Locales of learning and teaching art in pre-service education

Social ontology addresses assertions of the entities’ existence and social scientists bring into question whether particular conventions applied to the entities being studied can subsequently affect them. This study explores existing spatial classifications enacted by federal bodies to identify areas surrounding public schools in the United States. Over a three-year period, participants in a Midwestern university art education programme engaged in field practices that used the school locale codes as a mechanism to critically reflect on how labels such as urban, suburban and rural are understood in relation to their own positionality and pedagogy. Through Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory, the author analyses participant responses through a framework wherein schools are theorized as assemblages in order to identify the constitutive subcomponents of both material and expressive components in order to bracket perceptions of the locales. Implications are provided related to fieldwork practices in the field of art education.