Recipes from the gingerbread house: exploring the witch archetype to address the hidden curriculum in secondary schools

Recipes from the gingerbread house: exploring the witch archetype to address the hidden curriculum in secondary schools

This interdisciplinary study explores the role of visual arts practice and pedagogy in secondary arts education through a retelling of the Brothers’ Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. The tale serves as a metaphorical device in contextualising secondary arts education and through this process, highlights the hidden curriculum operating in many schools. The hidden curriculum is comprised of values that students are implicitly imparted, by means of school administrative processes and pedagogical practices rather than via explicit curricula (Giroux, 1981). Drawing on my own experience as an artist and secondary school art teacher, the study’s re-envisioned tale involves my embodiment of a feminist artist-teacher-witch living in the art studio gingerbread house, who creates art recipes for disrupting the hidden curriculum in schools in order to lead to beneficial outcomes for students, art teachers and the community. My sculptural installations and multimedia works are informed by artists working in the fairy tale genre such as French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle and German-American artist Kiki Smith and explore the ways in which art recipes can offer a space for educational re-enchantment as the project’s central contribution. The qualitative study employs a feminist interpretative framework and a practice-led methodology (Haseman, 2006) as an overarching approach. The research also incorporates action research (Johnson, 2020) alongside auto-ethnographic (Hamilton, et al., 2008) and reflexive (Gabriel, 2018) methodological approaches in addressing my artist-teacher experiences in undertaking the witch archetype. The study generates research outcomes by a cyclic inquiry-based process, informed by secondary school teacher surveys and artefact-elicited senior art graduate interviews. These considerations have been concocted through slow stirring in the cauldron of reflexion resulting in an embodied process of art making, which I have termed and described as a “marinage” method (the combination of the words “marinate” and “bricolage”). Therefore, art becomes both an ingredient and an outcome for this project and arguably a necessary flux enabling the maturation of the creation. Comprising of a practice component of a 70% and an exegesis of a 30% weighting, the study’s discussion gives rise to a more global consideration regarding the importance of art (its making, method and its analysis) in developing the skills required in a holistic, contemporary education; and indeed, in providing the key ingredients, and suggested recipe method for a more sustainable and diverse contemporary society.