CDA Nature, imagination, and tradition in progressive education: The role of art in Sir Alec Clegg’s (1909-1986) conception of children’s education and its legacy

This PhD project has been conceived as an interdisciplinary investigation into how education can use art (art history and artistic practice) to nurture children’s awareness and appreciation of nature and care for the natural environment.  

The project explores the transformation of the West Riding of Yorkshire (now West Yorkshire) into a national model for progressive ideas in education during 1945-1974. This was the period when Sir Alec Clegg (1909-1986) worked as Chief Education Officer in this area. For Clegg, it was important that classrooms displayed ‘natural objects‘, which were ‘both beautiful and scientifically interesting’, and that schools won awards in ‘national nature conservancy‘ for having ‘restored and beautified a piece of derelict land for the benefit of the community’. The project, therefore, will explore Clegg’s papers and the papers of the art teachers and art advisers who worked with him that are now kept in the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in Wakefield, Yorkshire. This will give the opportunity to draw on NAEA’s repository of largely unexplored distinct and unique collections relating to the development of arts education in the UK from 1870 to the present, to understand Clegg’s concept of ‘beauty’ in relation to art, nature, and children’s education.  

The project aims to re-capture, through NAEA’s collections, the ideas and teaching of the artists-educators who worked in primary and secondary schools in this area with Clegg. The project will also use this knowledge to explore the relevance of Clegg’s pedagogy to re-shaping public attitudes towards the environment today. The PhD offers an opportunity to work across disciplines (cultural and historical studies, art history, nationalism studies, and education studies) exploring how children’s art education can bring together artistic tradition (especially the British landscape tradition, and the Classical tradition, both centred on natural observation), and children’s imagination and creativity, in forging the idea of nature as a home and a part of the growing child’s identity formation. 

The central research questions for the doctoral project will include:  

• How did Clegg understand the role of art in children’s art education, identity formation, and appreciation of the natural environment? 
• What was Clegg’s attitude towards tradition, observation, and imagination in art education? 
• What were Clegg’s connections with progressive artist-teachers and educational movements, and how did his views on the link between nature and art compare to those of other Chief Education Officers in the early postwar period in Britain?  
• How can the West Riding approach to art and nature contribute to public engagement with the environment, today?  

The student will have a strong interest in environmental issues and the role of art and art education in transforming attitudes to nature. They will also have knowledge of modern European art history, especially British art history, and some experience of archival research. 

The student will be exposed and encouraged to engage with a variety of methods and concepts drawn from cultural and art/historical studies, nationalism studies, and education studies. The project involves qualitative approaches, in which the researcher seeks to understand (rather than to explain) how children learn. A key hypothesis is that artistic representation of the local landscape promotes knowledge and appreciation of nature as a home, and as a part of one’s identity. Art thus becomes a medium of self-expression, social integration of young personalities, and education about nature. The project will examine how children in West Riding were encouraged to approach and represent in their art the British landscape and the extent to which the countryside was presented to them both as part of nature and as a home and identity. 

There is wide scope for the student to develop aspects of the project in directions that interest them, as well direct the exact research methods employed.

Interest in the relationship between humans and their natural environment is high in the current context of environmental crisis, and desire to re-connect with nature is prevalent.  

This project therefore focuses on children’s art as a means of linking human lives to nature. Existing literature on twentieth-century art education in Britain concentrates on the influential educational theories of Herbert Read, and the pioneering art-teaching methods and ideas of Marion Richardson, thus overshadowing Clegg’s significant contributions in the area of British art education with what became known as the West Riding model. Read and Richardson did not attach attention to actual natural forms, promoting free and spontaneous expression in response to nature, rejecting any other method as mechanical, unnatural and unimaginative. For Clegg however, ‘the beauty of things’ mattered. His broad vision of education through art (rather than just art education) reconciled the British artistic tradition of empirical investigation of nature with imagination and innovation. 

Established notions of strict disciplinary boundaries have prevented art and cultural historians from exploring Clegg, while educationalists have overlooked the artistic depth of Clegg’s educational ideas. 

In addition to giving the student doctoral research skills – data and information gathering, evaluation, interpretation, and communication, this project will provide crucial and much-needed understanding of how art and nature can be used in education.  

It will offer the student distinctive opportunities to develop professionally through:  

• Cross-disciplinary experience by working with cultural historians, art education experts, and archival experts, analysing visual and textual archival evidence.  
• Team-working experience, by being part of the archival team at NAEA.  
• Hands-on /in-house instruction in cataloguing, re-packing and conservation of archival material. 
• The opportunity to curate an exhibition related to art and nature and an aspect of the archive of their choice. 

The NAEA Archive Coordinator will train the student in:  

1. handling and cataloguing archival material. Training in repacking and identification of conservation requirements will also be given, to contribute to the ongoing conservation work at NAEA. Cataloguing and auditing the core, and still uncatalogued, collection of Clegg would be of benefit to the organisation as it will contribute to its goal of achieving full Archive Service Accreditation by 2027. 
2. planning and curating an exhibition (including organising insurance, condition reports etc) based on the student’s research 

The above will significantly enhance the student’s employability in archive & museum sectors.