The Arts Classroom

Research on arts education generally focuses on either the teacher (Bremmer et al. 2020) or the arts (Heijnen 2015). The context gets little attention, even though size, colouring, decoration, and furniture of a classroom is of essential importance for the practice and effect of any form of education, which is especially true for the fundamentally embodied practice of arts education (Meerkerk 2019). This chapter sketches new directions for research on arts education. It acknowledges the material context of teaching by following the ideas of Post-Qualitative Inquiry (PQI), an approach that draws upon Braidotti's (2013 and passim) and Deleuze's (passim) ideas on post-humanism, while incorporating concepts of Ubuntu (LeGrange 2018) and Taoism (Wu et al. 2018). The chapter will analyse two case studies using the 'speculative adventure' (Roussel 2021) of PQI to bring the art classroom to the fore as a space and as non-human actors. The chapter explores the classroom not only as a space of possibilities, but as an entity in itself that can independently start a dialogue, that has a character, and that sets norms to which its human guests must conform.

Adventure · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology) · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Humanism · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Performing arts · Political science · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · The arts · Visual arts · Art Education and Development · Art Therapy and Mental Health · History · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Philosophy · Psychology