Conditions for learning: partnerships for engaging secondary pupils with contemporary art.

Here, expectations about what constitutes pupil production and what counts as art
combine with a sense of disempowerment and alienation. This lack of ownership was
felt by a number of pupils toward the end of the project.

2/live-wire: I did like doing this project a lot and I liked the artists we were working
with, but I don’t think the final gallery is a fair representation of the work we’ve done.

The exhibition marked a stage when adults intervened in the pupil production both
because of pressures of time and also a perceived need for a representative and
coherent presentation that they assume pupils are unlikely to realise.

2/gallery educator: [choosing images for the exhibition powerpoint]

I thought this photograph kind of suggested conceptual, critical thinking more than
some of the other images which were just workshop shots. And I guess it will come out
more professionally than the other things, which I think is important to the girls.

Possession: Self-expression and cultural capital

In secondary art and design, despite the rhetoric of self-expression, the curriculum is
often determined by the reproductive traditions of ‘school art’ [16]. It is true that at
GCSE pupils are expected to make choices and plan the trajectory of their work,
nonetheless, the assessment framework is circumscribed by learning criteria that can
limit agency. In contradistinction, pupils’ experience of the Critical Minds project
provided a certain freedom from such constraints, an opportunity for self-expression.

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