Between 2018 and 2020, eight teachers were involved in a two-year programme of visual-arts focused Creative Professional Development (CPD), delivered in partnership by the organisation Berwick Visual Arts (BVA) and Northumbria University. The overall challenge was to increase cultural leadership; with broader aims to engage North Northumberland…

Ofsted, the inspection authority in England, has told schools to ensure that all students have access to cultural capital, taken as a canon of music, literature and art. In this paper, we trouble this guidance by analysing conversations with 1447 senior secondary students. The students reported that the arts offered considerable personal benefits,…

Purpose: This paper critically examines the development and direction of the Fabricating Future Bodies (FFB) Workshop. Troubling notions of co-production as enacting equality or empowering participants, it draws on feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts to understand it as an eventful process that occurs in unpredictable and shifting…

New Zealand has its educational roots in 19th and 20th century British educational systems with close similarities between English and New Zealand secondary school education structures. In the last two decades, however, secondary school education in both countries has experienced multiple and sometimes radical reforms. Educational policy has…

High school students are expected to make choices about which subjects they study. These choices are not completely open; however, they are steered by what is on offer, previous achievement and conversations with teachers, family and friends; choices are patterned by class, gender, able-ness and race. We offer the perspective of subject choice as…

This paper provides a reflection on the use of visual art workshops in an interdisciplinary feminist project with female survivors of domestic violence living in refuges in England and Portugal. The paper discusses the fieldwork in each location with attention to the interaction between participants, between participants and the researcher/s, and…

History teachers frequently show pupils visual images and often expect pupils to interrogate such images as evidence. But confusions arise and opportunities are missed when pupils do this without guidance on how to 'read' the image systematically and how to place it in context. Barbara Ormond gives a detailed account of how to make the most of…

This paper explores the conflicts engendered during the artist's formation due to repeated submission to assessment in formal creative arts education. In a comparative qualitative study of two visuals arts practice undergraduate curricula, the underlying interpretative approaches to intentionality were uncovered to comprehend the impact of the…

The development of a workshop using the language, techniques, and processes of visual art to introduce particle physics concepts is described. Innovative delivery methods committed to the interaction and collaboration of different specialist areas are utilised, which--in curriculum terms-- encourages connections to be made between separate…

Using visual ethnography as a participatory method that places children's and young people's everyday experiences at the centre of research is discussed in this paper. The strengths and challenges of using participatory visual methods as a way of eliciting the thoughts, feelings and identities of young people within various education and training…

Digital technologies have material and social properties that have the potential to create new opportunities for children's expressive arts practices. The presence and development of oral narratives in young children's visual art-making on paper has been noted in previous research, but little is known about the narratives children create when they…

The European Framework for Key Competences (2006) promotes a shared European identity as a priority for assuring a cohesive future for the European Union (EU), yet the development of a discrete European identity remains acutely contentious, with critics claiming it is too shallow to support the bonds of solidarity needed to engender and support a…

Marginalisation of the visual arts resulting from the marketisation of education impacts young people's access to and interaction with culture on a global stage. In England this educational disruption is characterised by inconsistent access to arts-based curricula and democratic pedagogies, where those from lower socio-economic backgrounds are at…

Digital technologies have the potential to offer new opportunities for children's expressive arts practices. Although adult expectations surround and shape children's visual art making on paper in the early years classroom, such expectations are not so established in relation to digital art making. So how do children make sense of digital art…

This article considers how primary teachers can learn from the practice of artists in their own teaching of art. Fundamental to artistic practice is the notion of practising with various materials and tools. In the article I look at some children's images, as well as scrutinising some statements made by the painter Francis Bacon. The practices of…