Creativity in Artmaking as a Function of Misrecognition in Teacher-Student Relations in the Final Year of Schooling

Abstract

This article reports on a study of creativity in art education, and more particularly, what teaching and learning to be creative implies. The study employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of the habitus, symbolic capital, and misrecognition. These concepts are demonstrably relevant for understanding creativity as a kind of social reasoning that is transacted between an art teacher and students in the cultural context of an art classroom. The design employs a qualitative methodology. Methods include observations and interviews which are augmented by digital records. Results are interpreted using semantic analysis and triangulation. Four key functions are distilled from the results. These functions govern the way in which misrecognition performs as a practical, albeit contradictory, logic in the classroom. Misrecognition shapes and affirms the teacher’s and students’ beliefs in creative autonomy while they, paradoxically, take advantage of the contextual inputs that are available which incrementally strengthen the originality of the students’ artworks.