The Hidden Curriculum

Closing Remarks

The first privilege of today has been in gaining first hand access to the variety and diversity of impactful and adventurous practices that maintain and promote the dynamic qualities of Fine Art pedagogy as a strategy for heuristic and rhizomatic learning. What comes across from all of the excellent papers and descriptions of practice is the forceful dedication to principles that run through our community and have stayed with our community throughout generations of change. In general terms, the Hidden Curriculum conference has offered a picture of active resistance and inspirational alternatives in the face of constraining institutional and infrastructure manoeuvres whose pragmatic purpose is often detached from sound educational values.  As might be expected, the Fine Art Education community, represented at this conference, is constantly inventing means and ways of exciting, or agitating procedures of cultural production; the process of education is one of the most compelling and essential causes of cultural production. Events such as this are of increasing importance as we construct confidence around our practice community to champion the real values of Fine Art education. 

The environment for Fine Art education is subject to constant change and, it has to be said, interference.  There is nothing new in that, it has always been something of a fairground ride in terms of policy interventions and structural repositioning.  It is our habit to challenge and to offer potential beyond those policy objectives and for this to be most effective, we need to consolidate and we need to consolidate around certain principles.   

In recent years and decades we have enlarged participation and we have extended and expanded our discipline in response to dynamic and diverse cultural priorities.  We did that; educators and students working in the studio and classroom, and we will carry on because of a fundamental human need for cultural agency.  This relates to what was said at the beginning of the day about Fine Art Education offering fundamental rights to each in society. But at the same time, we must protest the current climate affecting education, ostensibly brought about by aggressive austerity; reduced contracts for art teachers in secondary and primary schools, the strategic shift from humanities and the arts in national educational policies, the continuing disinvestment in Level 3 Art and Design provision, the obsessive plotting to destroy any vestige of funding support for students in post-compulsory education, the barbaric housing policies that render student poverty critical.  The government is consolidating and severely reducing educational access and, specifically, access to art education, so we must consolidate to offer resistance.

And we have to collaborate, at events like this (the annual NAFAE symposium) and through our relations as networked artists and friends.  As educators, we are not and cannot be in competition.  We are not motivated by the prospect of beating each other and developing a dominant reputation for one University corporate brand or another.  We are not motivated by the TEF and the professionalization of HE educators. We are not motivated by the stratification of teaching contracts, nor by the hierarchies that qualify our status as researchers, or senior fellows, or professorial experts who offer impact. Not at all! We are motivated by our passion for the subject; by the transformational potency of art and its value to the lives of individuals, by the capacity of Fine Art practice to sustain a lifelong vocation in our students, by the essential human right of each and every individual to experience culture as both producer and consumer, by the offer of genuine democracy if we can properly assure that the arts can be respected as a condition of human experience and social exchange where excellence is purely a measure of specialist endeavour rather than a privilege of class or exclusive education. 

The privatisation of Higher Education has led us down a path of free market competition where Fine Art education has variable economic worth and profitability. The commercialisation of qualifications has led some students to doubt their rights to access, others to withdraw from relevant opportunities, and others to compete where there is no competition The privatisation of the HEA and now the QAA will, inevitably, pitch us (as educators) in direct competition with one another, where as we are simply individuals working towards the same and similar goals. The Professional Standards Framework, in the midst of all of this, is wrong headed and potentially mitigates against cultures of Fine Art education via a process of standardising education. It will constrain rather than afford the practices that bring us together as a community and confirm our association.  This variety of initiatives are inspired by governments and they are designed to distract attention away from the politics of education; they effectively demonise difference and marginalise alternative perspectives. Our habit of collaboration and co-operation will help us to remain grounded. We must remain centrally concerned with lived experiences and with the rich diversity of culture and cultural production.

And we need to unite. We are not a union but we do need to support our unions and each other. Our conditions of employment are at risk. Our freedoms in the workplace are at risk. We are being told what to teach and it will limit the education we want to offer. The fact is, I do not want to take registers from Teresa May.  I have no intention of adjusting studio cultures so that we can monitor the attendance of terrorists disguised as art students.  I do not want to waste time devising operational systems to support the ‘Prevent Strategy’; ethically testing the potential interpretations of student content and embedding censorship into the preliminary stages of making and thinking.  I am not willing to act for this ideological despot. I will not marginalise individuals. I will not silence student voices. I will not limit the rights of each unique citizen in terms of their cultural references or habits of expression. And I will not condemn principles of educational freedoms to memory; because it seems we must now preserve the privileges of competitive capital and, thereby, maintain a system of orthodoxy and hegemony that does not come from us. We have unity through our dedication to our subject, to Fine Art as a activity and an attitude, and through our passion for teaching and our compassion for open democracy. We must link with other networks both inside and out of the UK and we must move beyond the constraints of nationhood.

As always, we face massive challenges, both current and future, and we need to be aware of them but not at the expense of what we do best. Our conferences this year and last have debated and examined examples and initiatives that have successfully challenged an increasingly constrained framework for education in the areas and disciplines of Fine Art. Our refreshed collaboration with the European network PARADOX will keep us focused on the tangible and salient properties of a Fine Art education that is still attempting to properly value diversity in relation to; sources of knowledge, ethical responsibilities, access to resources, and frameworks for aesthetic experience and cultural representation. That governments are attempting to limit that diversity and limit access to education by stealth and austerity is one of the key themes for our organisation going forward. It is our privilege to offer resistance and to source alternative responses and strategies to the prevailing Tory policies of political containment and exaggerated social fragmentation.

Professor Paul Haywood
NAFAE joint chair