Art should play a central role in all education

By Evan Wood, Research Further Scholar

Whilst travelling India in 2024, we visited a small rural village including a school as part of the tour we were on. The experience felt awkward. I sat to one side of the activities taking place, observing as a photographer and thinking how do I make a photograph of this situation? How do I photograph a scenario but respect the people in this situation as much as possible? How does photography not play into voyeuristic connotations? Do I ask permission? How do I use photography to transcend the situation whilst also acknowledging the hypocrisies that wealth and privilege highlight? These questions are relevant to my career teaching photography, and to the work I undertake as part of my PhD research.

I tried to tap into the humility of what that situation was trying to achieve, drawing from my teaching experience in English colleges. I had sat at the back of the events taking place, but quickly realised that staying to one side wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do. These people wanted to engage, they wanted to tell their story. I thought about the students I had taught; what went right, what went wrong. But my thoughts always came back to their stories and crossovers of lived experience. It was not about language, it was about pictures and making them together.

With no Hindi under my belt, I signalled with my camera and we used my equipment to take some pictures together. They would look at the photographs in elation, as a group, then recompose themselves, signalling to me if they were happy with the image, and make new ones if they were not. What resulted was a series of confrontations of East and West, class, privilege, wealth disparity, generational trauma, relational trauma – built on care. The currency was seeing each other, using the platform I had – my camera. This is what we do in the classroom, too.

They were making pictures of themselves knowing they would be taken into a western space, shared on social media, with colleagues and who knows where else. These kids knew the value of the interaction. They had defiance. They wanted change, to be seen, to be validated. The photograph was a mechanism to be validated. I reflected on the value of the education I’ve experienced and serviced as part of my career, realising that I was not photographing them, but their stories. I later sent them the images on social media to much excitement.

Photography is a bid for connection. That connection is challenging, hard, beautiful and truthful. Richard Billingham’s work Rays A Laugh or Hannah Starky’s In Real Life are prime examples of how using art reveals a truth beyond the words we use to try to describe the trauma we experience growing up. This qualia; the signatures that define us, emerge in the marks we make on paper, the paint we mix or the photographs we decide to make. So how do we teach this? And are we making that enough of a priority in our curriculum? Are we providing opportunities, as lecturers, to empower our young people and listen to what they have to say?

These are tricky conversations particularly as we go through the process of decolonising our education systems. They reflect our own privilege, prejudices and traumas. For example, art requires infrastructure that is expensive and out of reach for most people. Colleges have this equipment and present a key place where the opportunities to use this equipment can empower them to bid for connection and heal.

Art should play a central role in all education. Those difficult questions should be central and leaned into with the communities that make up a multicultural country. Those stories are present within all students, artists, young people, but currently, our curriculum focuses on ‘intentions of the artists’ or ‘cultural context’. It feels like the language of an industry out of touch with the ground level integrity of making pictures and asking questions about difficult things – or simply spreading joy.

Art in our colleges could be bold, sensory and welcome us into our imaginations that are not unlike the back streets of Varanasi. Taming those with fancy words doesn’t feel like what is needed. Our young people are crucial, real, and as Harrison Ford said, “We need to get out of the way”.