Synergy and serendipity
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Joanna Mendelssohn
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Joanna Mendelssohn's biography and other articles by this writer
I keep looking for a term – the opposite of ‘a perfect storm' – to describe the synergy when a series of good events and people accidentally come together to create an outcome that none could predict. That is what happened as a result of the rare combination of creative energy and intellectual rigour in teaching visual art in New South Wales. I was a school student in 1962 when the state's great education revolution, the Wyndham Scheme, began to make an impact. Teachers were anxious but intensely focused as they faced huge changes in the curriculum. We were the first students to spend six years in high school, and the first to have major works of art marked externally. A generation later, when my children were at school, it was more relaxed and more methodical. They learnt about art through different frames of reference and produced process diaries to accompany their major works. Visual arts had become a pathway to thinking about concepts well beyond my adolescent experience.
As Australia inches towards a national curriculum in English, maths, history and science, arts education is put in the too-hard box. The arts may be increasingly important, but the challenge of designing a curriculum that covers the visual and performing arts, music and screen at varying levels of skill and analysis is daunting. A patchwork of different approaches has evolved in Australia – some world leading. A national curriculum needs to draw on the best, and find a way to navigate the jealously protected differences between states.
Over the past three decades, the teaching of visual arts in New South Wales has diverged from the rest of the country to become an international leader in linking cognitive development to visual understanding. Paradoxically, one reason for this innovative approach was the decision not to create a specialist art course until well after other states. Instead, a series of serendipitous events supported the inverse perfect storm: a shortage of qualified staff; an artist who was a teacher and arranged for his students to be exhibited in commercial galleries; an innovative head of art in a teachers' college who was not prepared to see the discipline downgraded; a group of education scholars who were able to apply their passion to creating an art curriculum and an annual exhibition of students' art that became a high-profile media event.
UNTIL THE LATE 1950s, DESPITE SOME PRIVATE SCHOOLS USING ART to ‘polish' non-academic boys, it was not taught in New South Wales boys' secondary schools, while girls took it only as a half-subject. This changed when the state was bought into line with Victoria to upgrade art to matriculation level. When the Wyndham Scheme extended secondary schooling to six years, art became a compulsory hundred-hour subject for all students with a follow-on elective course.
The post-war baby boom had already caused a shortage of teachers, but the shortage of specialist art teachers became acute in response to this requirement. Many art teachers had not completed high school; they were technical college graduates who had left school at fifteen. In 1957, Maurie Symonds, one of the most quietly effective educators of young teachers, established a four-year diploma for students with Leaving Certificates, integrating art and art education.
Symonds' ideas about how art could affect students were transformed by his experiences at the Armidale Teachers' College, which at that time was the home of the Hinton Collection of Australian art. He had seen how access to good, original works of art could open people's minds. He took this approach to Sydney Teachers' College before heading the art education program at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. The state government was dominated by the right wing of the Labor Party and Symonds was on the left. He had a firmly held belief that working-class children should know that the great traditions of art also belonged to them, and that through education there should be no barriers to success. He ensured that his students were given a well-rounded general education as well as knowledge of art, and emphasised the importance of teaching well, with a focus on the needs of the student.
Symonds died in 2007. In the eulogy at his funeral, one of the students he taught, Emeritus Professor Neil Brown, described the way ‘he stood up fearlessly for freedom of expression in the arts at Alexander Mackie Teachers College at a time when wowserism held sway among some of the more conservative academic staff and administrators'. As its graduates streamed out into schools, the innovative teaching at Mackie had a major impact. This was one element in building the inverse perfect storm. The next was unexpected.
THE CENTRALISED EDUCATION SYSTEM ADMINISTERED ONE OF THE LARGEST curriculum authorities in the world with an almost Stalinist rigor, and art had to take its place in the system. ‘The Art Branch' was created to supervise, control and support the influx of teachers. Because the making, teaching and external assessment of art needs space and creates mess, it was more convenient to locate the branch, first at Blackfriars and later at Five Dock, away from apparent centres of power. Specialist teachers with sufficient seniority to be head inspectors were thin on the ground, but the fledgling subject was fortunate in that one of the first appointed was Bob Winder, formerly a teacher at Sydney Girls' High and later director-general of education. He was joined by John Dabron, a music teacher who had hosted an ABC school radio program on art. As supervisor in art, Dabron became the passionate but eccentric personification of ‘the Art Branch'. Amanda Weate, a country teacher, was entertained with ‘stories of him padding down corridors with paint on bare feet'. The Art Branch gave her and other young teachers the kind of support other disciplines could only dream of.
Robyn Gordon, who taught art for many years, remembers: ‘Even though it was the art inspectors from Art Branch who came out to inspect us along the way for certification and then for any promotions, somehow it was a less intimidating experience because we felt a bit more like a small family group, with common interests and struggles to be fought to bring our subject up to parity of esteem with all other subjects in the curriculum.'
Dabron, Nita Playford, Bob Winder and Paul Milton established what Neil Brown describes as ‘an enlightened, folksy but threateningly authoritarian inspectorial system'. At times their approach ran counter to the official bureaucracy. When another country art teacher in his first year was suspended after local rail authorities decided one of his students had submitted an ‘obscene' work, Dabron's response was to send a supportive telegram. This small group worked hard to create an esprit de corps in the fledgling profession, well aware that within the hierarchy of schools, art teachers were often regarded as the resident eccentrics. Gordon remembers that when ‘a sizeable group of art teachers used to be gathered together each year for School Certificate and later, Higher School Certificate marking, Dabron would often cook up a storm in the dinner break and we'd be invited to share in some tasty food morsels'. Most art teachers felt their bureaucracy was on their side.