Jackie McManus (University of the Arts, London)<\/p>\n
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Jackie McManus\u2019 evening lecture drew on one of the core references for Art.School.Differences: The study \u201cArt for a Few: Exclusion and Misrecognition in Higher Art and Design Education\u201d by\u00a0Penny Jane Burke and Jackie McManus (2009). This study evaluated the British government initiative \u201cWidening Participation\u201d (WP) a ongoing programme that\u00a0has\u00a0redressed the under-representation of certain social groups in higher education since the late 1990s.\u00a0While WP has become a key policy discourse (in the UK and internationally), McManus reminded us that the objective of diversifying the student body is still largely driven by economic and utilitarian aims of creating a better-educated workforce. WP\u2019s neo-liberal motivations are paralleled and underpinned by the increasing marketization of higher education: degrees in art and design subjects are no longer eligible for government subsidy, and the reality is that that is restricting, rather than widening participation.<\/p>\n
McManus’s presentation\u00a0illuminated the insidious ways in which exclusion still operates by focusing on the\u00a0admissions procedures she observed at five British art schools. In particular she examined\u00a0the case of a black working-class woman,\u00a0on whose\u00a0admissions interview she sat in. The interview with the young woman,\u00a0who was applying for a fashion design BA, was cut short after said she was influenced by hip hop and interested in designing sports tops.\u00a0Before the interview took place, the interviewers had not deemed her portfolio weak. But after the interview they\u00a0agreed they would say her portfolio was weak as the reason for rejecting her. In her assessment form the tutors made notes about the “unfashionable clothes” she was wearing. Moreover, the fact that the candidate\u00a0intended to live with her parents while studying was read as a sign of immaturity. The “expensively dressed” English-white middle-class male candidate interviewed immediately afterwards, who intended to leave home (“because it\u2019s all part of the experience”), and “cited famous contemporary artists”, but had “considerably poorer qualifications,” was offered a place.<\/p>\n
Admission practices are tied up with complex operations\u00a0of exclusion that privilege the habitus and “the cultural and linguistic capital of \u2019traditional\u2019 students, who tend to come from white, middle-class backgrounds.” McManus’\u00a0findings confirm\u00a0the observations\u00a0the Art.School.Differences team\u00a0made\u00a0within the admissions procedures at Swiss art schools:\u00a0In\u00a0McManus\u2019 words, admissions judgments tend to be\u00a0“shaped by implicit, institutionalized, disciplinary and racialised perspectives of what counts as legitimate forms of experience and knowledge.” It is thus not enough to work at rendering admissions processes more “transparent;” transparency alone does not\u00a0make them\u00a0more “fair.” Fairness implies teaching those\u00a0with the supposedly\u00a0“wrong” influences and backgrounds, how to access and decipher admissions information, how to decode unspoken institutional assumptions and how to\u00a0develop their own (admissions) strategies and portfolios. Often, however, art educators who work with\u00a0working-class and “Black and ethnic minority” youth focus on vocational techniques (such as making handbags or printing T-shirts) rather than on imparting the discursive skills and strategies it takes to access and persist in the field of higher art education themselves.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
18.03.2015, ZHdK: Hopes and Fears for Art:\u00a0Policy and\u00a0Practice in\u00a0Widening\u00a0Participation in\u00a0Art and\u00a0Design\u00a0Higher\u00a0Education in the UK Jackie McManus (University of the Arts, London) Jackie McManus\u2019 evening lecture drew on one of the core references for Art.School.Differences: The study \u201cArt for a Few: Exclusion and Misrecognition in Higher Art and Design Education\u201d by\u00a0Penny Jane Burke and Jackie McManus … Continue reading Public lecture by Jackie McManus<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2706,"featured_media":1466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,152745],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-allgemein","category-kolloquium"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2391,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions\/2391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/artschooldifferences\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}