Subject Choice As Everyday Accommodation /Resistance: Why Students In England (Still) Choose The Arts

ABSTRACT

High school students are expected to make choices about which subjects they study. These choices are not completely open; however, they are steered by what is on offer, previous achievement and conversations with teachers, family and friends; choices are patterned by class, gender, able-ness and race. We offer the perspective of subject choice as resistance. The paper uses student focus group data from a 3-year study of the visual and performing arts in 30 schools in England. We show that students chose the arts not only because what it might do for them in the future, but also for what it provided for them in the everyday. We suggest that the quotidian is an important aspect of choice-making, which, in the case of arts pedagogies, both accommodates the highly regulated norm and offers a counter. This analysis points to avenues for further research on subject choice as well as provides important clues for school reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts education
• resistance
• subject choice
• secondary education
• England

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. To achieve the EBacc a student must achieve 5 + A*-C grades in English, mathematics, two sciences, a foreign language and history or geography at GCSE level.

2. Facilitating subjects are those which are taken in addition to specified prerequisites.

3. This response dovetails with the larger survey results (it included students taking and not taking arts subjects) where about a quarter of the surveyed students reported that they were planning to study an arts subject in the future, with only a fifth considering an arts-related career.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts Council England.

Notes on contributors

Pat Thomson

Pat Thomson PhD PSM FAcSS FRSA is Professor of Education, School of Education, The University of Nottingham. She is particularly interested in arts education and alternative education as sites for socially just pedagogies and change. She has published 21 scholarly monographs and edited books: a full list is on her academic writing and doctoral education blog patter, patthomson.net.

Christine Hall PhD is Professor of Education, School of Education, The University of Nottingham. Together with Pat Thomson she has recently published Inspiring School Change: transforming education through the creative arts (Routledge 2017) and Place based methods for researching schools (Bloomsbury 2017).

Lex Earl PhD is a researcher in the School of Education, The University of Nottingham. She researches food in schools and communities. She has recently published ‘School and food education in the twenty first century’ (Routledge, 2018). She blogs at Lexislettuces.org.

Corinna Geppert is a researcher in the School of Education, The University of Nottingham. She researches educational assessment, equity and equality, education policy and teacher education.