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

However, if these motivational factors are isolated from critical discourses and
deployed merely as strategies to gain attention, then they are not enough, indeed they
may even be counterproductive.

Partnerships and Collaboration

Critical minds demonstrated that collaborative partnerships between professionals
from different institutions can provide positive conditions for learning in the gallery
context. Likewise, pupils viewed a number of their experiences as new and
significant; interventions by artists, relocating sites for learning, collaborative
activities and the opportunity to reflect on practice. This combination of intervention
and collaboration distinguishes Critical Minds from normative practices and produces
a ‘community of practice’ in which members are enabled to develop as critical
thinkers through mutual engagement in common activities [23].

Communities, collaboration, mutuality

Through collaboration, the Critical Minds team constructed a pedagogy situated in-
between and across the school and the art gallery, a space which extends the role of
gallery education and its sphere of influence. This role was first established in the
1970s and has continued to change in response to educational research and the new
critical approaches demanded by developments in contemporary art practice. The
Whitechapel Gallery was one of the first art galleries to employ an education officer,
promoting the importance of a socially engaged, critical practice located in
contemporary practice. Social engagement relates to hooks’ theory of ‘engaged
pedagogy’ in which experiential and reflexive practice is fundamental to the

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