongly that when students were making paintings and drawings from observation of objects, people or landscape, they should be aiming to develop specific representational skills associated with the idea of ‘rendering’ a reasonable likeness. I was reasonably familiar with the development of Western art and different forms of visual representation and expression and I knew, for example, that the projection system perspective is only one and not the correct rep- sentational system for mapping objects and their spatial relations as viewed from a particular point into corresponding relations in a painting or drawing. Nevertheless I still employed this mode of projection as an expectation or a criterion of judgement when teaching my students.