ABSTRACT

In this chapter we investigate the way ‘classed’ practices permeate art and design education. We do so by drawing on the educational trajectory and recent experiences of PGCE Art & Design (A&D) students at the Institute of Education (IOE), University College London (UCL), exploring the ways in which ‘classism’ may be unwittingly reproduced across the different ‘fields’ of art education. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ (Bourdieu 1987: 50) primarily those of ‘habitus’, by which he means: ‘a complex schema of psychological and embodied social dispositions which shape relational ways of being’ (Mallman 2019: 25) and the more commonly used term ‘capital’, we chart the way the social trajectory of art educators involves the movement through a path of inter-relating fields. These fields exert specific influences and pose differing challenges and opportunities for student-teachers depending upon their social class background. We are at the same time seeking to interrogate how the student-teachers’ ‘habitus’ is moulded by their specific social trajectories and what implications this may have for their practices as teachers.