By Will Grant – Associate Director of Postgraduate Study in the School of Arts, UWE Bristol.
Linked closely with the Pedagogy strand of the ECRG.
The teaching profession practices in an increasingly fragmented landscape, with school profiles and processes diversified though the marketising instruments of recent policy developments. In a market, the individual teacher can be conceptualised as a competitor – aiming for classroom results and career advancement not alongside colleagues, but against them. Arguably, within this context, neoliberal instruments of surveillance and accountability have fuelled a narrow focus on measurable educational metrics, and created a sector defined by performative action (Atkinson 2018; Ball 2013). One unfortunate parallel development in the profession has been a rapid rise in personal burnout and faculty churn (Ofsted 2019), a paradigm echoed in teacher education, where a recruitment crisis exacerbates the pressure already placed on school leaders.
In 2022/23, recognising this wider context as problematic and frustrated with the genericism of nationally imposed ITE curricular directive, colleagues across four university led ITE programmes co-organised the National Art and Design Initial Teacher Education (NADITE) conference. The premise was promotion of authentic inter-institutional collegiality among student art teachers, such that they recognise and replicate the benefits of community practices on entry to the profession. In contrast to individualistic conceptions of professional success, research suggests that collegiality within the teaching profession might have much positive impact. This includes facilitating knowledge share and creation, improved personal wellbeing, and establishing disciplinary connectivity (Shah 2012).
As a curriculum component on the Art and Design ITE programmes of UWE, Goldsmiths, Bath Spa, and the University of Brighton, the NADITE conference was organised to take place in-person at the National Gallery, London. Alongside a diverse itinerary of innovative student presentations this facilitated engagement with the world class collections and expertise of our hosts. Time was ringfenced for informal dialogue across student cohorts, and very high rates of participation were ensured through travel bursaries – funded by UWE’s pedagogic project fund and the generosity of the National Gallery.
A small-scale evaluation of the conference delegates’ experiences, employing fundamental qualitative description (QD) (Kim et al. 2018), produced very positive findings. Students overwhelmingly felt that the event had been of value to their progression as an ITE student (95%), that the event had increased their confidence about joining the profession (87%), and that they were excited about joining, and perhaps contributing towards, the wider subject community in Art and Design education (93%). Among the descriptive themes that predominated were concepts of assurance, diversity, resilience, and a sense of belonging. While the contrapuntal benefits of collegiality in a neoliberal age are perhaps obtainable by all student teachers, prospective art teachers have more to gain than most from wide and agentic disciplinary collegiality. In a political and theoretical landscape disproportionately hostile to the arts (Adams 2013; Zafirakou 2018), it was particularly interesting, and encouraging, to see strong notions of ‘comradery’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘cooperation’ repeated throughout participants’ responses.
Whether of vocational benefit when working across a large multi-academy trust, i.e., within the emergent expectations of neoliberal orthodoxy, or as a means of ‘assurance’ for critical artistic communities who advocate for alternative futures, post-conference I am more certain than ever – for the professional art teacher, collegiality counts.
References
Adams, J. (2013) The Artful Dodger: Creative Resistance to Neoliberalism in Education, in Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 242–255.
Atkinson, D. (2018) Art, disobedience, and ethics: the adventure of pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kim, H., Sefcik, J., Bradway, C. (2017) Characteristics of Qualitative Descriptive Studies: A Systematic Review, in Research in Nursing & Health, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 23-42.
Ofsted (2019) Teacher well-being at work in schools and further education providers. Ofsted: London.
Shah, M. (2012) The importance and benefits of teacher collegiality in schools – a literature review, in Procedia, vol. 46, pp. 1242-1246.
Zafirakou, A. (2018) Art in schools – no longer a priority?, in The Arts Society, online resource available here:
https://theartssociety.org/arts-news-features/art-schools-%E2%80%93-no-longer-priority [last accessed October 2023].
