3/good: Yeah, I mean when I say whacky-like, when we done our film art... it was just
like a side of us that we wanted to express to other people, like the way we was.
Despite the fact that the art and design curriculum is often critiqued as insular and
removed from the everyday experiences and needs of young people, some pupils were
able to identify with school practices. For example, it is notable that 50 percent of the
pupils (two of four) identified as ‘resistant’ contradict such labelling.
2/resistant: . I actually do enjoy art a lot. It’s like your own, you’re expressing your
own. working through, not just writing, like through something else. basically it’s
included to our environment as well, so it shows where we live and everything.
The art curriculum is often perceived as reproducing bourgeois values; visiting
galleries is a primary means by which the middle classes enable their children to
adopt those markers of distinction that provide them with the taste and authority to
take up professional and leadership positions [17]. Gallery visits within the official
curriculum are in this sense a form of distribution, in this instance of social capital.
While for many inner-city pupils there is a clear disjuncture between their usual
leisure activities and visits to galleries, some have the social (and cultural) capital that
results in a cultural competence when using such venues. The pupil below has an
awareness of the different systems of perception and interpretation acquired through
informal as well as formal processes of socialisation. This enables her to be quite
dismissive of the project because, for her, cultural capital is already a possession.
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