Making Art or Studying Art? Routes to Ecological Thinking in the Secondary School Classroom

Art education scholarship has increasingly turned towards relational, ecological ways of thinking about the subject. This article asks whether that turn is reflected in how Art education is experienced and justified in the classroom. Drawing on interviews with students and an Art teacher in a rural state secondary school in England, it finds that Art education was most frequently justified through transferable skills. Using two contrasting examples of classroom practice, the article identifies two distinct routes by which Art education might cultivate ecological thinking: one through experimental making, whose effects are framed ontologically; the other through studying ecologically engaged contemporary art. Evidence of students initially unable to read an installation addressing biodiversity loss illustrates how the second route depends on a capacity the article terms art literacy—the ability to understand how a work relates to existing art concepts, precedents and conventions, without which much ecologically engaged contemporary art remains illegible and alienating to students. The article argues that developing art literacy offers a more modest yet defensible and legible starting point for Art education's ecological responsibilities than an appeal to the ontological effects of experiential making which risk being obscured by transferable skills rhetoric.