After almost every artistic intervention in a school, teachers say they have discovered their students in a different light. This is not the magic of art at work; it comes from a shift in the places people occupy within the society that a classroom already is. Understanding this mechanism gives practitioners concrete tools to work better, and to genuinely reach the goals of arts and cultural education.
« I discovered my students in a different light »
I have been working in schools for many years, and I support many artists and companies who work there too. One sentence comes back at the end of almost every project, from the teachers: « I discovered my students in a different light ». A boy who never speaks took the floor. A girl considered to be struggling organised her team’s work. Children thought incapable of concentrating sustained their attention for longer than anyone knew they could. Teachers say this with a kind of happy astonishment, and readily attribute what happened to art itself, to its intrinsic power.
I believe this explanation misses the essential point. Understanding what really happens in these moments changes the way we prepare and conduct an intervention, because if we know why it works, we can do it better, more often, more deeply, and we can account for it to our partners in other terms than by invoking a mystery.
Preparing for society, or being a society
There are two ways of conceiving the relationship between school and society. The first says that school prepares young people for society as it is, and that its role is to equip them to function within it, to find their place there. The second says that school is already a society. It is not an antechamber of real life, it is real life, with its rules, its power relations, its moments of justice and injustice, its experiences of cooperation and exclusion. I have described in the article Secret violence what this school society, when democracy is absent from it, really teaches children.
These two conceptions produce two very different positions for the cultural practitioner. If school prepares for society, the practitioner is an additional resource in this project of preparation. They bring something the school cannot provide on its own, an artistic experience, a different way of seeing, a particular skill. Their work is one of transmission. This conception is not wrong, but it places the practitioner in a precise position: above, outside, supplying what is missing, facing young people who receive. And this asymmetry, however well-meaning, reproduces the very logic that most committed practitioners are trying to move beyond.
If, on the other hand, school is already a society, the practitioner does not bring something from outside to people who supposedly lack it. They come to take part in something that is already happening: a group of human beings who live together for years, who negotiate rules, who build hierarchies, who learn to cooperate or to dominate, to speak or to keep silent, to belong or to be excluded. The art they bring is then neither a decoration nor a spiritual supplement. It is a tool for making that society live differently, for a while, and perhaps for leaving behind the trace that something else was possible.
Freinet’s printing press: the classroom as a working society
Célestin Freinet built his entire pedagogy on this second conception. A schoolteacher in Bar-sur-Loup, in the hills behind Nice, from 1920 onwards, he brought a printing press into his classroom in 1924. The students wrote free texts, chose and discussed them collectively, set them letter by letter, printed them, turned them into a newspaper, and exchanged that newspaper with other classes through interschool correspondence. The class was run as a cooperative, and its council, in which every child had a voice, decided on projects, on the rules of common life, and on the use of the money earned by the newspaper. Nothing there was symbolic, everything involved real decisions, and the school became a working society in which the children were the actors, not the recipients. Freinet formalised the principle in 1964 in his Invariants pédagogiques (Pedagogical invariants): « On prépare la démocratie de demain par la démocratie à l’École. Un régime autoritaire à l’École ne saurait être formateur de citoyens démocrates. » (Tomorrow’s democracy is prepared through democracy at school. An authoritarian regime at school cannot form democratic citizens.)
This position, school as an emancipatory micro-society rather than as a preparation for an existing society, has direct implications for the cultural practitioner. Their work is not to transmit artistic excellence to young people who would otherwise have no access to it. Their work is to create, for the duration of their intervention, an experience of what a community can be when everyone contributes, when the hierarchies are not those of everyday life, when something unexpected can occur.
Malraux’s legacy: the belief in mere exposure
If this conception has such difficulty taking hold in our practices, it is also because the French cultural sector was built on the opposite belief. André Malraux, Minister of Cultural Affairs from 1959 to 1969, conceived of cultural democratisation as an act of exposure, convinced that it was enough to place the major works of humanity before the greatest number for the encounter to happen by itself. Philippe Urfalino, in L’invention de la politique culturelle (The invention of cultural policy, 1996), has shown that this policy was explicitly built on a refusal of pedagogy and mediation. Neither learning nor accompaniment was deemed necessary, since the work of art, by its mere presence, was to produce a revelation. Before the National Assembly, in 1966, Malraux defended the right of every child in France to paintings, theatre and cinema, just as they have a right to the alphabet, and in his mind this right was exercised through direct contact, without intermediaries. Jean Caune drew up the balance sheet of this model in La démocratisation culturelle, une médiation à bout de souffle (Cultural democratisation, a mediation out of breath, 2006): exposure alone does not produce the encounter.
Yet this belief survives in our practices, in a discreet form. When an artistic intervention slips into ordinary teaching situations, the classroom in rows, silence required, speech distributed by the adult, evaluation from above, and an artistic content is poured into them in the belief that, since it is art, something will happen, we are repeating Malraux’s gesture within the space of a classroom. We say we are doing arts education, we believe we are, and we have changed nothing in the situation the students are in. We have changed the content; we have not touched the places.
What Dewey calls an experience
John Dewey sheds light on what is missing from this approach. In Art as Experience (1934), he shows that aesthetic experience is an experience of continuity, one that connects what was separate and produces a new coherence between what we perceive, what we do and what we feel. This conception of experience is bound up, in his thought, with a conception of democracy. In Democracy and Education (1916), he defines democracy not primarily as an institutional regime, but as a form of associated living, a way of experiencing the world together and communicating that experience to one another.
Applied to the practitioner working in schools, this means that their most precious work is not to show something beautiful or important, but to create the conditions for an experience, an experience that young people go through together, with their bodies, their voices, their thoughts, and which leaves something different in their relationship to themselves and to others. The encounter with the work of art matters, but it matters as one moment of this shared experience, not as a radiance that would operate on its own.
The breathing space: why teachers discover their students
I return to the teachers’ sentence. If it comes back so often, it is not because art has touched students whom nothing else could touch. It is because, when it is well conducted, an intervention creates for a few hours another social situation inside the school society. The space has been transformed, the tables have been pushed aside. The ordinary rules are suspended; one can move around, try things, get them wrong without being graded. Speech circulates differently, it is no longer distributed by one person to thirty. The capacities called upon are not those the school form usually calls upon: proposing, making, exposing oneself, cooperating. Students who are ill-served by the ordinary form find themselves well served by this one. What we then discover was not hidden inside them for lack of art; it was made invisible by the situation.
And something symmetrical happens on the teacher’s side, which we almost always forget to name. During the intervention, they are no longer in the position of leading, evaluating, holding the class together. They can watch. It is often the first time in a long while that they see their students act without being responsible for every minute of what happens. The discovery owes as much to this shift as to the students’ own.
I call this a breathing space. A school society lives within a tight mesh: the timetable, the curriculum, evaluation, fixed places, one person speaking and thirty listening. The intervention opens, within this mesh, a time when the ordinary assignment of places loosens, for the students as for the adults. This breathing does not undo the school society, it gives it air, and this passage of air leaves traces; the teacher’s gaze on a particular student never quite returns to its previous state, and neither does the student’s gaze on themselves.
This is why the practitioner’s role exceeds artistic dissemination. It is a role of shifting places, their own included. I recently defended this conviction before film and media education professionals, in March 2026 in Rouen, at the national meeting of the regional film education centres organised by Normandie Images, where I recalled that stigmatising young people’s cultural practices damages the bond, and that these practices call less for correction than for encounter, reflections I develop in the article Media Literacy : Should We Judge or Guide ?; then in June 2026 at the Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique, before the Grandir avec la culture network, around cultural rights and the formation of critical thinking, which I recount in the article Educating about images, organising disagreement.
Concrete moves for your next intervention
From this analysis I draw concrete moves, which I practise and pass on, and which any practitioner can try in their very next intervention. I develop them in detail in the sections of this website devoted to cultural mediation and to methods for facilitating collective intelligence; here are the main ones, focused on the school situation.
Transform the space before anything else. When I accompany a theatre company, the first experience I offer them is often the simplest: we are in a room where there are tables, and we begin by pushing them aside, clearing space, sitting differently. Arriving in a school and transforming the place, with the students if possible, is already transforming the conditions of the encounter. A prepared space tells the people who enter that they were expected. I recount this work with theatre companies in the article Training a company in participatory mediation.
Say hello to each person by their first name. When an artist arrives in a classroom, their name is announced, presented, known. The students, for their part, are named nowhere in this relationship. To undo this asymmetry, I go to each person, ask their first name, repeat it while saying hello, and give mine. Even with fifty people, this takes five minutes, and it changes everything: each person has been named, each person has been in direct contact with the artist before anything begins.
Reverse the proportions of making and watching. In workshop culture, the making is considered the important moment, and the sharing of the results a closing formality. I do the opposite: a short, autonomous making time, and most of the time given to the shared gaze on what has been made. A photograph taken in fifteen minutes can feed fifteen minutes of collective looking. It is in this time of the gaze that the group is enriched by itself.
The author does not comment; the others speak. In the moment of the shared gaze, the person who created does not explain their intention. The others say what the image or the scene does to them, what it makes them think of. The author listens, and discovers in their own creation dimensions they did not know were there. This discovery comes from peers, not from an expert passing judgement, and it undoes the school logic of the right answer. I detail this protocol of the shared gaze in the article Building, Not Valorizing.
Plan for a second take. When a creative exercise is proposed, the first take serves to settle in, and it is very often on the second that those who did not dare begin to dare. Planning for this time of repetition, without judgement on the first take, is one of the simplest ways of giving permission, in the sense I give this word in the article The framework that authorizes.
Make each person indispensable. I design my set-ups so that the group technically needs every person: a prop to bring in at a precise moment, a sound atmosphere to make live, a light to hold, a movement to perform within the frame. Interdependence then becomes immediate and palpable, without needing to be proclaimed. If one person misses their cue, the shot collapses, and everyone knows it. I develop this conception of the set-up in the article The bond that sets us free.
Give the teacher a real place. I invite the teacher to take part on the same footing as their students whenever possible: creating, showing, receiving the gazes of others. The breathing space is for everyone, and a class whose teacher has shown a creation of their own in front of their students does not resume its ordinary course in quite the same place.
Let go of your criteria. My artistic exigency does not disappear, it moves: it no longer bears on the conformity of what is produced to my criteria, but on the quality of the bond within which it is produced. When that bond is right, what gets made is very often astonishing, and it exceeds me. I have devoted a whole article to this move, Letting Go of One’s Criteria.
What the founding texts of arts education already ask for
There remains the question of funding. Support schemes evaluate the work according to quantitative criteria, number of interventions, number of young people reached, presence in priority schools, and according to criteria of artistic legitimacy that measure the quality of the practitioner, not the quality of the experience produced. Work conceived as I have just described it is difficult to fit into these boxes.
But the texts that found arts and cultural education in France deserve a close reading, because they say something other than what evaluation practices suggest, and because they are allies. The law of 8 July 2013 on the refoundation of the school system wrote arts and cultural education (éducation artistique et culturelle) into the education code and established an arts and cultural education pathway for every student. The decree of 1 July 2015 bases this pathway on three inseparable pillars: encounters with artists and works, individual and collective practices, and knowledge enabling « le développement de la faculté de juger et de l’esprit critique » (the development of the faculty of judgement and of critical thinking). The Charter for arts and cultural education, presented on 8 July 2016 in Avignon by the Haut Conseil de l’éducation artistique et culturelle, recognises an education « à l’art » et « par l’art », both in art and through art, in all the times of a child’s life, and establishes the joint responsibility of the State, local authorities and civil society. The stated goal of « 100 % EAC » aims for every young person to benefit from it.
Nothing in these texts calls for top-down dissemination. Encountering, practising, judging for oneself: these are experiences, not exposures to content. An intervention that slips into the ordinary school form to deposit an artistic object there ticks the box of the encounter without fulfilling any of the three pillars in depth. An intervention that shifts the places fulfils all three, because the practice is real, the encounter reciprocal, and critical thinking exercised. For critical thinking, which these texts place at the heart of the pathway, can only be exercised in situations where thinking for oneself is genuinely possible. The approach I am defending is therefore not an additional requirement on top of the official goals of arts and cultural education. It is the condition for actually reaching them, instead of letting ourselves believe that we do.
On evaluation itself, Jean-Marc Lauret, who long designed and steered public programmes in this field, has written a precious book, L’art fait-il grandir l’enfant ? Essai sur l’évaluation de l’éducation artistique et culturelle (Does art help the child grow? An essay on the evaluation of arts and cultural education, Éditions de l’Attribut, 2014). After reviewing thirty years of international research, he sets aside utilitarian justifications, those that would prove that art improves academic results, and argues for a qualitative evaluation, grounded in what arts education really forges, confidence, imagination, the capacity to think and learn for oneself. Above all, he reminds us that the first virtue of an evaluation process is to oblige the actors to clarify their objectives. That is the work I propose to practitioners: knowing what we are trying to produce, so as to be able to account for it.
The relevant questions do not produce figures, but they can be observed and they can be told. Did young people who usually do not speak take the floor? Did someone say or do something that nobody expected, themselves included? Were the group’s usual hierarchies disturbed, even slightly, even momentarily? Does the teacher say they discovered their students in a different light, and can they tell how? Did something happen in that room that would not have happened without the intervention?
Changing funders’ criteria is long-term work, and it goes through the professionals themselves: the way they account for their work, the words they choose to describe it, the indicators they propose to their institutional partners. The founding texts of arts and cultural education give this work solid ground to stand on. Rather than asking institutions to adopt goals other than their own, we can show them how to reach the ones they have set for themselves.
Knowing why we do this work
The first step, perhaps, is to know it for ourselves. Not to tick boxes, not to bring culture to young people supposed to lack it. But because school is already a society, because that society rarely has the chance to breathe, and because we believe that something can happen in the encounter between young people and an artistic proposal carried with care. Something that concerns democracy, directly, now, in that room.
