Evan Wood

Why there should be no 'shame' in art education 

Evan Wood, Research Further Scholar

Art education is supposed to be a place of wonder—a sanctuary where creativity and self-expression flourish. But for many, it’s marked by something far more constrictive: shame. Not just the personal kind, but a broader, cultural shame that quietly dictates who gets to call themselves 'an artist' and who doesn't. This kind of shame isn’t just a feeling. It’s a tool—a coercive cultural act that disciplines expression, polices identity, and upholds harmful hierarchies.

We often think of shame as an internal response to doing something wrong. But in reality, shame is frequently used as a social tool—a way to enforce norms and maintain control. In art education, shame can become a means of coercion, reinforcing dominant standards of beauty, skill, and worth. It tells students: There is a correct way to create, and if you don’t or can’t meet it, you don't belong.

This dynamic doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It reflects broader cultural patterns. In classrooms, this can look like teachers praising realism over abstraction, favouring Western art histories, or dismissing emotional or intuitive approaches to making. Students who think, feel, or create outside these boundaries are often subtly—or explicitly—shamed into compliance. The unspoken message: To be taken seriously, you must fit the mould.

Young children rarely start their creative journeys with shame. They're fearless. They draw purple cows and asymmetrical houses without apology. But once they're introduced to grades, rubrics, and "rules" of art-making, many start to edit themselves. Suddenly, the goal isn't exploration—it's approval.

This shift is not just educational, it's political. When shame is used to discipline creativity, it conditions people to self-censor, to strive for external validation, and to equate worth with technical precision or adherence to style. Over time, the internal critic becomes a stand-in for the external judge. And just like that, shame does its job—it keeps us in line.

Shame operates not just on the individual level but at a systemic one. It’s baked into how we measure success, how we define “skill,” and who we decide is worthy of being called an artist. It can discourage working-class students, neurodivergent people, and those from non-Western traditions from seeing themselves reflected or accepted in the art world.

To challenge this, we need to reframe art education—not just as a place to build skill, but as a space to deconstruct the systems that shape how we see ourselves and others. Healing from artistic shame is a deeply political act. It’s a rejection of the idea that worth is measured by polish or perfection. It’s a return to creative autonomy and connection.

For students and lifelong learners alike, this healing can look like:

• Making art in private, without the need for external validation
• Exploring materials and forms that don’t “make sense” in traditional contexts
• Engaging in community-based, non-hierarchical creative spaces
• Learning about art movements and makers outside the canon
• Naming shame for what it is: a control mechanism, not a truth

Educators, too, can take up this work. By embracing failure as a necessary part of learning, validating all forms of creative expression, and teaching the socio-political context of art, they can offer students an antidote to shame.

There’s something radical about making art without apology. When we push past the internalized voices that say "you’re not good enough", we reclaim a vital part of ourselves. And in doing so, we challenge the larger systems that benefit from our silence.

This doesn’t mean we abandon rigor or technique—it means we stop using them as the only benchmarks of value. When creativity is defined only by its ability to impress, it loses its power to transform. But when it’s rooted in play and self-expression, it becomes a tool for liberation.

Art education doesn’t have to be a site of shame. It can be a space of undoing, unlearning, and reimagining. It can teach us not only how to draw or paint but how to trust ourselves. That process starts with recognizing shame not as a personal failing, but as a cultural force—one we can question, resist and outgrow.

In reclaiming joy and autonomy in making, we’re not just healing ourselves. We’re making space for others, too.

Art should play a central role in all education

By Evan Wood, Research Further Scholar

Whilst travelling India in 2024, we visited a small rural village including a school as part of the tour we were on. The experience felt awkward. I sat to one side of the activities taking place, observing as a photographer and thinking how do I make a photograph of this situation? How do I photograph a scenario but respect the people in this situation as much as possible? How does photography not play into voyeuristic connotations? Do I ask permission? How do I use photography to transcend the situation whilst also acknowledging the hypocrisies that wealth and privilege highlight? These questions are relevant to my career teaching photography, and to the work I undertake as part of my PhD research.

I tried to tap into the humility of what that situation was trying to achieve, drawing from my teaching experience in English colleges. I had sat at the back of the events taking place, but quickly realised that staying to one side wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do. These people wanted to engage, they wanted to tell their story. I thought about the students I had taught; what went right, what went wrong. But my thoughts always came back to their stories and crossovers of lived experience. It was not about language, it was about pictures and making them together.

With no Hindi under my belt, I signalled with my camera and we used my equipment to take some pictures together. They would look at the photographs in elation, as a group, then recompose themselves, signalling to me if they were happy with the image, and make new ones if they were not. What resulted was a series of confrontations of East and West, class, privilege, wealth disparity, generational trauma, relational trauma – built on care. The currency was seeing each other, using the platform I had – my camera. This is what we do in the classroom, too.

They were making pictures of themselves knowing they would be taken into a western space, shared on social media, with colleagues and who knows where else. These kids knew the value of the interaction. They had defiance. They wanted change, to be seen, to be validated. The photograph was a mechanism to be validated. I reflected on the value of the education I’ve experienced and serviced as part of my career, realising that I was not photographing them, but their stories. I later sent them the images on social media to much excitement.

Photography is a bid for connection. That connection is challenging, hard, beautiful and truthful. Richard Billingham’s work Rays A Laugh or Hannah Starky’s In Real Life are prime examples of how using art reveals a truth beyond the words we use to try to describe the trauma we experience growing up. This qualia; the signatures that define us, emerge in the marks we make on paper, the paint we mix or the photographs we decide to make. So how do we teach this? And are we making that enough of a priority in our curriculum? Are we providing opportunities, as lecturers, to empower our young people and listen to what they have to say?

These are tricky conversations particularly as we go through the process of decolonising our education systems. They reflect our own privilege, prejudices and traumas. For example, art requires infrastructure that is expensive and out of reach for most people. Colleges have this equipment and present a key place where the opportunities to use this equipment can empower them to bid for connection and heal.

Art should play a central role in all education. Those difficult questions should be central and leaned into with the communities that make up a multicultural country. Those stories are present within all students, artists, young people, but currently, our curriculum focuses on ‘intentions of the artists’ or ‘cultural context’. It feels like the language of an industry out of touch with the ground level integrity of making pictures and asking questions about difficult things – or simply spreading joy.

Art in our colleges could be bold, sensory and welcome us into our imaginations that are not unlike the back streets of Varanasi. Taming those with fancy words doesn’t feel like what is needed. Our young people are crucial, real, and as Harrison Ford said, “We need to get out of the way”.