Abstract

In this very visual presentation, what happens during a collaborative imaginative drawing workshop for 10-year-old primary school children is shown to be at odds with an implicit conceptual framework for art curricula which still foreground individuals making discrete art objects. For example, in the UK, a number of art educators question this established fine-art approach and contrast it with developments in contemporary art.

In a 2012 paper, the British art educator, Dennis Atkinson, turns to Jacques Rancière’s tale of intellectual emancipation in The Ignorant School Master (1991). What happened as children drew together in the workshop is brought together with the implications for pedagogy of Rancière’s story and with ideas about relation and participation in contemporary art championed by curator Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) and critic Claire Bishop (2012).