Discovering self through education : inviting bodies into the art classroom

This paper explores the transformative potential of art education. As such, it focuses on how students adopt the transformative principles of feminist poststructuralism in the art that they create. In this paper I will concentrate of three key aspect of feminist poststructuralism including this theory’s notion of bodies, subjectivity, and politics of transformation. To illustrate these various principles I will draw upon my own art and the art created by senior secondary students. In doing so, I highlight how students use the potential of art education to take up feminist poststructuralism to discover and explore their multiple subjectivities, embodiment and lived experiences in their art