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In the final chapter of Felix Guattari’s book Chaosmosis, he poses the question: “How do you make a class operate like a work of art?” This paper seeks to develop and sustain the potentiality of the classroom-work of art connection through an account of teacher, learner and artist practices in a South African school. In doing this the paper argues for a close mapping of artist’s dispositions onto, and into, an understanding of multimodality. Over a period of four months two artists, Marcus Neustetter and David Andrew, worked with Arts and Culture and Visual Arts teachers and learners at P.J. Simelane Secondary School in Dobsonville, Soweto, on a series of interventions in classrooms and in the school grounds. Through the dialogical and relational processes that drew on the range of resources available, learners, teachers, and artists generated a series of transformative moments that began to illuminate the ‘classroom as work of art’ metaphor. The experiences over the four month period suggest that greater attention to how artists, teachers and learners collaborate multimodally could play a primary role in the training of arts educators and, for that matter, all educators.

Stream: Creative Arts and Learning

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

While at the Wits School of Arts he has acted as the deputy head of school and head of the Division of Visual arts. He is a member of the Wits Multiliteracies group and has published with Joni Brenner on the multimodal pedagogies central to the Visual Literacy Foundation Course offered at the Wits School of Arts over the period 1996 to 2005. Between 2003 and 2005 he co-coordinated the Flemish government funded partnership between the Wits School of Arts and the Curriculum Development Project that developed alternative paths for the training of arts educators through the development of the Advanced Certificate in Education (Arts and Culture) and the Artists in Schools and Community Art Centres programmes. He has shown his work in various galleries and museums in South Africa and in 2003 exhibited in Sierre, Switzerland as part of an artist’s residency at the Ecole Cantonale d’Arts du Valais (ECAV). He has contributed to the development of a number of international partnerships focused on art education, including those with the University of Asmara, Eritrea, a number of European art schools for the Master of Art in the Public Sphere (MAPS) project, and the Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2004 he was invited to join the editorial board of the International Journal of Education through Art. He has presented at numerous conferences both locally and abroad, most recently at the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA) National Congress in Cape Town, (February 2006) the International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) Congress in Viseu, Portugal (March 2006), and the National Institute for Educational Development, Okahandja, Namibia (August 2006). In November 2006 he was the recipient of the Ampersand Trust Fellowship.