Pedagogies of care: peer-led alternative art education during the Coronavirus pandemic

Marks, Aisling (2024) Pedagogies of care: peer-led alternative art education during the Coronavirus pandemic. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis studies models of alternative art education in the UK and San Francisco during the twofold crisis of art and education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its central thesis, that art is a privileged site of experimentation for pedagogy and education, where normative categories of value, assessment and metrics can be suspended, underpins an exploration of the desires and needs emerging from the field. From this, it speculates upon the formation and production of postcapitalist subjectivities from alternative art schools during this period of crisis in education. The thesis interviews 15 artists, educators, organisers, activists and participants involved in producing peer-led art education and free-school experiments as alternatives to neoliberal UK and USA university models. The research uses an interpretivist, qualitative paradigm to foreground the experiences and voices of the respondents, using narrative analysis, critical realism, and an emergent design to highlight my own experiences of doing research during the unpredictable time of the pandemic. It also uses Social Reproduction Theory as a methodology, to understand the care work of education and mutual-aid, as well as a lens for pointing towards postcapitalist futures. The research emphasises the central importance of care in shaping pedagogical practices, in which alternative art schools emerge as vital spaces for shaping self-confidence, vulnerability and community-building against individualist educational paradigms. Findings include that peer-led pedagogical environments for artists offer insights into possible postcapitalist futures by proposing a different model of education through socially reproducing qualitatively other relations. It also attends to increased access for artists from working-class communities, ownership over curriculum, the abolition of grades and assessment, and proposes the concept of transindividuality as a postcapitalist ontology. It expands on the existing studies on alternative art education models by detailing how practices of care were exacerbated and indispensable during the pandemic, and provides insights into the shaping of subjectivity within care-driven communities. Finally, it suggests further research into sustainable models for adult lifelong learning and communities of practice as well as comparative analyses with a university art education.