Practice and Pedagogy in the Arts; an Interview with an Artist and Teacher

Words by Lucia Spelsberg-Hornsby 

I spoke to my former secondary school Art teacher, who is also a practicing artist, about his teaching methods and how these might have been informed by his own work.

David R Watson lives and works in Essex. He has exhibited in solo and group shows in London and across the UK and Europe. He was named runner up in the 2013 Renaissance Photography Prize and has had his work published in the British Journal of Photography. Recent exhibitions include Four Part Inventions (a solo show) at Waterhouse, London, Op Cit at ‘Corridors of Power’, Chelsea College of Arts, London, Why Patterns? at No20 Arts, London (which he also co-curated) and Photographic Visions at PH21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary.

feature from ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’, 2022

Would you say that your artistic practice intersects with or informs your teaching practice?

That’s quite a difficult question to answer. In terms of the particular nature of my own practice; very little, in as much as, at this stage, I have a pretty clear parameter in terms of what I make and the issues that concern me. However, on a wider level I think that since all artistic practice involves trying to be open minded and speculative, it was helpful to my activities as a teacher to be able to deal with decision making and other things core to all artistic activity. I was faced with analogous problems to those faced by my older students (particularly sixth form), where I was trying to encourage them towards risk taking and personalising their responses. In terms of teaching younger students, I think that my own practice helped simply in the sense that I was willing to encourage responses and solutions that were not predictable and maybe diverged from the obvious trajectory of a project. In secondary teaching across all subjects I found that many teachers are frightened of student outcomes diverging from their expectations; practicing as an artist makes one more open to these divergences than those from a non-creative background. At a practical level it is always useful to be involved in making as it means you are involved in solving problems although they are different to those being dealt with by the students. I also feel that involvement makes me aware of contemporary artists/designers who may be relevant to the students - if one isn’t abreast of new work then the directions one can point students in become limited and potentially outmoded.

feature from ‘A Month of Lunch’, 2019/2020

How do you feel about a “hands on” intervention into a students work of art? (I.e. drawing a correction onto their work with your own hand.)

This I think has to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Worst case scenario is effectively doing something instead of the student doing it, which is worthless. However, intervening and offering small adjustments that the student can see one making, can guide them to replicating those critical adjustments on their own later and shows them how they might go about it. In such scenarios it is important not to allow the student to feel that you have encroached on their work and autonomy (the threshold for this will differ from student to student), and one needs to know the student in order to make judgements about this. Another problem is that one runs the risk of allowing the student to be lazy in not critically evaluating and improving their own work and becoming reliant on your interventions; clearly the opposite of what one should be trying to achieve. In my experience students are perfectly aware when a teacher has been overly involved and so they do not value the final outcome.

feature from ‘Works on Paper’, 2013/16

Do you have a particular ethos regarding guidance in teaching art, or do you feel there is a certain level of guidance vs flexibility which is necessary?

The role of guidance varies depending on the level and the type of student. Clearly simple technical advice is fine, as a student might take a very long time to pick something up that can be solved quickly and allow them to move on. However, my general ethos focussed on increasing the autonomy of students as they mature - thus for example in sixth form teaching I did not, and do not, believe in setting projects - I believe in setting open-ended starting points that are susceptible to multiple and divergent responses in line with the emerging personality of the student. Essentially younger students need narrower parameters in which to achieve because they have a more limited technical and expressive vocabulary that does require some relatively tight parameters to develop - in order for someone to be creative they will need a degree of technical competence otherwise they have nothing to build on. I think one of the key areas of guidance with older students is pointing them towards artists and ideas that explore territory that relates to their own emerging concerns so they can see how different artists have evolved solutions. This is one of the reasons I do not, and never have, liked the idea of having a class all look at the work of a particular artist as a starting point – it’s much more important that they select from a range of possibilities.

feature from ‘The Inscrutable Language of Toys’, 2023

What do you think about the current government’s attitude towards the Arts in education? Has this changed over the course of your teaching?

The current government attitude is one of defunding and marginalising the arts within mainstream publicly funded education. Effectively, they are saying that access to the arts is for the privileged and wealthy, and this is fundamentally anathema to me. The government is wilfully reducing access to “culture” and denying working class and poorer students access to cultural capital which denies them life opportunities in both a practical and intellectual sense. We see this manifest in the reduction of curriculum time in many schools and in the continued stressing of “academic” disciplines in judging a school and its effectiveness. At a practical level this is short sighted given the huge role which the creative industries play in the UK economy. The current government view is one which marginalises the arts and keeps them as the ‘Luxury” preserve of the wealthy and privileged, something which has long been a Conservative view of cultural practice.

feature from ‘Interference’, 2018

Would you recommend your profession?

The job can be extremely rewarding at a personal level, but over time it became increasing bogged down in an exam/grades driven machinery that makes it less and less attractive. I joined it at a time when it was still viable to be effective as a creative teacher - I retired at a point where that had eroded, but not beyond repair. I would recommend the job, but with the caveat that you have to be prepared to fight for the value of what you are doing and understand that you will be marginalised to some degree within your institution - though this will depend very much on the character of the management in a given school.