Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

The recent appointment of Betsy Devos to the position of US Secretary of Education has reinvigorated arguments for and against the privatization of schools, prompting many proponents of public schools to loudly voice their support of public education as a right (Menashy, 2014). Proponents recognize that privatization further removes schooling from the influence of the public, and instead makes schooling a commodity to be owned by the private sector; greatly reducing the freedoms in which citizens can participate. This qualitative research study explores the efforts of four university art education preservice teachers to create socially engaged artworks in a public middle school. A kind of public pedagogy, I suggest that by creating socially engaged art potential exists for preservice teachers to be in schools in different ways, opening up new ways of thinking about the “publicness” of art, schooling, and their evolving pedagogies. Data included written reflections, transcribed interviews and researcher field notes. Findings suggest that through socially engaged artmaking preservice teachers critique regimes of schooling, reexamine art as a relational point of departure for better understanding the “publicness” of spaces, students and teachers, and rethink possibilities for evolving public pedagogies.