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Primary School

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“[Art in primary school] is one of those things that you get introduced to but you don't know what it is. I want to draw a reference in terms of wealth and people who consider themselves rich. We are from a community, we don't know who rich from who not rich. We grew up, everybody's the same for us. But until you come out and see how people interact with each other, then you're like, he has more, he has less. But we are the same. And it's just the same with art. You see these things. You don't know that they're necessarily art until you come out and you see persons kind of talk it as being art. It's not one of those things that you were told…you can become an artist, you can do something with this field. It's one of those areas that always get pushed back. So yes, it was in my face, but I didn't know what it was. And it's a medium that I use to communicate best, but I didn't know what it was. I just knew that if you ask me something, I might start to verbally explain it, but if I draw it on a piece of paper, it might come out better articulated.”           Kimani Beckford | Painter, Collector, Curator AIRS (Artist)

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"My primary school experience, [was that] we did art primarily when there was nothing else to do. When our teacher was either bored or most likely frustrated or wanted us to get quiet. So let us get out a piece of paper, go for one of the school's trophies from some competition, put it on the office desk, and we would just draw them. And that is art class. They were never graded. We never got any feedback. There were no tips, no instructions, nothing. It was just a pastime activity to get us to be a little bit more quiet in class. That's it. All of the development that I experienced was from my own curiosity and saving my lunch money to buy a drawing book and drawing pencils."

Anthony Smith | Painter and Graphic Designer, (Artist)

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"I mean I'm surprised that Anthony actually had a kind of pastime that was dedicated to art. My primary school did not have that. I can actually remember one thing that would have come close to that. It was a little project in grade 5 and I think the teacher got some paint. Maybe poster paint. We found an object, I think leaves. We use a brush to paint the paint onto the leaves and then make a print of that. And talking about the fifth grade, I can remember my teacher actually spanked me because I was drawing. And the thing is, I was always on point with my work. And I was one of the top performers in my classes. So I wasn't one of those students who are idling or wasting time. [It was more like] Why am I drawing in the book that my mom bought?"

Greg Bailey | Painter and Faculty at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, (Formal Educator, Artist)

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“EN: Are there any schools that you've written about over the years that have strong art programs or ways of approaching art in the community that you've been especially impressed by?

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[Any schools with strong art programs or community outreach?]”Unfortunately, maybe I've not come across them as yet. The kids are concentrating on passing their exams. They need to learn their mathematics, their English, their sciences because those are the things which will ensure that they go from grade A to B to C. That's the progression. ‘I’m a brilliant singer, I'm a brilliant artist, I'm a brilliant painter.’ ‘Yeah? Do it in your spare time!’ So I think also what I see is there has to be a radical change in education per se. Can we just recalibrate? It has been scientifically proven that children with learning disorders are more receptive to  creative ways of teaching them. But it's an unfortunate thing and it's not only here, it's across the board. I think it's a developing country predicament. That's where empathy comes in. Art brings empathy, art brings inclusion. You're merging so many things. You're taking two colors and making totally different colors, primary colors, secondary colors. Do we know them? No, we don't. Because we were not taught and we are not even given that kind of knowledge. And it's not that these kids don't want to learn or cannot learn. It's not that. The whole problem is they're not being taught.” 

Amitabh Sharma | Arts & Education Editor for The Gleaner (Critic, Curator, Collector, Investor)

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“[The Future Makers] program just very naturally fit into [Sandals] educational vision. So it's really about looking at young people, trying to meet them where they are. Because sometimes I think that in education, we try to impact kids when they're too old. They need to be impacted at a much younger age. It's really about young kids and primary school kids, so kids under 12. And it's about exposing. [The Future Makers program] is about using education to transform lives or create opportunities or encourage young people to embrace and pursue creative passions.”

Karen Zacca | Director of Operations, Sandals Foundation (Investor)

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In grade one I got an assignment to to draw something that we liked and at the time I was a fanatic for fast cars, dark green and shiny. My father had one. So I'm like, all right, cool. I drew that green car it was shiny when I colored it with pencil crayon There was some thick pencil crayons and some wax crayons and I colored it it was really nice with the mountains in the background and somehow in grade one I knew that the mountains as they went further back they got lighter but no one explained that to me it's not like any theory course or anything. When I presented it to Miss Bruce she said that I didn't draw it, that it’s not my work and I need to bring it back home. She called my family and said that my sisters need to ensure that I do it by myself and what ended up happening was the reverse. They had to help me with the drawing to make it bad enough for her to believe it was my work. And that was spirit shattering in some sense. But it didn't last too long. Before you know it, I was a grade 2 student doing diagrams of the ears, eyes, and the nose, and the cross sections of the teeth for the grade 6 and grade 5 classes. And that made me realize that people actually respected what I did.

Anthony Smith | Painter and Graphic Designer, (Artist)

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“After going to [primary] school, the teachers saw my talent, then they started to give me charts to do. So every little illustration in the class, like things that they would teach to the children, they say, ‘What if he makes some sugar cane?’ They said we're gonna have a school competition, [then] a parish competition. St. Mary against Portland and school against school to see who would be the top artist for each school. So I entered the competition for my school. When I reached, I saw a lot of artists, kids. I said well I'm going to do my thing. And I was surprised when they said, ‘First prize, Headley Thompson from Oracabessa.’ And they said he's an upcoming artist, and then from there start to push on. The school give me a lot of works to do.”

Headley Thompson | Painter (Craft Artisan)

 

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Preparatory School

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“I went to St. Peter and Paul [prep school], which is in Liguanea, Barbican area.  We had crafts projects. So I remember a project where we had to make a hotel out of paper and I remember getting really into that. And then my mum moved me to a new school because I think I was quite artistically inclined and sensitive and I wasn't doing well in these large classes and there was no kind of creative outlet. And she moved me to Prior, which is now Liberty Academy. There I vividly remember we had so many more creatively oriented classes and learning structures. I remember we had to do a class project where we had to be in teams and come up with Jamaican themed buses. We set plaster in juice boxes, and then we came back the next week and we were allowed to carve.  It blew my mind that you could do that. And I remember having this vision of what I was gonna carve and then being completely unable to do it because this thing dried so solid. I probably put too much powder in because it dried really solid. But in my head I was like this is the best experience. I mean I would have been doing art all day every day if I'd been allowed. I didn't go to school a lot. I used to refuse to go to school because I would much rather be at home drawing and painting and just using my imagination.

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“The prep school that I went to was St. Hugh's Prep. And they seemed to be, at the time, a gentler kind of school that encouraged interests and aspects of creative activity. So then my experience with my own children. I have two children, they're in their 20s now, and their experience was a little different in prep school. And I think part of the fault of the education system in not nurturing an interest in art is that art classes will happen on a Friday. Not in kindergarten, but in the higher levels. So there is a sense of, let's get all of the important subjects out of the way first, the sciences and the literatures and whatever. And then at the end of the week, when their little brains are just consumed by everything else, that's when art classes would happen.”

Tamara Scott Williams | Founder of artephemera, NGJ Board, Previous 21 years LIfestyle Editor/Columnist Jamaica Observer (Policy Maker, Scholar, Critic)

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“[The first time I learned about art was] in prep school where you learn arts and craft. It was mandatory. You know, you get the glue, you get the sticks, you get paper. We have something called a scrapbook here in Jamaica. We would do a bunch of creative stuff.  Find stuff in the newspaper, cut stuff out, paste them in, create a collage of whatever it may be. And kind of moved on up to high school where, you know, art was a subject and it was much more serious than prep school. And it was optional, something you don't have to do once you pass a certain grade. “                                                                                                                                  Alwayne White | Animator, Media Production (Art Production)

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Secondary School

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GB: [In secondary school], art would be a part of a rotation. So for seventh grade, you are rotating all these different departments. You're doing things that you might go into as a profession. So business, foods, home economics, art, woodwork, electrical. It wasn't the full year. It was just enough to teach you about the elements, principles, and maybe a few artists and what they did. And then you would do some color wheel and some basic stuff. I can definitely remember learning about the Jamaican pioneers artists. And then you would also get a few well-known international artists from time to time.

 

AS: Yeah so when you think about old masters you're not thinking about Jamaican old masters exactly. You're thinking about European old masters. Italian and coming all the way down. That's what's going to be taught. That's the canon. That's the globalized canon. So we had to learn that, but my art teacher, Neville Thompson, made sure that we knew Edna Manley, Laura Facy, Barrington Watson, Albert Huey, and David Pottinger. When I was grade 9 and early grade 10, I got a new teacher who was more theoretical in his approach, who continued to encourage understanding that there are great artists from Jamaica. And then one of the textbooks was from a Trinidadian artist and art educator who covered art across the Caribbean too. However, while that was being taught to us, all of the stylistic underpinnings and the visual characteristics of what we're expected to produce would still fit under the European canon. So it wouldn't be seen as necessarily good if it was not fitting in the European canon, in the ancient Italian Renaissance, sometimes Baroque canon, if it wasn't fitting within that, and even sometimes abstract expressionism too. If the work wasn't fitting into that American aspect of the canon too, then it wouldn't be suitable.

 

GB: My first pastiche was Picasso’s musicians. So if it's not Italian, French, if it's not highly figurative, then you're not an artist. Right? And when I was looking at stuff that would be hung up on the walls in the art room, I was never on those levels. So I'm like, I can't call myself an artist. For me, I did not have a clear vision that I wanted to do art. Every now and again, you might hear a story that artwork can be so expensive, but realistically, where I’m from, art is just not a thing. It wasn't until I think the ninth grade when I went on a field trip for art. I went to the National Gallery. You would do art as a vacation subject up until the ninth grade. In our school, at the fourth or fifth form, that's when you can actually do it. You started to take the class as a CXC class, so that's when you go into it and you're doing it every week for the entire year.  Before I got to the fourth form, in third form, we would go on several trips. We would even watch movies and look for themes and talk about it afterwards. These experiences were very different but even after all of this it was just something to do. So maybe she knew that she was gonna leave and she had a talk with me during my rotation saying Greg I think you're very good and you should consider art as a subject to take in CXE. And it was at that moment I started to think about it because, as Anthony mentioned earlier, what is considered art are things that are established in the Western canon. So it was at that point, I started to think that, okay, maybe I should work at this because she was encouraging me. Teacher, Mr. Moody, recommended me to take the CXE, because you need a recommendation to take a teacher's CXC subject,

 

 

AS:  I probably would have gotten a 3 if I did it in fourth form. My art teacher recommended it and I was doing some oil paintings on paper. I mean, I didn't know that I should have primed the paper first before I painted the oil on it because I would just make the paper brittle. So it was easy for some vandals, in Jamaica we call them bad man, to sabotage my work. I went back one morning and I opened my portfolio, you know them flat cardboard portfolio there, with the mat board. And my SBA pieces were torn in half. It [hurt], because I worked over my holidays.I saved the money and I  bought my Reeves oil painting tubes. I'm painting on the veranda and I'm using oil paint industrial thinner. I didn't know about sulphur free paint at the time. I didn't know anything about linseed oil. It reach a point where my family inside the house have to say take a break now because the thinner is getting really strong and it's coming inside the house. That's just how serious I was but the sabotage said, you know what do it another time so I did.That was [also] a really rough patch though,  because there were times I had to sleep in the art room. It reached a point where my art teacher started putting me up at his house when he realized that I was staying over there. So he put me up at his house and he would lend me his laptop because his was way faster than mine.

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My art teacher created something like a maze gallery at the back of the art room. So it was a huge auditorium like building that was the art room. Half of it was for class and the physical space was like this. We had Some slanted tables that were normally used for technical drawing majors but then we would borrow them. They're kind of heavy. So only the stronger students normally have access to them, and that in and of itself has a lot to do with the body as material and the body as tool to facilitate the process of having access to better stuff. The back of the art room, now that was turned into a gallery-like setting, was heavily influential in how students perceived improvement and interpersonal and intrapersonal competition. So we had those chalkboards that would be used in primary schools. They were organized like a grid and then we would use thumbtacks to put up works from works above 80%. Normally the senior students got there because they meet a certain requirement. Not saying that junior students weren't able to meet that, but when the senior students did that, [they set] a level that we all should strive for. So we worked really hard until eventually my work got up there and it made me feel really good knowing that wait it's possible to actually get better. So it kept me motivated to try. You know it's one of the things that contributed to making me a constant learner, a constant improver, always trying to better this thing that I'm doing."

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“My first teaching job was at Spanish Town High School. That was one of the spaces that I've grown so much because of the challenges. And when I was there, art had such an important role because you can use art to communicate with just about anyone. But there are different ways to approach it. The students I had were really troubled. You're talking about students who've been going through different forms of abuse. You're talking about students in Spanish Town. They're in neighborhoods where there's constant gun fighting and war, and school is this place where you know there's always a fight going on. But I think I had a good relationship with them. . It was very challenging but I realized the potential of art. I would have them entering competitions just so they feel like they have something to offer. And sometimes when you talk to them you're surprised [at] the wisdom they have, but because they don't have anybody who really believes in them, it's very easy for them to just accept whatever is going on on the street. And that's a problem with a lot of young people in Jamaica, especially if they live in these neighborhoods.”

Alicia Brown | Painter (Visual Arts Educator, Artist)

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“I taught high school when I just left Edna [Manley College]. I did teach at a high school for a semester [at] Holmwood Technical High School in Christiana, Manchester. A rural environment. Grades 7, 8, 9, 10. It was rough. Very rough. Because I didn't train at that time. I didn't really think I was going to teach. And I was 20 years old and maybe there was an intimidation factor. Should I be doing this? I didn't study art education, so how am I to approach this? So I was kind of still figuring things out at that time too. And I think the students could sense that I'm this young new teacher, so it was very challenging. And the school had some disciplinary issues and you know obviously I'm trying to help them through art.

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[Teaching elements of art / engaging students:] I remember one time I did something so ridiculous but they found it hilarious. I was  talking about lines, and about vertical lines being something very solid and upright. And then I lay down on the floor and did a horizontal line. And they're like, what is she doing? And they're dying. I was like when you see a horizontal line what does that mean? It means it's kind of resting, it's tired, or it's another form of stability. So they kind of lit up at that. So I guess I kind of had to be a little performative in order to get some of the things across.”

Camille Chedda | Mixed Media Artist, EMCVPA Lecturer, InPulse Project Manager, Curator (Visual Arts Educator, Artist, Curator)

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“I started practicing with paint in high school because I was in Electrical Installation. I really never liked the thing because of the current and all of those shocks. But my best friends, them was always in the art class. And I am wondering how. I love art and I wasn't placed in the art class. My brother was a teacher at the high school that I was going to, Norman Manley High School. So from that link now I go to the principal and ask him if he can switch me over from electrical to art and craft class. And him sign the paper the same day, write me up and send me up where Miss Atkinson was my art teacher. Very intelligent woman of art. And that's where it start from, seriously.” 

Marvin Hibbert | Painter, Teacher Trench Town Ceramics (Visual Arts Educator, Craft Artisan)

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“In high school, I had excellent art teachers. They were also trained at the Edna Manley College and provided me with the opportunity to just explore. And coming to exams, you know doing what we call those CSEC exams in art, I was gauging everything around my performance in art. The year I did CSEC, I attended the Merrill Grove High School for Girls. And I remember, so when you do your course selection, and this is part of the problem with the structure of some of how we do things with education here, if you were inclined to the arts, then you'd be more coached to  do art, do this, do that, do literature, da da da. But I straddled both. I straddled both art and science. I did physics, I did geography, I did biology. I had to do art. If art wasn't in there, then nothing else was going to happen. And so what happened in the end, based on the number of subjects I was carrying, I went to the principal and I asked, ‘Can I do my art class with the other students on the other shift?’ Because the school was in a two shift system. And she said, sure. And that worked for me. I was also on the track team. I would do my art for the evening shift [and] go straight to training and do my other courses in the morning with the other students. So that was my make-it-work. It was  determination really because sometimes you run into some difficult situations with people who say, ‘Oh, if you do art, you're never gonna come up to be anything.’ And that was actually said to a group of us as girls at the school by a teacher no less, ‘Oh, what are you gonna do? Aren't you gonna make any money? You're not gonna do anything with art in Jamaica.’ Of course, it was hurtful to hear this from someone who's supposed to be nurturing you. And so the teacher that really made me feel like I was doing something, Mrs. Norris Dredwick. I love her to death. She was amazing. And she graduated Edna Manley as a painter, but she understood everything, the way you should approach compositions, understand light. So I started really learning and understanding art from the formal space of the high school education system with a good teacher.”

Miriam Hinds Smith | Fiber & Textile Artist, Director of the School of Visual Arts, EMCVPA (Visual Arts Educator, Artist, Policy Maker, Scholar, Critic)

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“I grew up not in the city area but somewhat in the country area, what we call the countryside of Jamaica. Born in St. Catherine, grew up in Clarendon [Parish]. So I came to Kingston first as a youngster while in high school. I think this was probably seventh grade. I remember coming to this very space [Olympia Gallery], which is kind of special to me because this is the very first gallery I've ever been, just getting introduced to art. I remember coming here on a school trip and I got to meet some artists. I don't quite remember, I think Christopher Gonzalez was one of the first visual Jamaican artists I met at the time. So that was my first introduction to art on a professional scale. And it resonates so much. So after high school, where you're introduced to a lot of fields, and you say, I want to do this and I want to do that. But art somewhat resonates more. I think it was a language that I was very comfortable speaking, even though it's a visual art, but it's a language that I was comfortable with communicating visually. So I gravitated toward that area with the motivation of my art teacher Mr. Atkinson. He was one of those first person that gave me that insight of what you can become being an artist.

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The good thing about my school at the time, Garvey Maceo [High School], we were more exposed to different forms of art. My art school teacher was well-rounded. So we got introduced to it from an early stage, from that time period. Because I remember even when I left Garvey Maceo, coming to Edna Manley College, like a lot of things that I was exposed to, a lot of the students in college wasn't [exposed to]. And then I realized that in terms of even the medium and the different styles, I was fortunate to get introduced to these mediums before. And I didn't knew that I was actually ahead. And luckily, well, I don't wanna use the word luck. Ambitiously, I'm always doing more than I'm supposed to do. So if I get one assignment, I will do three of those, that same assignment. So I always have surplus of my task. But in terms of the portfolio, I think we had figure drawing, still life, landscape. That much I can remember. I had even 3D as sculpture. As I said, we at the time was well-rounded. And I think my teacher realized that I wanted more than just the average. So I was exposed to a lot.”

Kimani Beckford | Painter, Collector, Curator AIRS (Artist)

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“In high school, I was motivated by my art teacher. So he was at the time a very good artist. I saw him as a motivator, I saw him as an idol in a sense, and I wanted to be like him. So I attempted to take it a little bit more seriously and practice every day, look at references, find out different techniques, approaches. Did a little bit of art history, so background on artists such as Grant Wood or Leonardo da Vinci. Until eventually I started to become more confident in the work, and it became more evident since the work looked a little bit more advanced than my age group. So I normally pretty much dominated my visual arts classes. I had classes twice per week, I believe. But the time period was short, so it was supposed to be like a three-hour class, but they did an hour and a half per session.I think one of the key opportunities that he exposed me to is the InPulse Art Program. So after graduating from Dunoon, I was home for a year and the opportunity came forth. And he was like, ‘So I heard of this program InPulse Art Program and we know you like art, so let's see what they have to offer.’ So I went down there, did the regular art classes, portrait drawings, sculptures, ceramics, cinematography, also stop-motion, animation. I became more interested in those things as I attended the classes. And I was eventually selected as a candidate for a scholarship, which I was more than elated for, because there's a little bit of financial problems that I've faced where I needed assistance to continue studies at Edna. And then I went on to teach [for InPulse].”

Jordan Harrison | Painter, InPulse Art Teacher (Visual Arts Educator, Artist)

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“I've been teaching for the past 16 years. I started at 22. I'm close to 40 now. I am a graduate of the Mico University College, where I did a Diploma in Art Education and a Bachelor’s in Secondary Education specializing in Visual Arts. I've taught at the same institution, Dunoon Park Technical High School. I started there in 2009. I've done some work at the Mico School of Continuing Studies, and I've also done extensive work with the Rubis Mecenat InPulse Art Project at the Dunoon Park Technical High School. 

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[I took the CXC at] Meadowbrook High School. I did art. I thought I was one of the better students, but I failed art miserably. I got a five. The only grade that is worse than that is an ungraded, and I got very close to ungraded. So I went to live in Montego Bay and I went to Cornwall College. There I met a teacher by the name of Clyde Clark, Head of Visual Arts, who encouraged me. He  looked at my artwork and gave me advice. ‘We have a good program here, you can try it. Come whenever you have free time.’ And he wasn't even my teacher. He was my form teacher.  He had a beautiful spirit, Rastafarian, long dreads, and dashiki attire. I practiced and I did more and more art. And when I sat Art for the second time, I got a straight A profile. So I got A for drawing, imaginative composition, graphics, and graphic and communication design. And I entered [and won] a lot of competitions. So Mr. Clark at Cornwall College, he was the one who made me give art a second chance, because I was about to give up on doing art. He was one of a few master teachers in Jamaica, and a master teacher who was an art teacher. He was an avid painter. 

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He had a whole museum and I think, three teachers at Cornwall College. We had a lot of teachers at Meadowbrook, We had about six teachers. Dunoon, it's only me. When I started at Dunoon, we had only grades nine, ten and eleven. As time progressed, they added grades seven and eight and twelve and thirteen. I've also done teaching practice at St. Jago High. That's where I did my internship, in Spanish Town. I think they had about four teachers at St. Jago. And I did my second year teaching practice at Innswood High, and I think they had two teachers there.

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[Curriculum changes over the years:] The National Standard Curriculum, the NSC, is a commendable effort, but I think that there needs to be greater investment and communication of the benefits. Because I think it's very fragmented the way it's been executed, and a lot of schools are doing their own thing. And, you know, one of the architects of that National Standard Curriculum was one of my lecturers from Mico. You know I would see her from time to time  and I was made aware of how the flow of the curriculum should go. 

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A lot of times in Jamaica, art is something that when students are giving trouble, they give them something to keep them occupied.So there is not a systemized way of teaching art in Jamaica. Many times students only do art when they come to high school. So they're way, way behind the eight ball. And based on the hierarchical nature of how we organize subjects, the arts is the one at the bottom and everything else is at the top. So the students don't really think it's valuable. And the curriculum is not helping the teaching of art. So I think efforts have been made. But I think there's still a lot of work to be done to have it cemented and followed in a systematic way that will engender students learning, loving, participating, and seeing value in art.

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[What can the Ministry do:] One of the greatest [benefits of the] Ministry playing a more direct role is having art taught in the formative years. Not that rigorous, systemic assessment thing, but some form of assessment.  From my experience, when there are formal assessments, people tend to find meaning. When they see a letter grade, they find meaning in it. Have art taught in the primary schools. Have it as a part of the curriculum and not some throwaway subject that you do now and then. Because by the time students get to me, it's a challenge to get them to relearn that creativity from primary school. 

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[On Mico University College:]I finished Cornwall College, and I wanted to be an architect but I didn't have the discipline for mathematics. I was good at art and the experience at Cornwall College had given me new confidence. So I applied for Edna Manley College. I got a glowing recommendation from Mr. Clark. But I was concerned about how I would fund this time at Edna Manley [which cost]  about $80,000 to $100,000 more than Mico. So I got a bit disillusioned. I did orientation, I did two weeks at Edna Manley. Then I went to Manchester to think about it. I can remember distinctly, I was on a potato farm, and my aunt who raised me called me and encouraged me to go to Mico. So I started Mico the following day. 

My seniors were the standard bearers, excellent artists. But in my batch, not so much. I was the standard student and I found that I had to be containing myself. And I remember one time, one of my classmates was complaining that, ‘Why did he come? He's making us look bad.’ And I remember Mr. Peart, who was our painting and drawing lecturer, said, ‘Instead of trying to rise to the challenge, you're cowering and you're trying to make this young man come down to your level.’ So it was different in that regard.

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It was an undergrad [program]. When I started, it was a Diploma. . We did a lot of art. And there are so many things that I learned in that three-year period that students who do the four-year course didn't get a chance to do. So I think in Mico moving to become a university, I think they tailored their program to capture as many students as possible. And I think the arts suffered a bit from that. Mico became a university about 2013, 2014. And when I did the Diploma, that was ‘06 to ‘09.

We did drawing, life drawing, painting, fiber arts, ceramics, sculpture, art history, education, technology and arts.We had curriculum classes outside of but still linked to art. We were tasked to plan lesson plans, curricula for art. And in our teaching practice.I started the Master's program during the pandemic in ‘21 at the encouragement of Ms. Monica Hines Graham. She taught general crafts - stencil printing, screen printing, batiks, tie-dyes, fiber art, block printing, junk printing, mono printing, etching. Ms. Graham is a graduate of the Edna Manley College and she was the former head of the department. So when I started, I found it difficult because I did drawing, graphics and imaginative compositions. I drew, but when I then went to Mico, I had to be doing things like tie-dye and stenciling, and it was foreign to me. I found it very difficult. I hated it.

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At that time we had a lecturer who was standing in for Ms. Graham. And I didn't find that to be helpful. I remember one day I was doing some batiks. You know, first time doing it, I was struggling. Ms. Graham happened to be on campus. And she came and saw me and she was there with me for about an hour and a half. And she went and got a big book, and she told me about the history and the development. It was Ms. Graham who was trying to get me to come and work at the Mico University to teach textiles because she wanted me to carry on her legacy. 

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[For The Master's program] in Leadership in Workforce Development and Technical Vocational Education and Training, I looked at student interest and participation in visual arts and methods, strategies, and ways that we can get students to buy into visual arts. So that study was rather revealing. It just confirmed a lot of the things that I knew, especially in the Jamaican context. Not a lot of research is done in Jamaica [or the] Caribbean. What I found was USA and Europe and Australia. What a lot of the findings showed is that parents don't think art is important. Principals don't want to fund it. Students don't think art is valuable. It just confirmed a lot of the things that I already knew, because at that point I was in a classroom for about 12 years. I did interviews. I worked with students. We did surveys. We did a project at the school, we went into the art room and we tried to make it more student-centered. We did displays, and we did a new mural, and we repainted the place, and we installed all the visuals. And a lot more students came in. But, you know, I was in and out. So by the time I came back, a lot of the time and effort that was put in was lost. Students stole a lot of the equipment and destroyed them. Yes, it's our reality.

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I’m in law school now but I'm a teacher at heart. Even though I've become disillusioned with teaching arts, I’m still a teacher. And maybe sometime in the future, there will be opportunities for me to get back in the classroom. But I’ve done 16 hard years. My first 10 years, I would be at Dunoon every Saturday and after school until five, six, seven o'clock, five days of the week. I spent my money buying supplies for the students. I assisted them in any way that I could. I did everything that was humanly possible for my students. So I have no regrets now that I'm in a different place, because I've poured myself into my students. And now I’m able to see quite a few of them, who are artists now, who are educators. And it was quite eye opening, you know, the way I made them look at art. 

When I started, one of the things that garnered my students' respect was the fact that I was a very good artist. I drew, I painted, I sculpted. I did everything well. When I went in the classroom and I told them something, they had faith in me that whatever I was telling them, I too was able to do that. Another thing is being there to support them. We have to support them. We know we live in a culture, in a climate where resources are not so readily available. So I was always able to find something here and there to procure the materials, or even the lunch money.  

[Advice:] When they leave school don't forget about them, follow them. Especially my students who had that innate ability, I always follow them. I give them guidance, so everybody who does art will become an artist. I try to remind them that there are avenues out there. At my school, art is offered as an elective for the older students. So many students will never see a day in the art room. So they have to really want to do the subject.

You have to know your material. You have to be entrenched, you have to know the jargons, you have to know the things that are happening, and you have to be open and honest with the students. 

Whenever I needed anything, just a different perspective, or I needed support, I was always able to reach out to [my network including other art teachers]. Sometimes we swap. I will bring my friend from St. Andrew Technical, and she will come and do my class for me. And vice versa. So we share.

Stefan Harriott | Visual Arts Teacher, Dunoon Technical High School (Visual Arts Educator)

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“I think the way art is framed in the curriculum does more damage than good. I can give you an example coming from my experience at the National Gallery giving tours. Because part of the bread and butter [of a museum institute] is schools at all levels, I was always struck that the younger kids, primary school level, will come to the National Gallery with an open mind. I mean, they're willing to look at anything. And they will respond to it in a very unmediated kind of way. And then you bring in the high school students, and suddenly there is this sort of very rigid concept of art and value that is attached to it. And suddenly the field narrows in terms of what they are willing to engage with, what they are willing to consider. And I think a lot of that has to do with the high school level curricula for art, which codifies a particular understanding of Jamaican art and a particular understanding of art, which is very narrow.And for instance,  what I found very frustrating with a lot of the high school students is that if there's not a painting with a frame around it, it's not art. So I do not necessarily have a lot of confidence in the curricula.

 

I think the art world would have to be more actively involved. But there is a tendency not to listen to the art world. If your perceptions that you convey to your students are not informed by what actually exists, by the ideas that actually prevail in the art world, then you're playing a very self-defeating game. And if you look at, for instance, how art is framed in the curricula right now in Jamaica, it's very much stuck in the 1980s. I mean, it's like whatever happened in the art world since then does not even matter. It is all about Judy Macmillan and Barrington Watson and Edna Manley and so on. And to give you another idea, there's this famous poem by Lorna Goodison, “Praise to the Mother of Jamaican Art”. I taught that poem on a number of occasions at the Edna Manley College. And then I asked questions about it in exams only to find out that about half of the responses would insist that this is about Edna Manley, even though we spoke at length about the fact that it is a critique of that sort of Edna Manley-focused narrative as the sort of originator of Jamaican art. I think this idea of Edna Manley equals the mother of Jamaican art is so drilled into  young people in Jamaica that critical thinking stops. And I think it's the lack of critical thinking in the art curriculum that is the main problem. So I think those are things that really have to change, because dealing with art can be an important tool to foster independent thinking, to allow people to think outside of the box. And when you're going to be so boxed in, in terms of how you teach about art, especially art in the high school system, then you are creating a problem.

 

If you talk to some of the lecturers at the Edna Manley  College, they will tell you what a task it is to open those minds in the first year, to really get out of that high school thinking about art and to consider other possibilities. I don't think Jamaica has done very well in that regard. I fully understand that the art world can be very arcane. And that especially the sort of more free-flowing kind of aspects of it can be very difficult to consolidate in a curriculum format. But there's a lot of potential there in terms of learning to think in different ways. And that's just not harnessed. The focus is so much on these sort of narrow conceptions and entrepreneurial aspects of the cultural sector. That vast field of other possibilities is just completely ignored, and sort of left to those people who make a choice to spend their life in the art world. Then suddenly those things become possible. But that also means that young people who make those choices may not be supported by their parents or by their communities because other factors, other expectations come into play.”

Veerle Poupeye  | Director Cayman Islands National Museum, Past Executive Director National Gallery of Jamaica, Past Edna Manley Faculty, Author “Caribbean Art (The World of Art)” (Curator, Collector, Investor, Policy Maker, Scholar, Critic)

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GB: So I've interviewed students who are applying for Edna Manley College, and when you look at the portfolios of these students, you can always handpick maybe five or seven schools across Jamaica that these students are coming from. It's almost always these schools, right? Right, because the high schools are using the same syllabus. So it's definitely the intention. A lot of the students suffer from a kind of weak high school experience. And that's really something I hope we can collaborate with the Ministry of Education to kind of see how best we can pretty much edit the way that the syllabus is set up workshops or training that can be spread out across the country so that our teaching in all high schools can have a threshold in terms of how serious art is being taught. I think it's one of those programs that you really have to go into the schools, it cannot be just a virtual workshop. if seven or 10 schools can do it why can't all the schools do it.

 

I think it should be included a lot more, it should be included a lot more even in the primary education. For instance, how social studies is set up in the primary school is different from how social studies is set up in high school.  I can remember social studies being a lot more geography based in primary school. You're learning about the locations and the map and then in high school it became learning about people and interactions and social issues. you learn about the history of Jamaica. I think that should also talk about art as well.

Greg Bailey | Painter and Faculty at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, (Formal Educator, Artist)

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I am the Senior Education Officer for Visualized Education within the Technical and Vocational units here at the Ministry of Education. Prior to me taking up the post at the Ministry of Education, I worked at two other institutions. So I taught visualized education to the human ecology students at the Shortwood Teachers College, as well as the early childhood students. And I also taught at the Jose Marti Technical High School, and then as a pre-trained teacher for a short period, I taught at St. Mary High School, my alma mater. I enjoy art making. After having gone through the rigors of learning about pedagogy, I recognized that art and art making caused me to learn how to learn.

 

So our curriculum was tested and scrutinized by industry players internationally and locally. So it's not just the visual education officer that sits down and says, okay, I think we're going to go with this or we're going to go with that. We have a team. So it was a whole core curriculum unit along with international stakeholders and other stakeholders locally that would have looked at things like the philosophy. And we would have done the framework to say, okay, this is what we would like to build a curriculum on.  So we want it to function this way. And then because of the philosophy, for example, we say, okay, we're gonna settle on constructivism. That's why we use 5E lesson plan, because it's a constructivist model. That's why we use differentiation, because it's a constructivist model.  That's why we use integration and STEM/STEAM learning and project-based, because they are all constructivist models. Fortunately not, the vast majority don't know that. And don't seem to.  Because it's very hard sometimes when you're ingrained in a particular tradition of dispensing knowledge and explaining and doing that sort of approach for you to relinquish and embrace a new way. And yeah, very difficult.

 

I don't think a lot of people understand. In term one, exploring design, thematic approach to design, design innovation, social issues in design, all of these competencies, you have to build those out in the students. If you try to teach each one of these in isolation, the learning therefore becomes abstract, because it has to be contextualized. And so what the Ministry has been recommending is that we exercise fidelity to the philosophy of the curriculum, which is that of constructivism. Which is why we promote things like project-based learning. And so what I generally try to help the teachers to understand is that you can use one assignment to teach social issues in design, one assignment to teach exploring design, that is all your elements and principles and whatnot, one to teach design innovation, and the other to teach,  thematic approach to design. And a lot of them don't believe.

 

Now in terms two and three, the competence that you would have built out in term one, terms two and three gives you the opportunity to get the student now apply the knowledge relative to all of these elements of design. So when I say elements now I am referring to design innovation, social issues, so on and so forth. You apply that competence now to the discipline of drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking. And in term two, you go again with other discipline. So when you're done in grade seven, you know how to apply design with these various expressive forms. Now I want you to learn how express yourself in a particular style, which is why we now go and teach people about the old masters and art movements. So they develop an appreciation for style.

 

If you know the CXC, when you get to grade 10, as soon as you come through the door, the teacher is going to say to you need to select a theme that you're going to use to create all of these art pieces. We start building the students' competence to work in a thematic way from grade seven. So you see, it streamlines the problem that we have to get the students to really learn in a concretized way is the fact that a lot of the topics that we teach, they're taught in isolation. 

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If the art teacher is not engaged in art making, it is going to cause what they have to impart to become very passive, dormant over a period of time. It will lack luster relative to passion, and it will not have the ability to ignite and to inspire as it ought to. It becomes regurgitative. But when you're doing the art making, and you're growing as as a professional,and you're discovering and rediscovering and learning and reinforcing concepts, you find out when you go in the learning space, it becomes more fluid and more natural, and you're able to pick up a learner from whatever stage they are in in their development and know how to move them. 

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if we had additional investment relative to manpower, then what you would possibly have is every single region seeing an education office of their own…

Each officer would be able to dedicate more time and effort to the advancement of their area of supervision. And so what would happen, you might not necessarily need all visual arts officers or the one or two or three or however amount to be dedicated to this particular training activity. It could be that specific sets would be responsible for this training activity, but the others would be duly engaged in, you know, advancing visual arts education and paying attention to teaching and learning and standards and stuff like that, you know. And I think that would work better. I think that would help us to get the kind of mileage that we're supposed to get. Because even though you have teachers in classroom, truth be told, in whatever space you decide to work, human beings cannot become successful in and of themselves. Fact. Coaching is something that, that is why we have something called lifelong learning. Coaching and mentorship is something that will never ever lose its place in our, you know, society. When you have somebody who will come in and give you a critique and tell you, well this is what you need to do this better, so on and so on and so forth. In a collaborative sort of way. All of what we just said , based on what I would have described to you [schools don’t] need more time, doesn't need “a different program”. It just needs people to become aware of and inculcate in their practice some of these andragogical “principles”. Pedagogical principles, yes we're going to maintain some of them, but it's mostly the andragogical principles in my humble opinion that will get the wheels turning where constructivism is concerned. How do you facilitate the exchange that I just described? It doesn't have to be a structured, timetabled sort of event.

 

We don't have any specific Jamaican textbooks. Not that I am aware of. And I think this is perhaps one of the gaps that needs to be fixed. And I think the more research we have being done in our context and the more papers that people start to produce, the more we will start to head towards publishing and doing books.

Shun Lawton | Policy Maker, Formal Educator; (Ministry of Education SR Visual Arts Officer)

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“As you may know, our political history is intertwined with our art history. As the institution is called the Edna Manley College, and of course the Manleys were a big political family at the time when the school was being formed. And so the way in which we have crafted Jamaican aesthetics, has in my opinion led to the way in which we have written our art history, our own sort of family dynamics, family politics, and how what the idea of the Jamaican subject matter ought to be. And so this is where demographics come in. So if you look at Jamaican art history, who is usually represented in the work is not necessarily who is represented in making the work, certainly in demographics, certainly in backgrounds. And so this, for me, it's a discomfort, let me say it that way. That there is a difference between the people who are depicted and the people who are doing the depiction is often a contention in Jamaican art and how we go about crafting the history. So identity and identity politics through art and culture is a big subject in Jamaican art.

 

How do we, in fact, transfer information from one generation to the next or from one group to the next? A lot of it is that in many ways the oral tradition, and art by its very nature, lends itself to that sort of experiential transfer of information. So many Jamaican artists will tell you about what lecturer was very important to them as opposed to what school of philosophical or educational thought was important to them. Our relationship is with our tutors, or generations, in one particular way. I just curated an exhibition looking at Jamaican art and how it interconnects between generations. So I started as early as people from Kofi Kaiga, for instance, from the 1960s, all the way down to people who were students of my own that just graduated a year ago.  And so, how the information gets passed down from one generation to the next. And one of the interesting things about that exhibition was that it's not simply a matter of how people from the 80s saw the world as they lived it then, but a lot of the similar problems that get passed on [to people] you see in the college right now that are dealing with what Kofi Kaiga dealt with in the 60s or Omari Ra in the 80s or 90s. And so that's also a testament to how on the ground so many things that we experience as artists aren't being solved, certainly at the governmental level, certainly at the socio-political level, and certainly at the financial level. And so you can trace some of these problems right through generations. So yes, we do have a way of passing down information, but we also have a way of passing down problems just the same.

Lots of issues of who is the ‘authentic Jamaican,’ and how does that get represented aesthetically and who is the authority to present those ideas about the so-called other. So these are big subjects that really speak to how we've crafted our socio-cultural relationships and how those things get filtered into our art history. And it ends up in the curriculum of the institution, which then churns out students with a lot of similar ideas about Jamaicanism and authenticity, so on and so forth.

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So I teach a lot of fundamental things. I have a drawing course that's geared primarily towards the history of perspective and what is perspective drawing, and it leans so much into things like computation and engineering drawing. And so many students that may have the aesthetic idea about art, but sometimes need the computation aspect of art making. Generally, I'm a very hands-off lecturer. I don't necessarily dictate to students. I try to help the student to figure out what it is that they're trying to say and give them examples of so many other artists that have said similar things in varied ways. And so it's a matter of crafting, helping to fine tune the student's voice as opposed to giving them one.

 

So for first and second year students, it's more sort of an art historical basis, more foundational. By the time you get to the third and fourth years, it becomes far more specific. Look at this particular artist and then it becomes a deep dive into this particular kind of work. I remember I was having a discussion about Mark Bradford with a student just now, but then looking at the whole history of that kind of art making practice. And how a lot of that, particularly in black art today, resonates with a lot of El Anatsui on the other side of the planet, and all those different ways of seeing a similar problem, and how that can inform your own work.

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[Grading system:] The grading system at the college is not an individual system at the end of the course when we have exams. So my personal grade gets averaged with a second marker. And so the second marker hasn't taught the students, hasn't seen these particular works necessarily. And so they are looking at it from neutral eyes. And so we have a discussion about that. So it's not that I'm necessarily grading individually each student. It's a bit more structured than that where it goes through a system of lecturers discussing about the grading system.

We have a group of internal examiners and a group of external examiners. It's similar to what we do in the institution between myself and another lecturer for our grading systems. For the final year system, we expand on that to include lecturers from inside institutions and practicing artists and a historian from outside of the institution. And so the student presents their body of work, where the student goes through how they're arriving at these solutions and through what mechanisms they're presenting their imagery. And then there's a section for discourse where the externals get to ask the students questions and there's a sort of discussion about the work and sort of eking out of possibilities. After which, both myself as a lecturer and my fellow lecturers, we sit around a table and we discuss each student. And so we give the background, the quality of the student and how they've approached the work, since we know their work best and saw their development from beginning. And then the externals have a discussion about what their reaction with the students is on first impression. And so we sort of echo our differences. And sometimes we violently disagree. And then we come to a conclusion with a grade.”

Phillip Thomas | Painter, EMCVA Lecturer, Curator (Arts Educator, Artist, Curator) 

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“I was teaching part time at Edna. So I think I only had two classes, and one of the classes was a team teaching class because the class is really big. It's a foundation class, and it used to have like 48 students per class. So I think that also helped me to work with another faculty member to see how they approach things. But also at that time, I started to look for other jobs because two part-time teaching jobs at Edna was not enough to live on, especially in the summers when you're not getting a salary. So I did some other teaching things, community teaching, that kind of thing. I also started to teach at UTech, which gave me a whole different perspective on teaching because their structure is different as well.

 

I think they were just starting their animation program and originally they just wanted me to write the course for them. And then I gave them that, and they were like, ‘Oh, do you want to teach it?’ They wanted to break it down into teaching the practical on one day and then doing a lecture on another day for that same class, which I didn't really do at Edna. It was always just kind of practice, like for four hours or so, practice.”                                                                Camille Chedda | Mixed Media Artist, EMCVPA Lecturer, InPulse Project Manager, Curator (Visual Arts Educator, Artist, Curator)

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