‘Drawing Out’ ‐ a Humanist Approach to Drawing

Over the past twenty‐five years as an art teacher I have sought answers to three questions: 1. In what ways and to what extent can drawing practice explore both conscious and unconscious thought processes? 2. In what ways can the participant individuate his or her experience through the practice of drawing? 3. In what ways can drawing form a dialogue between personal philosophy and experience? Refering to my own experience and pedagogy I define some of the historical, pschological and philosophical contexts for my perception of drawing, including comments from my students, in the process making no special distinction between child and adult art. I have studied the evolution of pupil’s drawing practices and particularly those of my own children, as they assert their own perceptions and responses to experience, conceptualising feelings both sensuous and emotional through telling stories and defining realities. Throughout history the will to draw has persisted, its function differing and changing through time and cultural contexts. Beuys commented that everyone can be an artist, if they want to be; can anyone really afford not to draw?     

‘We've Already Done that One’: Adolescents' Repeated Encounters with the Same Artwork

This article explores the way young people's responses to an image evolve when they engage with it repeatedly. An analysis of the sequential encounters of six adolescents with a Renaissance painting reveals that, as they gained experience with the picture, the youngsters probed for increasingly deeper layers of meaning in the work. Specifically, on their second encounter with the painting, the students showed greater sensitivity to visual information, and they incorporated their own experiences and knowledge into the meaning‐making process more actively than on their first encounter. This study also shows that, once the participants had established a relationship with the artwork on their own terms, they seemed eager to discover contextual information about it. However, far from accepting this information as ‘authority’, the young viewers considered it critically and used it to deepen, expand and revise their personal visions of the painting.     

Online learner’s ‘flow’ experience: an empirical study

This study is concerned with online learners’‘flow’ experiences. On the basis of Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow, flow was conceptualised as a complex, multimentional, reflective construct composing of ‘enjoyment’, ‘telepresence’, ‘focused attention’, ‘engagement’ and ‘time distortion’ on the part of learners. A flow model was put forward with regard to virtual class environment in a traditional university context, comprised with flow antecedents, flow and flow consequences. Based on the model, a virtual‐course flow measure was developed and administered to 525 undergraduate students engaged in virtual classes in order to examine the empirical relationships between measured flow antecedents, flow experiences and flow consequence‐course satisfaction in this case. The analysis of the data showed that: (1) students’ perceptions of their level of ‘skill’ and ‘challenge’ specific to each course are critical to determining the level of flow, (2) flow is a significant predictor of course satisfaction and (3) other than flow, individual differences such as ‘gender’ and ‘having a clear goal’ can make a significant difference in the level of flow in a virtual course. These findings are discussed along with the implications for bringing up a computer‐mediated environment more conducive to flow and learning.     

‘Tell me your story!’ – Making the ‘Other’ Visible through the Development of Collaborative Visual Narratives

This article reports on the findings of a series of participatory video art/documentary workshops designed and implemented to enhance understanding and collaboration between teenagers of diverse cultural backgrounds in the city of Pafos in the Republic of Cyprus. This research initiative was part of The Alien Trail (2017); a photographic project that explored the everyday life of refugees and migrants currently living in the island through the images of four distinguished photographers: Antoine D’Agata, Nikos Economopoulos, Bieke Depoorter and Nicolas Iordanou (Project Creator). The workshops were co‐designed by artists, educators and anthropologists in order to promote visual and multimodal communication amongst participants through short video and documentary making and collaborative drawing sessions. The findings of this practice highlight that teenagers were able to develop empathy and understanding by discussing and sharing meaning through exploring each other’s visual narratives.     

The Story Engine: offering an online platform for making ‘unofficial’ creative writing work

This article describes the outcomes of a research project conducted at the Ministry of Stories (a London‐based writing centre) which sought to develop an online, mentor‐assisted, writing platform. Across a 3‐month period, at four different sites across the UK, more than a hundred Year 7 pupils took part in the project, using the platform to write stories and get feedback from mentors who came from a variety of backgrounds. For reasons of space, pupil/mentor interactions are not discussed extensively in the article; however, these stories were collected and analysed alongside a range of other survey and interview data to establish how creative writing might be developed through online mentoring, the use of an online interface and the intersection of both these tools. The article seeks to answer some questions raised by the data collected in the project, and in turn, uses both the questions and the data to interrogate some of the discourses which surround the teaching of creative writing both in and outside the classroom, and in particular the tensions that occur between the teaching of writing skills, ‘official versions’ of writing in the classroom and children's use of their own cultural resources in creative writing.     

The ‘Golden Egg’

We examine a geometrical construction of a “perfect” egg shape, comparing it with students' conceptions of the ideal shape. Dimensions of birds' eggs are investigated, to find out how egg shapes are related to natural circumstances.     

The evolution of school league tables in England 1992–2016: ‘Contextual value‐added’, ‘expected progress’ and ‘progress 8’

Since 1992, the UK Government has published so‐called ‘school league tables’ summarising the average General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) ‘attainment’ and ‘progress’ made by pupils in each state‐funded secondary school in England. While the headline measure of school attainment has remained the percentage of pupils achieving five or more good GCSEs, the headline measure of school progress has changed from ‘value‐added’ (2002–2005) to ‘contextual value‐added’ (2006–2010) to ‘expected progress’ (2011–2015) to ‘progress 8’ (2016–). This paper charts this evolution with a critical eye. First, we describe the headline measures of school progress. Second, we question the Government's justifications for scrapping contextual value‐added. Third, we argue that the current expected progress measure suffers from fundamental design flaws. Fourth, we examine the stability of school rankings across contextual value‐added and expected progress. Fifth, we discuss the extent to which progress 8 will address the weaknesses of expected progress. We conclude that all these progress measures and school league tables more generally should be viewed with far more scepticism and interpreted far more cautiously than they have often been to date.     

‘That’s just the way I am’: metacognition,personal intelligence and reading

Metacognition is thinking about thinking and there is fairly robust evidence that an awareness of one’s own understanding, especially in reading, is strongly linked with success. Readers who are alert to the problems in their understanding of what they read and can adopt a range of strategies to ‘fix’ these problems tend to be better readers. Kathy Hall and Julia Myers here explore how such awareness works in one child’s view of herself as a reader and suggest that such insights need to form part of a useful assessment of the child’s reading.     

Expanding Higher Education in the UK: From ‘System Slowdown’ to ‘System Acceleration’

This paper sets out to explore the implications of current patterns of participation and attainment, particularly among 16–19 year‐olds, for the further expansion of higher education in the UK. It uses a range of recent statistics on participation and attainment to describe what is termed ‘system slowdown’. It then explores a basis for ‘system acceleration’ through the development of five possible routes into higher education both for 16–19 year‐olds and for adults. We conclude the paper by looking briefly at a number of inter‐related strategies the Government could adopt to encourage ‘system acceleration’. We suggest that unless the Government is prepared to consider policy changes of this type, it is unlikely to reach the higher education participation target it has set itself and may also jeopardise the basis for a sustainable lifelong learning system for the 21st century.     

‘Download’: ‘Postcards Home’ Contemporary Art and New Technology in the Primary School

‘Postcards Home’ using photography, scanning, digital image manipulation, text and colour printing was the third ‘Download’ project devised by the education department of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, England. It was led by artist Laurie Long with teachers and pupils from Pooles Park primary school in Islington, an inner city borough in North London. Based on the production of a postcard featuring an image of personal significance, the children were involved in exploring and constructing their own and others' identities whilst developing their technology skills in creative ways. The project raises interesting questions about the applicability of contemporary art practices to the primary classroom. The research is based on participant observation and includes the voices of the artist and teachers involved.     

‘Eye-candy’ in ‘Interactive Books’– a Wholesome Diet?

CD-ROMs are becoming more widely used now and one particular genre seems to have a good deal to offer as a medium for the development of reading. These so-called ‘interactive books’ have not yet been investigated in terms of their usefulness in teaching reading and Clare Burrell and John Trushell make a useful beginning to this. They are particularly concerned with whether the eye catching graphics of these books helps or hinders children’s reading of them and their report raises many interesting issues.     

From ‘consulting pupils’ to ‘pupils as researchers’: a situated case narrative

Schools in England are now being encouraged to ‘personalise’ the curriculum and to consult students about teaching and learning. This article reports on an evaluation of one high school which is working hard to increase student subject choice, introduce integrated curriculum in the middle years and to improve teaching and learning while maintaining a commitment to inclusive and equitable comprehensive education. The authors worked with a small group of students as consultants to develop a ‘student's‐eye’ set of evaluative categories in a school‐wide student survey. They also conducted teacher, student and governor interviews, lesson and meeting observations, and student ‘mind‐mapping’ exercises. In this article, in the light of the findings, the authors discuss the processes they used to work jointly with the student research team, and how they moved from pupils‐as‐consultants to pupils‐as‐researchers, a potentially more transformative/disruptive practice. They query the notion of ‘authentic student voice’ and show it as discursive and heterogeneous: they thus suggest that both a standards and a rights framings of student voice must be regarded critically.