Philosophy and pedagogy in arts education

Rethinking philosophically around art, artists and pedagogy does not offer one simple way forward. Rather, this text seeks to avoid the imminent threat to the arts in education, which may be figured in myriad ways, such as those practised by financially motivated, techno-bureaucratic machines that often run schools, colleges and universities. In the end, to avoid the harsh reality of being sidelined in the curriculum because the arts do not return sufficient profit, or because they are too messy and their processes are too difficult to evaluate, educators have to reinvent new means of resistance to a dominant and often unasked for reality. As Deleuze (1994) has said about repetition, 'we die a little every day without the arts' (p.45), talking about the capacity of drama to be more than a representation of life, but to have the capacity to stir up the very forces of life. Education in its many guises has become 'the' exemplary practice reduced to repetitions of the same, and is therefore in dire need of the arts. Hopefully, this book can provide an antidote to the ubiquitous use of textbooks (now often uploaded and stored in e-clouds), to outcome-based educational scripts with aims and pre-given methods, to standardised testing, to teachers not questioning their lessons, and producing student responses that are robotic and disengaged. When Deleuze (1994) says that we need the arts to stave off death, he is not making a relative statement, for death is apparent in the universal culture produced by current global capitalism. In many ways, thinking with the arts is about saving education from the repetition of the same; it is about changing the fear of experimentation, of the unknown and risky; it is about doing something new which truly engages with the life forces of the locale (Cole, 2011).