This paper examines how collaborative practices in the secondary art and design classroom can be formulative in the sustainability of cultural beliefs, practices and heritage conservation. This research takes its point of departure from the traditional culture of teaching and learning practices that feed the ideologies of the institution and entrench a whitewashed curriculum that favours westernised ideologies of arts and design practices. This paper draws upon my research that investigates collaborative pedagogies in the curriculum and seeks to illuminate how micro-relationships within the classroom enable young artists, craftspeople, and designers to look to one another to better understand a sense of themselves as active agents for change in the world, rather than passive receptors of the ideologies of the institution and the distribution of power. In this paper I employ the Lacanian understanding of the other, and Rencier’s Distribution of the Sensible to discuss how collaborative pedagogies enable the preservation of cultural sustainability not of the institution but of the learners.
Keywords: collaboration, curriculum, art and design