The spectacle of artistic assessment in the practice of art teaching

Abstract

This inquiry scrutinizes the spectacle of assessment in art teaching practice. My research uses case studies (Stake 2000), together with fieldwork interviews from three experienced art teachers to form ‘Teacher Scenarios’. The focus on the perspective of the teacher enhances cased-based knowledge (Shulman, 2008, 2004,1999, 1986) within the confines and ‘performativity’ of school organisation and process (Ball, 2000, 1991). Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle (1967/1994) argued that spectacle was an apparent public display and that images mediate social relations among people. Consequences include an objectification of individuals and a false sense of unification, masking actual alienation, and fragmentation of experience. A conceptual discussion uses Jameson’s postmodern analysis of the social shift from production to consumption (1983), Baudrillard’s rethinking of simulacra and authenticity (1996), and Foucault’s explanation of symptoms and surveillance (1963) together with Brown’s explanation (1999) of the symptomatic nature of social reproduction in the educational milieu, to reinvigorate Debord’s original economic construct. Collectively they provide an appropriate applicative framework of ‘Symptoms of the Spectacle’ to analyse case studies and art teacher scenarios. The three narrative cases informing the research include the clinical treatment of ADHD in relation to the learning potential of boys, the banality of celebrity, and streamlining as Modern design. Teacher interview transcripts follow each case to exemplify how spectacle works in artistic assessment. My interpretation challenges system-generated beliefs about artistic assessment practice in three ways. Firstly, art teaching comprises new teacher case-based assessment knowledge, which is typically concealed within the localised context of the art classroom. Secondly, symptoms of assessment as a spectacle are evident in the practice of art teaching. Finally, art teachers negotiate individual student assessment to ensure equity and the perception of doing the right thing within social relations. Exposing gaps in understanding how assessment is undertaken, then adapted to meet prescriptive functions in schooling, allows the concepts of authenticity and performativity to be valued. Tensions between system agendas are set against teacher beliefs and equity as teachers overtly comply with system requirements yet simultaneously work at the local level maintaining the ecology of the art class.