| In this dissertation I examine two common practices within a U.S. high school: dress codes and grading within an art class. Viewing the practices as aesthetic judgments that are regulatory and disciplinary, I layer and collage them in text form and in visual form, to analyze their effects within school. I interviewed young women to gather their memories of dress in high school. I also solicited stories about their use of drawings both inside and outside of art class. These stories create a narrative of how girls present themselves through dress and art production according to their perceptions of what is important within the school structure; but also how they use dress and drawings for their own purposes of pleasure, informal communication, and achieving goals. I interviewed art teachers to gather similar stories; to develop a picture of the ways teachers imagine their performance and appearance are judged by themselves and others, and how this relates to the judgment of their ability as a teacher. Layering the responses shows how teachers and students are enmeshed in practices of shaping each other's perceived value, partly through what I call school aesthetics. Using feminist methodologies allows questioning and disrupting of the traditional authoritarian position of the expert, and in turn of the teacher as expert. Pushing this disruption, I argue that the practices analyzed here produce divisions among students, and between teachers and students. Using Foucault's theories as a methodology of "pointing-to" areas I believe are useful to examine, I raise the question of whether these repetitive dividing practices are intrinsic to our systems of education: routines that continually re-form students into hierarchies of knowers and non-knowers, those who belong and those who are outliers, as the knowledge and behavior deemed essential shifts with the perceived need for divisions. The third code I explore regards the formal code of the dissertation. I consider the aesthetics of knowledge production and I present part of my research in the form of collage, zines, and comics; advocating non-traditional, multi modal forms of research as valid and potentially useful to high school students and teachers.;Key words: aesthetics, art education, dress codes, grading, high school, knowledge production, zines. |
