What is it that is going on when children collaborate to make art What is it that is going on when children collaborate to make art in a primary school workshop? A frame analysis.

Abstract This thesis examines a collaborative imaginary drawing workshop for primary school children in which values such as improvisation, collaboration and imagination lead the pedagogy. This model of collaborative drawing is at odds with an underlying conceptual framework for the art curriculum which still foregrounds individuals making unique art objects. In recent years, a number of British art educators have questioned this fine-art approach and contrast it with developments in contemporary art. For example, relational art is championed by the curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational artists believe that aesthetic form can be found in relations as well as objects. A creative workshop in a primary school is a complex social situation. In his book Frame Analysis (1974), the sociologist Erving Goffman develops an approach to illuminating what is going on in social encounters. Goffman looks very closely at micro-meanings embedded in social interaction. His methods are examined and interpreted in order to create a form for answering the question posed in the title of this thesis. Data is collected about the workshops using methodologies and methods suggested by visual sociologists and visual ethnographers. An adaption of auto-driven photo-elicitation is developed specifically with children in mind. A version of frame analysis, a frame assemblage, is applied to facilitate an interpretation of this data. The thesis also examines the conceptual underpinnings of both Goffman´s approach to frame analysis (1974) and Bourriaud’s conception of relational art (2002). It is argued that each depend on an ontology located in forms of radical empiricism championed respectively by William James (1842 – 1910) and Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995). An argument is presented which posits that both children´s collaborative imaginative drawings and what is going on in the workshop are most usefully understood from this radical empiricist frame. The potential implications for primary school art education pedagogy are unfolded.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of East Anglia

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Meager, Nigel

Language dc:language

en