‘Sir, I don't know what I'm doing’: An investigation into the role of happy accidents in a secondary school art classroom

Abstract

This research project explores the use of ‘happy accidents’ as agents for facilitating more meaningful and critical exploration in secondary school art. Owing to a preoccupation with standardisation and quantifiable results, the more nebulous and invisible qualities of art have become deprioritised within many curricula. This paradigm creates ‘safe’ pedagogies that place emphasis on verisimilitude and technical acme as the yardstick for ‘successful’ artwork, preserving the identity of teachers within the epistemological frameworks that dictate education. Equally, as competitive individualism and reward demarcate education, young people are spending more time partaking in activities for their instrumental value. This ‘teaching-to-test’ model translates to formalist, linear modes of making as the most expedient means of achieving grades. The following research aimed to trouble this status quo and offers a pedagogy that allows for more responsive, playful and personal approaches to experimental artmaking. The mechanism used as a springboard into inquiry was the ‘happy accident’, facilitated by the use of unpredictable media such as Photoshop and photocopying. Adopting a middle ground between Atkinson's ‘unknown’ and the inferentialist model described by Walton, students had the latitude to combine known and unknown knowledge to push their artmaking into more meaningful territory, whilst preserving evidence of the ‘mark scheme’. To bolster my attempts at disrupting canonised imagery of ‘good’ school art, students also troubled the common practice of creating overly embellished, illustrative sketchbooks, with the creation of self-made, A2, portfolio style books. The knowledge produced in this project was interrogated within a multimodal, arts-based research methodology: through interview analysis and the analysis of the artwork, or artefacts, produced.