Social class and Art & Design education: A significant omission

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors examine the relationship between class and art and design education, and how classism is introduced and reproduced in these settings.

While educators commonly discuss various limiting factors for student success, class is not part of the conversation in a meaningful way. When it is discussed, it is wrapped into the idea that working-class people have a “lack of ‘aspiration’, along with poor behavior.” Additionally, educational systems lean towards an ideology of meritocracy; and, art and design educators “resist creative risk-taking and ‘disobedient pedagogies’ which embrace a ‘non-compliance that opens up new ways of thinking and acting.’” These educators encourage different forms of self-expression in the art and design work itself, but not in the way in which students learn.

The authors note that class is a difficult and contested concept. Referencing Bourdieu, they describe that class is about distribution of wealth, economic capital, cultural capital, social capital, and trajectory of someone who navigates the different forms of capital. They equate capital to power. It is not only students that are susceptible to classism and a differential power dynamic; many educators also come from working-class backgrounds, and are similarly excluded.

To better understand the impact class plays on art and design education, the authors conducted six focus groups and 12 one-on-one interviews with art and design students. Students in this research described a variety of ways that class impacts their experiences.

One of the ways class appears in art and design education is through “class-straddlers,” which are students who feel that they exist in more than one class, but lack a feeling of meaningful belonging in either. Attempts to move between classes results in an “enduring attachment to a previous state which slows down or inhibits adaptation to a new one.” This occurs on a backdrop of art and design being increasingly considered a luxury, one that does not lead to meaningful jobs.

Art and design education used to be a “place where students are encouraged to be subversive, to look for alternatives, to disrupt normative attitudes and values; a place where being different and going against the grain are valorized and rewarded.” This has changed, and those outcast students now gravitate towards vocation-centered roles and attend newer, less prestigious schools. When they do engage with established and respected schools, they feel as outsiders, without the right clothing or ways of speaking.

The authors view class as something that has been ignored as an inclusion criteria, but recognize that some feel this may lead to “inclusion fatigue.” Another challenge to inclusion in art and design education is how “the current neoliberal education system, with its emphasis on standards, assessment league tables and inspections has led to teaching to the test and prescribed pedagogies—which can be seen to privilege fixed knowledge, conformity, and conservatism.”

The authors make no recommendation for change, except to claim that the system at large should promote a critical and participatory pedagogy for all students.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Describes how art and design schools used to be places for outcasts and those with extreme or deviant behavior and views, but has been assumed by those who have the financial ability to engage in a profession that has little financial reward—which are those who are not outcasts or deviants
• References the increasingly assessment-driven nature of education, showing that experimental pedagogy is discouraged (which runs counter to the idea of risk taking, implicit to art and design education)
• Gestures to a challenge that students will have assimilating into the culture of studio, where differences are magnified because of the small class and cohort size