Abstract/Summary

This thesis explores the agency of art practice on university students and their evolving identities as artists and trainee teachers. The purpose of the research is to better understand how their perceptions of self and identity can inform their future aspirations within the teaching of art at primary school. The study is particularly focussed on the students whose cohort, age and art practice are concurrent with socio-cultural behaviours and events relevant to their lived and living experiences. Theories around identity construction and art as research underpin the conceptual framework of this study. At a time when art, as a subject across educational phases, is under threat and undervalued, the thesis sheds light on the importance of it as a subject with agential potential to enquire about life in all its forms. An interpretative paradigm was followed, taking a qualitative participatory approach and using a wide range of visual data methods to capture lived experiences and perspectives. The visual data produced was generated by twenty-seven undergraduate students within the art studios at a university in England, over the course of an academic year of their primary education degree. A reflexive thematic analysis approach was used to explore, deconstruct, and reflect on the data during and after the production period. The key findings of the research indicate that past experiences of art education were restricted by rules, regulations and standardised outcomes thus significantly influencing how students viewed the subject of art as teachers entering the primary classroom. The situated experience of space, time and collaborative engagement within a designated art environment enabled them to disclose and share important perspectives in relation to their evolving identities and aspects of self. The students’ navigation in this experiential process affected a greater understanding of the transformational potential of art, through which to explore personal and political issues. This window of opportunity within their university degree informed the students’ aspirations and intentions as future teachers in art and as co-collaborators in knowledge production. Key contributions to knowledge were to make time and space to listen to and work with teacher trainee students in order to understand them better and so equip them to become listening teachers for their own class of children. To incorporate a ‘what if’ approach to teaching, through the agency of art enables a more contemporary and autonomous pedagogy for both teacher and learner. Finally, the research suggests that art, as a creative and exploratory agent, enables reflective decision-making to evolve. The study understands this as a powerful tool for learners across all phases of education but particularly for those who can then model this within their own primary classrooms to reposition and raise the profile of art.