Art as Education: Redefining a Live Art Practice as a Pedagogical Tool, and its Perception and Place in the Learning Environment

My research study examines and tests how the pedagogical elements of live art have the potential to contribute to young people’s development and to play a transformative role in secondary education. It uses a methodology underpinned by a constructivist epistemology that promotes knowledge construction through disruption. The problem that this research addresses is revealed through the rising crisis for art under the STEM curriculum (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths, excluding the arts). Moreover, a focus on attainments generates a counterproductive anxiety for students, and for teachers who are driven to ‘teach to the test’ (Giroux, 2017, p.9). This transpires through contemporary educationalist discourse in the field of critical pedagogy. These issues demonstrate a need for change that motivated this research study, in which live art acts as an agonistic tool in secondary education.

An investigation of past pedagogic art projects, which began with Beuys’ teaching performances in the 1960s, highlights the tensions that this practice brings to education. The rise of social art from the 1960s onwards presents the artistic context in which the radical stance of live art as a shifting practice has developed. Criticality, resistance, and disruption emerge as pedagogical elements. My research study tests their potential impact within educational contexts. This live art methodology becomes embedded in an action research investigation in schools as a democratic and self-reflexive enquiry. Elements that contribute to young people’s development are revealed through a diffractive qualitative methodology that considers a ‘more-than-human assemblage’ (Hickey-Moody and Willcox, 2019, p.1).

The final presentation of findings in a performance reveals the role of live art as an episteme that provokes self-reflexivity. My immersion in the secondary education system authorised the integration of this live art practice in the art curriculum (UK). An artistic manifesto is proposed as an alternative art syllabus that incites and respects individual freedom. The sustainability of this radical practice was questioned when embedded in the mainstream education system that relies on discipline and order. The final discussion considers embodiment, vulnerability, and unpredictability as elements that can transform the perception of assessments in education—a consideration of creative modes of self that supports responsibility, self-construct, and agency for learning to be-in-the-world.