"There are two creators;
God and the Poet."

Torquato Tasso

49.

"What do we as educators aim to do?"

When asked a range of my colleagues and other educators, the responses were varied and considered. 51

"And what attributes do we need to make us effective educators?"

As you can plainly see, the notions of what an educator's role is, and what make them good at it, is widely varied and constantly up for discussion and review. Every educator will have their own personal perspective on how they would answer these two question, and rightly so. No matter how good or conscientious a tutor may be, it is through spectacles such as this through which he/she approaches their work. Whether they choose to accept it and act on it or not is a matter for them.

As teachers, tutors and lecturers we are many things to many people, with new responsibilities placed on us from every angle. Put in the position to essentially "lead" a class in one way or another, one thing that we are not is isolated. I mean this in sense that people rely on us, and trust us, to deliver what they need in order for them to achieve. The same spectacles through which we approach our work, our students are looking for a reflection they recognise from variants of those same two questions. "Are they going to tell me what I need to know?", and "Are they any good, or is this a waste of my time?" No pressure then! Where do I sign?

With these responses in mind,and those from the preceding chapters, I have attempted to give a definition of the "problem" approaches that students may have, and offer some "thought strategies" which may prove useful when faced with such an event. Be Warned! For some of you, this may be no surprise ending. The conclusions I have drawn in these Thought Strategies may not be new to the educator, and much of it is simply common sense and already approached day-to-day without a moments thought. Many of them could also be said to be cliché. But to be reacquainted with the familiar after a long journey can be refreshing, and enable the traveller to see their usual surroundings and inhabitants on a different light.

As a definition, I have chosen to raid and bastardise the ideas of John Seabrook, who wrote the influential book "Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture." 52. Seabrook coined the work Nobrow from the terms High-brow and Low-brow. His definition for the term is as follows;

Essentially what this is describing is the post-modern experience and the crashing down of artistic cultural barriers and references. In a Nobrow educational environment, rather than an illustration tutor asking the whole class at the start of the course to draw a cartoon, then get them to throw them in the bin saying that will be the last cartoon she wants to see from them, (true story), the tutor may be encouraged to act differently, and set a whole project in cartooning with the aim of pushing the medium to its artistic and creative limits. If you see an interest, very often it needs to be nurtured. This is slightly a devils advocate's example as the tutor was trying to get the point across the cartooning isn't the only approach to illustration, which of course is extremely valid and reasonable. But it also interesting that it was cartooning that was picked on, and not observational drawing, which is also a stereotype of that disciple.

For the purposes of this study, I will use the original Seabrook definition above, and mutate it to produce a new definition specifically for Nobrow Art approaches and creative products in educational establishments.

Inspired by filmmaker Lars Von Trier's "Dogma '95 - Manifesto", 54. I have followed up this new definition for Nobrow Arts with a list of "Thought Strategies", as mentioned above;

In the spirit of Abbs, I acknowledge that there needs to be a Nobrow Arts Manifesto for students also. But also in the spirit of Abbs, I will leave that creative task up to the students themselves.

They'll learn more that way. And it's important that they do.

"The ideas of the ruling [group] are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the [group] which is the ruling material force is, at the same time, the ruling intellectual force. The [group] which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it."

Marx and Engels