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A qualitative analysis of creativity as misrecognition in the transactions between a visual arts teacher and their senior art students in the final year of schooling

This thesis researches the proposition that student creativity occurs as a function of misrecognition in the culturally situated context of art classrooms. Following Pierre Bourdieu??s socio-cognitive frameworks of the habitus, symbolic capital and misrecognition this study uses these concepts as a means of navigating teacher-student relationships at moments of creative origination. These concepts predict that exchanges between teachers and students are sites for transactions of symbolic capital where the teacher??s pedagogical role is objectively repressed through the mechanism of misrecognition. The study seeks evidence for creative autonomy as misrecognition as it takes place in classroom transactions and that differing levels of ??tact?? are employed in these exchanges. It emerges that the social reasoning that underscores these exchanges is inferentially sensitive to different contextual points of view, expressed in open secrets, repression, denial and euphemisation. The study finds that the artworks produced evidence degrees of originality that vary in character according to the subtlety of misrecognition that is transacted in these pedagogical exchanges. The case of an art teacher and an art class in the final year of schooling is examined in detail. The design employs an idiographic, qualitative methodology. Methods include observations and interviews which are augmented by digital records. Results are interpreted using a form of semantic analysis and triangulation. Four functions are distilled from the results. These functions govern the way in which misrecognition performs as a contradictory logic in the relationships between the teacher and students which works towards affirming the group??s belief in creative autonomy, while paradoxically, all members take advantage of the contextual inputs that are available. Creative autonomy is revealed as a fiction, nonetheless, a fiction worth nurturing for the successful realisation of creative ends. The study concludes that creativity cannot be strictly taught or learned. Nor is it innate and autonomous. Rather it encompasses a socially intelligent uptake in the culture of artmaking. What is possible is dependent on shared beliefs, desires and intentions which are transformed over time. Broader implications are suggested focusing on the significance of collaboration in creative education and the impact for educational systems, schools and undergraduate programs in art education.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/233075
Date January 2008
CreatorsThomas, Kerry Anne, Art, College of Fine Arts, UNSW
PublisherPublisher:University of New South Wales. Art
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Rightshttp://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright

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