My Inquiry: Student Art in School Spaces

Transforming Space into Place

Over twenty years ago, I engaged in painting murals on the walls of my secondary school. Many students contributed works over the years and in retrospect as a secondary art teacher, I can affirm the power of artworks in shared school spaces to transform ‘space’ into ‘place’. Institutional public buildings such as schools are very rarely noted for their architectural merits and I am interested in facilitating opportunities for students to humanize their places of learning through artworks which lend relevance and meaning to the space of their formative years. These actions need not be permanent murals. Temporary sculptural installations are also worthwhile possibilities. Art education philosopher Gert Biesta and aesthetic philosopher Roger Scruton have shaped my thinking about how art can help us ‘feel at home in the world’.

In a recent article about the meaning of art education Biesta draws on Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of our existential struggle to “reconcile oneself to reality” (Arendt, 1994 as cited in Biesta, 2019). Biesta utilizes her thinking about ‘feeling at home in world’ to illustrate the very point of art education itself. He explains how art is particularly well suited to a contemplative search for values which help one live one’s life in a grown-up way. In his book “Beauty: A Very Short Introduction” (2009) Scruton sees beauty as a value much like truth and goodness, and as such he considers the aesthetic as generative to reconciliation with the world:

"Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared and public world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path; it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us" (p. 145).

As a new art teacher entering institutional buildings generally bereft of beauty, I am eager to inquire into how I might facilitate student art interventions which reconcile, interrupt or transform soul-less spaces.

In “Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience” (1977) humanist geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan investigates the nature of our experience of space and place. He explains that “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (p. 6). Tuan asks us to consider “what gives a place its identity, its aura?” (p. 4). His research considers the importance of generating meaningful place “as tenants of the earth practically concerned with the design of a more human habitat (p. 7). Art interventions or installations within shared space are typically mounted because of their potential to alter the value of their respective environments. From Scruton’s perspective, this aesthetic potential constitutes a ‘re-enchantment’ necessary to feel at home in the world.

Why Beauty Matters

Scruton describes how the architectural beauty of English boarding schools “arose neither by accident nor by design, but from the unconscious need for atmosphere, for a sheltering and quasi-maternal presence…(2000, p. 165).” One can quite easily categorize the soul-less and sterile utilitarian cinder-block buildings of many public schools at the other end of this aesthetic spectrum. In the 2009 BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters”, Scruton critiques the architectural credo that form should follow function and shows how it has been used to “justify the greatest crime against beauty that the world has yet seen – that is the crime of modern architecture”. He rails against ugly architecture “spoiling what might have been a home and leaving us to wander unconsoled and alienated in a spiritual desert”. Having grown up in a decrepit and overcrowded mobile home in rural BC, I wholeheartedly concur that degrading architecture can affect one’s mood and dignity. In an article investigating the role of culturally relevant art education in society, June King McFee writes of the debilitating force of inhumane town planning and architecture. She states that the “magnitude of the problem of decaying living conditions with respect to the sense of identity and self-respect in the personality development of children can only be guessed” (1965, p. 89).

McFee suggests that “helping students gain the capacity for critical aesthetic judgement” (p. 93) might counteract architectural trends to “more and more ugly monotony…in bland and impersonal areas that have little colour or cultural meaning” (p. 92). While it is comforting to imagine that art students might one day exert positive aesthetic influence on the built environment, it is still necessary to facilitate opportunities to resist the psychologically disfiguring force of present-day spaces. The dark, sprawling, squat cinderblock architecture of many schools is utilitarian and lacking in ornamentation or beauty. Scruton notes that architectural “ornaments liberate us from the tyranny of the useful and satisfy our need for harmony - in a strange way they make us feel at home” (2009). The Vancouver Heritage Foundation states that Arthur Erikson’s modernist edifice, Simon Fraser University is often described as dehumanizing, authoritarian and alienating (2014). SFU has long been rumored to possess the highest suicide rate of any Canadian post-secondary school and its excessive use of rectilinear concrete is persistently blamed for this unsubstantiated statistic. Local news states that this is an urban legend which has been around since the early 1980s (The Province, 2016). Factual or not, it is telling that SFU’s architecture is consistently implicated as the progenitor of psychologically induced violence.

Architectural stressors to wellbeing are also embodied in ‘micro-aggressions’ present in a building’s small details. Small features that we none-the-less see, touch and use every day such as office-security barriers, security cameras, windows that don’t open and hard benches convey the message that we are unwelcome and that education and/or its students are not of value. Addressing questions of phenomenology in relation to spatial landmarks, scholar Sarah Ahmed states that “subjects reproduce the lines that they follow” (2006, p. 17). For Ahmed “The question of orientation becomes, then, a question not only about how we “find or way” but how we come to “feel at home.” (p. 7). School architecture that resembles prisons, hospitals, courtrooms, police stations, welfare and unemployment offices orients students towards familiarity with institutions of crisis and control. Depressing parallels are immediately drawn between a student’s educational environment and their future fate within these aesthetically evoked institutions. Architectural similarities between public schools, factories and prisons are often noted by scholars. Indeed, Foucault asks “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals…?” (1995, p. 228).

Collaborative Aesthetic Interventions

What prisons, factories and social service buildings commonly lack however, is an environment decorated with youthful art. It is difficult to imagine entering an elementary school without being delighted by children’s art pinned to the walls and I question why secondary schools should be any different. In “Aesthetics and the Experience of the Arts: Towards transformations” (1980) Maxine Green states that “There is no question but that the arts have been and continue to be treated cavalierly or suspiciously in the schools…”(317). I have no wish to facilitate art installations which satisfy youthful needs to personalize school space at the expense of adult staff who may view teenage art rather differently. My proposed solution to this problem is to facilitate artworks in shared space which have only a limited life-span. In addition to designated display cases, temporary art installations of sculpture and wall-mounted works throughout the school can create opportunities for students to experiment without permanently altering shared space with wall murals. Whilst some students are happy to exhibit alone, many teenagers feel more comfortable exhibiting together and would benefit from curatorial experience. Art educator Matt Christenson explains that “when students know everyone is putting up their work, the peer dynamic in the room becomes less competitive and more supportive” (2017). It is my hope that a preponderance of fresh and enagaging temporary group art installations installed throughout the halls will positively alter the way student’s experience the space of their schools.

Censorship in Shared Spaces

It is important to consider how an art installation in shared school space works to counteract existential estrangement. Art in shared school spaces can lend institutional hallways a distinct atmosphere and flavour. Indeed, small degrees of aesthetic intervention can serve to relieve grim surroundings through adding warmth and ‘relatability’ to inhospitable spaces especially if they are student-generated. It is also important to consider how artistically altered spaces can generate antagonism in school. In collaborative student undertakings, aesthetic disagreement can arise among participants. It is important to take the lead on curating collaborative installations in order to avoid this outcome. The predicament of how to responsibly facilitate art in public space can also be answered with corollary teachings on censorship. For example, the facilitation of a collaborative project in shared school space should include lessons which scaffold student understanding of censorship. My lessons on public art are informed by art education scholar Sebastian Fitch who emphasizes that teaching about censorship can raise critical thinking skills, awareness of multiple points of view, and self-awareness. Fitch quotes Henley (1997) who argues that “a distinction needs to be made between a student’s ‘right to create [and] the privilege to show’” (2018, p. 246). Should the need arise to censor a student’s work, lessons about the necessity of censorship may diffuse feelings of unfair treatment and prevent a situation in which young artists are discouraged from further artmaking.

As a former student muralist, and contemporary artist who has executed many public artworks, I can be in no doubt that the act of creating public works is a worthwhile learning experience for students. My inquiry into student art in school spaces asks not whether collaborative student art installation is valuable as a creative exercise, but if and how it might ameliorate student experience of school spaces. As this is ultimately an aesthetic question, I cannot produce hard evidence of how art can transform space into place. Rather, I must rely on feeling the ways in which this may or may not occur through immersion within the atmosphere of the school. Yi-Fu Tuan explains that “Places are centres of felt value” (p. 4). It is my hope that further inquiry will validate the place of arts (literally) within the schools. Scruton convincingly shows that the experience of beauty is integral to a fulfillment of our longing to be at home in the world. Biesta also confirms that ‘the existential challenge is not to run away from the world but to try to be at home in it’ (2019). In facilitating projects in which students integrate artwork with their lived environment, I hope to provide opportunities for them to do so.

References

Ahmed, S. (2006). Introduction in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Biesta, Gert. (2019, September 1). Trying to be at home in the world: New parameters for art education. Artlink.https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4781/trying-to-be-at-home-in-the-world-new-parameters-f/

Christianson Matt (2017) The Power of Displaying Every Student Art Piece. The Art of Education University. https://theartofeducation.edu/2017/02/21/power-displaying-every-student-art-piece/

50 little-known facts about 50-year-old Simon Fraser University. (2016, January 31). The Province. https://theprovince.com/news/local-news/50-little-known-facts-about-50-year-old-simon-fraser-university#:~:text=It%20actually%20has%20the%20highest,50

Fitch, Sebastian. (2018). Turning polemics into pedagogy: Teaching about censorship in art education. International Journal of Art & Design, 37(2), 244-252.

Foucault, Michel. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. NY: Vintage

Greene, Maxine. (1980). Aesthetics and the experience of the arts: Towards transformations. The High School Journal, Vol. 63(8), pp. 316–322.

Lockwood, Louise and Roger Scruton. (2009). Why Beauty Matters. Documentary movie. UK: BBC2. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/128428182

McFee, June King. (1965). Society, Art, and Education. Visual Arts Research, Vol. 42, No. 2, Looking Back, Looking Forward (Winter 2016), pp. 86-104.

Scruton, Roger. (2011). Beauty A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Vancouver Heritage Foundation. (2014, July 23). Modernism in Vancouver Part One: Post War Idealism. Spacing Vancouver.

http://spacing.ca/vancouver/2014/07/23/modernism-vancouver-part-one-post-war-idealism/

my mind map about student art in school spaces: