Arts sensuous, arts context, arts anxiety

This dissertation examines the meanings a group of young men assign to the arts in the context of one public arts high school in a northeastern city. At the time of this writing, this school is the only full inclusion, public arts high school, providing a comprehensive program in the arts, academics and wellness in the United States. The research on arts education is robust, with numerous proposals for design and delivery of learning the arts and learning through the arts. However, little is know about the everyday conceptions, perceptions and experiences of students in public arts high schools. For eighteen months this qualitative study employed various data collection strategies, including open-ended response survey, participant observation, individual interviews and semi-structured group interviews. The researcher's identities as an artist, teacher and researcher played a central role during the data collection, analytic and writing phases of this work. Participants were asked to share and examine their perceptions, conceptions and interpretations of the arts. The emergent meanings assigned to the arts were central to understanding their experiences at this public high school. First, the participants' meanings in the arts reference their intuitive, instrumental and contested relationship to the arts, revealing sensuous connections in which social relations and contradictions to self and others are implicated. Second, these meanings interact in a school context imbued with social perceptions and expectations about the special-ness of the arts, the "special" art school and the "special" attributes of its students. The cultural production of "special" and the young men's interaction with concepts of "special" in the context of arts learning reveal social forms of exclusion and generate questions about belonging, sexual identity and masculinity. While these young men contest social perceptions that they attend a "special school" and that they are "special students," they also reproduced their own notions of "special." Additionally, the young men's emergent narratives of voice and vulnerability also reveals a social process of arts learning that disrupts a prevailing ideology that assigns special-ness to the role of the arts and to the activities of artists (Zolberg 1990; Nochlin 1998). Third, the meanings this group of young men assigns to the arts reveal anxieties about resources, time and money. Conceptions of time and money implicate the young men's schooling experiences at this school. The richly textured and troubling conceptions of time and money connect with anxieties these young men express about their future in the arts. It is a striking convergence of everyday schooling interactions and contemplations of futures in the arts that generate real and figurative notions of time and money. For them, a future in the arts increasingly appears to be the privilege of the few who can make extraordinary sacrifices.